Tile it on
Sunday, August 01, 2010
Four tiles have gone to a friend of mine. She was over and saw them out on the cupboard. I have never used them in a project or even put felt on their bottoms and used them as coasters. They are handmade, handpainted, probably from Portugal, but I can't remember. Tashi is settling in. She and Barger get along the best so far, despite his being so much larger. She is teaching him how to play, something I don't think he ever did as a kitten. He has always been a bit stunned when it comes to play. He watches her antics as if she were a baby chimp and not one of his own kind.
If a woodchuck could
Thursday, June 24, 2010
My mom is clearing out a small storage room in her basement. A bunch of my stuff from my teen years is still there. She skyped me and held various items up to the camera and asked what I wanted to do with them. Of course I didn't even remember that these things were there. Apparently I collected bits of driftwood at one stage. I do remember as a child making a sculpture with a piece of driftwood that looked like a tree branch and gluing litle clam-like shells on as butterflies. This was in the days before video games. I told my mom she could give these pieces of wood back to nature.
So long box
Monday, May 17, 2010
I bought this box at a yard sale across the street at least four years ago. I had plans to finish it somehow, either with stain or oil. It was filled with bits of leather and some old wood burning tools. I decided awhile ago that I don't like the box well enough to put any time into it. Or even to use it as is. It has been in the trunk of the car for about a month, waiting to be dropped off at a thrift store. On the weekend my friend was helping me load some books into the trunk — yes, I bought more books at the sale, and she saw the box. And wanted it. Excellent!
Wool gathering
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
My mom hooks rugs. The old fashioned way. Cutting up pure wool clothing into strips and hand hooking onto burlap backing. She makes beautiful rugs. I don't have any here at the moment, otherwise I'd take a picture of one. (So I've taken an image from www.goprimitive.com. Check them out for patterns and greeting cards.) I used to have a couple, but my cats would stretch up to "investigate" them a bit too frequently for the health of the rugs. I could never put them on the floor, because, as anyone with cats will tell you, the preferred place to vomit is a throw rug. (Or into a pair of shoes.) I had a wool skirt, sweater and shift that I'd been saving for awhile -- I used to wear the sweater, but the moths ate holes in it. I have shrunk it once so far -- it needs to be shrunk a bit more before cutting it up for hooking. The skirt makes for good hooking because the variegation works to make its own subtle pattern. In addition to the clothing, my mom took some of my extra rags, a large rectangular magnet (she's going to use it to attract the sewing needles and pins that drop out of her arthritic fingers onto the floor), and dryer sheets that I won't use.
Of course I have knitting needles
Thursday, November 26, 2009
In every size. Because if things come in sets or sizes, I seem to end up with all available sizes. Just like crochet hooks. I have hooks small enough to crochet sewing thread and large enough to crochet wide strips of material. And pencils. I have pencils 6H to 7B and everything in between. In the years when I was an avid knitter I ended up with needles of every size and of course some duplicates. So when my friend mentioned that her niece had recently taken up knitting and she wanted to buy some wool and needles for her, I offered part of my collection. I gave my friend two long pairs, two circular needles and four straight needles for knitting socks. Plus a handy dandy guide with holes in it to find out what diameter needles are if they aren't marked.
Cut it out
Sunday, March 15, 2009
These cookie cutters are so small I can’t imagine the frustration of using them to bake cookies. (That’s a toonie to show scale.) I used one of the set in a ceramics class (1981?) to make teeny clay penguins. For some reason the penguin mold isn’t with its mates. A fierce March storm is raging here and the lights are flickering. I’m about to do the unheard of and shut my computer down.
Hop to it
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
This is one of the patterns I came across as I was cleaning out my craft files last week. I made several beanbag frogs in the 70s, when I was a teenager and learning to sew. It seemed everyone was making them. It’s just a piece of paper now. Don’t know what happened to the frogs I made, must have given them away more than 20 years ago. (I found a photo on the web that looks sort of like the finished frog.)
