Procrastinating

I'm supposed to be sewing and/or gluing and/or weaving right now, finishing up my items for the Holiday Galleria.  Instead I am playing around with the software that came with Photo Gallery.  These are from the week before Thanksgiving, taken at the rest stop on 64 East.  Not the greatest photo or photo manipulation, but I love these colors and shapes.  Very much like the sewing I am supposed to be doing right now, so I will take this as a sign to get back to work.

Candy Confetti

Bits of candy wrappers for collaged Christmas tree ornaments, part of what I'm making for the Crossroads Holiday Galleria.  I've spent most of the last few days cutting what is really a very small part of my huge stash of candy wrappers into tiny squares, strips, and points.  At this point many of my loved ones will shake their heads and talk under their breath about "real jobs."  But both the task of cutting and the bowlful of finished pieces are things of beauty to me.

Halloween

I wish I were a better photographer.   These leaves glowed with the light behind them.

We spend October making things for Halloween.  My husband wants to be known as the Halloween Guy of Richmond, in the manner of his friend Ralph (one of the stars of the Tacky Lights Tour).  I'm not quite so into it, but it's fun to work on this project together and think of new things to make each year and figure out how to make them.  Art can build anything but is especially a wizard with PVC--skeletons, ghouls, cemetery gates.  I've been playing around with some of the photos I took to try to make them look spookier.

Travel Gear

Heading out to SWVA for the weekend!  Five hours on the interstate, each way, plus some hotel room down time.  I always get a lot done on these roadtrips, partly because I always take so much more to work on than even makes sense.  I've been trying to be more realistic and only take what can fit into one gallon-sized zip bag.  Plus the yarn in my purse.  And my pockets.

Bedside Table

In case I wake up in the night and need to make something.

Helping Hands

I like to use a variety of threads in any project--some scavenged, picked up at yard sales or thrift shops, or from sale bins at local yarn stores--but one of my favorite all purpose yarns for crocheting is Sugar and Cream by Lily. (The folks at Lily did not pay me to say that.)  It comes in a pretty good range of colors and is reliably inexpensive.  It is nice and sturdy with a good hand, is great for dishcloths (comes with a free pattern on each label), but for my purposes it has one drawback:  it is too heavy.  It is a four-ply yarn so I have dealt with the problem by splitting the yarn into two two-ply balls.  This is extremely labor intensive.  It takes more than an hour to untwist the yarn and rewind it into smaller balls.  Today I had some help.

Magic Carpet Crochet

For quite a while now I've been experimenting with random and freeform crocheting.  I've got several different projects going on, both two and three dimensional.  The piece that I'm concentrating on right now is one I've been calling the magic carpet.  It's an assemblage of odd pieces I've made over the last year, and finally this week I started putting them together.  The first thing I realized is that I don't have nearly enough things already made to go into this!  It's going to take longer than I ever imagined.  Here are some images: