Stamping: First Attempt

My first attempt at cutting stamps. It seems my ink pads need refreshing . . . oh well. I stamped a card for my dad and hand coloured it with crayons. I need to get some wood blocks on which to glue the stamps. Squashy styrofoam does not work all that well!

New Art Supplies

Ah, the lure of new art supplies. We are going to attempt to do Illustration Fridays. We also picked up some lino cutters and are going to try and do some stamp cutting. Geninne has a fabulous tutorial here.

Thrifting

Yesterday for the first time we visited our local Reuse Centre. It's great!!! A bit overwhelming though. Bins and bins and bins of great crafting finds. I think there were almost ten bins of fabric alone. Of course the most hilarious was the sign that I finally noticed on the way out:

"Unattended children will be fed raw sugar
and given a box of trophies."

Look at what we brought home.

They are so smart.

But we also brought home these! Vintage knitting pins, adding machine tape that fits perfectly in our sticker-maker, vintage patterns for my sewing room wall, some weird thing called a But-o-fix that I can't wait to investigate, and a large upholstery fabric sample book that I think may be destined for purses.

Meow

My youngest, in the truest sense of the phrase, has a pet rock. It is her kitty and she pets it and strokes it and says meow. It is very sweet.

Puddles

 

I made this coat a couple of years ago from an old IKEA curtain. It is really heavy cotton, lined with a super cute ladybug fabric that my MIL gave me. I love this pattern. It is an Ottobre pattern, #21 from the Spring 2005 issue. I found a great NikWax product called CottonProof and soaked the coat in it. It didn't change the handle of the fabric much, it is just slighty smoother and the waterproofing is great. I can dump an entire jug of water on this coat and it just beads off.

 

I found these photos today. The colours of the petals are so lovely. Maybe inspiration for some dyeing? Maybe not, nevertheless, they are very happy colours.

 

 

Blue Chocolate

Ah the loveliness that is merino and silk . . . This is a present for my aunt, who is fabulous and spends a lot of time with my children and me. She is great and deserves some beautiful yarn to knit for fun. She is on a yarn diet. That's a sad, sad thing, a yarn diet. Hence the name Blue Chocolate.

Anyway, not that my yarn is anything amazing, but I am happy with it. I was aiming for laceweight, but I ended up with sportweight. Oh well. It isn't super consistent but it's better than I've done before. I spun the whole 28 g on my broken spindle since my wheel does not seem to have high enough ratios (only 6 and 9). The fibre is from Louet and is 80% merino, 20 % silk. The yarn is a 2-ply, sportweight, 13 or so wpi, 15° twist angle, and measures in at 2500 ypp. Since I consider myself still to be a new spinner, I am happy. And besides, it is such a pretty colour!

While I was at the whole yarn statistics thing, I made up a table of all the neat little facts I looked up. It used to be called a Yarn Grist Table. Isn't that an ugly name? I had to rename it The Twisted Facts of Yarn. It's so much less grisly sounding! I'd really like to share it with you but I have yet to figure out how to upload a pdf to Blogger. Anyone know how??

Silly Me

Well, I just realized that I have had the settings set to Do Not Allow Comments on all of my previous posts. No wonder no one has left me any comments! Not that anyone is actually reading this of course, but maybe my mom at least might leave me a comment???? Anyway, I have rectified the situation and all previous posts have been edited to allow comments.