A timely table

I have been thinking for a long time about replacing our kitchen table with a larger, less decrepit, and more washable one, and I had gotten so far as to reject the idea of building a table, and to save up funds for a new used table, and even to write a time to go shopping for it on the calendar.

Then we all got sick, and there were a lot of church activities and things going on, and around the time we were mostly recovered, my husband called and said his boss had a table he was giving away.

He gave me the measurements over the phone, and it was just the size I was looking for.

After various exertions, he got it home and we got it into the house.  The chairs came with it, but they are definitely oversize for the room and I am mostly using our old chairs with it.  

The table itself is just about as big as will fit there.  When fully opened, the fridge door comes within an inch of the table. I am not above taking my drawknife and shaving some wood off the table legs and the bench I made before, to gain an inch or two. The fridge could be moved back a couple of inches also.  Happily, none of those things are necessary.

Theoretically, we can all squeeze in around it, if enough of the smaller children sit on the bench--which hasn't happened yet.  

Another thing I did recently was to unravel a finger-crocheted chenille scarf that I had been given some years back, and re-crochet it into a little mat for a chair seat.  The colors go well with our living room, and it is good to have the scarf being used more.

I have been somewhat surprised to notice that I have not been doing much crafting at all during this sabbatical.  Just more music, more puzzles, and more reading.  I did get a bunch of mending done as I've been watching movies with the elder children.

At one of the church activities, I was talking with an older couple from another church, and it turns out that they were homeschoolers back in the Eighties, before homeschooling was explicitly allowed by law in Minnesota.  They said they had to keep a low profile, and that friends of theirs were investigated by the state.  Later on, one of the larger homeschool co-ops started up, and they were involved in that.  

Where's the beans??

I don't know when the cheaper brands of baked beans started being canned as a big lump of beans swimming in a sea of liquid, but now I have encountered it twice, once in a store brand, and once in a brand from one of the largest ag companies.

In the latter case, I pulled out a strainer and measured:  just about exactly half of the can's contents by volume were pourable liquid.

I hate washing strainers.

This reminds me of early in the pandemic, when dried pasta suddenly started taking much longer to cook for some reason.

In other activities, I was able to repair watchbands for two children.  I took a toy apart and pulled some dust out of it that was getting in the way of the mechanism.  I altered a swimsuit so that it would fit for another season.

I knit a dishcloth from acrylic yarn rejected by a child, who also went through a substantial fabric stash and burn-tested samples to separate out the ones with synthetic fibers.

I finished one section of crochet for my curtain project.

Several pairs of pants were retired for being too far gone in the seat, and there is at least one more that needs to be retired, now that I think of it.

My husband dehydrated some cabbage.  I learned that you can freeze tomatoes whole.  Children have been growing mint.

My husband also brought home a vintage metal-frame chair similar to three that we already own.  They are very child-resistant, except for the vinyl seats.  My longer-term plan is to redo them in sturdy leather.

A family from church is making big changes to their diet, and they gave us several boxes of food from their pantry that they could no longer eat.  It was good to get a change from our usual and somewhat tedious simple foods.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Independence Day

We took some popcorn and lemonade and went to see fireworks last night.

I've been progressing with the old-lady-style crochet, but not so far as to want to practice holding the thread properly.

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I took a short barrel-style upholstered chair from the fifties that I patched up a while back, and stripped all of the upholstery off it.  The most recent potty-trainee had frequently used it as a place to quietly go without immediate detection, and I am not in favor of unwashables in the home.

As usual, it was a messy and somewhat hazardous process, but very satisfying in its own way.

The chair turned out to have two sets of springs in the seat and cushion, which explained the chair's other popularity as a trampoline.

The looseness in the frame turned out to be from two bolts, easy to deal with.  Beyond that, the structure is fine except for the beginnings of a crack along the top.

I am thinking of building the bare frame out a bit with wood, doing some shaping and sanding, and then finishing it simply with Danish oil (fast) or linseed oil (slower).  For the seat, I am replacing the springy cushion with a washable pillow, and keeping the bottom springs.  Some amount of new padding and cover will have to go over those.

I saved all of the tacks that I pulled out of the chair while stripping it down, which will be useful for other chair projects, especially since our main staple gun is currently nonfunctional in some non-obvious way.

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As a research project, I tried mixing acrylic paint with dryer lint, to see what I could do with it.  I found that the lint, mostly cotton, absorbed a lot of the water from the paint, so it dried very quickly and was different to even mix through the lint.  Kneading the two together (wearing rubber gloves) was unpleasantly like handling freshly-vomited cat hairballs, and the dried result is very much like painted hairball.

