Latest craft projects to keep my hands out of the potato chip bag:
Recyclable plastic grocery bag crocheted with strips of recycled plastic bags.
Two crocheted cotton grocery bags.
some kind of bag lady
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Category Archives: crafts
that 1960s funk and flash
Following up on yesterday’s post, I dug out the shirt that I had made for my husband. Here it is:
I added flower on each shoulder, like epaulets.
This is a detail of the embroidery:
And, on the front, the sun and the moon.
Did he wear it? You bet he did!
the funk and flash of elder style
A comment on my previous post led me to this site featuring stunningly attired elders.
Appropriately entitled “Advanced Style,” this site is constantly adding photographs that illustrate just how creative, funky, and individual elders can be in the way they dress. I can’t help notice that many of the photos are of people who live in New York City, where style is queen.
As a tease to get you over there to look around, here’s a look at three of my favorites.
The site welcomes photo submissions of elders in full regalia — or even just elders with remarkable style. Send to Advancedstyleinfo at gmail dot com.
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At some point back in the early 70s I had a book called Native Funk and Flash. I wish I had held onto it, because here on Amazon, a collector’s copy is worth $100.
I copied several of the designs in the book into embroidered embellishments on clothing. I put one design on the bottom side of a denim skirt that I made. It was called “four faithful fish feeding on the bread of life,” with a circular braided bread image in the middle and four fish facing the bread, each positioned in one of the four directions.
My most elaborate project reproduced the rising phoenix (pictured on the butt of the woman on the front cover, above) to cover the whole back of one of my husband’s muslin shirts. I embroidered it all with various colors of metallic thread.
I still have that shirt in a storage bin in the cellar. I’m going to dig it out and post a photo of it because that glowing phoenix is one of the most beautiful things I have ever created.
Ah those 60s! Even though we were married and parents, we still had a lot of funk and flash.
(For images from the book: Native Funk and Flash, link over to Knitting Iris.
the opposite of learning
I’ve decided that the opposite of learning is forgetting.
Several mornings a week, as I sit at the table and drink my daily vitamin shake, my six and a half-year-old grandson gives me a memory test. Sometimes he shows me each of his little die cast airplanes and sees if I remember the name of each. He has dozens, and he knows them all. Sometimes he sets up his dinosaur models and tests me on the names of each of those. Each time I remember a few, but I forget the names of most from day to day — even though he names each for me, speaking very clearly and explaining the distinguishing features of each.
As he learns, I forget.
On the other hand, as he learns, I also find out about all sorts of bits of information that I didn’t know and didn’t know that I didn’t know. Of course, I forget most of it, but, at the time when he is explaining to me that whale sharks eat plankton, I find it interesting, both that I never knew that and also that it doesn’t matter that I never knew that.
I forget. He seems to remember everything, and I think it’s because being home schooled enables him to pursue learning about what interests him, whether it be tornadoes, fossils, war planes, or road construction. And, at the same time, he’s learning that math, science, history, reading and writing are necessary to his understanding of what interests him.
His mom posted a unique perspective on what she has discovered that is important for kids to learn on her own blog.
We are definitely a bunch of avid learners in this extended household. Unfortunately, I am forgetting as much as I’m learning.
Hopefully, my son, who is on a learning curve regarding moving this blog to WordPress, will soon finish the job so that he can then forget it.
Soon. My new look will be up soon.
And, with it, a new photo of me, which my daughter is going to take for the little blurb about me that is going to appear in Vicki Howell‘s upcoming Craft Corps book.
And you thought that I was just a blogger. Live and learn. Except for me. I live and forget.
five things
Ex-Lion Tamer tagged me for posting five interesting things about me.
I had to do some serious thinking about this, since these days, my life is about as interesting as a bowl of cold oatmeal.
1. I once accidentally left a pink satin teddy in a bed at a New York City hotel where my daughter was waitressing/singing.
2. For more than twenty-five years people assumed that I had curly hair because I always had a perm.
3. Last night my mother and I stayed up until 2 a.m. watching “Lilies of the Field,” and I realized that I had never seen the movie before! Sidney Poitier was totally HOT!
4. I hardly ever read non-fiction. I am usually reading two fiction books at the same time and listening to a third on my MP3 player as I fall asleep. Understandably, I often don’t remember the stories a month later.
5. I started two craft businesses thus far in my lifetime, doing craft fairs and selling to folks who found out about my wares by word of mouth. The first I called “Self-stones,” and I turned tumbled stones into various simple accessory items and packaged them with a description of the magical lore and healing properties associated with those stones. The second was called “Sass & Chic,” and I sold shawls that I crocheted in a spiral from a pattern that I designed. Here’s a photo of four, two of which I embellished with washable pony beads.
