8 posts tagged “crafty”
1. New cat: Friday before Christmas, a bundle of black and white mewing was at our door. Seeing as she was very good looking and declawed, we assumed she had made a run from her family. We put signs up in our neighborhood the next day, but have received zero calls to claim her. A couple of brief tests later, she's now trying to acclimate herself to life with the other pets and the preteen.
2. New pantry: As I type, my husband is busily and noisily screwing drywall up for those most massive and wonderful pantry I've ever had the privilege to cook out of. Since moving to Florida, we'd been making due with a little four-foot, thirty-dollar job from Target to hold dry goods. This one is at least six times that size, has lights, deep shelves and is making use of a previously unused area of the house. Brilliant.
3. New hair color: Egyptian Plum by Clairol. Because I'm worth it, dammit.
4. New plans: Motivating a friend to write a book or a dozen, getting my crafty biz going, learning new art techniques, and doing everything in my power to live a blissful, creative life.
More than three months ago, I shelved this blog in a fit of despair.* I needed to find some way to put my head down and make my life work, and I hope I am now arriving at that point.
To that end, I'm rebooting this Vox for the New Year and am giving it the following direction:
- My Vox is going to remain a personal blog, about the tribulations and festivities in the life of a near-30-year-old woman living in the Sunshine State, married, raising her brother, feeding the cats and overpriced terrier. When I burn a loaf of bread, celebrate a report card, or have a funny anecdote to share, it will go here. If I like a movie, read a book, or have to out my obsession with Project Runway, it will go here.
- I'm setting up another blog to chronicle my creative aspirations and my fledgling attempts to sell the goodies and oddities I create. If you want to see pictures of collages, messy journals, and stitchery, it will go there.
While, in general, I have a big o' fear of overlapping my personal and (ha!) professional personnas, I also plan to do a kind of monthly recap on my Vox of how things are going over in artsy land. Mainly for the purposes of hoping to shamelessly lure you to my Etsy storefront, obviously.
I'm also going to take the leap and start pointing people who actually know me (other than you, Donut Pusher) to this blog. If you went to school with me or know me from some other venue, gosh, I hope I didn't rant about you in this blog's earlier incarnation. I kid, I kid...
To those in my Voxy neighborhood: Hey, thanks for keepin' me in your loop. If you had a baby, opened a business, got married, ditched the jerk, or otherwise made huge moves in your life since September, I hope they have worked out for you, and I'm sorry I didn't write. Special shout-out to the very creative Lorri, whose Vox I wandered into whilst investigating other arty-crafty blogs for inspiration for my new venture. There are so many very talented people out there doing amazing work, it is both inspiring and scary to me!
More soon, including 2007's "mayfly." (Don't know what that means? Looky here. Want to read 2006's? Looky here.)
* "a fit of despair": This phrase makes it seem needlessly dramatic, but things were very low on that day in September, and I don't mean to diminish my emotions or feelings about life as I felt them then. We were unable to make mortgage payments on our house, my mother's life insurance policy had been denied, and, in a less than ten-hour window, both of our cars died. Life was not peachy keen, and I still own that feeling of damnation and don't mean to make light of it with these four words.
I made this for a Warhol-themed swap online and was pretty pleased with the final product. Rhinestones aren't usually my thing, but it felt right in this instance. Overall, the whole experience was nicely inspiring, and I've now got two more "mostly done" purses and a pile of 8-10 more boxes waiting to become something special. I recently bought some vintage postcards at a flea market and my husband's been bringing home all sorts of inspirational odds and ends, so I'm sure there will be more photos to follow.
I <3 me some random motivation, so I have joined and committed to the Craft Challenge group. This month there are several "missions," but I've already been quite successful:
Spend at least 15 mins a day satisfying that craft urge in your belly. Lucky me, I usually get more like three hours to do this. But, because of the challenge, I'm making sure I do it every day. Thus far, I've worked on my handmade paper, a donation jar for my husband's Habitat for Humanity affiliate, and decorating the binders I use to store magazine articles and my ATCs. Bonus: My husband just interrupted this post to have me help him make a card for his parents.
Visit 1 craft show. This weekend, I volunteered at the Gasparilla Arts Festival for 5.5 hours and then visited Tampa's Crafting Out Loud, a regularly scheduled craft fair featuring indie/urban crafters. Saw some friendly faces, neat photo frames made out of hard cover books, some fun handpainted boxes and jewelery displays, enjoyed a cuppa chai and a cute green felt rattle by melimade for a friend's newborn. (Which nicely works into another craft challenge...
