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Loopy

May 23rd, 2013

This project has taken a long time, with lots of stops and starts:

A year or two back Mum gave me two doilies she and her sister embroidered as teenagers. She was 14 and my aunt 16. Not being a doily using sort of person, I decided to frame them, but spent a long time hunting for the right frames. Because the orientation of the pattern on the doilies is different they looked strange together, so I wanted separate frames, but I couldn’t find rectangular frames in proportions that looked right. Circular frames would be better, but there didn’t seem to be any of those available.

Eventually I hit on the idea of using embroidery hoops. I was going to sacrifice my own hoop, that I’ve had since I was a child, but once I saw how crappy the ones in Lincraft were I decided to buy two of those and keep my old one in case I needed to embroider something – something I’m glad I did now the stitching bug has bitten me.

Then lots of time passed with me trying to work out how to turn the hoops into frames. Simply stitching them onto cloth and stretching it over the hoops would have been easiest, but I wanted to put the doilies behind glass.

I found some pre-cut particle board circles close to the right size and I got the local glass shop to cut glass to match. Then I sewed the doilies to some calico and stitched that to the particle board. After bit of stain and varnish the hoops looked pretty good.

The hard part was finding a way to keep the glass and embroidery fixed inside the frames. I tried bending brass wall hooks into L-shapes, but couldn’t find nails or screws small enough for the frame. I wound up holding the glass in by hammering nails into the inside of inner circle and cutting off the heads, then using tacks on the back to hold the boards in.

I thought this project was going to drive me crazy a few times but, as always, it was just a matter of waiting for the perfectly simple solution to come along.

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Scentendipity

May 16th, 2013

I’ve been feeling pretty crap for the last few weeks. So crap that at times I didn’t even have the energy for crafting. There has been a lot of gazing at Pinterest and Bloglovin, googling stuff and online shopping (my heddles turned up – yay!). Turning to my stock of essential oils to try and ease the aches and pains, I found that some were now out of date. That led to gathering together all the essential and scented oils around the house and to googling phrases like “what to do with old essential oils’.

One of the suggestions I found was to make your own scent diffuser sticks. Now, I must have missed the diffuser stick thing. Probably because they look like incense, which gives me a headache. Or I saw that someone was trying to get me to buy what was essentially (pun not intended) sticks in a jar.

Other people out in the internets must have been as unimpressed as I was at the latter, and made their own by drilling holes in a jar lid and sticking twigs of bamboo skewers through it. I have an abundance of bamboo skewers because I’d experimented a while back on making my own hot chocolate pops.

I was all ready to find a jar to drill a lid into when, in one of those moments of serendipity, I spotted the plastic tube that had come off the long-stem rose Paul had recently bought for a photo shoot. The shape of a test-tube, but with a rubber stopper with, yep, a hole in the top. I have plenty of these from a bunch of flowers someone gave me a few years ago.

So here’s the ‘recipe’ for my Reused Flower Tube Scent Diffusers.
Add 20 or 30 drops of essential or scented oils to tube, attach lid, stick a couple of bamboo skewers in, tie a string around it (I used offcuts from weaving) and hang it on a hook:

Or a door handle

So now my workroom smells of rosemary and peppermint, the wardrobe of lavender, and the bathroom of cranberry and ginger.

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Posted in creative recycling, home artycrafty home

Map Coasters: In Pictures

May 10th, 2013

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Posted in creative recycling, home artycrafty home

Hot & Bothered

March 11th, 2013

We’ve had a crazy number of days of 30+ degree weather, and have a couple more in the high 30s to go before the relief of a cool change arrives. Apparently it was the hottest summer on record. I have to keep reminding myself that it’s officially autumn now.

The weird thing about this is that we haven’t had a run of 40+ degree days as we’ve had in the past. A few years back Adelaide had a crazy long run of 40+ degree days. So it could be a lot worse. But it still feels wrong.

Maybe, for me, it feels worse because I was right about hot flushes and summer being a nightmare combination.

I’ve been wondering why the heck we built my workroom on the first floor facing northwest. (The answer, of course, is that up was the cheapest and easiest way we could extend.) When you go upstairs you ascend into a layer of hot air at about chest height. When you then walk into the workroom it’s like walking into a sauna minus the humidity. I can run the aircon, but with a heatwave this long I’d have to run it night and day to make the room usable. There’s also something wrong about burning so much energy and ultimately contributing to the global warming that’s probably causing the extreme summers we’re having.

