Happy Creative New Year

... and I hope it is a happy and productive one for us all!

I have been swept up in so many projects the last few months, thankfully none of them in any way related to being sick. There has been some rearranging of mantelpiece decor, as above (see the sock blockers in the corner there? compliments of Trish, who spotted them years ago at a rummage sale I had just left, and missed seeing - they have walked around to different display areas here ever since.)

Lots of watercolour planning and painting, none of it very impressive but always enjoyable. Though, for the record, this snowman looks much more polished in his actual size of Tiny.

SO MUCH FICTION WRITING. In 2021 I wrote and edited a novel, revised another, started a new one, and wrote a short story and started two others, despite all the other pressing crises including my beloved older relative's broken hip and subsequent move, which Pete and I coordinated. (She is doing great!)

A little knitting, not as much as I would like... Omigosh though, I was late to the party discovering that Emily Foden (Viola yarns) has written a knitting book. Naturally, I hesitated zero seconds before purchasing a copy. It arrived in a mailer with one of her quirky/adorable drawings on the back, and inside that was a brown paper wrapper with another drawing by her which I am not throwing out ever, 

and inside THAT was the book. Which is amazing. Emily is one of the most creatively talented people I have ever met and I highly recommend Knits About Winter for the patterns, the photography, the words, and the general feeling of potential while holding it in your hands.

 

(also, this vest.)

Actually a lot of what I'm doing now is about getting at a feeling of calm and possibility, go figure. But Januaries are always like that, aren't they? Even when we're not in a plague year. 

Some of that is coming from shopping, which I'm trying to resist or at least restrict to work-related purchases like pens. Have I mentioned Wonder Pens here? Their website is so welcoming and their photographs so alluring, it's a real delight to spend time with. I usually take my time thinking about what I would most enjoy having and sometimes that means missing out on something very cool. Not always though, heh.

For Christmas I received a Pilot Kakuno fountain pen and it is rarely leaving my hand. 

 

I've already had to order new ink cartridges... plus a second pen with a fine point because I like both fine and medium points, and take notes upstairs and down, so two pens is perfectly logical. Even practical. Ahem.

The Kakuno is a starter fountain pen intended for children (which I still basically am) and has a smiley face on the nib, but adults like it because it is inexpensive and safe to throw into the bottom of a bag and maybe even lose, unlike a $1200 fountain pen because apparently that is a thing that exists. I, however, would cry if I lost mine. It is ergonomically ideal and glides across the paper I'm writing on. 

 

The paper is another Yay... I was reading a review of 'best annual planners' and was reminded of Filofax, a mini version of which I carried for quite a long time pre-cell phones and stumbled across again recently while tidying a bookshelf. Being a diehard shopper I went to their Canadian website and looked at what they're doing these days, then immediately bought myself an A5 size notebook. 

LIFE CHANGING.

The paper is like glass, it's so smooth. But also not like glass because even my beloved new fountain pen doesn't really show through on the other side. And the pages are repositionable, which is perfect for planning a novel and making notes generally. I bought the hole punch too, thinking I would mix and match papers, but I really only want to write on Filofax paper now.

 

My cousin sent me a very enjoyable mystery to read on Boxing Day, aka Mary's Annual Holiday, and I enjoyed it very much alongside my tiny snowman bookmark and tea in a mug I bought myself. Anthropologie has the funnest monogram mugs! But I especially love anything with illustrations by Nathalie Lété. (please note: no watercolour painting took place on my day off, though a Q-tip and my brush cleaner did manage to stay in view at my painting perch.)

 The book, The Secrets of Wishtide by Kate Saunders, was perfect for a lush day off... very well-written and perfectly paced to keep the pages turning. It's always a treat to come across someone delightful you hadn't read before, isn't it. I followed that up between Christmas and New Year's with The Darkest Evening by Ann Cleeves, and enjoyed that enormously too. An excellent reading vacation all around.

