It is reversible, and each side has this a pocket made from a vintage apron, transfers, and embroidery.
A few of the steps on the embroidering of the flapper girl pocket are shown in the photo below and previously written up here.
Coloring with crayons on fabrice is a neat and easy concept. The idea was blatantly copied from giggleface studios for all steps of the Flapper Girl face.
By definition, collage is an artistic composition of materials and objects pasted over a surface, often with unifying lines and/or color. The origin of the word "collage" comes from the French word "coller," which means to glue. Simply put, anything that is glued or pasted onto something else might be broadly interpreted as collage. Historically, collage has existed for many centuries; and, notably, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque launched collage into the art world of Paris in the twentieth century and made it a mainstream term with a more widely accepted understanding. But, much earlier, experimentation in collage took place in France (Madison ArtShop).
It was cute, but who would eat all those marshmallows?
I came up with a different cake by using a boxed white cake mix, the required ingredients, and then baked the cake in a 9" x 15" jelly roll pan. After the cake cooled and was then frozen overnight, I cut out a sheep cardboard form and cut around the form placed atop the frozen cake. (It helped to freeze the cake thoroughly before cutting it.) The "waste" cake taken from around the edges of the sheep form was frozen for later use with strawberries in a different dessert.
After spreading the cut-out sheep cake with white icing, I sprinkled on colored sugar daisy petals purchased at the craft store. And I added two goofy eyes to the face of the sheep. With a little imagination, you can see the result looks a bit like a sheep:
Maggie did a beautiful job with the sheep, shepherd and dog!
This is Betty blowing out candles on the cake at her birthday party yesterday.
Thought I would give a quick blog shot of the finished "altered art" for Baby Ella Ann, due in about two weeks. This gift was referenced in yesterday's Blog posting. Shhhhh.... her mom and dad don't know about it yet.
A new baby niece will be making her entrance in a few weeks. One of the presents we bought her was from an Etsy Store (all things handmade) called RockaByeBabyRetro. It is a darling Onesie made into a dress. There is a pink bow at the neck and applique on the front, with a full skirt. Carousels and animals are the dress theme in pinks and reds.
I plan on using all my watercolor skills on this little beauty, and will matt and frame it in a girly, pink flowered frame. Remember my post yesterday about that spontaneous mushroom among the succulents? It must like hot weather because this morning it is still alive and looks like this:It's been more than a century since Grand Junction hit 90 degrees over 50 days in a row, but it happened again today. At just about 1 o'clock this afternoon... thermometers in Grand Junction pushed past 90 degrees for the 52nd day in a row. With that push, 2008 was officially thrust into the weather record books.
1. I like reading favorite authors’ entire works ( i.e., P. Gregory, J. Picoult, C.S. Lewis, etc.)So here are the six bloggers I have tagged:
2. I can only eat corn on-the-cob which has been sliced OFF the cob by a knife
3. Crafting projects go in stages of months or years, then picked up again at a later time (knitting, sewing, painting)
4. If I had to make my living by my art, I would have starved many years ago
5. I hold only one grudge; all else is forgotten because of my bad memory
6. I think my husband and brothers are the greatest things since the invention of fat-free coffee additives and Maxine.
Read their blogs; creative souls writing there!1. Knitted Gems (Marie)
2. ritazramblez (Rita)
3. Dragonfly Crafts (great background of dragonflies)
4. Apronista
5. SweetWilliam
6. The Felt Mouse
What colorful, tasty organic vegetables! I went back later and picked up 8 cups (packed!) of basil and arugula leaves and made four more batches of pesto sauce to freeze. Ronda suggested making some arugula pesto with added lemon juice, and it was delicious!
This is a picture of our back patio Sunday evening.
Is this some amazing mushroom?Actually, the one on the left sprung up spontaneously from a potted plant of succulents and petunias. The one on the the right is ceramic and was purchased from a local nursery.
Can anyone tell me the variety of the little brown mushroom?
not likely to break into pieces. Cassidy and I did not bother to put wire reinforcement in the middle of our stones since they are for decoration, not pathways.
As the gardener of six little struggling basil plants, I could hardly wait to harvest some of the herb to make pesto.
Pesto for Freezing (Food Network).
hose six basil plants, with added garlic, spices, olive oil and pine nuts.I made a reservation to tell one of my stories a few days ago since the NPR MobileBooth is coming to my home town for two weeks next month. My slot is reserved for August 12 in Grand Junction, Colorado, the last stop on its national tour.Since 2003, tens of thousands of everyday people have shared life stories with family and friends in StoryBooths in New York City and Nashville, and in MobileBooths traveling the country year-round. Everybody’s story matters, every life counts...