Homebound

For various reasons, I've spent the month very much at home.

I've done a lot of the usual recycling of one thing into another:  new cloth diapers from a flannel sheet, and kitchen wipes from worn-out diapers.  I'm making toddler pants out of some 25-cent yard sale sweatshirts.

I laminated some more pretty papers and fabrics for shelf liners.

I decluttered some things that needed to go.

We made a bunch of birthday decorations from paper, including paper coffee filters.  Most of them are still up.

I got a small crochet hook, so now I can crochet my crochet cotton properly.

Preparations

I got my Christmas shopping more or less done, and most of it in one round of going into one store after another right before closing time.  I was blessed to be able to find some good things in the limited time that I had.

Last weekend we had 8+ inches of snow, most of which melted as the thunderstorms came through.  No storm damage here, although there was an unusual and oppressive feeling in the air as the storm approached.

I've done a few little experimental projects, aside from gift-making.  One was to flatten a peach can and play around with shaping the metal.  It was easy to cut with tin snips of the giant-scissors style.

Another was to do a quick little crochet snowflake using string, in the same style as this hanging, where the crochet is colored and stiffened afterward with paint.

I am planning to run some more scraps of fabric through the laminator, and perhaps to do some more woodcarving for gifts.

An embroidery I am working on is proceeding, although I've not put much time into it:  a little scene of a shack in the woods.  It will probably turn out well just because I am too busy to overwork it.

One child has ambitiously planned and made the gingerbread for a gingerbread village.  Another is preparing for a cooperative Christmas craft booth effort with friends next year.

Little rainbows

I had a handful of little plastic prisms with holes for stringing them, from someone's unfinished project.  I decided to use a bead crochet technique to create an evenly-spaced hanging of them that I could hang up.

I took a reel of fine brass wire, and strung the prisms on it in order, without cutting the wire.

Then I used a large crochet hook, and started crocheting.  Where I wanted to place a prism, I slid one up the wire, and then did the next stitch, to lock it into place.

The problem with crocheting or knitting with wire is that it twists something terrible.  Luckily, my piece was short enough that I only had to struggle with twisting wire as I was finishing up.

On the upswing

Last week I had a bit more energy, and got a few things done.

One thing I had been wanting to do for months was to do another round of stripping the bath towels of all of the stuff that the washer leaves behind. My previous post on that is here; the results this time were about the same as before, with the soak water being “almost brown”.

When I was sicker, I looked up online how to clean out and adjust the slow-filling valve on one of our toilets. Slow as in it would wait for many minutes, before refilling the tank. With some fiddling, I was able to get that working much better.

I also made some more pot scrubbers, although with half-double crochet stitches instead of triple crochet, and I cut some more disposable kitchen wipes from a worn-out T-shirt.

It feels like spring cleaning time, and I was able to give a few limited areas a thorough scrubbing.

Finished the chair

The main difficulty was that the fabric I used to cover the chair has little ability to stretch, which made it difficult to ease it around the various curves of the seat and the back.

I also ran out of tacks, and had to do some hunting to find more staples for the staple gun.

Then one of the screws for the arms stripped badly when I was putting the arm back on; not one of the original screws, but someone's replacement screw that was a bit too large.

But now that the chair is done and in place, with a sheepskin draped over the back, it fits in with the rest of the room. The "too yellow" fabric just looks sunny. It has been a cloudy and dark winter.

For the padding on the back, I again crocheted a "rug"; this time of jersey fabrics. It used a lot of fabric, but not all that I had. The "rug" itself didn't look bad, but I wanted a surface that is more washable, durable, and not continually shedding little bits of lint. 

Cost for this project was zero, as I used only things that we already had.

A pot scrubber and a new knitting project

My homemade pot scrubber was wearing out, and it was time to make a new one. I have some plastic mesh produce bags tucked away in my craft drawer, but I also had a few narrow lengths of tulle, salvaged from gift wrapping. I chose to use the tulle this time.

I didn't follow my pattern from before, but instead did a chain ring, followed by a round of half double stitches, followed by a round of slip stitches, increasing as necessary to keep it flat. The result is denser than what I usually do. I probably would have been better off doing a single round of double stitches; I don't think there was enough tulle to do triples.

For the knitting project, I've started knitting a hat to give as a Christmas present. I bought the yarn a while back, and did a gauge swatch, and figured out how many stitches around it would need to be. I also decided to make it double-layered, as I did for my own hat.  Today I actually cast on and knitted the first inch or so. With my recently improved knitting speed, I should easily be able to finish it before Christmas.

I've also been selectively cutting down the dead plants in the flower beds. Some I am leaving there until spring, because I like to look at them. Since I learned this year that you can get usable fiber from nettle plants, I've been looking forward to harvesting the patch of nettles that is well-established in one of our flower beds, but by the time I got to them, there were only a few of them still standing, and the rest were down and mixed in with some other tall plants.

A deeper mitten basket

I had two baskets for mittens, one at the front door, and one at the back. Both were made of crocheted strips of cotton fabric, mostly old sheets. Since I've been trying to establish a single Coatroom Zone, I needed a single, larger basket, instead.

So I unravelled one of the baskets and re-used the strips to extend the other one and make it deeper. There was more than enough.

Then I cut down on the number of mittens and gloves a bit, so they would actually fit in the basket. I should do another round of this, as it is still quite full. I want the children to dig through it, not throw everything out so they can find something.

Doily wall hanging

As promised, more information on the making of the doily wall hanging.

I did some digging to find information on the pineapple pattern that I wanted.  There were two crochet books in the library that had similar motifs, but used differently. I was able to track down an online pattern very similar to the pattern my  grandmother used, by doing an image search.

The pattern had eleven pineapples, while I wanted eight, so I had to do some math to estimate how far out from the center I should begin each pineapple.

Between the pineapples, I partly followed one of the book's patterns, and partly I improvised, based on what would help the doily stay flat. At one point, I had to unravel a considerable distance back, and redo several rounds.

Another complication was that I had a definite size that I wanted it to be, right around 24 inches in diameter. I used my homemade crochet hook to make a single pineapple swatch beforehand. It was too large, so I needed a smaller hook. I elected to whittle another one, this time from a chopstick, but I forgot the cardinal rule of crochet-hook-carving:  shape the top of the "head" first. So on the first attempt, I broke the head off as it was almost finished, and had to turn the hook around and carve a whole new head on on the other end.

The new crochet hook worked nicely, and at a nice stitch size.  The thread is cotton utility string.

When I got to the edge, after several experiments I elected to not make any scallops or frills.

The doily is stiffened and colored with latex paint; "Antique White" on clearance for $5 a quart at Walmart.  I put some paint in a bucket, added the doily, and gently kneaded it to get the paint through it evenly.  It took almost half the quart of paint, in the end. Then I laid it out on a flat surface covered with newspaper and waxed paper to dry.

The waxed paper worked nicely:  I was able to get the dried doily up without it sticking anywhere. The doily was stiff, yet still flexible. The paint color, however, turned out whiter and colder than I expected,  so I ended up doing a second coat, using the same paint but with some yellow artists' acrylic paint mixed in--yes, you can mix acrylic paint with latex paint; latex paint is really acrylic paint with some other stuff added.

I sponged this warmed-up paint over just the front of the doily, and let it dry again.

Then I had to figure out how to hang it; it was too heavy for the thin brass wire I have strung across the brick. I did, however, find some brass chain in our hardware hoard.

The next challenge was how to hang the doily on the chain. I elected to sew several D-rings, from my sewing notions hoard, on the back of the doily.

After that, I strung the chain through, and had a helper hold up the other end, to see how much the chain was going to sag, so I would know how high to hang the ends of the chain. I noticed that the doily tended to slide in toward the center, so I grabbed a short white tension curtain rod from the basement, and ran it through the D-rings as well--to keep the doily straight.

You can see the ends of the rod in the picture. I plan to replace this eventually with a wooden stick, which will blend in better with the brick.

To hang the chain, I drilled a couple of very small holes in the outside edges of the trim that runs up and down the edges of the brick, and inserted finishing nails, or brads.

Total cost was under $15:  three balls of string at not quite $3 each, and then half of the $5 quart of paint, plus a few bits of hardware that we already had (and that could easily be improvised).

I could have saved myself a lot of trouble with the crochet design, if I would have chosen a moderately-sized doily pattern, and stuck to it.

"An Art", or two

The phrase "an art" is from McMansion Hell.

I made it to the Cozy Minimalism phase of putting art and things up on the walls. The method emphasizes using fewer, larger, more meaningful pieces, rather than a horde of smaller things with little individual presence.

So I grabbed a big framed Ikea print from the garage; my husband picked it up by the side of the road a while back, and he has a plan for re-using it. But for now, it can be on the wall; the pattern and colors actually fit in well with the rest of the room. It took three tries for me to figure out exactly where to put the nail in the wall, but small nail holes in drywall are easy to fill, with a little spackle.

In some lights it acts more like a mirror, but the reflections are not unwelcome. That wall has always been poorly-lit and overly dark.

For the other big empty space, over the fireplace, I did a Wary Meyers sort of visual brainstorming; you can read about the method here.  Turning the paper sideways works wonderfully for sketching little concept drawings by the dozen, and that was what I did.

Eventually I figured out that for something to be meaningful, there would have to be some sort of connection to our pasts or family history. From there, it was a short step to remember the kinds of doilies that my grandmother used to crochet. With some research, and some math, and some experimenting, I was able to come up with a scaled-up crochet pattern that I could crochet in cotton string for that wall space.

I'll go into much more detail in a future post, but as of now it is done and up on the wall, and it is quite striking.

I was careful to proportion it so that its width was not more than two-thirds of the width of the fireplace opening.

I also found that it was better to not exactly duplicate my grandmother's crochet pattern, but to do a somewhat modernized interpretation of it...so that it could evoke the past without looking like one of her doilies resurrected itself, somehow found its way into my house, and then climbed up onto my wall when I wasn't looking. The things you learn, when you actually go and do things.

Perspective gained

With the national debt at over $62,000 per capita (not including interest), it seems obvious to me that we are in for one flavor of austerity or another in the future. Well, then...let's get back to the basics:

Water.

Food.

Clothing.

Shelter.

I've noticed something interesting in Proverbs 31:  the idealized "Proverbs 31 woman" does a lot of work with textiles, and clearly has built up a lot of skill in the fiber arts.

I think there are a couple of reasons for that.  The first is that the basics of sewing, weaving, knitting, crochet, embroidery, and so on can be done with very little investment in tools, and a moderate investment in materials. It just takes a lot of time to learn the skills, and to practice and use them.  Whereas growing food requires land and seeds, and possibly animals.  Knowledge and skill are also required, but living things do want to live and grow, which is a big help.

Water and shelter are more stable things--either you have a source of water, or you don't, and if you've built your house well, it will probably stand for years.

In recent years, the price of basic clothing has come very far down.  All you have to do is ignore the fact that much of it is made of plastic, and assembled by basically slave labor.  And then it's hauled across the world in big ships running on fossil fuels.

When the debt party ends, that's the end of it...one way or another. So I see some wisdom in learning how to create my own textiles, even though economically it doesn't make any sense at the moment.

Summer hat

I had a plan to crochet a summer hat out of cotton string, and then scrunch some paint into it to stiffen it.

But Walmart didn't have enough cotton string, when I went.

What they did have was about 400 feet of hemp string (in the crafts section) for $5, so I went with that.

I started at the brim, made a long chain, and worked upward, with a single crochet (**American terminology**) stitch to start with for the first two rows--for firmness--then switching to half double stitch, which is a bit faster to crochet for the area covered.

I did scattered decreases, as needed, trying the hat on as I went.

I finished up with a few yards of string left over, worked in the ends, and then gave it a bath in some strong tea, to dye it browner.  That was yesterday, and it is still drying.

Sabbatical project: Crocheted owl

Decorative owls have been a trend for a while, which seems to be on the wane now. I was willing to wait until they started appearing in the thrift stores, until last year. What happened was that I started being interested in owls and some other things, and eventually realized that I was commemorating my grandma, who died ten years ago. She was a huge influence on me, need I say; growing up next door to her was an enormous blessing.

Artistically speaking, when a theme starts to emerge from seeming randomness, then there is the possibility of intentionally encouraging and reinforcing it, to pull everything together into a coherent and meaningful whole.

Grandma had a number of owls in her house, probably many of them gifts from others. But Grandma and owls definitely go together in my mind. So I went on an owl hunt. Because of limited funds, this mostly meant crafting owls. I have a tub of plaster of Paris, and thought about casting an owl. I thought about painting owls, and carving owls out of wood, and making seed art owls. The owl that I actually made and finished, though, was crocheted from yarn out of our stash.

The yarn was brown, orange, and yellow, and looked like it was left over from some crewel embroidery kit from the Seventies. I added in some other scraps of acrylic yarn.

