The sharpest crafting implement

So recently (before the crippling back took over my life) we went to our local fair where we were delighted to discover that there is an annual wool and fiber festival. It was so amazing. I could hardly manage to restrain myself from blowing an entire months rent on wool. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me, it was truly drool worthy.  Additionally I was reminded of my plan to learn tatting by a lovely woman selling beautiful filigree shuttles silver plated.

Tatting.

Ohhhhh tatting how I love you!

I've had these books for awhile, I can't remember where I got them only that they came with me from the UK. Learn to Tat by Connie Ellison and Tatted Jewelry by Lyn Morton.  Learn to Tat comes with a instructional DVD which I have to admit to not using as of yet, probably I should have as I absolutely had to access online video tutorials to  get it all to work properly. I have this feeling that it is one of those skills best learned sitting at the foot of your grandmother!!

And then I visited Pintrest (oh man- just look up tatted jewelry!!!) and some other blogs etc. There are some beautiful designs at Le Blog de Frivole. 

Its brilliant when laying in bed and I read that traditionally it was a craft taught to people recovering from illnesses. It is so suiting I find the whole situation slightly embarrassing.

So now my head is spinning with ideas and designs. It is sparing me the absolute soul destroying level of boredom I could be hunkering under.

However Tatting shuttles are the sharpest craft implements I have ever had the misfortune of partially laying on in bed!! They have a horrific little sharp point on one end which is entirely useful and practical until you loose it!

Yike!

As an aside Autumn has set in here in an amazing way with breezes, crispy mornings and rain showers.
I don't remember ever having rain before the end of September when I was growing up in Mariposa. We are closer to the coast here but it has still taken me by surprise and it is so cold in our house. 

My poor little homeschoolers are working in scarves and hats and mittens!

Last week the thermometer was recording overnight lows of 34 F and it felt it. Today the rain is falling in earnest so it is a little warmer.  In the UK there is a quiet battle of  hardiness and pride in how late into the year one can last before turning on the heating... well its not yet October and we are having morning fires.  Guess that means I loose.

Isn't it beautiful? Almost worth waking up with frostbite!

xx Jo

Good news. Bad news.

Good news:  My bedroom walls and ceiling are very well painted.

Bad news: I know this because I have spent the last 7 days staring at them from my position in bed.

Good news: I've finally taught myself how to do Tatting and it is so much fun! (More on that later!)

Bad news: Doing any sort of craft flat on your back is a little tricky and involves your fingers going numb every few minutes.

Good news: I've found my girls are exceptionally willing to be  helpful around the house.

Bad news: I've found M. is really bad at grocery shopping so our repertoire of meals consists almost entirely of  thing a college boy might eat.

Good news: We have Prime membership so I've been able  to watch unlimited Jane Austen adaptations from my supine position.

Bad news: We've reached our data limit. Boo Hoo!!

Anyhoooo... because of all this back stuff... grrrr... I am feeling very very sorry for myself.  So do please excuse me a little whine and a few spelling errors.

xxJo

The hip Victorian silhouette project

I love the trend for Victorian silhouettes that has come up in the last few years but the dull black leaves me a little uninspired and quite frankly makes me think of funerals. 

I also love to make mementos of my children at different stages of their life. Particularly a set of three showing all three girls at the same time. When the girls were little I did a set of their footprints all at once (ages 4 years/2 years/ 3 months) which were the things we most feared getting lost or broken in the move because they are irreplaceable and utterly priceless.

So here is my work in progress and a little (very very little and simple) how to:

You need:

1:  a digital camera and computer.

2:  tracing paper.

3:  a large enough piece of fabric to fit comfortably in an embroidery hoop of your chosen size. I used a 10 inch diameter hoop which is what I will display the portrait in long term as well, but you can mount it in a frame if that’s more your style.

4:  Your hoop

5: two coordinating pieces of felt- I used the acrylic kind that’s really cheap.

6: needle and thread in coordinating colours.

7: a stencil if you wish.

Seat your subject in a chair in front of a white, smooth  background (I hung a piece of paper on the wall) and shine as much light from every direction as possible. Take your photo and upload it to the computer. Size the photo on your screen to as big/ small as you fancy and trace your subjects profile onto tracing paper directly from the screen- carefully don’t press hard!!

Carefully cut out the profile- that’s your silhouette template. Cut out one exact copy from your top piece of felt and an enlarged (by only a ¼ to ½ an inch) copy from the bottom felt colour. It’s okay to be less precise on the bottom copy but try to keep the enlargement even all around the silhouette.