Now I am back to cooking every day, which means weekly pizza using a recipe I adapted from this one on the BBC's food site, because the bags of double 0 flour I can buy divide neatly into 500g portions and it calls for 650g. I supplement with 150g of semolina flour and all is well. Also I cheat and use a sheet pan and nobody here cares they're not getting a slice from a circle, but the last time I made it I was struck by the texture on the parchment paper I use for ease of removal and thought I'd share. it's like one of those high school geography class elevation maps, don't you think?

Or maybe I just imagined that. 

 

Here's something more useful to you, perhaps: a project I did for some small Christmas presents and didn't get to share in time. It would work equally well for Valentine's Day or Easter or any other day you wanted to tie a bookmark onto a bar of organic chocolate. Especially if you have an excessive amount of art supplies.

First, I scribbled with a Derwent Inktense pencilcrayon onto a gritty board (you can use a plastic cutting board but I have the Caran D'ache Palette) and wet the marks to get a nice smooth inky paint, then brushed it over a big sheet of watercolour colour. Inktense doesn't reactivate once it's been wet and dried, so this gave me a nice streaky background colour to work with. 

Gosh, even after parking the dried sheet under some very heavy books overnight, the paper still curled a bit... but never mind, it all works out in the end.

 

Then I painted a lot of circles over the sheet, in a very limited watercolour palette of red, turquoise, and a deep shiny purple from Daniel Smith. I outlined some of them, and I left others plain. To liven things up I did a few circles in sparkly white from the Kuretake Gansai Tambi Starry Set. The great thing about those paints: they glisten, but don't rub off as sparkles all over everything you touch.

When all that was dry, I sliced up the sheet with my cheapie Fiskars paper trimmer and voila! 

Pretty bookmarks to slip under the ribbons I used to tie tags onto the chocolate bars. With a gift card or an actual volume, it's an instant book-reading vacation.

There, that bookmark thing alone was supposed to be a whole post of its own back in November. I need to be less busy, I guess.

As it stands, though, that's quite enough from me for today. I will try - I always do try - to check back in more regularly but if you don't hear from me, rest assured I'm still writing away at something you might see at some point. And I will hope all is well with you, too. As a sendoff, let's revisit some more snowmen I did after watching an excellent tutorial from Harriet de Winton on Youtube:

See you soon, hopefully before these two melt away into springtime :^)

How to make candy-friendly bookmarks

I've had this idea for bookmarks cut from double-sided card-stock scrapbook paper for months, so naturally I waited until three days before I wanted to tie them to candy canes and give them away before I started making them.

Fortunately, they are fast.


You Will Need

cutting mat
rotary cutter
a ruler longer than 12"
a hole punch
lengths of ribbon/scrap yarn - allow 11"/22" per bookmark
scissors
candy canes, the kind where the wrapper follows the contour of the hook


How to Proceed

First, cut out the bookmarks.  I made mine 1.5" wide and 6" tall but obviously this is flexible depending on the size of the candy you want to tie them to.  If you're using 12" x 12" paper your job could not be easier: just keep cutting the pieces in half.

You know... from two 6" x 12" pieces, you take one and turn it to cut into two 6" x 6" pieces, and take one of those and cut it into two 6" x 3" pieces, and then cut one of them into two 6" x 1.5" pieces.

Even faster: take your 6" x 12" piece and just keep slicing every 1.5".

I cut some from 8" squares too, leaving out the excess bits, before I realized the paper was really too flimsy for a bookmark.  But if the paper is good, it's still easy to use an 8" square piece.

Most of my bookmarks were intended for people with a very small appreciation for florals, and a lot of my paper was pretty far down that road, but when you cut up the patterns it's amazing how 'floral' becomes 'abstract'.

If you're not attaching these to anything, you can stop here and maybe even pick up a book to put one to use for yourself.  If you are, however, keep reading.

Next:  punch a hole in one end of the bookmark, not too close to the top that it will rip, and as close to the center as possible.  Don't be like me and get too tired and absently punch both ends of the bookmark because that is just not pretty.

Now you are ready for yarn or ribbon or whatever you are doing at the top.  First, do some colour coordination because that's fun.  And rewarding, if you're like me and have lots of yarn left over from other projects that is too nice to toss and too short to make something else with.