Of course, I never really made any money from either craft business. But I had fun.
I need to figure out how to have some fun in the future.
saved by a craft
Sometimes these days I think the only way I have stopped myself from strangling my brother and/or my mother is by picking up a crochet hook or a pair of knitting needles and going at it with a new hank of yarn.
I realized recently that I am a “process” craftsperson rather than a “product” one. I have at leave five projects started that I’ve set aside because I got to points in the patterns that required a lot of attention to detail. So I’ve started a lightweight crocheted afghan for when I move in with my daughter and family. It’s the same stitch over and over again — striped using two related yarns. There is something about the rhythm of the hand movements that’s mesmerizing, mentally relaxing. I can sit in the middle of a raging familial storm and block it out with the repeating stitch mantra. It’s certainly better for my health than drinking.
Oh, I have finished projects — like this and this and this and this.
But that was all before I moved my mother and me in with my brother. That was before my mother needed 24/7 care. Then I had the mental energy to focus on the details of form.
Now I just need something to do with my hands, something to intrude between my world and my brain. Something that I can easily put down if I have to.
So, it’s
Yarn over hook.
Insert hook in the next stitch to be worked.
Yarn over hook.
Pull yarn through stitch.
Yarn over hook.
Pull yarn through all 3 loops on hook ……….
pillow talk
This is one side of the pillow I made for my mom to encourage her to “self-soothe.”
I used cotton poplin photo fabric on which to print out the 25th anniversary photo of my parents, my mother’s favorite photo of the two of them. Then I pieced washable satiny fabric around the photo to make the pillow the size I wanted it to be. The great thing about the photo fabric I used is that it’s washable.
On the other side of the pillow is a photo of what there is of my mother’s immediate family. (It’s the same photo I used in our holiday card.) I call it the “family pillow,” and she holds it while she falls asleep. She doesn’t like sleeping alone in her bedroom; she says she’s afraid (not unusual for people with dementia). But when I tuck the family pillow under her arm and remind her that she has the whole family with her, she relaxes and is able to fall asleep.
We all need ways to self-soothe. I’ve been doing it with chocolate. But that hasn’t been enough.
So, today, just as the heavy flakes started falling, I had my first visit with a therapist who uses approaches to which I respond better than “talk therapy” and who takes Medicare. I’m still processing what went on in this first session, but I will say that I felt much lighter as I left than I felt when I got there.
Maybe I will make myself a pillow with the images that I need to empower myself to relax.
my fiber arts passion
Because color isn’t enough. Because there has to be texture. Because you can combine those two elements into something to wear. Wearable art.
After all, there are just so many blank walls available after you hang up all the photos of your family and friends.
A friend of mine emailed me recently about some books she was reading that approached knitting as meditation. For me, that’s just what knitting, crocheting, and sewing are — a way to calm my mind and surround me with serenity.
I have constructed several items of my own design over the years, and I’m working on more. Since this kind of activity is even a greater part of my life that blogging, I’ve decided to begin putting together a page about my fiber art experiences, which will have a link in my sidebar.
I was inspired to start thinking in that direction by my fascination with Rebecca Clayton’s multi-faceted blog, Pocahontas County Fare, which reflects Clayton’s many passions. Usually I post here about politics, caregiving, and assorted other issues and events that cross my screen along the way. (And if b!X ever has a chance to explain how I can get my “categories” to show on after my posts, I will have a way to organize access to those topics.)
While I’ve posted a few pieces about my knitting and crocheting projects, I really haven’t given the kind of blogspace that reflects just how much a part of my everyday life playing with fiber arts is.
I used to sew most of my kids clothes when they were little (even b!X’s). The last real original sewing project I did resulted in a quilted jacket that was so labor intensive and came out so beautifully that I don’t think I can equal anything like that again. The project was an assignment for the one quilting workshop that I took, wherein we used a sweatshirt as the basis for quilting a jacket. Because it was my first try, I used a yellow sweatshirt that I found in a dollar store. The jacket I created was unlike anyone else’s in the class, since they all followed traditional block-style quilting. And, unlike my classmates, it was a total improvisation as I went along. I had no final concept in my head about what it was going to look like.
The only thing I don’t like about my jacket is the yellow backing. Otherwise it’s the most self-designed item I’ve ever put together. Instead of using the sweatshirt sleeves as the backing for a quilted topside, at the last minute I decided to knit the sleeves and sew on crocheted strips at the collar and hem, picking up a color from the fabric. I also sewed on a crocheted pocket. I used six or seven different fabrics, no piece larger than the black squares with the flowers. I also did free form machine quilting stitches over the whole front and back.
I haven’t tried another quilting project since, mostly because I don’t have a large enough expanse of space and a large enough expanse of time to devote to such a project.
