Kudos Kleenex

I rarely purchase facial tissue – pretty much just when I'm having a cold, or when I come across a box with a design that I really like. Like this one from Kleenex! I'm suddenly inspired to decorate our guest bathroom, which is beyond plain...

Don't you just love everyday objects with good design?

T-shirt recycling update: Floka-tee rug

This post actually answers two different previous ones: one about latch-hooking, and one about recycling my old shirts. My current project is...you guessed it! Latch-hooking my old t-shirts! I needed a new rug for in front of the bathroom sink, and I've got a car trip in front of me, so it seemed to be the thing to do.

Here's my practice section:




You can see why I call it Floka-tee. It looks like a Flokati wool rug, only made with t-shirts!

I didn't have time to hunt for latch-hooking canvas, so I'm trying burlap with a quilting hoop. I kind of wanted something a little less stiff anyway, because I'm hoping to be able to throw it in the washer.

I will probably sew on some sort of backing at the end, but here's what the reverse looks like:




I think for my rug I will do several free-form sections of different colors of white, off-white, and light gray (my favorite color scheme).

I can't wait to play around with this more. You know what would be super cute? Little stuffed-animal shaggy "monsters"!

Olden days

We're planning a camping trip for next weekend up to Yosemite, and thinking about that brought back memories of the olden days, camping with the fam! Camping was always how we spent our family vacations, and I had so much fun pretending I was in THE olden days, "roughin' it."

Since I was quite young I have had a keen interest in the times when crafting wasn't just an activity, but the way one went about the business of living. (Though I'm sure if I absolutely had to make everything by hand it would suck the fun out of it real fast!) I would look at objects around me and try to boil them down to their simplest and most basic origins. Not just how did they make bread, but how did they make flour? Not just how did they sew, but how did they make the thread and weave the fabric? Once I found an answer to a question like this I would instantly feel this impulsive yearning to try it out myself. To have made, at least once, every thing I could, completely and totally from scratch.

What made me think of this, in relation to camping, was the memory of a certain time when my family was camping by this river in central Texas outside San Marcos - the Guadeloupe? I would generally bring my best friend along, and this time she and I decided to do a very old olden days craft. We walked along the river banks and gathered up the stickiest, thickest clay that we could find, and using the campfire as our kiln, we did ceramics. It was so much fun! I must have heard or read somewhere how ancient cultures would make rattles, for babies or as musical instruments, because that was the main thing we did, and if I remember right, it came off pretty well! You just use the coiling method to make two bowls. Then you roll small bits of clay into round balls. You wrap each ball in newspaper and put them in one bowl, and then invert the other bowl on top, sealing the edges to make a hollow ball. The newspaper keeps the small balls inside from sticking to the inside walls, and the when the peice is fired, it just burns up. (That was the part that fascinated me the most.) We buried our little rattles under the coals of the fire early that evening, and by the next morning, we had primitive little rattles! It was so satisfying to complete that project and have it turn out.

I wonder if there is clay in the soil at Yosemite...

aaaaaaaaargh

What a blog funk I've been in!

Well if there's one thing I know, it's that the longer you go without doing something, the harder it is to get back into it. So I decided this morning I'm doing a post whether I have anything to say or not! (So there!)

And then in my email was a note from my friend Melissa saying I should post this cool project she saw this morning. Hey....I'll take it!

It's a pretty neat little deal – her friend Debbie has a husband who is way into all these obscure foreign beers (like if you meet him once you'll know that about him), so she's started framing his collection of bottle caps:

And the bonus is: these things are magnetic so it doubles as a note-board. Nice!