My first FRONT PAGE!

I earned one of these:


I almost gave the rest of the house a heart attack in my very noisy disbelief. I loved this photoshoot but was scared that the pictures were too dark. I guess that wasn't the case!
What was it you ask?
Only my gorgeous venus victrix beaded bangles. Up there, at the top.
I love these

I was working on more of them today and am happy to see that they are getting the recognition I'd like them to get. As well as Mr. Twentyfivecent moose. Elk. Whatever.

FRONT PAGE!
I have proof, too:
Okay, it's a little blurry. I'm so glad I decided to check my etsy when I did...And for me, at least, there's no question, views-wise, that my item got something special happened to it. It was at I think 75, but now is around 250.
Another etsy milestone. I'm very happy about it, and will be even happier when the perfect person gives these babies a home. I'm keeping the moose. Elk. Whatever.

the craft-o-matic

i'll start with an extended disclaimer, about the word "craft" then will digress to my original titled point after i've got the definitions ironed out.
i must admit that i dislike the term "craft"- i'm ambivalent about it, really at best. i like craftsman houses, i'm serious about craftsmanship (another term i'm ambivalent about- craft"man"ship? is this another word like handsome, meaning capable and strong and dextrous that is given to the male gender, and generally denied to women, or are we talking as in "manos" "manual" ? i like both and would much prefer to be called handsome anyday, rather than just "pretty". i'm also ambidextrous, which only adds to the confusion. another rant for another time. back to craft.)
i think of it in that light and i think of something serious, focused, meditative and skillful. something that work at its best feels like to me.
but there's a negative connotation to it to me, and this darkside is worth exploring in my mind. i am first reminded of these wooden lawn decorations common in rural/suburb coastal texas. painted shapes to look like plump women bent over, cheerfully painted flower print bloomers on display, tending the garden. i feel a little pity for it, and a little frustration/disgust. add to that, acyrlic yarn. add to that all that is lumped under the label "craft." the light in which the term gets no respect. when my mother says the word craft and means stuff that people have made, she uses a tone of voice similar to the one she uses when she says the word crap, and oftentimes i am an echo of her.
but whither this disdain? i'm going to argue that it's born from a lack of respect for what is generally regarded as "women's work" (silly dolly porch decorations made from nylons, excuse me, pantyhose and decorated with embroidery thread french knot eyes and some rubbishy acrylic hair, perched atop a mini broom and hanging from fishing wire come to mind)- uneducated, unskilled, and previously completely necessary women's work. okay. maybe not all completely necessary- the ornamentation of elaborate embroidery fulfills only the human desire for adornment for ourselves and for things like sacred spaces.
but quilts- a silly dotty old lady activity- were vital in keeping the folks who engendered most of us untaken by cold on cruel winter nights, before comfortor factories farted them out at alarming rates. (the sales i see on bedding confirm that many many of them do exist).
so, to reconcile with the term craft, i have all of these strange considerations themselves to reconcile.
and hold my head up high about the term craft, as in my case it is women's work, it is ornamental-necessary, and i execute it dextrously.
on to the "craft-o-matic"
i suspect this is a reason many etsy folk have two shops. one for supplies, one for work. or two for work. just different kinds of work. once the brain is spinning, really, the artist/crafter interprets the world in different ways that begin to mutate and change the output. i started off writing, took up crocheting and have continued evolving with both and i caught myself earlier designing valentines' cards and thinking about variations on the theme going, well it would be fun to make elaborate, one off art cards...
and then the (probably sensible) part of me says, look, that's not your job. you write and do this fiber stuff, and that's enough. you're not a draw-er, though you enjoy it sometimes, you're no print or paper artist. leave well enough alone, and just make them for love, for family.
then part of me goes, well, but that would be a nicer thing to do when it's hot than working with uh, wool?
then part of me goes, well it's not like that, it's felting experiment time when it gets hot.
part of me goes, you're not going to be able to do that all the time.
part of me goes, we'll see.

