Made With Love

Welcome to "Made With Love". It is the name of the shop that I am in this summer. Some of you may remember that I was part of an Artist in Residency program the past couple of years. Along the same boardwalk are other shops that are filled with local craftspeople and artisans. This year I am in one of them with six other people. Several of my casemate mates were in the same spot last year and I was invited in by Erin, who was a student at the Craft College.

Welcome to "Made With Love".....
In no particular order.....

Chelsey, who is a self confessed bead-aholic. She makes all her own findings (which are the posts, clips, jump rings, ear wires etc.)
Then there is Yolande. She and her husband do twice yearly wood firings. They have built an anagama kiln on their property in the north of New Brunswick. They are doing a firing RIGHT NOW! and I can hardly wait to see the new pots that she brings in over the next couple of weeks! Most of what you see here are electric fired. The wood fired pottery is truly special.
Next up is me. Because I have such a diverse offering, it takes several photos. First are my hand-dyed yarns and origami cranes. You can also see a few of my Temari Balls on the tree. I am giving a workshop in temari this summer as part of the edventures workshop series.
I also make origami cards.
Then there are my silk scarves and hand woven, hand dyed scarves.

Hand dyed, hand spun, hand woven scarves. And silk velvet and silk satin scarves as well as my hand spun yarn.


Amy La Loon is another potter whose bowls look as if they will scurry away with your cereal or soup. On the top right, you can see her "corset tea pot". I can almost hear it singing "I'm a little tea pot.."


Ashley is a graduate of the fashion and textiles departments . Ashley is very dedicated to the environment and uses only organic cotton and fibers whose production are easy on the environment.
Erica's designs are all inspired by nature and she uses mostly sterling silver. I suppose that I should have done a few detail shots. Believe me when I say that they are beautiful!
And then there is Erin. Erin is also a graduate of the Textiles Department.
Her main products are hankies, including these with instructions,

And hand knit owls. I had to turn this one around because like befts, they all like to go to the left.

Thanks for stopping by. And if you are in the neighbourhood, please stop by in person!

Recycled silk

I was fortunate enough to receive a bag of silk threads from a friend that dyes silk fabric to make hangings and pillows. She dyes yardage and strips the fabric into the correct size, then makes her product. They are truly beautiful.

And so are the threads that she felt she couldn't throw out.
It was slightly challenging to spin the thread balls but with a bit of pre-drafting I managed. I decided to ply my recycled silk with some black merino.

The resulting yarn is a lot of fun. The colour changes quite frequently and the black really ties all of the different colours together.

Detail.

Recycled silk threads
black merino
Skein 1- 84 yards
Skein 2- 77 yards

On the loom

Fine wool scarves, in red this time. You can't tell from the photo, but the outside edges are a tad darker than the center. They are nice. The colour is beautiful and the colour changes are very subtle. But I have been avoiding the loom lately and I think it is because I am just not inspired by these scarves. Sigh. I think that I will just have to press on . Or maybe that should be "weave on".
We will see where I am by the weekend.

Commission

I had a call from the man that I made the stole for last year and he was interested in having another commission done.
This year he wanted bookmarks to give as gifts to graduating students. This pattern was from the phrase "Jesus Remember Me".
He wanted 20 in all. Ten green and ten purple.

I was quite pleased with the way that they turned out. And thankfully, so was he.
I may make more using a different pattern. But later.

The Almond Brothers

What? You think that I have the title wrong?

I beg to differ. These guys are definitely made of almonds.

Well a couple of them are made of Brazil nuts, but who is splitting hairs?

These are Mira's creations. Bill makes a breakfast cereal that contains whole nuts and Mira, looking at them, decided that they would make good carving material. Imagine my surprise when I open the freezer door and found a few little carved men. And there is Mira, in the back yard carving away.

And of course they needed somewhere to stand and so the chocolate stage was created.
Alas, they suffered a grievous accident and were eaten by giants. When speaking to the giants later, they declared the Almond Brothers delicious.

Smooth as.....

kitten's wrist.

That is what my Father-in-Law says about something that is soft soft soft.

And seeing as this is merino, and seeing as it does remind me of the colour those beautiful smoky cats that some people have, Smooth as a Kitten's Wrist seemed like a good name for this colour way.
Although next time, I think that I will go for a little more variation. A few darker spots as well as a few lighter spots.

Here is the singles. At the top of the picture, you can just make out my high tech roving holder. One of those firm plastic gift bags. It sits conveniently on the floor beside me when I am spinning, holds a crap load of roving, there is nothing for the roving to get caught on, and when I am done spinning for the night, it fits on the treadle!

Final yarn. On green leaves in my front garden. Summer is almost here!

Content: merino
Source: my own dye pot
Yardage : 130
Weight: 4 oz

Zorbing

We watched Bolt the other night. And as some of you may or may not know, there is a hamster, named Rhino, in one of those hamster balls that played a big part in the movie.
This led to a discussion of hamster balls and how fast a hamster could travel while in one. Having no idea, I googled "hamster ball" only to find that most of the top hits are for some video game. So I did the next best thing. YouTube. I think that I added "rodent" to the search mix and came up with several poor videos of hamsters in balls. But we answered our question. Those little guys can go surprisingly fast!
We kept on looking at various videos (it is so easy to get lost in YouTube land) and eventually we found Zorbing videos. Apparently it started in New Zealand.

Hamster ball for humans.

Who knew?

Seriously, click on the link.

There is nothing stranger than humans.

Oh My!