Crochet hints:

1.  Start from the center of the piece. and work outward.

2.  Shaping is accomplished by using stitches of different heights. From shortest to tallest, in crochet this is: slip stitch, single crochet, half double, double crochet, and triple crochet.*  (Below slip stitch you might put just doing an embroidery whip stitch along the edge of the piece.) I found it helpful to think of lines of stitching that I was working across an area, and varying the stitches within each line to vary its height as needed.

The other element of shaping is choosing where to put the stitches; choosing which stitches to hook into, for more or less density and fullness.

3.  Finer details (such as stripes on feathers) can be achieved by embroidery, using yarn to stitch on the surface.

4.  Some subtlety of color can be given by using multiple strands of yarn at a time, where all the strands are not of the same color. For most of the owl, I used two or three strands of the crewel yarn at a time.

5.  Some mistakes can be covered by embroidery; I originally made the owl's pupils much too large, but was able to cover the excess pupils by embroidering over them carefully with the iris color.

6.  Crochet lends itself well to three-dimensional work, such as for the beak of the owl, and to incorporating other materials...such as a stick for the owl's "perch".

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* These are in American terminology; I have seen European terminology where everything is moved up by one: their single crochet is our slip stitch, and their double crochet is our single, and so on.

A pregnancy project: Making things stay put

Making room for a new baby mostly means making time for a new baby...with an emptier schedule, fewer commitments, and simpler housekeeping.   I did some work on the last point, to fix some things that seemed to never stay where I had put them.

One rocker had a seat cushion that ended up on the floor at least six times a day.  I used scrap pieces of denim to make ties for it, which I sewed onto the cushion by hand.  That was several months ago, and I haven't had to put it back even once.

Our bath towels were frequently sliding off their pegs. So I crocheted a loop onto a corner of each towel, using sturdy cotton yarn. The yarn has been in our stash for years, but the colors coordinated well with the bathroom colors. Now the towels stay put. I should note, though, that the pegs for the towels used by the younger children are horizontal, and they can easily get their towels down without ripping the loops off; in other situations, that might be a problem.

I have a crate that we are using for a piano bench, with a seat pad made of several layers of fabric, tied together quilt-fashion. This seat pad was also frequently found on the floor.  I used linen yarn to tie it directly to the crate, through the hand-hole. Now it sometimes is flipped down, but it is easy to flip back.

One of the children's winter coats did not have a loop inside the collar for hanging it up; I made one out of a scrap of bias tape, and sewed it in.

Got it!

After I got the curtains straightened out, and made the bed up nicely, and finished crocheting the twine rug and deciding exactly where to put it, and added a couple of quick little art projects, still the room seemed to be missing something.

I can't breathe in here yet, I told myself.

Well, why?

I want to feel grounded and centered in here, and wholly myself, but there's nothing here that connects me to my past. 

This isn't surprising, because a few years ago I did a Really Big Purge, and gave away or sold almost everything of mine that I didn't physically need. It was the right thing to do at the time; all the objects I love are engraved in my heart, and I don't really need to keep the things themselves...they can be "sent ahead to heaven" where rust does not consume.

But that left me with few possessions from way back in my past. I made a search around the house, and found a couple of things. They didn't quite fit in the room, either, but I left them in overnight.

Then I realized that a painting I had hanging in my office, would now work really well in the bedroom. It is a painting I made a few years ago to remind myself of one of my favorite spots on earth, back where my roots started. I took the picture and put it up in the bedroom, and it fits in just right. Actually, it ties the whole room together:  it has some of the curtain and bedding colors in it, and the homemade frame echoes other elements in the room. I put this painting on the emptiest wall, which makes it stand out, wherever I happen to be in the room.

After getting that settled, I went on to finish the spring cleaning in there, which I began a couple of weeks ago. I washed the windows, vacuumed the screens, wiped down the shelves and baseboards, and finished with a quick vacuuming of the carpet. Those seem like small things, but they do make a big difference, perceptually.

Now I can breathe in there.

The small things and the not-so-small things

Another series of small wins:

I figured out how to re-attach the wreath hook on the front door (after it fell down...it was only held up by double-sided tape!) in a more secure manner, using screws. So I don't have to buy a new one.

I altered a pair of jeans that was too big, by taking in the side seams. Hint:  try them on first, inside-out, and see how much needs to be taken off. Also:  watch out for the rivets while you are sewing!

I started some seeds, in folded newspaper pots. These pots are easy to make, but hard to keep folded without being stapled or filled with soil.

I've been keeping up with the mending.

I applied KonMari folding to the bed linen, and it looks much more organized.

