Show Your Halloween Stuff!

This week, Inspiration Avenue challenges you to post Halloween photographs, recipes, costumes, altered art: anything Halloweeny. 

This is the time to get creative with your stuff, be it scary skeletons or sweet pumpkin smiling faces.  Go here to join in the fun!   Post one or several of your favs and see blogs of others who have taken the challenge. 

To get you started on altered art and/or photographs about Halloween, here are a few faces and items from Etsy and Pinterest that may pique your interest.

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from Attic Clutter

 

And of course, Charlie Brown wishes you a Happy Thanksgiving!

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Fair Isle Slouch Hat Finished

Taking the Hydrangea Fair Isle Slouch Hat:

Modifying the colors with these Jamieson wools:

And one wool hank dyed with marigolds:

This is the finished tam:

It is a bit slouchy on the manny head.  I played around with colors using the color wheel, and it proved to be a good exercise in knitting with differing strands of colored yarn.  It will be a warm hat and a labor of love.

Linking with Fiber Arts Friday and Finished Objects Friday.

Dangerous Knitting

Check out this link sent by my husband.  Who knew we knitters could be such a hazardous group to the safety and welfare of the general public?

A knitting group said it was no longer allowed to meet at a library because its needles are "dangerous" and its members are too noisy ...more

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Disregarding the hazards of knitting with sharp needles, I've started another pair of socks from a hot new pattern, Caffee Macchiato.

 

 

 

Hand dyed sock yarn by MustStash.  It is called Jump & Jive, a Tribute to the 70's.  Makes me happy.

 



Faces

Inspiration Avenue challenges you this week with a theme of "faces". Look here to read about the challenge and join in.

 

above photograhs by Edwin S. Curtis

 Ralph on his 100th Birthday

 

 Source: Gold Panner (Summit County, CO, Historical Society

 

 (A Study -Limbo ID:374 from 2006 Lilly Oncology On Canvas 2006 competition)

It doesn’t interest me to know what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for,
And if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.
It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love,
For the adventure of being alive.
It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon.
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrows,
If you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become
shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own,
Without moving to hide it, or fade it or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own,
If you can dance with wildness and let ecstasy fill you
to the tips of your fingers and toes
Without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic,
to remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true.
I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to your self,
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul,
If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see beauty, even when it is not pretty, every day,
And if you can source your own life from its presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure,
Yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes!”
It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up, after the night of grief and despair,
Weary and bruised to the bone,
And do what needs to be done for the children.
It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me
and not shrink back.
It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself
And if you truly like the company you keep in empty moments.

(The Invitation) by Oriah

Embroidery and Silk Ribbon Embroidery

Back in the day, embroidery was used as a past time by ladies with leisure.  It was a beautiful way to gussy up clothing or even, shall we say, a tea towel?

c. 1900 source

 

Embroidery today is definitely not your grandmother's.  Such great pieces I found on Pinterest.

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Silk Ribbon Embroidery and Silk Ribbon: 

 

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by Natalie

Machine Embroidery:

 

 by Dottie

And linking with Inspiration Avenue's Weekly Challenge Day of the Dead 

 

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from Lou Anne at Inspiration Avenue's Weekly Challenge Day of the Dead:

In Mexico, this holiday takes place on the first and second of November.   People take two days out of the year in order to pay their respect to their dead family members and friends.  During this celebration, skulls and altars are made, food is placed on graves, and families and friends celebrate the lives of departed children and adults. I really hope that you'll create something this week as a response to El Dia de los Muertos.  Whether it's the holiday itself, the Halloween-like feel of the skeletons, or the bright colors that inspire you, I'm looking forward to seeing your creations.   



  Linking with Fiber Art Friday

Pumpkin Faces & Pumpkin Cake

It is time to Get Pumpkin!

 

Bing has a few faces displayed, but a more fun look is my goal.  It is to gild the lily on my fall front door wreath that we used last year that now needs a little update.

Boo!

Take a look here at Attic Clutter to see some airbrush art with cute pumpkin faces.  I'll try to paint one on a blank oval canvas and put behind this door wreath:

Here is the canvas, an oval with a rust colored acrylic prepped on it and ready for its pumpkin face.  The craft store did not have a circular canvas, so this one will have to do.

Now to paint the pumpkin face and figure out how to attach it behind the wreath.  Duck tape?  Duck tape can do anything, right?

Here it is.

 

August Flowers

 

For an easy and delicious autumnal cake with pumpkin, Pinterest has this cake!  The Food Critic forgot to say to add the eggs to the wet mixture, but otherwise the cake directions are straight forward.  It was delicious, although my brother said it was not sweet enough to his liking.  It makes a firm, dense cake with just enough sweetness for me.

 

 



September 2013 Flowers

 

Enjoy your last days of September!



Making Different Colors Work in an Established Knitting Pattern

Gosh, do the H and I love being retired.  Besides the usual ADL (activities of daily living, in the vernacular of my past working life), we get to do so many fun things.  One of which is knitting.  Are you surprised?

Since I learned how to do a bit of colorwork with Fair Isle knitting, I am adapting the Wolf in Sheep's Clothing pattern for the younger dog, who is a bit smaller.  To dimutize dogmatize the pattern for the smaller animal, I took out one row of sheep knitting and one row of rams in the pattern.  It is almost completed, so that one crafty project for a Work in Progress on Wednesday.  Check in with Tami for others' blog postings and pictures.

 

Now you know about my obsession with knitting.  And granted, this new project may be taking it to the extreme, but first, let me explain.

See this wonderful Fair Isle pattern tam created by Sheila Joynes (remember, only two colors per row, and changing colors every second or third row, perhaps)....

 

Very pretty colors of wool, but they are not in my stash.



What I do have in my craft room are the Jamieson & Smith Ronaldsay wools, dyed by Pam Murray on Orkney, Scotland.  They were previously earburned here.  (And again, you can find Pam here on Folksy, but she seems to currently be out of stock.)

The Ronaldsay wool yarns in colors I'll be using to make that tam:

To begin, I had to create a chart on a spreadsheet that took me for...eee ...vvvver.  The learning curve was an hour, seriously.  But it is done now and if I want to chart the colors again for this tam, the spreadsheet is saved to a working document.

That show off yellow ball of wool at the bottom right of the picture was one that I dyed using marigolds from our yard ... and it took several tries to make those yellows that I complained about here.

So now I can get to work with my colored pencils, matching the wools to the colors of the pencils, to see what effect each of those colors brings to the table by coloring in the squares.  I plan on coloring in two or five spreadsheets to see how the colors work together.

If my math is correct, there could be 7x6x5x4x3x2x1 = 5040 combinations of colors knitted up in that tam pattern, and using just those seven colors shown above.  But then again, each row could be changed up in various other ways.  My math skills are not up to figuring out how many more variations that would mount up to!

And how is your Wednesday going?