Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Easter Crafting Gone Horribly Wrong

So excited to celebrate the joys of Easter. I am also excited to take my sweet baby to her first Easter egg hunt this coming week. Every Easter season I am haunted by a craft project from my youth. The Evil Bunny. I think I was in 4th grade (not positive because I have a horrible memory) and I made a paper mache bunny. I painted it with lovely pastel stripes, added ears, and then for some reason...gave the bunny a weird face with cat like whiskers. This bunny appears every year at my mom's house...she refuses to let me throw away this horrid creation. This afternoon it somehow made it to my home. Oh the moment of horror when I spotted that bunny amid silver framed photos of my girl. Do you have any bad crafting projects from childhood that refuse to go quietly into the crafting night? Held onto by mom, dad, sister, brother? Please tell me I am not alone.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Small price, big luxury knitting projects

If your crafting/creative explorations have a tendency to branch out in all directions like mine do, you know that you have spent a small fortune on supplies and tools. My creative stash reminds me of the Sex in the City Episode when the main character Carrie Bradshaw calculates just how much money she has spent on her designer Jimmy Choo shoes...she had not realized that she spent 40,000 dollars on her shoe collection, also the value of her needed apartment down payment. I have no idea just how much money I have spent over the years exploring my creative interests and I am not so sure I want to know. At any rate, I recently stumbled across a great little knitting book called Luxury Yarn One Skein Wonders: 101 Small Indulgences by Judith Durant.  The book has great scarves, hats, and baby projects that only require one skein of yarn. Luxury yarn is definitely not cheap, but worth the splurge for the right project. Too bad my daughter is now giant-sized (18-24mo. projects will take more than one skein...). I am trying to decide which project to add to my project list...I love scarves, but she also includes a couple of great patterns for hand warmers. My hands are always cold at work. Choices, choices. Oh checkcard?? You are needed in the yarn department.

Luxury Yarn One-Skein Wonders: 101 Small Indulgences 

Sunday, April 3, 2011

giving handmade and handmade gift tags

Since 2011 is my year to GSD...I hope to have many handmade gifts prepared for the holiday season. One of the hardest parts of the handmade gifting for me is the actual giving. The making is the easy part...the giving is tough. I always worry that
a)the person will hate it
b)the person will think i am cheap
c)the person will have no idea how much time, work, and money went into the project.

I saw a commercial last year that had a guy saying...nobody really wants handmade gifts for the holidays. I also read articles online and watched a news segment about comments made by Mo Rocha about handmade sweaters. He was called out by knitters nationwide for a casual complaint he made on a NPR radio show (I think it was Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me) about handmade sweaters being itchy. Cheap yarn is itchy. Good yarn is so soft and lovely.  I think advertisers and people with bad memories of gifts made from cheap supplies tarnish the handmade gifting and further exacerbate my worrying cycle. See a,b,c above. Repeat.

I am always looking for new gift ideas so I can give my gifts without worry of all of the above. I recently read a great little book called Gifted: Lovely Little Things to Knit and Crochet. It has great projects and bonus: a recipe for homemade hot chocolate mix. I think I might just have to gift that to myself. Hot chocolate, chai tea, and coffee make the winter season so much more bearable. I also discovered this great website for a product line called Knitterella. The gift tags are just adorably sassy. I am going to order some of these to go with my gifts this season.
Craft Hope Spreading seeds of hope one stitch at a time