Purchase something from a fellow crafter. Thanks, melimade!
Open that Etsy shop you "keep meaning to open." I actually signed up for Etsy, but now am having second thoughts about a business name for myself. More on that in a follow-up post.
Finish a UFO (unfinished object). My likely candidates for this are three needlepoint works, all for female friends who've been so good to me during this stressful time.
So, I'm well on my way, and the first week of March is barely over. Me thinks I may have to ask teach for extra credit. ;)
PS - Photos to follow. My camera isn't around the house right now, but I should have photos up mid-week of some of my work, plus my craft area.
From one of my best friends in a recent e-mail:
It would be nice to know mundane minutiae like this about my best friend--if she could maybe convince herself to send an email in response...
My response:
Hey, sweetie. I certainly did fall off the radar there for a bit, didn't I? I guess I've been coming to terms, trying to understand what "normal" is in my new life. Thus far, it looks like this:
Morning
Z goes to work around 7:30 every morning, and I get up around then (or press the snooze for 15 minutes...). I wake up my brother and feed kibble to every creature in the house (Iams for the cats, Beneful for the terrier, Honey Nut Cheerios for the kid), then get myself washed and ready for the day. I get M to PLACE anywhere from 8-9 and usually do some running around after he's dropped off (oil change, grocery shopping, wandering the craft store).
Afternoon
I get home by 11, have some sort of brunch-type snack, then sit down at my craft desk. For the last two weeks, I've been making cigar box purses, artist trading cards, and decorating store-bought journals. I usually do that until 3:45, when I walk out the door with Yoda and walk 4-5 blocks to meet M on his way home from school. That's usually the highlight of my day...walking with Yoda and chatting with M. When we walk in the door, M sits down right away to do his homework and, if it takes him less than 30 minutes, we whittle away some time on his upcoming invention convention project (he's making an update to the Trapper Keeper for today's techno kids). After schoolwork is done, we either play a game together or he buggers off to go skateboarding or play online games. If so, I hit the craft desk for some more time.
Evening
Around six o'clock, I start making dinner, and Z walks in the door any time from 6:15-6:40. This can make meals just a tad chaotic, but I've become a pro at getting M to set the table early and, if Z's late, just sticking stuff in the oven on "warm." We eat dinner together and share stuff about our days. M is becoming a much improved conversationalist, though we have to work more on him listening to others. At least twice a week, he says something that just cracks us up. This week, we were trying to explain to him what a non sequitur was, and he was having a hard time pronouncing the word. We explained that it was a pretty strange word, not originally English, and hard to spell. Much to our surprise, he got the spelling right on his second try! What a smart kid. After dinner, Z and M clean up, then we either play together or go our separate ways until 9pm, when M goes to bed. It's funny, I've gone to two parenting workshops in the last month, and many parents complain about problems relating to bedtime and getting homework done. But M is such a regimented child that we almost never have issues in this area. Sometimes he gets mad at the homework problems, but I never have to nag him to sit down and do it. Anyway, some nights Z and I watch TV together or play video games; if he's really tired, he just goes to bed, and I stay up late crafting.
Obviously, the amount of time I spend at the craft desk makes this pretty ideal (I've made three purses, two journals and countless ATCs), but there are a million setbacks every minute it feels like. I still have to meet with my mum's attorney, still have to open the box from the cremation society, still have to sit down with Z and write our wills out and determine who takes care of M if anything happens to us. Those are the big things, but there are little things too...Yoda staring at Mum's bed and whining, grabbing four napkins instead of three for dinner. One day last week, I just came home and cried on the couch for a couple of hours, eventually exhausting myself into sleep.
It's odd, last weekend was really nice. Z came home early on Friday. We cried together, made love, then went out for a drink and an appetizer before getting back home to pick up M. It was true quality time together, and I really felt his love and support. Friday night, Z stayed home with M while I went to a craft class and then out for drinks with R. R and I also needed some quality time, as he has been taking really good care of me during the week (stopping by for coffee in the morning, going to the grocery store with me, or even just dropping off blueberry muffins when I need to be alone), and I'm not always as grateful as I should be. Saturday, we hung out with M and did some shopping; M spent the night at a friend's house, and we went into Largo to celebrate L's birthday (strangely, by riding a mechanical bull). Sunday was a day of productivity, Z cleaned the kitchen and bathrooms, while I did laundry. That afternoon, cuddled up on the couch, I said I'd had a good weekend--that I often felt silly or happy or friendly first, and sad second or third. It made me realize that's not true for most days...I am sad first and foremost, then all my other emotions come in a muddle afterwards. While it felt warm and good and honest to say then, now I just feel bad for feeling so bad most of the time!