This is about a decision made after the birth of my physically handicapped daughter in 1970. The doctors attending to her in her first hours of life gave her father and me the decision of either doing no medical intervention with her death imminent within a few painful months, or to immediately begin intensive medical treatment. The physicians left the room with this question to be answered by us, young people in college, working, never having planned on being parents, much less to a child with grave problems.
We were advised there was no guarantee of success in any way relating to her quality of life. My husband’s inclination was to let nature take its course and not intervene medically: we were young and we were not through with our formal education, and since she probably never walk, her life would be very difficult for all of us. (I was a sophomore in college, and we were both taking as many classes and working as many hours as we could to help defray student loans and living expenses.)
But the path we chose, and the decision made, was to start trying to save her life immediately. We decided to let the doctors do what they could for her.
And she lived. And she grew up, although most of her adolescent and adult years were spent hospitalized due to shunt malfunctions and systemic infections.
There are more than a few ironies in this story. One was that Julie’s father and I both DID finish our educations (he got a PhD and I have a Master’s degree). So her life did not hamper that goal. And another irony is that Julie’s father died of cancer over twenty years ago, while Julie is still living today.
Which is not to say that over the years, her life has been extremely happy or in any way carefree. She has had over one hundred surgeries relating to complications brought on by her birth defect. She has been depressed to the point of trying to end her own life; she had virtually no childhood friends her own age.In a few weeks, Juliet is facing another very serious operation. She has been in bed the better part of three years with skin ulcerations and infections. But in spite of the heartache, there have been positive, bittersweet successes…
1: She has worked for as a receptionist and lived alone, using public transportation to get her to and from work while in a wheelchair;
2: Julie completed high school and then college with a four year degree -- this in spite of many long months of hospitalization;
3 : Julie has resided independently both as a single and married woman;
4: Julie has maintained an eleven year long, loving marriage to a man having the same handicap of spina bifida;
5: She moved across country from her native state, and then she and her husband built their handicap accessible home five years ago on land which he husband purchased many years ago as an investment;
6: She (and her husband) are members of a strong faith-based Christian community. I’m told they are of spiritual importance in that church group;
7: Julie aspired to be a journalist, worked at a local newspaper as a college intern and had several sequential articles published. She currently writes to the editor of her local newspaper in South Carolina, expresses her opinions (especially about the problems that handicapped people encounter), and has had her letters published in the Charlotte Observer;
8: She and her husband are the loving owners of an eight year old frisky Yorkshire terrier;
9: Julie is a loving, generous, stubborn, sweet person with an amazing coping mechanism of denial.She has become the person she is, in part, because of caring adults coming into her life by way of a loving family, excellent medical care, good surrogate fathers, a decent education, mental health assistance, the religious community, paid caregivers, and adult friends. And her own will to live and thrive are, of course, part of her essence.
And so all this has happened, at great financial and emotional expense. Her determinism and desire to keep living came out of ONE DECISION years ago to proceed with medical intervention. Julie's life has played out in far reaching ways that I cannot fathom. But it MUST have been the right decision to try and stave off hydrocephalous and infection in those first hours after her birth, because all of the lives she has touched have been significantly, and I believe positively, changeIn a nutshell, this story is about perseverance and love, and how each person's life is important and part of the structure behind the doors where we live. Maybe more than a few will find it a valuable listen.d by knowing Juliet.
... Monk's Cloth has become popular for making afghans, baby blankets, pillows, and even tote bags. Aida cloth can be used as well as most pre-finished items used for cross stitch such as towels, bookmarks, and baby bibs. When working on Monk's cloth, which is approximately 8 squares per inch or 4 floats, with yarn, you may use a size #16 or #13 tapestry needle as well as the special bodkin and weaving needles they now have out. For stitching on smaller fabric though, use a blunt tapestry needle, such as when working with cross stitch. Make sure the needle easily moves under the floats of the fabric you wish to use. The tightness of the fabric weave will also determine how easily a needle will slip under the floats. (from Here and Above).Carol Selfors, a local friend, brought this craft to my attention and shared with me a few of the blankets in her stash for illustrations to this post. Carol has made several lovely items using this thread technique for pattern design. Here are a couple of pictures of her blankets graced with huck weaving:
Breakfast on Saturday, a great Dinner on Saturday night...along with First Rate Music on stage on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings.
e away with a beautiful necklace from Holly Sokol. Her Sokol Kiln Fired Glass site is well worth checking out....painting consisting of three panels, usually hinged together with the central panel being twice the width of the wings, which may fold inwards. The triptych developed from the diptych and was used both as a portable altar and, on a larger scale, as an altarpiece.