So instead I’ve moved into the big open plan lounge and kitchen room at the other end of the house. The aircon there is stronger, and the crazy compressed straw insulation the original architect built into this place works its magic. If I could sleep down there, I would. In fact, it might come to that in the next few days.

Paul was off doing vintage car racing things on the weekend. I had four days by myself. I took my computer downstairs and continued working on the Bond, making good progress on both. I’ll have knitted garments to post pics of, once the weather cools down enough to model them.

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Posted in home artycrafty home, life & everything else

Wrapped

March 3rd, 2013

Lots of UFOs but nothing to blog about, so here’s a photo I found on my camera a while ago and have been saving for a moment like this:

It’s our presents for Christmas, wrapped in the paper I printed. Always nice to have coordinated wrapping!

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Posted in creative recycling, home artycrafty home, paper craft & bookbinding

Again

February 14th, 2013

I’ve been reorganising the workroom yet again. I blame the cat.

You see, it all started when I finally got around to re-covering the sofa bed in the library that Slinky had shredded. While it was in the shop and out of the way we rearranged the bookshelves behind it. That led to a book re-shuffle. That led to us having the space and need for a tall, narrow bookcase. I had one in the workroom, and decided that I didn’t it in the workroom as much as I needed it in the library.

And that led to reorganising everything on the remaining shelving in the workroom.

What? Less storage in the workroom? Well, the bookcase was a single five-shelf Expedit unit sitting on top of two 4×4 units. It was full of books and magazines. But half of the books are now going into the library and the rest…

Well, the rest were craft books and magazines, of which most were about knitting. And since I’m avoiding hand knitting now thanks to RSI, there really wasn’t any point owning so many books on the subject. So I cut the collection down by half.

It was surprisingly easy. I was keeping a lot of books simple because I’d knit something out of them. Yet every time I made something I’d take a photocopy of the pages so I wouldn’t end up scrawling all over the book, so I had a record anyway. A lot of these garments I didn’t have any more, because they were now too small or I’d grown tired of them.

There were books I’d kept for sentimental reasons, like the Stitch’N Bitch book that was the first knitting book I bought after getting hooked again. There were books I’d never made anything from anyway. And there were books that failed to sell last time I’d had a big cull.

I didn’t cull all the books, though. One way I was getting around having less shelving was by storing things on top of the remaining units, but books don’t stand up without support so they had to move down onto shelves. That meant shuffling more of the shelving contents around, which led to an all-out clean-out.

Knitting tools and the folder of patterns I’ve made got thinned. Boxes of paper and card were culled and reorganised. Art materials, tools and books were shuffled so they fit better or were more accessible.

So that’s the linen press with it’s boxes of craft supplies, the wardrobe, the bag collection, the library and now the workroom culled and organised. To be fair, the last time I did a workroom reshuffle I didn’t have to touch these particular shelves, so they were due for it. Even so… I’m starting to wonder, what driving all this culling and tidying up? Is it part of some deeper itch to get a little order into my surroundings?

Whatever the reason, it’s had some unexpected benefits. I had barely touched any fibre craft in months, and suddenly I’m all inspired again. Which means blog posts with pics are coming up.

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Posted in home artycrafty home, life & everything else

Designs on Bookplates

February 10th, 2013

So having decided I should design a bookplate, I went looking for inspiration. I pinned a range of them to a dedicated “Beautiful Bookplates” Pinterest board. There are some lovely modern bookplates in there. I also have this book.

It seems owls, cats and trees are very common subjects for bookplates. There are lots of pretty women reading books and, of course, pictures of books. There are also versions of the book stealer’s curse.

I’m thinking of drawing a sea turtle. Slow on land, but surprisingly agile once immersed. Hard on the outside, apparently very tasty on the inside. (And they eat jellyfish, so I already have an affection for them.)

What would you put on your own personal bookplate? Do you have an animal you identify with? Or a plant? Or some other symbol? Do you like the old style of bookplate, or something more modern? Do you even use bookplates?

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Posted in books, home artycrafty home

Book Shelfishness

February 7th, 2013

When making the shift into co-habitation, the question of which possessions to combine and which to keep separate is an interesting and sometimes tricky one. It probably says a lot about a couple which possessions they don’t allow to become enmeshed and which they do. Sometimes it’s a matter of identity, sometimes practicality.

Paul and I have always kept our music collections separate. This is mostly practical. We both have eclectic but quite different tastes. There’s not a lot of overlap. So it’s easier to find what we want to listen to by keeping our collections separate.

