in the company of women

i have, over the past year, found a really awesome group of women friends to hang out with. one of them was able to borrow her sister's summer house near the west coast this past weekend and we spent a truly blissful 24 hours there together.

earlier in the week, we had been to a salon evening, where we got these red yarn bracelets, which we were to wear for three days with the purpose of looking at it and meditating on all of the happiness and good luck we would have in the new year. we decided already then to take them with us to the beach and release them into the north sea, in a kind of ceremony.

so we each took off our bracelet and released it into the sea in our own fashion. but it felt powerful as we stood there together, giving the little bit of yarn a last moment of silent, individual good intentions for 2014, before sending it out into the waves to be free.

then we wandered down the rock-strewn beach. so funny that just a few weeks ago, there were a few shells on the beach, but no stones at all and now it's covered with stones. (tho' i will grant that this is a different beach, a bit farther north).

we found a small beach ball in the waves and kicked it around a bit. this despite being five grown women. our little groups formed and reformed as we all walked and talked and enjoyed being together in a setting apart from our everyday.

after our trip to the beach, we retired back to the warm summer house, where a fire was soon burning merrily in the wood-burning stove. we got out our art supplies and began both the drink and the draw phase of the weekend. i made a gin cocktail (of course), using homemade pear-ginger cordial as a base. we each brought something to share (both wine and food).

we ate a tuna mousse with some very good bread, followed by a gorgeous fish soup and then my chocolate pots with salted caramel in the bottom for dessert. all along, there was wine. late in the evening, after the crochet lessons (i really learned how to make a granny square this time!), we turned to pomegranate gajol and a smoky laphroaig whiskey that i brought along. happily, lots of laughter and water in between kept it from going totally wrong the next day.

we don't really have any rules for drink and draw, but we did decide that we all had to draw the little silvery fish we saw on the beach in some form or another. other than that, we all indulged in whatever we wanted to. several of us are using an old book as the base, humument style. we had quite some fun reading from one of the books, which had a lot of illustrations as well. old books provide a surprising base for creativity. my own is called talismanen (the talismen) and tho' it's about knights and such, there are meaningful words on every page if you select carefully.

there was much laughter and sharing and deep, serious conversations as well. it all felt very, very good for the soul. i don't know what it is, but as i grow older, i find that more and more i crave hanging out with women friends. our spouses and families weren't far from our thoughts or our conversation, but it was good to just be together, eating, drinking and drawing and even singing. and crocheting. just the girls.

scenes from a weekend on the west coast of denmark

i went away for a weekend drink & draw with my posse of amazing women who make me laugh. we borrowed a wonderful summer house and stayed up very late learning to crochet, talking, laughing and drinking a bit too much wine, gajol (a licorice-flavored tipple), laphroaig and gin cocktails. we also ate some amazing food. but i'm pretty exhausted, so i'll have to tell you all about it soon. these photos of our walk down to the beach, where the north sea was crashing to shore with strangely yellowish-brown rather angry-looking waves, will have to suffice for now. and i totally want that little steep-roofed magical fairytale house in the last photo, don't you? it was quite amazing, coming up over the dunes to see it. kind of like stumbling onto how i imagined denmark would look in reality, after all these years.

here's hoping your weekend was amazing too.

lightening up

just to lighten things up a bit, for your perusal, the first issue of b.a.h. from bookhou:

Open publication - Free publishing - More bookhou

so much inspiration and goodness. makes me wish i lived in toronto.

birds of a feather

i took a little walk out in the yard this morning. it was foggy out there and very still, but the balmy (it's supposed to reach 10°C today!) air was filled with joyous bird song of all sorts and the odd call of some geese from down on our lake. i stood there, breathing in the fresh air and all of that bird song and i pondered the controversy i stirred up yesterday.

i had a few pangs because in some sense it wasn't actually any of my business. it wasn't my art being copied, so why should i care? but the fact of it is that i did care. and i found as the day progressed yesterday, that i cared a lot. i couldn't get it off my mind. and it's not only because copies devalue the original and i felt it affected the stones i'd purchased from margie. in fact, that was actually the least of it.

i think what bothered me most was that margie seems to me to be one of the biggest-hearted, most giving, down-to-earth creative souls out there...the way she shares her process, her thinking, her insights, her life and her craft are all acts of a giving and kind person who is engaged in what she does. for this to happen to her seemed so unfair. to someone so truly an artist and a craftsperson. you could accept it more easily if it happened to someone whose work didn't seem so unique or who didn't share it in the same giving, warm spirit. in fact, i saw some bloggy controversy a couple of years ago over those wooden mustaches on a stick that i didn't feel badly about in the same way because it didn't seem to be THAT special of an object. but what margie makes is special - her missing pieces stones and her merfish - they're really unique. so to copy them for sale so blatantly and unapologetically (as it turns out), is simply so disheartening.

but what is heartening is the way that margie's community rallied around her. i can't actually find any community rallying about renee (or shall we call her pell?) (and i spent quite some time looking before i wrote this). so although one could become disillusioned in all this and feel hesitant about sharing one's process and creativity online, it is also very powerful to think of how many people support margie in this - and her right to defend her creative, intellectual property. and although there are many people out there crocheting stones, these designs are so distinctively hers and they're very clearly being copied.

when i first saw one of the impostor stones on the etsy front page, i actually thought that someone was reselling margie's stones. they are so distinctive, they call her immediately to mind. and then when i looked closer and realized it wasn't margie's stones at all and further found that there were also merfish in the shop, i was shocked!  and what's strange is that it would seem to be totally unnecessary. renee is obviously very talented at crochet and has some sweet little animals and such in her shop. so why steal margie's ideas?