Today is my birthday and what better way to celebrate than to talk about making cards.
OK. Supper is on the way and the Conde de Valedmar is already gone ( a little something that I picked up when I left behind the "mommy's night out", so maybe this is the second best way to celebrate a birthday. Or maybe not. I'll leave you to decide.

Let's talk about origami. Origami cards to be specific.

I start out with some funky paper. I recently discovered that there were some really wonderful scrap booking papers on the market. Some are two sided which makes for a really interesting card.
They are first cut to size. Then they are folded with the first few folds.
Because they are done en-mass here is a view of the first set of folds.
I then make the second set of folds and match the front's to the back's.

Then comes the gluing the fronts to the backs and the final pressing stage.
And of course, I just realized that the final product are down at the new shop that just opened for the summer, and I didn't take a picture.

I guess that you will just have to come back later.....

In the mean time, here is a little something that I found on my bedside table.


Isn't life interesting sometimes?

New York Good Bye

Due to the excess amounts of beer consumed the night before. I really didn't get a great sleep. Having to wake at 4:30 didn't help either. We were all assembled and ready to go by 5:00. Unfortunately, the bus driver had a little bit of an incident at the hotel (husband screaming at wife, while a small baby howled near by) and he didn't get there until 5:30.
In the mean time, we waited, assembled, ran back to rooms for a final check and turned in out door keys.
Good bye New York.
If you look closely at this building, if is built over an expressway. Or an expressway was built under it. I am not quite sure which.
One of the crew on the trip wanted to stop at the New Hampshire Liquor store. I managed to find a couple of bottles of wine that we can't buy around here. This one, however, was one that I left behind.
Final panoramic of the people on the bus. Most if them are sleeping. Or at least pretending.
When I go home, the kids were waiting on the lawn, and Bill had held supper so I ended my trip with a wonderful meal and a good sleep.

New York Day 3 (part 3 )

After the Amazing Fashioning Felt show, we headed down the street to the MET again. Entrance to the Cloisters automatically gets you into the MET so I wanted to take advantage of that. I didn't take any pictures when I was there on Sunday (the lack of batteries in the camera thing), so I wanted to take a few pictures of things that I had seen that I thought that the kids might like. There were also a few things that I really liked. The new American Art wing opened that day also and so I took a quick run through.

Here is a Frank Lloyd Wright window. They had a whole room that he had designed. I really wish that I could have spent more time there. As it was, I was very conscious of the time deadline.


There was also the Egyptian Temple. Inside of the MET. In the atrium. I love that there are so many people around so that you can get an idea of the scale of the temple and the room.
Here is one of the devotional carved balls that some amazing unnamed artist had carved lord only knows how many years ago. You can click on the image to enlarge it. Even though it is a little blurry close up (no flash and all) I think that it is worth your while.


Knights in armour on their armoured mounts. What is not to love!


A beautiful carved tea pot from the Orient.
After the MET Linda and I hopped on to a bus and headed down to Washington Square. A few days earlier, I had bought a pashmina scarf from a street vendor for $5. I kicked myself many times for only buying one. One of the things that I wanted to do before leaving was find pashmina man, as we called him, and get a few more. While we were on the bus, during rush hour traffic, I spied a sign crying out that someone had pashmina scarves for sale. We hopped off of the bus and I was able to get a few more. Ok. Maybe 6 more. I even gave one away to my friend Anne. But I had a very hard time choosing. A very very hard time choosing. Made me wish that I had bought 10 more.

Pashmina Man was set up across from this building. Those are trees that you see. About 3 stories up. I have to admit that I feel somewhat sorry for those trees. They have no where to grow. Maybe they are glorified bonsai trees but at least I doubt that they have to worry about dogs having their way around their trunks.

Linda wanted to see the Crystler Building up close, and happy that I had secured my pashmina scarves I readily agreed. The sun was going down and the building was glowing.
When we were closer, I took another photo that was a little more exaggerated.


We the hopped in a cab and went down to Washington Square which is just above Greenwich Village and Soho.

After wandering around and deciding on a pizza place that didn't have a liquor licence, we secured a bottle of wine and had a wonderful supper. Food was so amazing in New York. I think that I was saved from myself because I walked miles every day.
While we were eating, I noticed the adverts on the top of a couple of taxis. Toto, we really weren't in Kansas anymore!

Then it was back to the hostel and more beer on the terrace. I didn't care how late we stayed up or how much I drank because I knew that I was going to spend the greater part of the next day being relatively brain dead on a bus.

Tomorrow....good bye New York

New York Day 3 (part 2)

You hear a lot about NYPD. But one thing that I hadn't heard was that they were using these mini .... cars? I saw a bunch of them around the city. Some times they were parked (4 to a space), a few times they were actually being driven, and here they were parked near the Central Park Precinct. Cute eh? But I can't help but wonder at the policeman's reaction when he gets drawn to drive one of these things around.
When we made it through the park, we went to the Cooper Hewitt. There was a exhibit called Fashioning Felt. Oh my! No cameras were allowed except in the ceremonial felt tent. The tent was designed and built to fit in the atrium of the museum which is (very approximately) 12'x18' x 18' high. It was designed and built by Janice Arnold.
Here are a few views of the incredible structure. If you are able, I strongly suggest you visit this magical palace.
There is an amazing amount of difference in the different panels.

Many different fibers were used
And many different patterns



For the rest of the exhibit ( or at least most of it) click on Fashioning Felt right HERE!
You'll be glad that you did (if you are a fiber person that is)

Tomorrow Day 3 the final instalment