Probably we’ll end up doing el cheapo printing at Vistaprint… my dreams of hand-crafting invitations have vanished. The only thing I could possibly do is block printing… and I don’t really like the look of it.

I drew this up after seeing these amazing invitations (called Hendrix). They’re letterpress invites from Bella Figura. Another thing we can’t afford in our already ridiculous budget.

Not exactly the same thing.. but a similar feel.

I can’t decide:
- to add colour or not
- to draw it in illustrator (sharper cleaner lines)
- to just scan this inked drawing
- redraw it in pencil… i liked the pencil look a bit more.

Hmm…. I’d better decide because my sister told me she doesn’t think I’m taking this “seriously enough”. ;P

oh noes! gotta get crackin.

I went to a workshop with practice.ie. I was giving a talk, but I also got to participate.

More about Andy Parson’s in this interview….

It was fun to use cardboard as a painting surface. I always get so hung up on *materials*. I’m so precious about them in the first place, I never want to waste them. And this gives me a fear of experimenting.

So I overthink and over plan and approach a proper canvas and make a proper “painting” and it’s so blah blah.

This was so much fun because I was just messing around, I had no idea where I was going with it… and what it would turn out like. I enjoyed it entirely.

I’m so curious to see what Andy is working on next. I really liked his work with the Young Model in Wolf on Arm….

My niece’s sewing set

Originally uploaded by feather.

My niece came to visit last week, she brought her boyfriend, who is lovely. He didn’t mind occupying himself with Xbox while we sewed.

She got a sewing machine for her birthday, and I was just doing some basics with her.

This is what she made:

- A bunch of drawstring bags for me and her
- A needlebook
- And a pin cushion

For some reason I thought: oh! pin cushion is small, we’ll start there. Silly idea. It was much better to start on straight seams. So we came up with the bag idea.

She enjoyed rummaging through my button collection. She has very nice taste. She picked vintage white glass buttons, and red buttons. She was v particular about getting the whites to match.

She said she was “so proud” of what she made. It was so nice to see her so pleased with something she made.

I also got a bunch of draw-string bags out of the deal. She did a great job sewing them up. Now my cables, mouse and digital what-nots are contained in nice bags, instead of piles.

SO I’m going to flood my blog with old posts.

The lady at “Me, Life, Cross Stitch, Vegetables and Other Stuff” is doing a give-away for the 12 days of Christmas. Each day she’ll give post about something. You leave a comment, and she’ll draw the winners on Sunday! Read: “On the first day of Christmas”

I’m getting excited about my Secret Santa swaps. I am doing a Secret Santa swap with the Irish Knitters group on Raverly- and I have probably the best swap-target. She is so easy to buy for, I love her work & her taste. OMG I am so excited about the things I have found, but I can’t post about them until after Christmas. I can’t wait to show off not only the stuff, but where I found the things.

And I’m doing a Gnome Swap with a gnome group on Ravelry. I started making the frikking thing and he’s so frikking cute, I can’t stand it. I can’t post a picture until my partner gets it!

I also finished a whopping 3 (that’s right folks, 3!!!) hats for presents. Whoah.

Did I mention I had a photo published in this really cool book?

I should have mentioned it before. Martin John Brown, a co-author with Larissa Brown, approached me after seeing my photo on Flickr.

I was chuffed it made the cover! See my photo is top centre

(link to amazon)

From the publishers: Knitalong:Celebrating the Tradition of Knitting Together – you can also see a photo gallery from the book at Melanie Falick books. Their book also got very good reviews from readers at Amazon, well done!

From the above page, about the book:

“Authors Larissa Brown and Martin John Brown present an inspiring look at centuries of people knitting together, and why knitters find the interaction so meaningful and worthwhile. Along the way, they offer 20 projects especially suited for different types of knitalongs. The Barn Raising Quilt and the Traveling Scarf, for instance, call on individual knitters to collaborate on a single project; while the Pinwheel Blanket and the Meathead Hat encourage a community of knitters to improvise on the same pattern to come up with a variety of results. Also included is essential information about finding, joining, and starting knitalongs.”