If you're using ribbon you are probably fine with single 11" lengths of it; if you're using yarn, you will get a cuter tassel with a double strand.  Cut 22" lengths for these if you're using slim yarn, a bit longer if you're using something more bulky, because you will need flexibility when you go to tie these onto the top of the cane.

I found it easier to wait till I was ready to 'finish' the next bookmark before I cut each of these long yarn lengths into two.  At that point, you line them up perfectly and fold them in half again so you get the top of a loop.

And now, you're doing the same thing no matter what your tassel is made of: poke the top of that loop through the hole, and slip the loose ends of the yarn/ribbon/whatever through said loop.  So cute!

Finally, it's time to tie the bookmark to the top of the top of the cane.  If you want to add a To and From card onto this present, slip it onto the front half of your tassel strand(s) before you do your tying.  Set the cane right in front of the bookmarker (and tag if you're using one) so it/they make a secure backing, and pull your yarn tight when you tie it to the top of the cane.  If it's snug enough, it won't slip off either end, which is extra Yay.

Done.  Done and cute and ready to go out spreading bookish cheer to your friends and neighbours.  Have fun!

A burst of knitting, plus paper craft

At about this point in December, crafty people are starting to hand off the gifts they've made for people they won't see on Christmas Day.  My strategy for this year was to do that, instead of running overtime on making stuff, and then wrapping presents till 2am on Christmas Eve... and Christmas Day... and then well on into the season.

Because that plan seems to be working for reasons I really need to pin down for future reference, this is how I spent Sunday evening:

Yep, working on the last of the gift knits.  As you may have surmised from the picture, this is the Churchmouse hot water bottle cosy pattern, and it is so very lovely to knit you should cast one on right now and worry about the matching bottle later.  (sadly, the matching bottle is smaller than the ones I see for sale locally, so if you live in Toronto too you may want to order one of the Churchmouse ones.  Or maybe you would want to order one anyway.  They are priced to reflect their specialness, but they also smell like vanilla? so you are going to get what you're paying for.)

When the box turned up last Friday and prompted me to push through every other project so I could cast on as soon as possible, I unwrapped the Cascade Eco Duo I'd ordered (pre-caked!) and expected something a little bit rough because affordably-priced woolly yarn so often is.  But no, it turns out it is essentially an underspun cloud of baby alpaca blended with merino wool, with a very subtle colour shift as you go along, such that you can practically fall asleep as you work your way along the row.  Or, in just one word: bliss.

(Just don't make mistakes that need ripping out, as for example when determining gauge, because did I say alpaca?  Alpaca doesn't like to be ripped away from its neighbouring bits, and you do not want to cross it.)


In other news: my Knitter's Mending Tray is no longer crowded with mending, because I ran in all the ends of all the mohair boot socks and have even washed all of them and worn a pair.  That's how 'old news' the mending tray is already.

Now, it's a paper craft tray.

This is yet another example me getting a good idea and then going totally overkill on it: bookmarks cut from double-sided scrapbooking card stock.  I wanted to attach them to some candy canes for various and sundry kids who read, and then I thought they were such a great idea they could do trimming service on some presents for grownups, and then I realized I just wanted to cut a lot of bookmarks and there was simply no point in worrying about where they will go.  I think there are about 80 of them stacked up there in this picture, waiting for holes and scrap-yarn tassels.


Marketing is everything when it comes to the kind of presents I usually give, so in more of my spare time on Sunday I made some card backings for the seasonal pins I found for a few nice ladies who don't read Hugs (except for Lannie, who already has hers.  What are the odds of finding a Christmas pin with bright pink in it?? and if it's bright pink, it's gotta be Lannie.)

In progress:

and a few Afters:

This idea is the result of my scoring about a dozen vintage Christmas pins over the summer.  I hadn't seen any of these things for sale in forever, though they were very popular when I was little, and I thought I was going to look so genius come December.  Then in November I walked through Sears and found two huge revolving racks of them.  (I still think mine are cuter.  Plus, vintage!)

