Skating Away

 The tea set is done!  See, every once in a while I DO finish something I started.  But as soon as one is finished, the next one starts.  Or more likely, the next one was already started.  It's hard to have more than one painting project going at once, though, as I just don't have the space.  Probably it's a good thing. So now I've moved on to the pile of skates I picked up over the summer, and so far they are progressing pretty quickly.





 The problem I sometimes have is lack of inspiration when it comes to deciding just HOW I'm going to paint them.  But this time, the ideas came almost faster than I could write them down, and I have plans for 10 of the 12 skates I managed to accumulate.  Here's one I did last summer after finishing the cherry chair and stool and was still in cherry mode.  Right now it's all I can do not to paint one purple with violets on it.  I still might, it's not exactly wintery but then neither are cherries.


Thanksgiving is almost here, and once again I have managed, for the most part, to avoid Christmassing my shop.  I'm old-school, I guess, and I think Christmas should wait until after Thanksgiving.  I understand people like to get shopping early, and my Etsy shop is certainly sporting lots of Christmas stuff, but there's not much that annoys me more than going into a store, any store, and seeing Christmas stuff out in October.  So until Thanksgiving week, Incredible Threads remains, for the most part, a Christmas-free zone.  No holiday displays, and certainly NO Christmas music.  I love Christmas music but it has to wait until this week.  My plan is to go in tomorrow and deck the halls while the store is closed. 

November begins....

...I guess I blinked and missed October.  Well not quite, I did enjoy the foliage.  The view out my new window includes one really nice maple tree!  But that's bare now.  And if it wasn't bare already, today would take care of that.  It's really, really windy!  I even got an update from National Grid yesterday with a high wind warning.  I had forgotten all about having signed up for those, did that during the blizzard last winter and never heard a peep out of them till now. 

 I've been a crocheting fool lately.  Although there are a lot of other things to get done, so I'm trying to limit myself to crocheting while I watch TV.  Lucky for me it's football season!  So I have been getting a lot of crocheting done and a lot of additions to my Etsy shop.  I am trying to convince my friends and Sparky of the validity of the concept of fingerless gloves, without much success.  None of them text.  But that's ok, they are selling pretty steadily so SOMEone gets it! And that just gives me an excuse to make more.  Although I have a lot of yarn that just doesn't lend itself well to that project, so at some point during the winter I may try to learn how to make booties.  If I get really ambitious.

Sue and I hit the motherlode of sewing and fabric stuff!  We bought about 20 big totes-worth of stuff from someone who was cleaning out, and it's going to take us a long time to go through all that.  We plopped it all in Sue's living room for now, and what you see here is just a small part of it.  Good thing she didn't happen to have any furniture in there!  So we are both pretty much all set for the winter as far as raw materials.  I think.

Well the house is all put back together on the outside, the only thing remaining is the inside window casing.  Preston cut the boards out, and I promised to stain and poly them.  So that will be this weekend's project...along with digging through all those totes and boxes!