Hibernation....

....continues to sound like a really good idea.  TRYING to stay positive and active and productive, but the bear in me just wants to eat and sleep.  It's really been a tough winter, even the people I know who usually LOVE winter are like, "enough already".  But spring is in sight, won't be long now.  The other day Pam and AuntiePat and I were walking and most of the snow was gone and it was almost 60 out!!! We saw a whole crew of robins sucking worms out of the ground; two days later, it dropped back down to 20 degrees and it snowed.

I have been productive though.  The tailoring is caught up, and I've been making regalia like nobody's business.  Keeps my mind off the cold outside.  Inside, it's nice and warm.  Also I went to visit Sue, who lives two miles up the road and whom I haven't seen all winter.  She has been making all sorts of beautiful stuff, and I got all inspired looking through it. 

And I've been practicing the piano Preston got me.  After noodling around and pulling parts of songs out of the dusty, unused corners of my brain, I settled on my first actual project, which was the Eagles' "Wasted Time".  Such a beautiful song, sad but hopeful, and although I wouldn't call it "easy" by any means, it's a song I can actually pick apart and learn (because I don't read music, I play everything by ear).  Sometimes the piano gets lost in the background of songs and you can't really tell what's being played, but not this one.  Check it out.  So now that I've got the chords figured out on the piano, all that remains is to get both hands to work independently of each other, which is turning out to be the real challenge.  When you play guitar, not to minimize it, both of your hands are working to make the same note/chord.  On piano, they are both doing completely different things most of the time, so you have to train your brain for that. 

So while I keep going back to that, I've moved on to a new challenge:  Michael Nyman's "The Promise".  go and listen, and laugh all you want at my choices for beginner piano but it's coming along quite nicely thanks to YouTube tutorials.   I should mention, I guess, that I was not a complete stranger to the keyboard.  I took piano lessons when I was a kid, and we had an organ in the house that both of my parents played.  Still, I'm pretty pleased with myself!

Happy New Year....

...resolutions, new beginnings, blah blah blah.  Bah humbug right?  Don't mind me.  I never make new years' resolutions, because I know I won't keep them.  Instead, I am just doing what I do every year after the Christmas hubbub; diving right into what's next, balls to the wall.  And what's next for me is to get ready for what projects need to be done for spring; namely, the regalia (which i have started, isn't this a wild shade of pink?).  Also finishing the orders I have, which if I had any discipline at all would have been finished before I started the 8 ribbon shirts that are currently in progress.  Of course, if I had any discipline at all, I wouldn't have any problems with new years' resolutions.




So what I did on New Years' Day was to finally sand the boards that Preston cut for me several years ago for a display I designed for the store.  Unfortunately, I'm not a carpenter so the design had a couple of flaws, which I never resolved and so it never got finished. Looked ok on paper, but would not have worked in reality as my resident builder pointed out.  But I finally figured it out, and have been trying since last fall to get them sanded, stained, and poly-ed.  The problem is, it has to be a nice day AND I have to have the day off AND I have to not get sucked into someone else's project/have an afternoon of errands.  So that happened today, and even though it was a balmy 33 outside I sucked it up and sanded them.  Didn't get them stained, but that's ok...I can do that on a bad day or at night, whatever.

Welcome to my Process.

 What an awfully pretentious thing to say!!!  But everyone has one, and mine is sometimes very strange, even to me.  This time it revolved around some ribbon, some sand, and some glitter.  It always comes down to glitter at Christmastime.  Anyway, I had some lime green and turquoise ribbons, wide ones, and although I know it's a really popular color combination, it didn't strike me as very Christmas-y.  Then I noticed I had lime green and turquoise glitter in my stash, which was very pretty, and it occurred to me that somewhere in the little shop of chaos there was colored sand that I acquired from goodness knows where, a long time ago.  Cut to a Sunday night, when I was going to pick up a pizza, and as I drove around the back of the pizza place I spotted a large container of enormous red Christmas balls, waiting to be brought inside to decorate for the holidays.  For some unknown reason the cylinders in my head clicked into place and the project was suddenly clear, and something totally unrelated to large red Christmas balls came to me. It's a garland, made from styrofoam balls covered first with colored sand, then decorated with glitter, and strung on the wide ribbon.  Of course, though, it didn't get finished.  But that's ok, it will.  Also not finished were all of my skates; I still have 4 left in progress, along with two polar bears and 7 penguins.  I am addicted to starting new projects. 