With your fabric in the hoop and your two felt silhouettes placed on top stitch in small even stitches all around the edge of the top silhouette.

If you are going to skip the stenciling- you are done.  Either cut away the excess fabric from your hoop or stitch it back behind and hang your portrait. Alternatively frame your beauty and make it look as proper as you choose!

For the stencilers… I am ashamed to show you the messy back of my work but I feel it is only fair to show you how I am adding pattern to my piece…  My stitching looks great at the front but is a 

PAR-TAY 

at the back….

***BLUSH***

I used a stencil which came as a set of three for free with a magazine and I traced my basic design onto the back of the outline of my stitching and added embellishment where it looked too bare.  

Voilà! Hip Victorian Silhouette! 

 Use your template for other projects too. 

I used mine to make porcelain silhouettes which I hang in a group. They took (surprisingly) less time to make than the stitched versions. But you could use the template to cut sheet icing for a special birthday cake or to paint a drawer in a shared room  rather than putting names on the drawers.

Have fun!

xx Jo

The place I'm at when I should be doing something else...

Soooooo....  You know I've been busy. With lots of things.

I have the ABC's of busy...

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A is for Apples

 in the orchard- more than I can keep up with cooking, canning, feeding to my children, our neighbor's cows or the deer.

B is for Bird-sitting

 our chickens when they are out of their pen in order that the nasty bobcat that ate one doesn't get anymore!

C is for Canning

because I planted too much veg, inherited too many fruit trees and generally got too ambitious when ordering peaches via our friends at Live Power Community Farm with our CSA (Community Sustained Agriculture... its a mouthful to say and eat) box.

--------------------------------

The alphabet goes on and on and on (like Gone With the Wind but with no war, elegant dresses or Rhet Butler ... just lots of me looking flustered and throwing tantrums about someone messing up the quilt draped artistically over the back of the couch AGAIN!!!!!) finally ending in:

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Z is for Zombie*

...sometimes... sort of... not really...

but M. sometimes acts like one.  He has been really really busy too and starts talking about going to bed the moment the children are up the stairs to go to sleep at 9 p.m. Naturally my instinct is to rebel and go to bed at 3 a.m. so I'm kinda a zombie too some mornings. 

*no photos of "Z" for the protection of the innocent

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  but the letter that has been consuming my time and mental space is S.

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S is for Sweet Little Wood

and Shop!  I am officially set up in a beautiful shop called Gin'Gillie's Vintage Home Collective in Gyserville California!

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When we left England we had some idea of opening a vintage/handmade sales space of some kind but we were uncertain of what exactly we wanted to do and more importantly where! I have a space on Etsy but in order to make it work you need a large-ish shop and really you have to push yourself to be proactive in order to keep your listings popping up because there are so (I cannot stress this enough) SOOOOOOOOO many sellers on Etsy. 

So the reasons Etsy is not really for me are that I am: 

1: too lazy. 

2: too annoyed/terrified by the postal system in the USA. 

3: to lazy

So this is what I enjoy doing. I find stuff. Old busted (sometimes) not really loved stuff. I take it home buff it up and show it I love it and then put it where someone else might pick it up and decide they love it too. Then I spend time with my family and make stuff I love with my hands... while the kids do homeschool... while I wait for the twelve jars in my canning pot to get to the right temperature... while I sit and wait for yet another interminable visit to the orthodontist to end...  while I inwardly gripe that M. has gone to bed at 9:01 and I'm not anything like tired yet.  Then I put that handmade stuff where someone else might pick it up and decide they love it too.

The long and short of it all is that when I should be watering watermelons that are taking over the back acre, keeping my little chickies from going stir-crazy in their pen, or sleeping with my husband at 11 o'clock.:  I can often be seen thinking about, designing, creating, washing, dusting, stitching, drawing or daydreaming about  Sweet Little Wood, my sweet little space that I can play with and make my own.

x(yz)  Jo

P.S. if you have never seen a tiny little baby watermelon...

 they are the cutest darn things ever!!

P.P.S. Does anyone know if apples are bad for cows?!?!

Sorry about the postmove hangover...

We have been computerless for some time. Our third computer in two years in fact. How are we managing to kill them so quickly?!?  Fortunately because they are so new when they break its all been under warranty.

