When you think things can’t get worse, they probably can … it took us another couple of weeks to get over that nasty virus, and then my mother got worse again, and then had a fall, and then she died almost 4 weeks ago. I try to remind myself that she was 90, she had multiple health issues, she had been ready to go since last summer, and at last she is no longer in pain. The funeral was 10 days ago, so now I’m trying to get used to life without her.
The past 18 months had largely revolved around her, and the anxiety had stopped me doing almost anything creative, but she loved to see the results of my crafting, so I know she would want me to get back to it as soon as I can. We went to the spinning & weaving guild monthly meeting today (Saturday – though strictly speaking it is Sunday here now) – more of that in a later post, probably. I’ve also signed up for two drawing workshops, one next month and one in April. That’s scary!!!
I’ve been following Melanie J Cook’s blog, The Onion, for quite a while. I love some of her ideas in today’s post about Moo cards. I’ve been considering trying to put together enough photos and/or artwork to order my own Moo postcards, but now I think I need to order some stickers and mini-moos too when I get around to ordering.
We were driving home from visiting my mother in hospital this afternoon when we noticed this cherry tree with an amazing carpet of petals beneath it. We just had to stop and get some photos.
As you can see in the first picture, there is still a lot of blossom left on the tree, so it seems surprising that there can be so much on the ground, but the flowers are double, so there are a lot of petals per blossom!
I tried to post this yesterday, but the silly site refused to let me upload a picture instead of just linking to Flickr as I usually do. It turned out to be a linux problem, and I struggle with those, so it took me until today to fix it.
This was the view from the front of the house yesterday. I’d post a photo from today but it still looks very much the same. “They” are still saying don’t drive unless your journey is essential, so DH’s office was closed today, but he walked into town to buy a power lead for his work laptop so he can work at home tomorrow if necessary.
I’ve been too busy to spend much time doing so, though, so I still haven’t decided whether to move the blog or stay here, or worked out why I can’t place photos where I want on this blog when I used to be able to do that. Oh well, in the meantime I’ve been making more mini-books, but I’ve also made a couple of notebooks – a small one with polymer clay covers for myself and a bigger one for a swap. I need to write them up here too.
I keep referring to my swaps at swap-bot, but I don’t have a link to the site on my sidebars. I really ought to put one there, but there is no point until I decide where I am going to continue blogging. Swap-bot is a great site, with something for almost everybody. I usually swap handmade items and craft supplies, but there are also swaps for bought items and various types of ‘writing’ swaps. I host a monthly series of quotecard swaps (just a favourite quote on a postcard) and I have received a lot of interesting chocolate from other countries through tag games, in which you tag someone who is offering something you want, and then offer items you can send to the person who posts after you. I’d never have known how good Scandinavian chocolate is without those tags, and I’ve also fallen for some US chocolate I can’t get here.
I also spend a lot of (too much?) time on the swap-bot forums. The ‘public’ forums are open to any member and can get a bit rough at times, like any public forum, but there are a lot of fun and/or informative threads too. There are also group forums for particular topics and many which are just for groups or friends (or friends-to-be), and those are usually peaceful places and very supportive. I’ve learnt a huge amount from the forums, and I also blame them for seducing me into new crafts like bookbinding.
I’m pondering what to do about this incarnation of my blog. I haven’t really got comfortable with WordPress, and there would be advantages to switching to Blogger. On the other hand, I like having it here under my own control.
Meantime, here’s a fun contest with a prize of a pair of ugg boots, no less. Just visit the Whooga Boots website.
I’ve been a bad blogger again, mostly because I have been so involved with various Swap-bot exchanges that I haven’t had time for fibre crafts. I think I may have to widen this blog’s scope to cover art and paper crafts. In the meantime, my latest swap was a photo challenge – to take a photo a day for a week. I have created a page with my seven main photos and some others. You can see it here.
Just as a taster, here are thumbnails of some of my favourites. They are not clickable, so if you want more detail you need to go to that web page. ;-)
I try to keep this blog focussed on fibre crafts, but sometimes I digress. This bookworm meme, found here, is too tempting …
 In the list of books below, bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you want to read, cross out the ones you won’t touch with a ten-foot pole, put a cross (+) in front of the ones on your book shelf, and asterisk (*) the ones you’ve never heard of.
1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. +The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. +The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. +The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L. M. Montgomery)
9. +Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. *A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. +Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. +Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. +Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. *Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. *The Stand (Stephen King)
19. +Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban(Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. +The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. +The Catcher in the Rye (J. D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. *The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. +The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. +East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. *Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. +Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. *The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. *Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. +The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. *The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. *The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. *I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. *The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. +The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. +The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. *The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. +Bible (some of it, at least)
46. +Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. +The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. *She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. +Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. *The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. +Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. +The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. *The Time Traveler’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. +Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. *The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. +War and Peace (Tolstoy) (what can I say? I went through a Russian literature phase in my late teens)
64. Interview with the Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. *Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. *The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. +Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. +The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. *The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. *Not Wanted On the Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. +Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. +Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen) –
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. *The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. *Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. *In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. *The Outsiders (S. E. Hinton)
97. *White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)
PS I’m now going to look up the “never heard of” books to see whether I need to add any of them to my “want to read” list.
As promised yesterday, we took the camera with us for this evening’s stroll along the Thames towpath. Unfortunately, we were too late to get good sunset shots, but our digital camera coped fairly well with handling the fading evening light. (All the thumbnails are clickable.)
First we visited the swans:
“Oh, you’ve brought bread!!!”:
“Didn’t your mother ever teach you that it is rude to snatch?”:
“Uh oh, 4 greedy swans is getting too much.” (Yes, I know there are only 2 in the picture, but by now there were 4 who couldn’t wait for me to throw the bread into the water):
And finally, the pictures of the Thames itself:
Coming soon, I hope, more real fibre blogging. At the moment, I’m mostly preocupied with a quilting swap, which needs to stay secret till it is finished. I do have more takadai braids to scan – I hope to get those pictures uploaded here soon.
The only fibre-related present I got this birthday is a Bosworth Moosie, but I’m not complaining as if I’m going to get only one, a Moosie is a good choice!
Mine is 28g (1 oz) and has a Cochin rosewood shaft. It isn’t easy to get pictures that show the markings well. Click on the side views for larger pictures.
Most of my other presents were paperback novels, plus one DVD set, but Rys also gave me this beautiful little fossil, only 1.2″ across:
Lastly, I have a better picture of the mini-socks, which shows the colours better. I’m still trying to decide whether to make them into earrings or just add cords to make them into ornaments.