Here's a fun new project; Santa brought me a Yamaha keyboard.  It's such a pleasure to play, after trying to do stuff on a Casio; it's a very nice Casio, not a cheap one, but the keys seem so cramped it's hard to play with both hands on it.  And I don't have big hands, and I certainly don't have the long fingers that would serve a piano player well, but I still need room to move around.

So Christmas is over, and I have already begun to prepare for spring.  Last year I posted a lot of regalia pieces for sale, not realizing how much in demand they would be RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF PROM SEASON.  I was not able to keep up with demand and also keep up with prom alterations.  So this year, I'm going to be prepared. 

If I can pull myself away from the keyboard long enough.

So There I Was...

 ...sitting at Sparky's table, up to my elbows in Mod-Podge and soot, and my phone went "cha-ching", the noise it makes when I make an Etsy sale.  We had to wait until the project was done to see what sold!  Tortuous.  Anyway, this was my first ever attempt at decoupage (I guess I missed that part of the 70s), and surprisingly enough, it was a success!  I have had this skate and the book of Christmas carols set aside for like 3 years, I kid you not.  I knew just what I was going to do with them, not really sure why it took me so long to do it.  Maybe I was unsure how to proceed, although I understood the technique well enough, because I had never done it.  In the end I just dove in with both hands.  The idea was simple enough; antique the sheet music with tea (which really proved unnecessary as it toasted quite well as I scorched the edges), rip it into pieces, scorch the edges with a candle without burning the house down, and plaster 'em on there with Mod-Podge (which I had never used before, although I guess it has other applications besides this one).  Seriously, I had had this project hanging around waiting to be done for SO LONG that the big jar of Mod-Podge had hardened.  Fortunately, Sparky had some.  Great stuff!  Now I'm wondering what else I can decoupage.  No blank surface is safe!!  And today I will find out if it can be used to stiffen the bases of treetop angels.  I guess I will owe Sparky another jar!

So I've gotten the majority of my skates done, there are still a few left to do but I had to stop and do something else for a while because...well, you HAVE to.  Here's another experiment I did, wanted a rustic Americana kind of look so I used crackle medium and then antiqued it with wood stain.  Of course nothing is complete without a little glitz, even if it is antique bronze instead of shiny gold or silver.  Seemed to go better.
Notice two things about this picture;  one, I have no nails.  Well I mean I have nails, but they are very short and unpainted.  Fussing with my manicure is not in my schedule.  Also I find longer nails get in the way.  Secondly, there's a cup of tea.  There's ALWAYS a cup of tea.  Nothing much gets done here without being fueled by tea.

In other news, I now have bifocals!  I know some people balk at the idea because of the age thing, but I am so excited I just can't tell you.  They laughed at me when I picked them up yesterday at the eye doctor's because I couldn't wipe the smile off my face.  Gone are the days of taking them off and sitting on them, looking over them, putting them up on my head and putting them back down, etc. etc.  What a pain in the ass that was. I put them on when I picked them up and didn't touch them again until I went to bed last night. 

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!

Progress!

If this is not the most beautiful thing you've ever seen, that's ok...but it ranks WAY up there on MY scale.  It has actually been finished for a couple of weeks, I just have been too busy to post.  It's been not too cold here during the day, but the nights they do get chilly so we have had the stove lit a few times.  Now all that remains is to get the end of the house put back together!  We were delayed by having to fix the leaking fuel lines in Preston's truck, that sucked up several days.  Always something.

And look, I have a window!!  Again, might not seem like such a big deal, but that is the corner where my desk is and it faces east.  Imagine how dark that corner was with no windows in it.  Our house was pretty cave-like, not a whole lot of natural light got in.  Till now!  Just have to frame it in, but that can wait.  Got to get the outside finished.














In addition to all my other projects, I've been crocheting a lot.  I have quite a bit of trouble reading crochet instructions, but as it turns out there are lots and lots of tutorials on YouTube and that's what I need; to be shown.  I already knew how to crochet, but only in two dimensions.  Now I can make these neat fingerless gloves and I'm trying to figure out how to make a hat.  Because there must have been five extra minutes in my day when I wasn't doing anything else!!  These sold within an hour of my listing them in my Etsy store so that's encouraging.  I think that must be the fastest sale I've ever made.












Time to get out the Christmas stuff I finished off during the year and get that listed, too.  Yes I realize it's rushing the season, which I hate, but I see by my Etsy shop stats that people are already looking for tree skirts and as I usually wait till the last minute to do everything, I don't want to miss the boat.