making things and reading

i made soap yesterday. i took the easy route, buying a shea butter soap base at the craft store, but adding honey (from our own bees) and oatmeal and sprigs of lavender i picked last summer and dried. i'll make another run of it this evening at a "make things with honey" event at our local culture house. i'm also making all sorts of yummy honey-related things to eat. i convinced our local beekeeper's association to show people the wide variety of things you can make with honey! i love instigating such things. the soap was super easy and i'm going to tackle the more difficult cold process kind next time - using oils and lye and time. i like the idea of knowing exactly what's gone into the soap. husband wants me to get very ambitious and make shampoo as well. but one step at a time. he's done a marvelous job building a room that's made for such projects (he calls it the brewery), so once the sink is in out there, i will have a place to do such projects, conveniently located right next to the honey centrifuge.

thanks to faithful use of goodreads, i realized that i can manage to read at least 100 books before the year is out. my goodreads stands at 84, but i also did my annual reread of the harry potter series, so it's actually at 91. to round it out, i dug around in boxes and found my nabokov collection, as i've just read andrea pitzer's the secret history of vladimir nabokov and so i have a hankering to reread pale fire. the three hardbacks, i scored long ago in a used bookstore in scottsdale, arizona for a song. i've already delved into speak, memory, nabokov's autobiography, and i realized that tho' i've had it for years, i hadn't actually read it before now. i wonder how many more of those are on my shelves. maybe my goal for 2014 will be to read 100 books that i already own. most of this years reads have been from the library, as borrowing instead of buying fits my current lifestyle and philosophy much better anyway. tho' it remains hard for me not to write in the library's books. if i only read my own books, their loan rates are going to go down and we can't have that, so i guess it will have to be a mix.

* * *

if you love JFK (and i do), you have to see this collection of photos in the atlantic.

fanciferocity

fanciferocity - i learned that word from the j. peterman catalog today. (it would be my dream job to write for them.) i figured it was appropriate, as i've gone a little nuts with the fanciferous little round baby acorns. it's just that every time i go out to feed the horses, i see more of the little caps on the ground and i can't stop picking them up. it's funny, as i already told you, i started thinking i'd just make red and white, since i want to use them on our christmas tree, but very soon, i picked up orange and green and blue (of course) and before long, i was making a whole rainbow. i just couldn't help myself. molly suggested making a garland and i just may have to do that, if their little sticks will hold up to it. otherwise, i'm going to incorporate them in my packaging for the upcoming christmas market we're having at our local kulturhus (community center). hopefully they'll make my bottles of cordials and jars of jam look totally irresistible.

i have so much going on and so many thoughts and ideas and possibilities swirling in my head at the moment, that it strangely doesn't want to come out into the blogger compose window. that doesn't happen to me very often, but apparently now is one of those times. i will undoubtedly be back soon with some self-therapy. but until then, i hope you're all having as glorious and warm an autumn as we are.

skipping through my mind

distant friends.
fragments of ideas.
snippets of information.
snatches of inspiration.
questions, always questions.

beginning to make things again.

experimenting with photos and transfer glue and wax from our beehives.

why is making such a fleeting thing?

i feel it drift from me, just out of reach.

and then it drifts back.

i wonder how to make it stay?

pink and blue morning skies.
pink and blue felted stones.
we learned how to make them here.
ours are kind of lumpy and rather large.
but i learned a lot about wool quality.
no more cheap roving from the dollar store,
no matter how pretty the colors may be.
probably going to need some sheep.

pinspiration no. 3

i've just finished up pinspiration no. 3 - this fresh and fabulous bag. inspired by this pin (which i am ashamed to say i pinned 45 weeks ago - yes, it took me that long to do something about it). there is a free pattern and directions here (thank you, very purple person!). i just got out a newspaper and drew my own pattern (will make the handles slightly longer in the next go), but i used the directions. they're good if you're an experienced seamstress.

this is some fabric i bought ages ago, with pillows in mind, but i absolutely LOVE it as a bag. it's a rather heavy canvas - i suppose it's an upholstery fabric. it has some synthetic content (you'll see in a minute how i found that out).

