Such Sweet Hands

I have a baby shower to attend later today. I don’t have a real present! I will also have to scramble to get together the dessert I promised to bring. I was going to make fudge, but discovered at midnight last night I had no evaporated milk! So today is all about getting resourceful so that my good friend gets the baby shower bits and trinkets that she deserves.

The new baby’s name will be Zoe.

The initial inspiration for this little scribble of embroidery came in the first few minutes of watching Ugly Betty (I adore Ugly Betty!!!! The show is so quirky and brightly colored that it has to bring out your crafty side. I think I may throw an Ugly Betty crafting party sometime in the nearish future). Ugly Betty wears a necklace with a proud goofy “B” on it. This jumped into my head alongside the dilemna of having nothing for this baby shower. Soon I had one of my favorite happy yarns thread into a tapestry needle and some teal craft felt in my hand. This is what came out:

The happy yarn in question is Noro’s Sakura, this stuff is like candy and it makes me tremendously happy. The Z and the E were made using a backstitch. The O was made using a section of the yarn that is wrapped with thread, too bulky to drag through fabric with a needle, but too cool looking to not use. Besides, I was freehanding this and an O shape would have taken a while to get right. So I shaped the O, pulled the ends through the felt and tied them in the back. Then I braced the O shape with orange embroidery floss. To brighten up the Z, I wove the same orange embroidery floss through the stitches. I crocheted a little circle to add to the piece, and Voila!

…. a piece of random craft felt with a name embroidered on it. As cute as I may think it is, hardly a finished item proper for a typical gift. I thought I’d give it to my friend in the form of a patch that she could attach to whatever she likes. On second thought I’ve decided to give it to her with a note saying I will make something of her choosing with it, that way she gets a choice of how this quirky little thing is used, but doesn’t have to do the work herself. She’s busy enough with being a Mom and all.

Sitting in my cozy new corner playing with my spirograph…

The spirograph soothes me. It’s a way of simply making appealing doodles and falling into mindless repetition and letting my brain work out anxious kinks.

A lot of my anxious kinks are tied to ideas. I get a vague inspiration and then it runs in ten directions at once and I can’t focus down on any one thing. It’s like craving chocolate ice cream and tacos and eight other contradictory flavors all at once. It’s easy to become exhausted and confused and never take the steps to realize any of these ideas. So doodling always helps calm my twitching thoughts…

I looked up from sprirograph and found a tray of yarn right in my eyeline. I felt a few more ideas come over me and started to get anxious. Then a little voice in my head told me, “You don’t have to try to make every idea…”

I obviously don’t make every idea into something, but it is very hard to let go. Once it’s been glimpsed in my mind at all it’s so easy to add it to a long list of ideas I get to flog myself for not bringing to completion. So this thought that an idea can be an idea and simply left alone … if I can embrace that, I’ll probably be a less anxious person.

This isn’t the scariest! Click on the pic to see the plentitude of crochet fright we found at the Salvation Army Thrift Store in Lubbock. These are my roots ya’ll! Save me!

We’re very lucky to live in a place with a gorgeous and fruitful rose garden. This last week a bit of rain sort of knocked things around out there. When a bush full of rose blooms sits in the rain all the blooms catch water and become heavy. This caused part of one of my favorite rose bushes to fully fall over. I’m glad to say I saved that section of the bush from the gardener’s sometimes mercilless pruning shears by removing a lot of the blooms. Enough blooms and stems in fact that the task of cleaning them up and arranging them was daunting. I put them in the guest bathroom sink and promised them I’d return later to clean them up.

I didn’t so much forget as just get busy with other things…

Rob came home from work and opened the bathroom door to find the display in the sink. He seemed to find it a pleasant suprise. Or at least one of the best odd things he could come home to find in the bathroom sink and he embraced the idea.
It’s pretty fun to open the door to a usually blah room and find a bunch of pink roses!

The roses seem to like their place too, so that’s where they’ll stay. Hopefully I’ll remember to remove them before it becomes a rose swamp.

I have been up all night playing with swatches. I usually take photos of my experiments in natural light. But there that doesn’t work so well in the middle of the night. I had a ton of fun coming up with ways to get an interesting record of swatches using the scanner. Then I finished the work that I actually needed to finish by this morning and now I can’t sleep.

Photoshop is far too easy to play with even when sleep deprived and wired.  I took my “natural-ish” looking scans and did a lot of random clicking to get these images.
Forgive me. I know photoshop fun can turn tacky on a dime. Forgive me if this is tacky. I like it. We’ll see what I think when I wake up.

I think it might be fun to break one of these down to inspire shapes in a blanket design…