Ever heard of needle punch embroidery?
Today’s another show-and-tell, this time from Jeff’s grandmother. It seems that Dolly was like many a crafter - she collected stuff, and she held onto what she didn’t use. A couple of weekends ago his mom and I went through the boxes of things she had collected to see what was what. I love other people’s collections of crafting paraphernalia, particularly when some of it is rather old. You never know what kinds of designs and crafts you’re going to find.
So here’s a few things from her collection, a collection not unlike many crafters. It’s not huge (well, her button collection is) but it’s representative of someone with many interests, and it’s representative of several decades, too. It’s it many ways a typical stash, one that brings back memories for the people who know it. My husband remembers his grandmother embroidering with that thread, and she made him a shirt from that blue plaid material with pearl buttons.
I think maybe I like this picture the best, because it has memory for me, even though I wasn’t around for this … Those yarn potholder-type-hotpads are something that Jeff and I got from his grandmother’s friend Lola for our wedding. The fabric is still neatly packaged, very much a project for a busy woman. The type of embroidery hoops there tell me when they were purchased - they don’t actually hold fabric that well, but I’ll tell you, they’re going to make awesome frames. And the Star Trek pin is pure grandson - Dolly saved three of his Star Trek pins 
Tools are always great - crafting mostly takes tools of some sort, and so you can really tell what sorta things somebody did by their tools. What they were interested in, what they used a lot, what they thought about and never did. Painting, crochet, beading, tatting, knitting … I’m definitely going to have to learn to tat now.
My favorite of the bunch is definitely this bonnet. Jeff’s mom actually found 2 different bonnets.
This bonnet is the one that still has color in the fabric, obviously a nice, ruffled bonnet for good use. I find it interesting that you can totally take it apart with the buttons. When I tried it on, the brim was so huge that if fell down over my nose.
But you can see the strength of the sun in these babies. The other one has almost no color left.
Each has a wide brim and a long collar to keep the sun off. The other one actually has about 15 little pockets in the brim for cardboard pieces! The cardboard is replaceable, and it keeps the big floppy brim off your face! Ingenious!
These are truly fabulous. Maybe I just used to like Little House on the Prairie a lot, but … it’s a bonnet!
Oh, oh, and needle punch embroidery? I’d never heard of it before, but here it is. I even have a needle and some fabric and designs. I have no idea what this really is, but apparently there’s still a lot of people doing it. You never know, maybe it will be the Next Big Thing.
Photojournaling: a small trip and a few thoughts
Yesterday I was going to clean house. I didn’t. Instead Jeff and I took a nice drive into the hill country toward Fredericksburg. Aside from my family living in Texas, the hill country is what has made me return to Texas more times than I’m really comfortable with (is that an accent creeping in?). It’s rocky, half-arid and hilly, with lots of limestone and some seriously hot weather. This time of year, the wildflowers are just starting to bloom, the land is thinking about going nuts for 2-3 weeks of riotous spring before summertime hits.
A consequence of having the flu (twice), going to a conference and having a busy workplace is that it’s easy to get seriously behind at home. I’m struggling to catch up to myself, and as I’m still under the weather I’m finding it pretty difficult to keep up with my normal pace. But really, it’s too soon to play catch up. I still don’t feel like myself at all. I haven’t been this run down in a long, long time.
I found a real live antique store yesterday. You know, the kind that hasn’t renamed all its old stuff “vintage,” started a hipster tea shop in one corner and marked up all its merchandise 300%. This is the kind that has booths from different people, sections of random cast-off miscellany of unknown lives. Each booth is different. I found a lot of glassware I liked, a whole array of crochet and a little bird fluttering about building nests from pieces of old clothes.
Outside there were the smells of barbeque in the air - the smell of mesquite smoke on the air, a faint vinegar tang and the unmistakable aroma of large amounts of brisket. This particular little town believes in things that large cities are trying to push with limited success … local business and homegrown food. I really liked seeing a reminder what these things were before all the ad campaigns got hold of them.
Lately I’ve been going a lot more off of main roads to the point of getting lost. I may not be sure of where I’m going, but I think I may be feeling less urban, which is rather surprising if you’re me. Meanwhile, you see that sky there? I like western states because of skies like that. One of my very favorite things is traveling states like Wyoming, Montana and Kansas where the land is so empty you can watch the shadows of the clouds racing across the ground.
That picture (above) reminds me of opening a door very much like this one at camp when I was about 12 and getting stung three times by yellow jackets. Heat index that summer (temp in the shade) was 120 degrees.
So my cousin Chelsea, who’s in that mid-teenage, low-effort (dare I say lazy?), I’m-trying-to-be-a-pain-in-everyone’s-a$$ stage, told my grandmother this past weekend that she couldn’t help her sign up to receive my blog by email. Her reason? She made something up about how I had to do it. I’m rather irritated. Chelsea, should you ever read this, gee thanks for the help. And after that lovely long email I wrote you about how to help grandma and your mom with signing up? Was I difficult like this when I was 14? I was, wasn’t I? I apologize to the whole world who knew me.
When Jeff and I are tired, we tend not to eat at home. This is bad for the pocketbook and the health. So part of my process of getting back into life after the flu has been cooking, which has essentially involved the crock pot. I was really quite nervous about leaving it on all day to cook like that. However, I have done so three times now and my house is still standing. I’m still not convinced, but dinner was so very nice, as was coming home to find it done. I have also long been sketchy about the crockpot as an evil tendril of Suburbia creeping into my urban life, but I give up. I grew up in Suburbia, and I have Major Issues with it and its evil domestic minions, but the crockpot is certainly heckuva lot easier than standing at the stove at 7 wishing I could just sit down.
Well, keep your fingers crossed for me and my flu, folks. I’m hoping one of these years I’ll start feeling like a human again instead of a well-worn rug.
Flowering Cactus
As part of my everlasting bout with the flu, I made a cactus out of yarn.
It’s not, perhaps, the most beautiful cactus ever, and I think the next ones (oh yes, there will be more) will be more … steady, but this one’s not half bad. And it’s flowering. And here it is on Jeff’s desk. It appears to be next to his “Hunter S. Thompson for Sherriff” mug, hiding behind the water bottle. I’d also like to mention that if you should forget Thompson’s name, Google will refresh your memory if you type in “author sherriff drunk.” Hey, we all leave a legacy, right? His is, at the very least, interesting.
My inspiration was a picture from the free patterns pool on Flickr. Her cactus has a better crocheted pot than mine … I don’t think I did a good job following directions (me, what a shock!) and so it turned out somewhat more large and basket-shaped than I intended. But I have ideas about making better pots. Did you know there’s a whole Knit & Crochet Cactus Flickr pool? So many ideas for more cacti.
I was inspired to make cacti by my boss’s collection of cacti. She has 5 or 6 little pots on tall stands with a different cactus each. They bloom, they grow, they love the big window they sit in front of. I’d never much thought about cactus - the prickly pear sort grow around here, they bloom, they’re prickly. But she pointed out their sculptural qualities, and watching the different sorts grow over the past months I’ve seen what she means, and now I’m really fascinated too. It also probably helps that they’re in these really simple but lovely pots that she made. She makes pots that really quite outdo normal terracotta.
I don’t know that my first fabric cactus has that sort of sculptural quality, but … we’ll see. One of the nice things about crochet is that it can be formed and stuffed in so many ways.