whew...that week's over

and last week sure did feel like a busy one.
i did two events last week, and wanted to make sure i had plenty of lovelies available. i'm glad i got all that work done, it was a nice boost to my inventory, but it was a week of late night coffee brewings and plenty of new pattern devisement.
i got to work with some new yarn (that addictive noro niji!) and use up some old- i'm now officially out of crayon green wool. i can think of no other word to appropriately describe the color; if one were to pull the color marked "green" out of a crayon box, this is that color. the new bangles turned out beautifully (of course i'm biased) and i love the spring scarves i made. now just to find them all homes.
i was joking with someone at hip happening on saturday about how it's like having kittens or any other sweet and fuzzy thing that needs a home. it's less like selling than it is having a part of yourself go out into the world. i'm not able to separate myself at this point, i still hope that the things that i make will be used, enjoyed, appreciated. of course i also want them to be useful, enjoyable and durable- thus the ridiculous insistence upon details.
so yes,
there was art walk hillsboro and hip happening here in town.
i think the first event is more popular when it's just a little warmer, which is a bit of a cruel paradox for me. last year, i discovered how hard it is to sell scarves in the summer, in southern california. it just wasn't happening. so i improvised. this year will be the same; i'm really excited about some of the ideas that i'm incubating at the moment (coming attractions!). i had a great time hanging out at styledbaby, and i'm going to be sharing more about that shop soon. voodoo child found a home (after probably being my most-hearted item over at etsy) and i was glad to see it go. the woman who bought it was wearing a coat that had the same exact red- it just fit with her. i think also that she and her husband found it funny that i had a series of classic rock scarves. who doesn't like a theme?
hip happening was this weekend- and i think many of us primarily made sales to other vendors. i would have liked to have been in the upstairs area (the show was in a historic masonic lodge, so the upstairs/main floor had this amazing old theater/stage thing going on, with flats from a play currently in rehearsals onstage) as the atmosphere up there was awesome. beautiful hazy natural light pouring in big old windows. however, those of us in the basement bonded and i met some really cool people. (who i'll also be sharing later.)
but, well, what? the economy? it was slow.
but that wasn't the part that wore me out.
i need do develop some duck's back feathers and protective oily coating so the multitude of offhand comments doesn't start accumulating. shows are great because they allow you to have face to face time with the people who look at your work, and they allow you as a shopper to interface with the person who made the things you're looking at.
but, may i say, there's a lot of comments made. and it's not that they're all negative, not by any stretch. some are constructive, some are interesting. but there's a lot of them.
some of the behavior i see at shows simply wouldn't be allowed in a more formal store. and that's okay, in some cases, but i quite seriously saw a person looking up a booth's skirt- lifting the table cloth up to inspect the table underneath. which was not for sale.
other behaviors just add up. there is the classic gap girl frustration with those who re-merchandise the merchandise- leaving it as thrashed as any teen girl's bedroom. or dorm room. which is okay, i like to arrange and re-arrange, i feel like it keeps the table from looking stale. but it's those who do it after i've seen them eating from their hands. or those who put their super-tall starbux down on my table in the middle of my work, and then start digging. the coffee on the table did annoy me, perhaps if this continues, i'll get a tv dinner tray and request that drinks be placed there, instead.
and there are a lot of picky little comments- "this yarn, but a hat" (well, that yarn doesn't have much in the way of what we call memory, so it would make a pretty unsatisfactory hat, trust me i've made that mistake before), "this yarn, but that color" (i like it too, but that yarn doesn't come in that color), "this stuff is expensive" (i'm sorry but i don't like to use petroleum yarn and the costs for that stuff are subsidized by the future generations, symbolized by the cute kids you've got with you), and so on and so on. i don't answer back to everything, but my argumentative brain thinks the responses, and so i get a little tired.
i think with the closer interface, people feel more defensive about not purchasing. they feel the need to make justifications, and i can see that. there's a ton of verbal tipping, too, those that aren't going to make purchases but give compliments. i got a couple of "keep it up" encouragements from women i'd just had good conversations about yarn with, and that felt nice. i also didn't realize that i've absorbed all of this knowledge about yarn, which i suppose is cool. there's a lot more to learn though.

i've set a limit on what i'll spend on a table though. i read somewhere once, that it's good to keep in mind how much the rental fees are and how many sales it would take of different kinds to make it back. i've learned this weekend to estimate on the low side; perhaps i'll think of it the way i think of gambling- don't pay a table fee that you can't afford to lose, whether it's six bucks or sixty or six hundred.

lessons, all. and the time can't be considered wasted if i apply what i learned.

people at craft shows

can be very negative. vocal. vocally negative and negatively vocal.

it's been a busy week and i'm currently decompressing, but there will be news, updates and all kinds of stuff quite shortly.

never buying shampoo again?

i finally tried it. i finally tried the hippie-frugal-elementary school science project baking soda hair wash and vinegar rinse.
and i'm never buying shampoo again.
i'm a sucker for b&b products (bath and beauty, y'all). i got all my handmade soaps from alaska- strangely enough- the ones i'm using now are from gladheart acres (the rise and shine is probably my favorite; it's citrusy enough to wake me up in the morning) and a wonderful intro to the family/company from my m.i.l. i also have their solid lotion stick and love it.
i've got my eye on some more soaps from alaska, swanmountain's rose soap looks divine, and there's a guinness soap on there that would make my hub smell like, well, delicious beer. perhaps it's a good thing he doesn't drive, no?
and i love bath salts and bombs and bubbles, having been clued into the pleasure of a leisurely bath and cup of coffee/cup of tea/glass of wine and a paperback by my gran when i was quite young.