Above: Anonymous painter. Triptych with Virgin and Child Flanked by archangels, scenes from the life of Christ, apostles and Saint George and Saint Mercurius. Ethiopia (Gojjam?), late 17th century. Tempera on panel. 14 78 x 4 5/16 inches left; 15 1/8 x 9 inches center; 15 1/16 x 4 7/16 inches right. 36.7 museum purchased, the W. Alton Jones Foundation Acquisition Fund, 1996, from the Nancy and Robert Nooter Collection. (taken from Tadias)
Get 'em while they're hot!
If your sewing stash looks like mine, you will have plenty of extra selvage fabric to make these roses, since each rose requires only one piece of fabric 5” x 30” (piece it together if you don’t have a 30” strip; no one will ever know!).If you are a fan of fabric, this is the project for you. Fabric flowers give allergy sufferers nothing to sneeze at when adding a decorative element to any room. (Picture courtesy of JoAnn Fabrics)
es easily patterned.Revolution breaks out, houses are plundered, and Wang Lung gets in his possession a silver treasure. The family returns to their home region. Wang Lung buys land and soon owns also the house of now impoverished Hwang. The only problem is their retarded child, a girl, who don't speak. O-lan gives birth to twins, a boy and a girl. The elder boys go to school. Wang Lung buys another wife, Lotus. O-lan is not well after the birth of the twins, and she dies after the wedding of her sons. In his old days, Wang Lung gives his love to a young slave girl, who also takes care of the retarded girl. His youngest son moves from the house to become a soldier and because he also loves the young slave girl. Old Wang Lung witnesses for his sorrow that his children do not share his unyielding devotion to the land.In 1932, Buck won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for this book, and in 1938 won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
In 1949, outraged that existing adoption services considered Asian and mixed-race children unadoptable, Pearl established Welcome House, the first international, inter-racial adoption agency; in the nearly five decades of its work, Welcome House has assisted in the placement of over five thousand children....The Good Earth kept me spell-bound. The rich history of China is graphically crafted with Buck's choice of words. The story was captivating, and parallels to modern day life can be conjured up from every page of this narrative.
As usual, the world wide web is a wealth of information about making neck pillows: decorative, scented, or medicinal, it is all there.Heated, scented neck pillows can give relief to sore, aching muscles while soothing the soul. Drape it around your neck, lay it across your back, or slip it between the sheets to warm the bed before retiring for the night. They are easily made and can be filled with grains or add some herbs and spices for a tranquil aroma.A scented pillow sounds great! So I found this site which gave a recipe for scented rice:
In a glass Mason-type jar pour a teaspoon or slightly more of potpourri-type fragrance or essential oil, swirling the jar around to coat the insides. Add nearly a pound of uncooked, small grain rice. Place a coffee filter over the top and screw the lid on tightly. Shake well to coat the rice and place the jar on its side. Over the next few days, roll the jar frequently until the rice has taken up the scent of the oil. Cinnamon, apple, cloves, lemongrass, lavender, lilac, orange blossom, honeysuckle, rose, sandalwood, bergamot – the scent choice is yours.If you budget allows, and you are not a crafter, perhaps you would like a Luxury Travel Pillow
Either way you go, purchasing a new one from your supplier of choice, or making it yourself, neck pillows are always winners, especially if they smell oh, so nice!...since those small pillows now provided by only some airlines aren't very comfortable. Inflatable travel pillows are available for less than $20, while slightly more cumbersome stuffed travel pillows are available from several manufacturers. Brookstone, for example, offers the Nap Travel U-Pillow ($25), which is stuffed with thousands of micro beads.
For $75, a u-shaped neck pillow from Tempur-Pedic is made from memory foam that cradles and molds around the user's neck and conducts body heat.
Aprons, especially vintage ones, have been on my radar for a few months. Not only are they making a comeback in style, but they are also making big impressions on bloggers. In a brief Google blog search, I found more than a dozen women who blog JUST ABOUT APRONS.A few weeks ago, another post can be read here about Meg McElwee's figure flattering Sew Liberated Emmeline Apron. That project is almost completed, and I'm having fun putting the clever bodice together (it features three coordinating fabrics).The word “apron” actually originated from the word “naperon” which is a French word for a napkin or small tablecloth. And, some of you may be surprised to find that the apron did not start off as a piece of apparel worn singularly by women. Instead, aprons were mainly worn by men when they were first invented. ... men wore the apron while completing work in such professions as: blacksmiths, farmers and gardeners, fishmongers, meat and wood carvers, furniture makers, leather smiths, cobblers, tailors, jewelers, metal forgers, clock makers, barbers, and stonemasons to name just a few.
HER TIMES and Betty Ninja and Apron A Day and Flapper Girl Creations and Craft Chi and Lulus Vintage and Fuse Action and Rick Rack Attack and Tie One On and The Apronista (she is sponsoring two apron swaps for your participation) and Textiles and Quilts, which is especially for tips about collecting vintage aprons
darling apron I purchased yesterday at the Farmers' Market in Palisade, Colorado.