This weekend, Mum's friend MC will be in town. We'll go out to dinner with her tonight, and then join her and her husband for brunch Sunday. I'm really looking forward to that. Saturday, Z and I have doctor's appointments in the morning, and I may take M up to a local festival that afternoon. Z and I also have to spend some time cleaning out the garage, as he's been buying cabinets from work to remodel our kitchen, and we need to better organize the space to store them. I'm not looking forward to that, as it will involve moving some of Mum's stuff around, and I'm not ready to make choices about those things (even things I know I won't be keeping, like her hats and wigs, I'm not ready to do anything with). Speaking of which, when I do feel ready to do something like that, it may be a great time to have you or E down. That would definitely require some handholding.
Next week, I'm going to apply for a great job I heard of through E's mother and make an appointment to get Ripley fixed. She's in heat right now and a great source of amusement for the household. I also meet with a grief counselor from Hospice and am struggling somewhat with what I want to get out of that session.
How's that for a nutshell of life? I'm sorry I've been distant. I don't know why I'm putting up this facade of enormous strength, but I guess it's what gets me through the days. It's been a month and four days, but I see her everywhere around me and yet somehow manage to be in denial, unable to understand that she's not here to share thing swith me: to laugh at the animals' antics, to feel pride in M, to talk about the next season of Project Runway, to enjoy the things I'm making, to see her new kitchen cabinets, to share a cup of coffee with outside by the pool. It tears me up. MC said this morning she once heard someone describe grieving as similar to learning to breathe underwater, and that rings so true for me right now. It's like doing this impossible thing, and all your instincts struggle against it. You need to do it, but every cell screams NO NO NO NO I CAN'T.
With love and appreciation for your polite "nudge,"
artgeek
Show us something you're working on.
Submitted by Sephy.
Something inspired my mum to make holiday cards this year, so we've been enjoying (I hope) sitting across from each other in our new shared craft area and making cards from a mishmash of crafty things I already had stashed and things she bought specific to the holiday season. At first, I worried about how our creations would be received (my mother doesn't really do any papercrafts and my collages are much more chaotic than your basic christmas card), but now I'm just reveling the time together, the hands-on fun, the joy of exploring and making together.
This card marks the halfway point through our cardmaking, so while it is a finished product, the cardmaking is "in progress."
After recently reorganizing my craft room and unpacking my craft books, I started to flip through my copy of the Reader's Digest Complete Guide to Needlework and was inspired to do a sampler. Previously, I've always just looked stitches up online and incorporated them into whatever my current project was. However, while I picked up this book originally for its chapter on huck embroidery, I was certain I could learn things about basic embroidery, too.
Starting out with several small pieces of aida cloth and some basic colors of embroidery thread salvaged from my mother-in-law's craft kits, I decided to do each stitch in the chapter. While working on the first few lines of stitches, I thought about how traditional samplers often included moral/Biblical phrases and considered what text to put on my pieces. Originally, I was kind of taken by being very traditional and merely stitching my name, age, and the date of the piece. There was something funny to me about my samplers, made at age 28 in my leisure, compared to those made by girls in their first decade, for whom embroidery was part of their early education (a way to learn their letters, as well as other topics, like geography).
Eventually, I thought of artist Jenny Holzer and her Truisms. They seemed entirely appropriate and, in fact, I'm not certain that I haven't stolen the idea of combining Holzer and embroidery from Elaine Reichek (off topic, briefly: That's really not the best link for her, but there's no Wikipedia entry and Google mainly turns up books of her work or reviews of past shows; if anyone has a better source for info about or images by Reichek, please share!). Anyway, I found a selection of Holzer's Truisms online and selected the shorter ones for my consideration. I've finished two samplers and am part-way through my third:
Overall, I like them a lot. Not only do they achieve the goal of teaching me new stitches, but I think the final pieces are a curious intersection of modern woman and traditional craft and are a unique display of my varied education. Comments and thoughts are welcome. Individual photos of the samplers above are on my Flickr site.
