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First Friday

Happy New Year, everyone! It is a time to think of fresh beginnings. I am anticipating big changes this year; the end of the year is going to look a lot different from the beginning. For now, though, I am thinking of crafty resolutions.

It is important to express your creative side, to tend to your mental garden. Here are some ways I plan to do that for myself this year:

Design a new crochet pattern every month, on average.
Try a craft I’ve never done before. Possibilities include soapmaking (the right way), candlemaking, quilling, wood carving, macrame, needle felting, Chinese knotting, tatting, and throwing pottery on the wheel.
Finish two more pieces for my Children’s Book Quilt.
Make my summer hat, before it is in season.
Finish my Fibonacci-themed wall quilt pattern.
Make a clothing pattern template for myself, following the directions in How To Make Sewing Patterns.
Take better and more creative pictures of my finished projects. This is complicated by the fact that I live in northern New England, where (especially in the winter, but to some extent in the summer) natural light is in short supply even during the day.

I’m also taking a four-session sculpture class starting Monday. I did a semester of sculpture in college and am looking forward to getting my hands in the clay again. How are you going to tend your creative plot?

Oh, and as for my First Friday plans, I have but three words: Christmas tree bonfire.

Upcoming: You may be wondering what happened to the sketchbook updates I promised… well, I lost my sketchbook. Perhaps if I’d had time to clean as much as I’d wanted before leaving for the holidays it would have shown up, but now I’m pretty sure I don’t have time to finish it even if I find it tonight. So that’s sad and kind of a dumb reason to miss out, but there it is. Instead, we have the rest of the New Year’s Eve fun, some candy animals, a hat, and sculpture class reports – which should actually take us well into February.

I leave you with a beautiful Christmas gift from my sister:

We’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet, for auld lang syne!

Stately soap and a countdown

On New Year’s Eve, I was going to go to a First Night event, but the friend I would have been staying over with was kind of lukewarm on the idea (she was not completely healthy), and I had just gotten back the day before from my long holiday trip, so I wasn’t so up for going out anyway. I decided to stay home and craft in the New Year. At some point in the afternoon I had the idea to complete ten projects by midnight, like the last ten seconds’ countdown. I didn’t expect to do everything from scratch, though as it turned out I did all but #1 from scratch. Also, except for the flowers used in #7, I didn’t buy anything new for the projects. Here’s the Craft Countdown list:

1. Ulu knife sheath
2. Vermont soap
3. Business card holder
4. Trio of “paint card notepads”
5. Trio of bookmarks
6. Lowly Worm
7. Flower decoration
8. Memo pad case
9. Robot iron-ons
10. Denim coaster

Since work will be busy through March and I’d like to avoid a replay of the baby sloth episode (though baby sloths are well worth the bandwidth), I’ll post individual entries for each of these, spread out with other entries. Today, item #2!

I stopped in a La Quinta on my drive back from the Midwest to New England, and they had lovely orange-scented soap. The only problems with it were that it was small, as one would expect, and also kind of hard. No problem; I’ve solved that before. This time, in addition to water, I drizzled in some orange-scented bath gel (I like citrus scented bath products). And then I decided to get fancy with the shaping, and dug out a cookie cutter. I am ridiculously tickled by the result:

As before, I diced up the soap fairly fine but not perfectly (it was two La Quinta bars), threw it in a bowl with water and bath gel, and microwaved it to melt/dissolve it. I was a little subtler with the heating this time, doing shorter stints, and I think that helped. Then I put the cookie cutter on waxed paper and used a rubber spatula to scoop and press the soap into it. I left it for several hours to cool and solidify, and then was able to press it out by hand.

Bottle cozy

My grandmother has been instructed to drink a lot of water, so she asked for a water bottle for Christmas. Specifically a metal water bottle. She likes her water very cold, so I thought I could take yarn with me and make her a sleeve for the bottle, which turned out to be an Arizona Tea bottle after all. She’d suggested black; I also bought white and had some sparkly burnt orange on hand. I made the bottom from cotton yarn so it could act like a coaster, and the sides were Vanna’s Glamour. She looks like a real Hawkeyes fan.

I just freehanded it; there are some shell stitches, some alternating dc inc and dc dec, some straight dcs and some multi-row scs. It was all with an E hook.

On my first attempt, I decided for some reason that smaller yarn meant I should use a larger hook for the sides so it would fit. That was erroneous. I decreased by lots of stitches as I went but it was still way too big. However, it made a great hat for my niece’s new stuffed cat!