We also have kept our books separate. This was not practical; it had everything to do with identity. The books that we own are a snapshot of our personal histories. We kept them in different bookcases: mine in the pine bookcases I had made nearly 20 years ago and took with me wherever I moved, Paul’s in incredibly heavy solid timber glass door cases we don’t really want any more of.

The thing is, we’ve been together for over ten years now and have since bought so many books that we’ve both read and for which there’s no way to tell whether a particular book is ‘mine’ or ‘his’. The bookcase issue is getting to be impractical, too. I’ve been culling my books savagely in order to fit everything in mine, and Paul goes on adding to his, which is starting to feel a little unfair. No, it’s starting to feel a LOT unfair. Especially when Paul often ends up adopting books I’ve culled.

Hmm.

So I suggested the other day that we finally combine our collections. Paul, to my surprise, agreed. (In fact, he looked rather happy about it… until it came to the part where we had to remove, cull, re-order and replace a whole lot of books.) But to reassure the possessive bibliophile in me, who still remembers the awkwardness of having to extract my books from the ex’s collection, I’ve come up with a salve: bookplates.

We’ll probably only put them the books we feel most sentimental about. While I could buy them, we’re going to need an awful lot of them. I could make them, but that’s going to be time-consuming. However, I have had bookplates printed before for people who forget to bring my books to signings, or have ebook versions. It’s a lot faster and cheaper to have them made in bulk.

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Posted in books, home artycrafty home, life & everything else

Sorted

January 28th, 2013

Found at the op shop for $7 when I dropped off all my culled clothing, linen and bags. It looks unused and is well made. A very simple design, but the curve makes it more interesting than a basic black clutch.

I’m guessing someone was given this and it wasn’t to their taste. It’s fits my little black clutch needs perfectly.

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Hard Copy

January 14th, 2013

I’d love a dollar for every time someone has said how foolish it is to not get your best photos printed because it’s so easy to lose digital copies, then done nothing about my own growing collection. I’ve had a digital camera for about ten years now. Though I’ve managed to get some holidays albums done, I’ve not been printing out photos of events and people. I’ve still got two holidays to catch up on as well as a fuzzy idea about printing and framing a collection of favourite arty photos to hang in the stairwell.

So how to sort out ten years worth of photos? Well, thanks to Pinterest, and a blog post pinned by my friend Margaret, the task has gone from too-enormous-to-contemplate to large-but-possibly-do-able.

I’ve modified and reordered the list in the post to this:

1. Consolidate into one location
Which I was in the habit of doing anyway, but Paul’s photos are, naturally, in his own computer/backup system so we’ve set things up so my computer can access them.

2. Group by year, event/subject
I’ve not bothered grouping them by month as well because that would split up holiday pics. But I’ve added folders for ‘garden’, ‘house’ and ‘cat’.

3. Cull
The previous step revealed that I’d been storing some photos in two places, and so had a lot of duplicates I could delete. I haven’t got to the serious culling yet. The process of picking photos from a holiday trip or event to post in blogs means I’ve already got a system of moving photos into a ‘working’ or ‘rejects’ subdirectory, so I should only have to cull those subdirectories.

4. Additions
Do I want to scan old photos, documents or ephemera to add to an album? Or photograph objects to include? Or add clippings or con books?

5. Backups
The original blog post puts this one at the end. Personally, I think the sooner backups are done the better.

6. Divide & Conquer
Decision time. Holiday photos are best put in dedicated albums. I’m considering making convention and writer scrapbooks with clear pockets for ephemera and clippings, constructed in a way that allows me to add more pages. One of the reasons I haven’t done an album of the author tour I did in 2011 is because three quarters of the pics are the sort you’d put in a writer scrapbook and the other quarter are holiday pics. They don’t mix well, so I think I need to separate them.

The most useful idea I gained from that blog post was of doing annual albums. I never know what to do with personal pics of personal events, parties, the house and garden, the cat, family, etc. They used to go in an ongoing album of general stuff that I was never very good at labelling so I’d eventually forget dates and places. If I did a small album each year using one of those album printing services I might be able to keep up.

7. Design & Print
While I do enjoy making interesting albums using bookbinding methods, getting around to it is a problem. I could probably use album printing services for holiday pics. Where I’d like to design my own format is for convention and writer scrapbooks, using a japanese stab or post binding method so I can add more pages later. A bit like the New Zealand photo album I did a few years back.

So I have a plan, and an overwhelming task divided into smaller manageable ones. Since I’m entering a pretty busy work time I’m not setting any aims for getting all my photos sorted any time soon. But at least it seems do-able now.

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Posted in home artycrafty home

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