so while i still don't understand it, nor her refusal to admit copying and just stop it (please see the comments on the post below for proof of this), i am heartened to see the crafting community rally together around an artist and a person like margie. that is another testament to the way in which she has shared her creativity and built her reputation via her blog and flickr and her etsy shop. it seems that birds of a feather do flock together. and if that makes us followers, so be it. there's a big difference between support and bullying and between what's right and what's wrong.

felt bowl tutorial

it's hard to believe, but i don't think i've ever posted a tutorial before. several people asked me to post a tutorial of the felt bowls i've been making of late. i should preface this by saying that i am total beginner at this and what i'm really posting here is my experience with this medium. if you're a real felter, you may want to go visit some other site now, as you'll probably be appalled at my technique. :-)  however, it has worked for me and i've really been enjoying the magic that is needle felting.

the first step is to get yourself a big cup of coffee or tea, as this process takes awhile.  i'll admit, i drink a lot of nescafe's instant espresso. it has that lovely foam that i don't want to know how they achieve in a powdered product. instant coffee, a guilty pleasure. and now let's get on with the felting.

these are the tools of the felting trade. i call that big one with the 5 needles in it "the big kahuna." sabin insists it's called "the kachunk." you can name yours whatever you want. there are different grades of fineness in felting needles. here in denmark, the ones we can get don't really have numbers assigned to them, tho' i've seen that elsewhere - we can buy fine, medium and regular, which seems rather similar to medium.  the needles aren't like regular sewing needles, as they have very fine little barbs along the sides. oh, and you WILL poke yourself with them eventually. sometimes all the way through your finger, so be careful.

it can be handy to have a wooden holder on the needle, as you are poking it in a LOT of times and the needle without it can begin to make your fingers sore. that said, i often use the medium single needle on its own. i have a fine needle for finishing work in the smaller holder. and in the big kahuna, five regular needles. you will break a needle at some point (usually when you've just stabbed it one side of your finger and out the other) and the holders are easy to change them out.  that bit of foam the needles are stuck in is another essential item. this piece, i cut and used to make the bowls on the weekend. it comes as a square and is the perfect working surface for your felting. you should be able to find these where you find your felting supplies. and you will need to replace them regularly as they definitely wear out if you're doing a lot of felting.

next, you need some wool roving in the color of your choice - wool is key, as synthetic materials or cotton won't felt. i buy roving in craft stores and fabric stores and, of course, online. this beautiful piece of hand-dyed wool, i bought on etsy. i blogged about it previously. if you're in the market, i can recommend this etsy shop and this one.  or, if you're lucky enough to have your own sheep, ask him or her to donate a bit of wool. to make the bowls, i have tried both the crudely cut piece of felting pad above and this time, a styrofoam ball, as pictured below. you end up with a more flat bottom using the felt pad and a bit more round with the ball, tho' even with the ball, it's still possible to create a flat bottom.

tear off a piece of roving in a size you can manage and begin covering the ball with it. i roll it and needle it into place with the big kahuna, then i continue rolling it and poking it repeatedly with the needles. it is sticking to the ball, but it's also sticking to itself and beginning to felt.  the longer you poke with the needles, the more they do their felting magic.

keep winding until the bowl reaches the height you'd like - i went about 2/3 of the way on this styrofoam ball. if you run out of roving before you reach the height you wish, just tear off another piece, overlap a little bit and keep going.  you basically can't poke this too many times with the needle.

once it becomes closer to the bowl you'd like to see, you can switch to a single needle and keep felting. i worked especially on the top, poking in along the edge, to form a nice, smooth, rounded edge on the top. if you can see that there are areas where the felt is thin, you should add more pieces and continue poking them. the poking is quite therapeutic and if you want, you can imagine people you're angry with, but mostly, it takes you to kind of a meditative state.

you can work on making the bottom a flat surface as well - just keep poking and it will flatten out. this whole poking process took me about 30 minutes or so, so it's a task which requires patience.

once you think it's felted together enough, you can remove it from the ball, carefully peeling it back. some styrofoam bits will come off in your fibers, but you can flick them out with the needle. i may have to find a solution for this, but as of yet, i haven't.

once it's removed from the styrofoam ball, you'll see that there are thin spots. you should needle more felt onto the bowl, both on the inside and the outside, until it's the thickness you'd like it to be. you'll need a felting pad for this, as you have to have something to stick the needles into. you may also pop it back on the ball as needed. if your roving, like mine, is multi-colored, take care to choose the colors you'd like in the spots you'd like them. basically, you just keep poking. it's simply magical how those fine needles cause the fibers to grab hold of one another and hold their form.

i'm still working on this little bowl, but it's getting close to finished. you can decorate it by stitching on it or by attaching little curly locks of fiber around the top. and voila, you have a little treasure bowl of your very own. and if you don't feel up to all that poking, you can find a couple of little treasure bowls here.  as far as the time required, one bowl takes about two episodes of boston legal.

good luck and take good care of your fingers!

if you have questions, just leave a comment and i'll try to answer them.

edited:  the lovely lisa (who is a real felter) asked if i tried wet felting it afterwards....that's where you dip your felted item in soapy warm water and work it between your fingers to further felt it. i will say that i did that with the very first bowl i made on saturday and i didn't like the result. it made it dull - possibly because i didn't rinse it well enough and possibly because the roving was hand-dyed and it made it more uniform in color to wet it.  the advantage of wet felting afterwards is that you have easier control of the shape of the bowl.  here is the one i wet-felted:

if you can crochet, you can also crochet your bowl using wool yarn and then felt it with warm soapy water (or even throw it in the washer) afterwards. but i find there's something really magical about transforming an actual ball of fluff into a usable little vessel, so i like the needle method. plus, i can't crochet to save my life.