but the one thing that's never excited me is shampoo. sure, sometimes it smells good but a person who has a bee sting allergy is generally not crazy about her hair smelling like flowers. i dislike the plastic bottles that must be stood on their heads to get the last bits out with those farty-sounding squeezes. and then there's the markup. and crazy-long lists of ingredients. and the condescending "lather, rinse, repeat if you've been soaking your head in motor oil" nonsense.
sure, some shampoo makers have tried to liven things up for me by putting jokes or trivia or faux-biographical vignettes on the bottle. i'm an inveterate reader, the type that can't keep herself from reading when there's words. eventually those words get old.
so anyway. needless to say, i'm not a huge fan of shampoo, but i do like clean hair.

enter the baking soda/vinegar thing. read about it in bust a couple of years ago when i still thought bust was der poo. it's come up again a couple of times since then and every time i've seen it, i've thought, you know, i'd try that. when i came across this blog entry i was ready. i bought a giant jug of vinegar a couple of weeks ago thinking to start cleaning with it. and for cooking. so far it works great on the bathroom sink, with some baking soda, and not so great on the mirror.
if that same elementary school project doesn't fail me, baking soda's a base, and vinegar, of course, is acidic. i know from extensive at home wild hair coloring projects and fiber work that vinegar is used to neutralize ph and smooth hair shafts back out. armed with this knowledge and baking soda paste and diluted vinegar in an old water bottle with a cinnamon stick & orange essential oil in, i washed my hair.
no lather, plenty of rinse, zero need to repeat.
the fine, straight, tending towards limp and oily hair is quite happy. it smells faintly of orange and not of salad dressing, which is good. it was cheap. cheap enough to where i can't really estimate how cheap it was. maybe two tablespoons of baking soda?
and that's good because that means i can use my pennies for delicious handmade soap.
oh yes and more yarn.
noro niji is good to me, and therefore i return to yarn garden to extend this series.

the things i love that hurt my hands

perhaps, hurt is too perjorative a word. perhaps a more neutral statement might be "things i enjoy that are rough on my hands."
i could never be a hand model, never ever, not even for a million bajillion dollars. okay, we'll if that's per year, then i could do it for a year, as i foresee that though my fiber budget may increase and i may once again someday buy lots of books, a million bajillion dollars would probably see me through the rest of my life. but it would be a tough year.
hand models, from what i've read, wear gloves all the times, never holding hands. cuticles are a professional obsession, and you know those girls who cry when they break a nail? they look like disney starlettes next to someone that pictures of whose nails put the butter on the bread and the bread on the table.
for a whole year.
i would not be able to cook. just look at these mitts, will ya? they are burnt up. perpetually. i have pink and purple things in various stages of age. these aren't major burns, just the little burns that happen when you cook, a lot and do things like touch things that are hot, or have hot things touch you. it happens. also, from all those years ago (nine?!?), i still have waitress hands. have you ever gone to a restauant and been handed a plate from a person who hands it to you bare handed, saying, careful this plate's hot? and you touch it and it is? that's waitress hands. i also put jar lids on waay too tight.
so. no cooking for a year. perhaps i could make a lot of salads? but no knives, as little cuts kind of happen too sometimes. i would have to depend on some wretched such contraption such as a shooter of salad, but someone else has to wash it. no washing of things, i'd have to avoid dishpan hands- my hands would be the poster hands for the antidishpan hands movement.
as a side note, i'm sorry, but no housewife knows dishpan hands like a restaurant dishwasher, particularly a latin-american pater familias (two of whose sons also work in the kitchen) who probably washes dishes at two restaurants. i've seen the cracked bleeding skin between the fingers and known they didn't have health insurance or paid days off.

computers are probably also really bad for the fingers. i can type quickly, thanks to having been taught in like first grade. typing was pretty much all a primary school kid could do on those gorilla green screens and they gave it us with a vengance. i pay so little attention to the mechanical movements of my fingers that i freak my husband out by staring out the window while i'm typing. for some reason people find that rather disconcerting, but i think that's hilarious because they don't know if i'm writing anything that makes sense, or if my fingers have all jumped one over and i'm writing more like domryhik yiul yjod. and quite frankly neither do i, until i look back and check. so lots of repetitive stress on the hands with little attention paid, so i should probably cut back on that.