the directions are pretty good, but i'm not sure i would have thought that if i hadn't made all of those reversible dresses last autumn. the bag is theoretically reversible, tho' i put a pocket on the plain black lining inside and don't intend to reverse it. if you had two fabulous fabrics, you could definitely nake a reversible and versatile bag. here's where i'm using a brush to help me turn it - that moment is always a bit weird, as it feels like you must have done it wrong, but then it ends up all right.

finishing the handles was easier than i thought and easier than my dresses were last autumn. it was here that i felt the directions were a bit iffy - i wished there were better photos of the process, but i muddled through and it did go together quite smoothly.

the improvised pocket i put on the inside - i just NEED somewhere to put my phone so i'm not rummaging around for it in the midst of 50 old receipts and wads of used kleenex.

my version of the bag is a bit wider than the one i pinned - it will make it nice and roomy for all kinds of things - i'm thinking knitting projects and cameras.

i'm using a little room off my living room as a craft room these days - i moved the dining table there a few weeks ago. unfortunately, there's no working electricity out there, as when we moved the 1940s electrical box and got a new, modern one, they didn't reconnect that end of the house (it had been cobbled together originally and so the electrician didn't realize it wasn't reconnected). until i moved my crafty bits out there, it didn't really matter, as we didn't use that room except when we had couchsurfers. this morning, i lit some candles on the table and as you can see, kind of forgot about them when i was working on laying out the bag. soon, my fabric was flaming up rather merrily and stinking up the place - possibly indicating synthetic fibers. i managed to quickly put it out and only ruined a small corner of my fabulous fabric.

the first bag was so much fun, i'm going to make up another one with this fabulous fabric that i bought ages ago in oslo. you can never have too many bags.

UPDATE: now with the second bag complete - and a bit longer handles so it fits over the shoulder a bit better. i'm so happy i finally used some of my fabric stash! i'll enjoy it so much more now than i did while it languished on the shelf.

pinspiration process

a bit of the process on pinspiration no. 1 - the advantage of having an old, crappy house, cobbled together with string and tape, is that you don't mind writing on the wall, so i started by sketching out the letters for CREATE.

next, i used half a box of husband's little tiny nails and banged them into the wall. luckily it was some kind of gypsum/papiermache wall material and not a brick wall, so it was time-consuming, but relatively easy.

i held the nails in my mouth, which rather alarmed the child. and i did, myself, have several rather vivid visions of accidentally inhaling one or more of them and having to drive myself to the doctor.  i managed, despite a cold and stuffed-up nose, not to.

we raided the yarn stash (i let sabin pick the colors - rainbow, of course) and wove the yarn around the nails until we thought it looked right.

sabin wasn't very patient about it, she wanted to be done NOW, NOW, NOW and wanted to hear none of it, when i pointed out that it as also about enjoying the process. she wants results. fast results. oh, and in this shot, you can see pinspiration no. 2 - sabin's dotty nails! - inspired by this pin. i even made a little dotting tool by sticking a pin in an eraser.

we left long tails, not sure what we would do with them. i kind of liked them just hanging down, a bit like dripping paint, but sabin wanted them swept up to the side. i have to agree, it did look better.  and again, for reference, here's the pin that inspired our morning project.

we've got a little diffuser of clary sage going in the making room and sabin said, "mom, it smells just like your blue room." scent memory is a wonderful thing and clary sage definitely stimulates creativity. back later with today's products of pinspiration.

a week of pinspiration: no. 1

pinspiration no. 1. this was the pin. 

we've only just begun.

stay tuned.

we've already got tomorrow planned.
(and by we i mean me & sabin)

it's a whole week of pinspiration - also known as actually making something based on all that curating.

evidence of creativity so far in 2011

after getting that little saddle thing off my chest (which incidentally made me feel much better (and that's actually what this whole blogging thing is about)), i decided to turn to something more positive...so i went through my flickr and made some mosaics featuring all of the acts of creativity i've been involved in so far in 2011. some overall themes...quilts (7 of them! which surprised me a little bit) and food feature heavily. plus i counted eggs and honey and baby bunnies, because although i didn't lay the eggs or make the honey or have the bunnies myself, they are definitely acts of creativity to which i have been party. and i have been making a lot of yummy things with those eggs and that honey.

it all makes me want to finish 2011 even stronger than i started it. so standby, i've got something fun up my sleeve and you can be a part of it.