I used different accent tapes to fill the boring white space on the index cards - the hole punch I used for a secure way to attach the pin only goes in so far from the edge - including washi tape of course, and some paper tape which I guess is a scrapbooking accessory also.  I saw the paper tape in a discount store over the summer and thought: there will come a day when I will want something that will do what this does.  And that day was Sunday, and by some freak of nature, I knew where to find it.

(I'll have to tell you about the organizational tools that made that possible, because I can't be the only one who needs that sort of help.  Maybe on the break between Christmas and New Year's, when we go back to caring about that sort of thing, after weeks of just trying to make as much stuff as possible in not enough time.)


Tomorrow I think I'll do a proper tutorial to show you how the bookmarks came out.  I really love them, and they made good use of soooo much scrap yarn.  Not to mention the scrapbook paper I used to make them.  Seriously, I paid less than $10 for the package and I've already gotten 2 cute wall banners and a ton of tiny gift toppers out of it. And there is still so much left over to play with.


For now though: have a great day, and I hope a super productive one!

Raw materials: paper craft edition

For much of 2013, I've been chipping away at decluttering my house - simplifying, streamlining, and shedding generally.  Apparently this mission does not apply to craft materials, and the resistance to acquiring same.

Not only have I found it difficult to avoid more Washi tape, I came into contact with stamps and stamp pads at the store where I bought much of this last lot, and I've since bought some stamp pads - but not stamps! - because they were Martha Stewart ones, massively discounted at HomeSense. I think the US equivalent of this chain store is TJ Maxx Homegoods.

What I've absolutely had to have though are double-sided scrapbook papers, which are astonishingly cheap at HomeSense.  Even a non-scrapbooker like me can see the time-saving indoor party banner potential of double-sided paper, especially after the disaster that was pre-punched tiny banner strings:

(turns out they were discounted because the pre-stitched thread ran though the non-banner part of the paper.  GAH.)

The clincher was bringing home Super Batty and Steve.  I swear, those are magical bats, because in spite of being at about the maximum recommended level of sleep deprivation I've been overcome by creative impulses since they arrived.

The pull of paper craft

What I really want is a Monster Bat mobile for the cottage living room, but the cost would be prohibitive with real stuffed bats and anyway, I would just want to touch them all the time.  Paper monster bats: that's a different story entirely.  Not to mention super fast to make.

And then there are all the other great paper project ideas I found online.  If you dare, you're welcome to check out the Pinterest board I've been building with the ones I like best.

One project I will totally be doing in some form or another: bookmarks cut from the double sided paper.  I do little presents for my neighbours every Christmas and sometimes Valentine's Day too - cookies usually.  But how great would a bookmark tag be, one for every member of the household? And no effort at all, really.

The raw materials

My goodness, the patterns on these papers are incredible.  I would be glad just to stick them to my walls as is, so I could look at them all the time.

How cool would it be to add the odd inspirational word in matchy puffy alphabet stickers?

Not to mention the rub-on images, to use either on the papers or on little gift cards.  There were an astonishing variety of them (four sets, each with several sheets inside) in just one $3 package.

Some of the rub-on images are borders.  I can so see wall-art uses for those.

And the scope of the colours and designs!  I'm completely smitten with the blue pattern on the bottom right corner of this pad of scrapbook paper... it may need to become something utilitarian so I can look at it all the time.

The cheery colours on this last set may need to find their way onto the doors of kitchen cupboads at the cottage.  They say 'summer' to me, and also, 'endless cups of tea.'

What is especially wonderful about these papers and tapes is the fact that you can have instant art gratification.  All the hard work is done, and what's left is tremendous scope for creativity in choosing pattern combinations and shapes and applications.  In dramatically less time than it takes even to knit a tea cosy (it's done, and drying, and I'll do a reveal next week) you can have something with amazing visual punch to put into your living space.

And really: the materials take up almost no space at all!  I hope. If I stop here, and don't buy stamps, ahem.

(keep your fingers crossed for me, and I will for you.)