Category: Uncategorized

Have you noticed the funny little orange square at the lower left corner of this page?  RIght below the cute little (made by me) tee-shirt?

A lot of you are knowledgable blog people, but I’m really just learning, so the orange square was new to me.  If you click on the box, it will let you sign up through a place called feedburner to receive notice when this blog is updated.  And, you can do it for all of your favorite blogs, so you don’t have to worry about keeping a list of them.  Pretty cool, huh?  You can learn more here.

After lots of frumping around, I finally posted my first item on ETSY.  You can find it at http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=7846&page_id=1&sort=title

It’s a cute little tee-shirt with a handpainted Brontosaurus (you can’t see all the wondeful shading and colorful variation I was so happy about in the picture, darn it!).  This isn’t exactly what I had planned on doing at ETSY — I have been thinking in terms of offering some hand-yarn and maybe some assemblages there —  but I made one of these for Ollie and he loves his tee, so I thought maybe it would be a good place to start.  Wish me luck on my new venture!

I love the days where things click and art literally seems to roll off my fingers as an intuitive process.  The act of making art actually is as rewarding, if not more so, than the final result for me when this happens.  It has to be one of the best feelings in the world.

I am off for an early bedtime with a big cup of tea and my newly arrived copy of Traci Bautista’s new book.  I have aready scanned it enough to realize it is going to be a huge treat.  I purchased it because my wonderful friend Kathy has been raving about it (make sure you look through the photos of kathy’s art.  She is amazing — I especially love her felt book) and has convinced me I really needed another book!  Husband has thoughtfully put 101 Dalmations on TV and I’m hoping it will hold the attention of our youngest so I can give the book a look through and plot some art time this weekend.

It’s a no art day for me.  Normally, this would make me really sad, but today, it’s ok.  I got to spend a lot of time yesterday finishing up my sample pieces and working on my article for Caroline’s zine, which she is calling "Sugar."  I have been experimenting with using embossing powders on fabric and although I only had space to discuss the basics in the article, the experimentation was a lot of fun!

I also wanted to tell you all about an amazing experience I had this week.  A good friend’s mother died after a long struggle with cancer.  A bunch of us from my office made the trek down to Selma, Alabama for her funeral.  To get to Selma from Birmingham, you drive through lots of little southern towns — Clanton, where the watertower is in the shape of a huge peach and Maplesville with its paper mill.  It was like a drive back in time.  The church was beautiful.  It had a lovingly restored 100 year old pipe organ.  The embossed tin ceiling in a rich copper color inside of the vaulted dome was suprising and had an almost Moorish feeling.  The stained glass windows were incredible.  And it was a lovely funeral despite the sorrow — replete with funny stories about a strong, steel magnolia who was loved by her children and grandchildren.  Amazingly, Jett Williams, Hank Williams daughter, sang in this small church with just 100 or so people in it.  She sang Will The Circle Be Unbroken and then finished the funeral with Amazing Grace.  I’m still stunned, just thinking about how beautiful her voice was, echoing in the church.

I feel like I should be Willie Nelson singing "On the road again."  This is my umpteenth trip since this year began.  But I didn’t think to pack my camera, so I can’t show you knitting progress, which makes me sad because I’m onto the sleeve of the Anthropologie Shrug.  I decided to make it longer than the pattern and also do elbow length sleeves.  Strangely, when I finished binding off the bottom edge, I found that instead of too tight, as my previous post indicated, it’s actually a gracious plenty of sweater.  It may even, horrors, be too loose.  I’m not sure the Knitting Gods are smiling on me. 

The shrug really is gorgeous in any event.  Instead of knitting the sleeves flat, I’ve picked them up on circular needles and am knitting away.  I was too lazy to constantly switch yarns to keep the stripes even on either side — I couldn’t bear the thought of all that end weaving.  I hope I’m not going to regret that when it’s done.  I also brought along the Oat Couture cotton sweater and have casted on the front and begun the bottom edging.

Since I can’t offer pictures today, I’ll just share this thought….why doesn’t my local yarn store offer a class in frogging (ripping out large areas of mistakes) tinking (knitting backwards when the mistake isn’t too far off) and fixing dropped stitches?  Perhaps many of you knit perfectly without error, but I don’t.  And while I seem to be getting the hang of frogging (lots of practice!) I can’t tink purling with any consistent success (hmm…it occurs to me that maybe I should just turn it over.)  As for fixing dropped stitches, I’m a disaster.  I just have to go all the way back to fix them.  It annoys me that I can’t figure out something that is probably really obvious on my own, but I can’t.  I wonder why someone doesn’t teach a class called knitting for losers?

I must leave y’all — my room service dinner is here (I’m back to low carb dieting so it’s shrimp cocktail and lambchops).  Honey–if you’re reading this while doing homework with and fixing dinner for the kids, we’re working very hard here.  Really.

This is a new experiment for me. I have kept a blog at Live Journal for close to a year now and I really enjoy blogging.  Maybe it’s me or maybe it’s Live Journal, but I can’t get some of the functionality I want there, so I’m experimenting with starting a new blog here.  This seems easier for someone like me, who is far from being a techno-geek.  But will anyone be able to find me?  Will I lose all of my old posts or find a way to bring them here?  I’ve always wanted to be one of those people with life-long journals to look back over and blogging is as close as I’m ever going to get, so I hate the thought of losing a year of entries.