My hands have been in pain so it's put a serious damper on my knitting. So I've decided to spend some time mentoring new knitters instead of knitting myself. I did do just a bit of knitting on a hat band this morning for a knitted cap I've come to call the Maize Hat. The band is the easy part, so if I can just get through that I'll have a new goblin hat. Yay! It's raining today so it's a good day for knitting.   read more

It was supposed to rain tonight, but when I woke up this morning it was already drizzling. I guess the clouds didn't read the weather report.I'm starting a group called S.C.A.M.P.S. which stands for Sewing, Crochet, Art, Metalwork, Patchwork, Superstars. At least I want too. It's still simmering in the back of my mind. The main problem is I want to have the meetings during the week, and most people can only come on weekends. I don't like to tie up my weekends in case I have to go out of town or do a craft show. Always a dilemma. I need a week with 5 days in the weekend, and 2 days in the week   read more

First thing this morning I grabbed my canvasses and my paints and headed outdoors. I spent much of the day painting. And I'll be able to post them on Deviant Art now that I started using that again. The first one is an idea I got from a flash of a TV show. It was hanging over a bed in one of those home remodeling shows. The second painting is of succulents growing in my backyard, So I'm calling it Succulents at Twilight. I wish the sun hadn't gone down at 5:30 PM. I had to stop painting for the night. It was too chilly for one thing and too dark for another. It felt good to be painting again.   read more

Yesterday was our monthly Stitch-n-Bitch in Fountain Valley, California. Here are some photos of people and their projects. Heidi works on knitting a blanket.Amelia models a knitted hat inspired by the Jane Hat in Firefly. Her mom Marianne made it.Amelia is making a critter that doesn't have a head yet based on an anime cartoon.Guy carries the bowsocks he's making out to the truck.He hand dyed every one of those.The beaded heart brooch / pin I'm working on.We snacked on blueberries, blackberries, apples and marbled bread. Marianne was carding wool and alpaca together to make gray fiber. Roseanna   read more

Yesterday I took a day off. My hands have been hurting like crazy, particularly my left one. I can't even turn a doorknob without pain. So I avoided all knitting, dishes, crochet, and heavy typing. My hands feel less stiff today but still painful when I try to grab heavy things like frying pans or bags of laundry. I did do a bit of cross stitch last night. I worked on my bison. I'm thinking of making it into a cross stitch picture frame with animals around the border. It would be a good gift for a man who likes to hunt, camp or fish. It's on beige aida cloth. I'm not sure how to turn it into   read more

I fell in love with these glass spiral focal beads. Being a hypnotist, I have a thing for spirals. I just listed it in my Etsy shop last night. http://www.etsy.com/ view_listing.php?lis ting_id=39468335 I know I have a red one somewhere too. I'm not sure if it's on a half finished necklace somewhere. My beads need organizing. I was talking to Matt Nix of Nix creations last night. He has something like 38,000 followers on Twitter. I wish I did. I don't think I have even 1000. Do you twitter? I think my follow twitter button is over in the side bar if you want to follow me. I've also been knitting   read more

As soon as I get paid again for something I'm going to send for a knitting teddy bear pattern for the Mother Bear Project. They've given nearly 50,000 teddy bears to children with HIV/Aids in Africa and other places. All bears are made from the same pattern, and either knit or crocheted. I'm just ordering the pattern because I already have yarn and needles. Just the pattern is $5.00. If you need a whole kit, it's $20.00. If you are near Anaheim CA it would be great to have a group gathering for bears. What do you say? http://www.motherbea rproject.org/   read more

We knew rain was on the way, so I spent as much time outdoors today as I could. First I got my juggling practice in. Then I started a cross-stitch project that's super portable and took it out to the garage. I'm making a bison. It's little and will be a magnet or something. I want to offer more cross-stitch in my Etsy shops, and big projects aren't practical. They take forever and no one is going to pay for the hours spent making little x's. So the next best thing is little things like bookmarks, pendants, magnets, and so on. I also worked on my Purple and Black Attack slouch hat in crochet. That   read more

Crocheting a slouch hatAlphabet and Barnyard SamplerTime to crochet with another colorHeart motif in knittingWorking on a cross stitched cowBeads beads beads for a beaded collar.It was a fruitful weekend and I got a lot done. But I also bought myself even more work to do. Here are some photos I took of my current projects. Just to show you how much photographs can vary, those two hats are the same hat, taken outdoors in natural lighting one day apart with the same camera by the same photographer. So remember when you order on line, you can't be too in love with the computer monitor version of what   read more

Lucky me, I was going through some old magazines, and I just happened upon a Vogue Knitting from winter 2007 that's full of Valentine's Day ideas. So I started straight away knitting a heart motif in black yarn that I will probably put on a T-shirt and let the shirt show through the lace part. And I got that idea from the TV show http://knitandcroche ttoday.com/ rerun where they featured circular crocheted motifs around the neckline of a t-shirt. My imagination grabs things like that and just runs to the knitting needle organizer.In other news, just before Christmas I started knitting my daughter   read more