The nice bonus was I got to pick any book I wanted. I chose “Knitting for Baby” which I have lent to my boyfriend’s mom who is a new grandmother.

I don’t usually blog about non-crafty stuff, but I thought this was worth mentioning. I didn’t know what this Movember was all about- I thought it had to do with “movement” but no, it’s men growing moustaches for raising awareness about mens health. 1 in 6 men will get prostate cancer. I won’t list any more statistics, that was stunning enough. I love men, and I love moustaches. What more could you ask for a charity/awareness drive?

If you don’t know any fella growing a moustache for Movember, maybe you’d like to donate to Daniel Hunt- a very talented web developer and all-around Good Guy:

View Daniel Hunt’s Mo-Space. Money donated to the Irish version of Movember goes to Action Prostate Cancer

The day I found out Nana passed away, I was visiting my sister and her family. I was teaching one of my nephews to knit (I had shown them crocheting before) and we also dyed some yarn. Later on when we actually got The Call, this nephew, M. and I were kneading dough to make pizzas- which is something I pretty much always do when I go up there. (Remind me to show you the Manta Ray Pizza that M. made!) Anyway, Nana would have appreciated all this fun kitcheny creativity going on.

It was cool when we looked online we saw Pea Soup of the Day’s tutorial on how to dye yarn with food colouring. It was cool, she showed her son getting into the dyeing. Boys like yarn too, see!

So here we are trying to dye wool. We gave up on the spoon, that was silly. We were trying to get like stripes, but it wasn’t working, so we ended up just pouring the dye on.

I was my brilliant idea to leave some white spaces, those didn’t come out- but the cool thing is, we got purple! And we only had blue and green food colouring! Somehow if you make the blue really really strong, you’ll get purple. Looks like some blue food colouring also contains red! More scientifical food-colouring info here: Using Food Coloring as a Textile Dye for Protein Fibers

Easy peasy:

Boil:

Let cool before rinsing:

Steve Eminton, of http://letsrecycle.com “said that mountains of plastic bottles, paper and steel cans were likely to build up by the end of the year and that the problem would be exacerbated by the Christmas festivities, when a surge of packaging materials and drinks containers would fill recycling bins.”

Yet another reason to make prezzies or Buy Handmade http://www.buyhandmade.org/

I saw the video below on the Shiny and Fuzzy blog, an idyllic view of recyclables sorting.

Just in case you ever wondered… this is NOT how recycling is sorted in Ireland. A friend of mine who lectures at IT Sligo on Environmental Science saw first hand that much of the recyclable material we “sort” actually gets all bunged together anyway! He also explained how it was hand-sorted, which was laborious and costly, and much of it simply gets shipped off & they pay to be processed elsewhere. Up in Donegal, my sister explained that the Bring Centre she used to go to in Carndonagh is closed… there’s simply not the infrastructure to manage all this recycled material in Ireland.

Basically, one answer is simply not to buy as much this Christmas, refuse to purchase heavily packaged goods, and tell the supermarket, toystore, whatever to stuff it.

This past spring I took a pottery class. I never really wanted to leave the “pinch pot” stage, and found ever more inventive ways of pinching pots- one hole, two holes, even 7 holes. I added eyes and teeth and made characters. Coiling? Slab? No thanks.

I did however make these little “Round Tuits”, but never finished them. They are only bisque-fired, not glazed. I mean to paint them or stain them, then seal them with wax or something, not sure the best way to finish them. Then tie a ribbon in them for hanging.

My Nana had a wooden Round Tuit on her mantle in the kitchen. It was always a joke in her house, about not being able to say you didn’t get a Round Tuit. My sister got the original, but I thought it would be nice to make one for everyone in the family.

I guess the fact is, I never got a round to preparing these and giving them to everyone- and I suppose now is really the time for these.

I will be going back to the US at the end of this month for a visit. I hope these little medallions are a cheerful reminder of Nana’s good sense of humour and her love of spoonerisms and word-play.

Here’s some more pics of the pinch pots I made in pottery class: