also, hey, did anyone notice?

We've been doing this blog for two YEARS now.

Go us!

Song-a-Day May: A song about ice cream for Lawrie

This is not always true, but today Song-a-Day was the last thing we did.

Now, you might ask, "what gives? Why assign such a low priority to this artistic pact you have made? If you fail, the only person you will hurt is yourself!"

If faced with such an indictment, all I could do is tell the truth and hope you could see the dilemma I faced. You see, the new Star Trek movie came out today.

It is simply beyond my ken to deny my nerd heritage by not seeing this film on opening night.

Conveniently, the movie (or rather, the social circumstances associated therewith) proved inspirational. Specifically, my friend Lawrie, who kindly joined the Schmitty and I at the movie, provided us with this helpful advice:

"The song can be about ice cream!"

She was totally right! It can!

New Year

I had a fantastic day yesterday, getting a tour of some of the better, more interesting and downright perplexing craft supply shops around Portland. I didn't get to have my own yarn spun at Yarnia but I did find some amazing insane old craft magazines at Knittn Kitten (expect vegetable bouquets to appear here in the near future), and some Very Hungry Caterpillar fabric at the Fabric Depot .

That's going to be my kitchen curtains. Seriously, it will be awesome.

But the most inspiring spot was Twisted. I invite all of you to visit me and we'll go there. There are couches, and tea, and wonderful people and they only have one (1!) yarn that has acrylic in it. I couldn't find it. They have patterns all over, books, you can sign up for lessons... and some sock yarn so stunning it made me want to conquer my fear of double pointed needles.

In between my new printer/scanner, my new camera, and the existence of Twisted, I am excited for what I can do this year. But here's the thing. I'm not going to assign myself anything. I'm not going to say now what I will and will not do this year. The only promise I'm going to try and keep is that I will finish the projects I start, in some form or fashion.

I have some old (1902) issues of Good Housekeeping magazine. So many articles and ads on how to keep busy with fabric and paint, home decorating and food. How lucky we are that these things we call "crafts" can be our comfort and solace, inspiration and meditation as they have been for generations before. I wonder if it isn't so much the finished project, but the work itself that is important. After all, how often is it that we keep the work for ourselves? But the time we spend in creation, that is ours, and ours alone.

Save some time for yourself everybody, and fill it with what you love. Happy New Year!

Scooped you again, Catch

Yeah, that was so a goal for this year.

At least it's an excellent template if I do decide to go and do it in granny square.

Channeling my inner fourth grader

All right, so there was no post yesterday (although that does not reflect a dearth of craft; I crocheted for an hour in the airport:

and then made 350 desserts with the adoxograph [no photos of that, sorry]. It just turns out that Kathy's job is hard work, and getting up at 5AM on a Sunday to go to the airport is hard work, and in the absence of the scarf being done and photographic evidence of the desserts, it was kinda hard to get motivated to write something).

However!

Today is a new day, and so I drew/colored a hand turkey. Hand turkeys were a great favorite of mine in my youth, and, I must admit, it was nice, from a nostalgia perspective, to revisit that particular form of self-expression. (Hopefully it will be nice from a punctuation perspective to use fewer commas in the rest of the sentences in this post. Yeesh.)

Here's Tom:

The fat cat looks displeased.

I can't remember whether I was a color inside the lines person as a child now that I am old, but if my current performance is any indication, I may have been a get distracted by other things person. Seriously, can I not even color for twenty minutes without stopping to watch a TED talk?

Loose threads, and a new year

I spent yesterday finishing my remaining knitting projects and kicking myself because I needed less time to finish them than I thought I did. I am a lazy git.

I have a few new surly things in my head, I want to learn how to do granny squares and make a ridiculously old school blanket from them, and then, for further inspiration there is this.

If that doesn't give you some ideas for stuff to do then I can't help you.

I am totally going to collage some shoes. I have modge podge and EVERYTHING.

Where did these things come from anyway?

The bathroom mirror in our house is dynamic. Since we have such weird work/sleep/life patterns, we find ourselves with things we would like to share without waking each other up. And so, there is the dry erase marker. Luckily, he is as bored with the idea of knitting sweaters as I am, so he has no problems with the bookshelves becoming overrun with weird critters. In fact, I have pressed him to contribute, and so the mirror gives me fun projects. Sometimes, though, I'll get a proper sketch:

And that is just all the more frustrating because, dammit, he's pretty good with a pencil and I've been just making this stuff up as I go along... (Patterns, what happened to using patterns?) But I take my best shot.
I totally dig the eyebrows, but could never do this again because I have no idea what I did. Regardless, the quadtropus.

Apparently I am making a giant eyeball next. (Also for the record, totally doing crochet with round stuff and knit with straight because I haven't figured out how to crochet a square.)

Some of these people actually started by felting their own materials...

We took a field trip today, my sweetheart and I, to the Center for Puppetry Arts downtown. They added the Jim Henson special exhibit since my last visit (I SAW THE REAL SWEDISH CHEF HELLO!) and if ever there was a museum for crafty folk this has got to be it.

Papercraft puppets, wooden puppets, fabric puppets, puppets from hundred of years ago and of course, the detailed craft work that went into all the Henson stuff...I mean you could see how some of the stuff was stitched together. Also interesting was to see some Muppet characters from the films - as was pointed out to me, it's obvious that Henson was aware that you could capture much finer detail on film. Fishface from Labyrinth and the Skeksis from The Dark Crystal were both great examples of this:
I don't know how much you can see from this detail, but the costume alone is an intricate work. It is delicate layers of aged, torn, once highly intricate laces and velvets. The kind of fabrics that manage to suggest long-faded nobility. Not that you could see the detail in the movie, but the overall effect is something you would respond to subliminally.

What defines a "master" craftsman? Well, thereyougo.