When the cat’s away….

or when you don’t have one, clearly the mice have their way!

We always have mice come in when the weather gets chilly, especially in our very civilized barn.  In the workshop recently, we found this cache meticulously carried a few seeds at a time from a teeny hole chewed in the bottom of a bag of bird seed and deposited in the drill case for a snowy day.  Many of the seeds had been shelled first..

We’ve taped up the hole in the bag, plugged some large access points around the garage doors, reset the traps and put out smelly repellant the mice don’t like.  It seems to be working…

A Wreath-making Play Date

The ladies needed a Christmas wreath for the front door of Six Loose Ladies, the yarn shop where I volunteer.  Often we have gotten a fresh wreath and decorated it with fiber related things:  felted balls, gnomes, little sheep and the like.  Every year it was a new challenge, not to mention the time and effort to put it together.  This year we were thinking it would be nice to have something we could use year after year.

My coworker Suzanne and I decided  to see what we could put together.  We googled “funky wreath” and scrolled through the images that came up.  Lots of them were fun but not for us, either to make or appropriate for a yarn shop. Then we happened on one made from colorful fabric circles, layered and tied with buttons.  “We could make this out of wool fabric,” we said.  “We are all about wool, after all,” we said.  We planned a day in my studio to make it happen.

I promptly went home to experiment so we had a better idea of how it should go together and what would work well.  When Suzanne arrived, we sorted through our collections of wool fabrics and chose a neutral color palette, adding a little burgundy for interest and color.  We started with circles of different sizes, layering them as we saw fit and messy-sewing them together.  In each stack we put a disc of stiff batting so the circles wouldn’t wilt over time, and enclosed it between the two largest discs.  After sewing, we added buttons for texture and a few jingle bells for a finishing touch.

When these were all assembled we attached them to a wire wreath frame we had wrapped with wool strips.  A glue gun is a wonderful thing and it proved to be quick and mostly painless for this project.

We finished it off with a wool fabric bow, which got its very own button of course!  If you want to see it in person, check out Six Loose Ladies’ front door this December.

 

 

Slow Stitching

It seems like we are always in a hurry these days.  We bristle at anything that takes a long time and we’ve gotten used to instant everything.  Even our projects reflect our hurry: quick knits, quilt-in-a-day, instant glue, one coat coverage paint, ready to assemble kits…

I’ve been working at a slower pace lately stitching up some felted baubles for Christmas.  First I wind wool yarn loosely into balls, cover them with roving, put them into an old stocking and felt them in the washing machine.  Then I wait for them to dry which takes several days.  My creative process is unhurried, auditioning various colors of wool felt, deciding on embroidery motifs, beads, etc.  Then comes the actual stitching –  a calm and meditative process which transforms the plain and ordinary into interesting and beautiful.

You can check out my original inspiration in this tutorial by Judy Coates Perez here.  Who knows, you might decide to slow down and make some yourself.  I hope so.