If I had a computer over the last few months this is what I might have talked about:

 12 Ducks: cute when ducklings, messy when ducklings and getting messier as they get older, stinky, nightmare to pluck. Now sat in my deep freeze waiting roasting. NEVER EVER AGAIN!!! (hear that Matt... NEVER!)

25 Chickens: cute when chicks but not to be ordered by post as you have the horror of opening your box of chicks to find a load of dead ones, and they can drown in shallow water dishes... again not a nice surprise to come home to. Now a total of 17 chicks. 2 are Cornish giants, they will also join the ducks in my deep freeze- for now they are called "Chickzilla" and "Jabba-the-Chick" because they are huge and ugly compared to the other chicks.

Vegetable beds: do get someone with a tractor to till a 50 foot square area. Do get it tilled before the ground has hardened into a form of steel disguised as dirt. If for some reason the plow doesn't break up portions of the steel-soil do get your husband to wield the pick axe to break it up because you are likely to injure yourself. Do check for bindweed in the areas you want to plant: no amount of weeding is getting rid of that crap.

Weather: just because you are in California does not mean the weather and temperature will be perfect in the summer. June has been cold in our house, cold enough for jumpers and slippers and wrapping up in blankets. And now rain- lots and lots of rain. So that crackling/springing noise is the sound of all the weeds in my garden (which I only recently beat back in preparation for fire season) worming their way into the soil and springing up with glee.

So... Hello. Sorry for the long absence. Next time a proper post with pictures.

xx Jo

Yarn along and Pack up... again.

I know how tedious this must be getting to hear that we are packing boxes... AGAIN.

Think how it feels for us though! 

 I am truly and sincerely hoping to just settle after this.

 Our little yellow farmhouse in the country is a rental but I have every intention of not thinking or dreaming or wishing for anything different for a LONG LONG LONG time.  This will be our third move (fourth home) in 9 months. For a person who likes to nestle in, get to know the inside-out of a place, learn the little signs of the changing seasons, know where the warmest shaft of sunshine lands, find the best patch of blackberries and anticipate the harvest: the last 9 months have been a slow cruel kind of torture.

This packing job is a breeze though. We have some furniture (mostly bought at the awesome Lytton Salvation Army ) and the bulk of our possessions, already here, came in five suitcases and will leave the same way and I've been doing new home shopping in the last two days and have more than quadrupled the things we had with us. However it does mean I now have crockery (goodwill) glasses and mugs (goodwill/Khols/Target) and some pots and pans (family/friends/goodwill/Target) and can actually prepare food for my family in the new place.

 

Matt believes he can read my stress levels by how much knitting I get to do. I am happy to report that the crochet hook (a useful and fun tool but not my preferred modus-operandi) has been tucked away and the knitting needles are out again! I finished the tissue box cover, which was a lot of fun to design but I would change some things next time.

 

The base I did as a granny-rectangle (is there such a thing?!?) because it takes up less yarn and I only had one left-over ball of grey and just the dregs of mustard and aqua. That was great but I should have gone through only one loop on the round when I turned up the side of the box, and again at the top, which would have made it more willing to conform to the shape of the sides of the box.  By the time I realized my mistake (and being essentially very lazy) I couldn't be bothered to undo all the stitching and redo it again.

Delphine is almost done. She needs some buttons and a silk ribbon. So I'm holding off sharing till she is there. The fit is truly spectacular even though I had quite a few "Hang on this looks minute and is never ever going to be my size" moments before and during blocking.
 

I've made quite a lot of headway into Paloma  using Rowan wool cotton in Ship Shape. It is a delicious soft wool but I think it may be too heavy for the pattern. I bought the wool with help from the knitting ladies at John Lewis before I left the UK but sadly they were not entirely correct. I have since found that there is a great conversion chart UK-USA yarn weights on Wikipeadia and indeed: my beautiful Ship Shape wool cotton is too heavy. However before anyone starts to wonder that a tension square didn't notify me earlier of the issue I would like to remind you of the afore mentioned fact that I am essentially very lazy... and heartily sorry for it. So I'm in two minds. Do I carry on and hope for the best or pull it out save my beautiful and delicious Ship Shape for another day?

  

Jo xx

Just click your heels together three times...

When we saw it on Craigslist we fell in love.

When we walked through its rooms we felt at home.

When we learned we were going to get to live there we danced for joy.
 

 

 Its a little yellow farmhouse out on a country road. It sits on enough land for our vegetable patch and some chickens. Perhaps a porker if our landlord is willing. 
In one week time its our home God willing.
 

Jo xx