And so these days I’m mostly knitting and crocheting because I can work in a small space and in small segments of time.
What an appropriate metaphor for my life right now — finding small satisfactions wherever and whenever I can fit them in around my mom’s schedule.
I made the quilted jacket five years ago, when I was able to live outside this box. I can’t imagine ever doing anything like this again.
And chaos reigns supreme.
This is the view across the top of my roll-top desk, past my room divider, into my kitchen. Like my life. Chaos.
— Still getting over major tooth abcess and root canal work.
— Now mother hearing voices singing Polish Christmas Caroles while the podiatrist (who she insists is Polish but he’s not) is working on her hammer toe.
— While making broccoli soup in my Vita Mix, didn’t realize that the machine was set on high speed and the cover wasn’t on tight enough and — heh — broccoli bits all over everything, including me.
— Made batches of pesto with the harvested basil after I cleaned up the broccoli mess.
— Still not ready for the craft fair that I do once a year; need to print up signs, finish a few more items, and price everything. New items this year, thanks to a brainstorm of my breast-feeding daughter: washable nursing necklaces and shawls.
— Am almost done using putting transfers (that I printed up on my computer) on a special t-shirt to wear to BloggerCon.
— Finished harvesting my tomatoes, basil, and parsley; now have to clean out my garden before frost hits.
— Gotta get to the library to return Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons, which was so enthralling to me that I read it in one day (instead of cleaning up some of the chaos). As an ex-Catholic who went to 13 years of Catholic school and is totally fascinated with the lore of Church and its roots in paganism, I just loved this symbol, taken from the book:
— Gotta pick up The Secret Life of Bees, which is waiting for me at the library, as well as one of Judith Jance’s’ mysteries-on-tape that I can listen to on my way back and forth to Boston.
— Next stop is at Hannaford to pick up my mother’s prescription for Quinine for her leg cramps and then to Joanne’s for fabric to cover seams that I let out from a jacket I love that I made smaller years ago when I WAS smaller.
When my friend P stopped by after the tap-dancing class that we’re taking but I missed because of my root canal, we commiserated about how being retired isn’t what we wanted it to be. (Her 87-year-old ex-mother-in-law, to whom she’s close, has just been diagnosed with advanced breast cancer.) She thought that she would be spending her time resting, traveling, reading, having fun.
Whoever keeps trying to tell us that life can be just fun and games at any age is really selling us a bill of goods. I don’t know anyone whose life is that way.
Meanwhile, I’ve got to go battle chaos. And entropy. Always entropy.
Yes. America as a whole seems to have succumbed to entropy. And apathy.
Busy Happy Hands
While this is going to sound contrary to my strong feminist persuasions, I have been known to admit that the two most useful skills I ever learned are typing and sewing. I can type as fast as I think. That’s why I blog so much. I am fleet fingered, and, in my previous career as a writer faced with constant deadlines, I have found the typing skills I learned in high school to be invaluable.
In my role as mother, in my interests in costume construction, in my obsession with wearing clothes that fit well, in my years of gaining and losing a few pounds here and there, knowing how to sew has come in very handy as well.
I like to make something out of nothing, to take an old idea and give it a new spin. I like to work with color and texture, form and function.
That’s why I also knit and crochet. When I retired, I officially registered as a small business so that I could sell what I make. I thought I would do a few craft fairs every year, and the first year I did. But I learned that what I really like is designing and making stuff. What I hate is the record keeping and the hard physical work of setting up and taking down a craft booth and all of the tedium that goes along with standing around all day waiting for someone to buy something. This October, I’ll be doing my last big craft fair. At least I think that will be my last.
So, what exactly to I make and sell, you wonder.
One night several years ago, while I was still employed full-time, I saw Ally McBeal wearing a kind of short, snug-fitting lacey poncho. It looked like a circular shawl that you could slip over your head and it wouldn’t fall off your shoulders. After a few false starts, I designed and made one of my own and wore it to work. That very day, two people asked me to make one for them. And so I did, and the next thing I knew I was getting more and more orders. So, I made a whole bunch of them and started a little craft business to sell my “spiral shawls.” This is an example of one.
Last winter, in an effort to use up leftover yarn, I made a washable rolled brim hat that is adjustable. Then I made several and gave them away to my friends — who wore them to work. Yup. People asked them where they got them etc. etc. Over the past several months, I’ve completed two dozen of my Indestructible Adjustable Hat, which I also will sell at the October craft fair.
I’m one of those people who can’t just sit and watch the world go by. I have to keep my hands busy. If I don’t, I eat.
Now I’m crocheting a Winnie the Pooh bear for my grandson and a sweater vest for my mother. I suppose I could clean the bathroom or weed out my books or organize my pantry. But those things don’t make my hands happy.