then there's the fiber arts. let's not joke. i'm worried that sleeping every night with icy hot on my hands after i'm done working at night could cause some long-term health issues. i'm dead set on finding a non-petroleum based product- something beeswaxy perhaps?
i work a lot. when something's your passion and you make it available to the public, it becomes like an addiction. i can't watch a movie without my hands wanting to be busy, they feel twitchy and anxious. some people have "restless leg syndrome" i think the same of my hands. they don't like to stop.
i think also they want to be strong. i have a dear friend who is a jewelry designer, worker with stones and wire and silk. and thick wire. she rubbed my hands once and i was amazed, this strength coming from these slender little hands, from this physically small person/thin and bright strand of energy. i was afraid, actually at one point for my hands so subdued by hers. would my hands panic? would i cry? (the worry of the eternal 8 year old.)
point being, i want my hands to be like that. my great-grandmother's hands must have been like that, though it's so long i don't really remember the strength qualities of her hands. i remember though the flat spots on her fingertips, yet how soft the pads of her fingers were. they were compact, tending towards broadness versus length. i can wear her wedding ring, so our hands must be similar. which gives me hope.

an update on the noro niji:
i'm fighting with myself to finish this project and not just run to the yarn shop and get more. my brain is trying to devise a series of items using this yarn. the texture and color combine incredibly- though i spent most of yesterday trying to figure out just how i wanted to use it. i ended up on choosing a granny type square, which is something i've not done much of. of course i had to make my own variation, which will be available for view sometime today or tomorrow!
oh and the kureyon purse needs more felting. i forgot how stubborn that yarn can be to felt.

thoughts on progress, yarns

projects set calmly aside in annoyance:
1
by 9:30 this a.m.
but let's not go there.
let's go instead to the ball of louet's "clyde" sitting on my shelf, twinkling at me. got it in vancouver at stitchcraft- i agree with whomever said it's near impossible to go into a yarn shop without buying something, especially a new one or one you'll only be visiting once. (i have vacation sprees at fantastic fibers every time i go to alaska, and hit up nancy's knits pretty hardcore in houston- though julia took me into one that was also pretty cool in the heights.)

so. this stuff. boucle. wool with 5% silk, boucle. i approach this yarn with trepidation and limited expectations, as i've never felted a blend with silk in it before.
wait, scratch that, i've used plymouth boku, which gets really soft but is difficult in my experience to felt. let me google that for you: oh no. it's the same silk content. rats.
(oh and folks, let's quit comparing boku and nuro's kureyon. i have a girl-crush on noro, and my thoughts on another noro yarn follow shortly. to compare the two might lead someone to believe that noro is thin, which it's not. i spent some time last summer working with both at the same time and the boku is thinner. it doesn't have the sometimes psychotically wild color variations, though it has some very pleasing ones- i'm thinking fondly of a boku that reminded me of watermelon tourmaline (do yourself a favor and open that link in another tab- it's pretty there! nice work karengilbertdesigns!) okay. so boku's good, and i have an admitted bias towards noro kureyon (which is also all wool, no silk) but they're not interchangeable. nor really comparable- apples and oranges.

additionally, i have a poor track record with boucle yarns. i can't stand the lack of stitch definition (which i'm thinking will be good for felting) and dislike how difficult it makes counting. i'm too detail oriented - the devil on my shoulder says "too anal" for boucle. i made a small pouch with it and we'll see how it felts before moving forward.

so. lastly we come to the noro. it's the noro niji. fiber wise, it's almost the same as blossom, only with less nylon- which i would imagine contributes the core thread (correct me, spinners?) and the really flashy bits of color in blossom. niji is still 5% nylon, which does not excite me about yarn, but as established, i'm a sucker for noro. i snagged color 86, which to me means golds violet, a little green and a dark pink peeking at me on one skein beneath strands of the turquiose i'm crazy about right now. three skeins, and they're all saying something slightly different.
moving through the skeins- they're soft. they're fuzzy. they are all in agreement on the point "spring scarf."
i was attracted by an etsy forum thread on the topic the other day. and i see a piece that's flexible enough to wear day afternoon night. how some lifestyle-y/fashion-y spread would say something about wearing it with a "blouse and khakis or cute boot cut jeans to meet mom for brunch then transition to with a sweater while walking your golden retriever, then over your shoulders with a little cardigan over a dress over tights for a date with a hunk." or something.
but cyndi lauper's "time after time" on my internet radio and the yarn appears to be giving me meaningful looks. more as it comes.

the stats:
louet "clyde" labeled by stitchcraft as "green summer" color 06, lot 17642
chunky wt/bulky 5
95% wool, 5% silk
boucle 50 g/82 yds

noro niji, color 86 lot a
i'm not sure about weight. it's fluffy like a boucle, but not as dense as the louet clyde. comparable to noro's blossom
45% wool, 25% kid mohair, 25% silk, 5% nylon