I pushed through and made it over the peak of the hill for my Major Sewing Project; the rest of the work is downhill.

One thing I've been thinking about for a while is a small rug for the bedroom. I've been testing various ideas, and have settled on a granny-hexagon, to be crocheted from about $3 of dollar store twine (probably jute), for organic texture.

I also did a Nester-style "quieting the room" exercise in the bedroom--taking down all the decorations--to see what it needed. Most of the things went right back where they were, but it was good to have worked it all through again.

I scavenged some pine twigs from last year's Christmas tree, for a future project.

I found a nice pair of walking shoes at Goodwill for $7, although somewhat Providentially, because I passed them over at first and only took a quick second look as I was leaving. Shoe shopping usually makes me cry, because my size is very hard to find. These shoes are replacing a pair of shoes that were Providential when I found them (on vacation, after the soles of my hiking boots suddenly started melting into tar--don't ask me why--and I was left with only dress shoes while camping in the rain), they were even in my size, but they are really too narrow in the toe for me to wear long-term.


Plus one BIG WIN:

I figured out what I want being in my home to feel like...I knew before what I liked and what I didn't, but now I have one phrase that covers it all. And looking around, most of what we have already supports that theme. I've done a little tweaking since then, to bring it out a little more clearly.

A few years ago, I read a book about how to work your way toward a two-word Style Statement for your personal style; probably this book. My decorating theme isn't the same as the two words I came up with back then (which still fit me well enough), but
it fits within the broader style.

In Alexandra Stoddard's books, the idea of decorating a room to feel like being in a garden often comes up, but somehow that never seemed quite right for me...I'm not nearly as into gardens as she is. I had to find my own favorite thing, and now I have.

While the barbarians clamor at the gates...

...for me to provide them their bread (lunch) and circuses (Lego Star Wars video game), I will give a quick update:

The choice between fixing up the old computer and buying a new used computer was made for me, when the old computer died...in the processor, according to my husband's interpretation of the error lights. He went to the local FreeGeek for me, knowing my requirements, and picked up a computer...for only $10, plus a couple more for extra memory, because they were still selling rebuilt computers at half price to get them out the door. The new computer is a little slow sometimes, but it does what I want. It is also very clean inside; the old computer had a decade of dust and cat dander in it. I may do something to the outside of it; black isn't really my color.

In other projects, I pulled out an unfinished crochet project, and started making it into something else. Originally, I was crocheting irises out of acrylic yarn, and I had gotten to the point of having two flowers and some leaves. I like the technique of taking different colors of yarn and "painting" with them, but it takes a lot of mental energy. Also, I needed a new dishcloth. So I took the crocheted pieces for one of the flowers, and unraveled the others for yarn to knit around the pieces and join them together. This involved picking up stitches, knitting them, and using techniques like short rows to fill in the spaces and turn tilted edges into square edges. Now the knitting is done, and I have dozens of ends to work in. Some I will work in along the surface, for color and texture. Others I am going to have to just tie and cut short.

I also took out the last of the dollar store cotton string, and crocheted a comet to go with the crocheted star, and stiffened it with white paint in the same way. (The comet is a circle, with a tail.) They are on the same wall in the bedroom now, and go together well. A while back, I put a frieze of paper snowflakes over the closet door, I am thinking of replacing them with something else soon. I also made a small copper star for the bookshelf, just by cutting the shape out of thin sheet copper with not-my-best scissors. (The copper is from a roll that I bought at the art store years ago.) I brought in a pottery bowl from the kitchen, to set on top of the bookcase.

I did some more drawing on my white vase with the blue permanent marker. It is fun, and if I were a professional designer this would definitely be one of my go-to techniques for developing new decorative patterns, but the marker tends to rub off if I'm not careful. I believe the art store has markers for ceramics that mark more durably.

Christmas around the house

Joining in on The Nester's Christmas tour of imperfect homes...it doesn't have to be perfect to be beautiful (thank God, and I thank God also that the church Christmas play is O-V-E-R).

Crocheted star, recently made; I'm thinking of painting it gold:

Found objects Advent calendar, we have a little bag of real frankincense this year:

Mary and Jesus in the stable, as arranged by children: 

A slightly burnt-out strand of lights draped over a mirror:

Tree stand and skirt...I like plain burlap for the tree skirt. This kind of tree stand holds a LOT of water and is more stable than most; I highly recommend it. The tree is carrying a load of presents that the children have wrapped up for each other, so it looks too frazzled for a full picture.

Finally, a loopy crocheted Christmas ornament: