I cherish the time I get to spend with my family during the annual trek to the Pacfic NW. This year, we spent a couple of days in Lincoln City, and I got to see the beach in what was an unseaonably warm winter.
Alas, this is what I returned to. Snow. In my backyard.
As I unpacked, I realized that I didn't buy as much of a variety of craft supplies as I thought I did during my vacation. Ho hum. The only thing I bought was, erm, fabric...gobs of fabric.
And this little gem. 
My mama took me to a new craft mall that I've not been to and I fell in love with this ceramic tile. As I was making my decision, it just so happened that the artist (Sheri Medford) who painted the tile was working that day so I got to meet her and chat for a bit. Nice!
but it sure looks colourful! I was planning to stick with ultraviolet blue, but the girl who does my hair really wanted to try Pravana's Wild Orchids on my hair. Meh, it's just hair, so I agreed. We (yeah, I say 'we' like I had any say in this) decided to try for a gradation effect as well, so the strands deepens from fuschia, violet, to purple. Did I mention that I love it? I really do.
What a mess! That's the current state of my craft table...glue, paper, scissors, markers, paper, ink, miscellaneous tools, paper, gel medium, pens, did I mention paper? 
It may be hard to figure out what I'm working on right now, but here's a close-up!
Chunky Halloween Houses!!! Yay!
This was one of those "Duh!" moments for me. While sorting through my yarn stash (yet again!), I found a skein of yarn that I sorta love. The rich jewel tones of the yarn is what draws me to it...but I can't abide the fun fur yarn that it was plied with! The yarn has been in my stash for a few years (circa mid 2000s when fun fur yarn and their derivatives were trendy).
With the help of my favourite top whorl spindle, I am unplying the yarn so that I can do something (finally!) with the gorgeous lofty yarn!
Here it is, all "unplied" and sitting pretty on the spindle.
And in it's final form - one happy shiny jewel hued ball of yarn ready to be knitted.
Now I'm off to find more "not-so-loved- yarns in my stash with the hopes of making them them more useable/lovable!
Drawing is not something I excel in, but I like to sketch out rough drafts for projects to get a feel of things to come. It's also a good way to whittle down possibilities that seem like good ideas in theory, but might look silly in real life.
These are my sketches for a chunky page that I'm working on for CDM's Book of Hope (relay for life fundraiser). A couple of these have potential, but I'm not particularly enamoured with any of them. Perhaps I'm overthinking things...or perhaps it's time to go back to the drawing board...literally.
Last weekend, I had a fabulous time hanging out with CD for our 2nd Annual Crafty in Cincinnati. After having so much fun the first time round, we booked rooms at the same hotel with plans for trying new crafts and catching up.
Friday evening, we played with paper and made a couple of chunky houses!
My chunky house "A Virgin of Yesterday"!
CD's fantastic cat chunky house!
Saturday was a busy day! We went to IKEA (boy oh boy!) followed by a visit to St. Theresa's Textile Trove (an absolute gem!). In addition to a good selection of eclectic fabric (hand marbled, hand dyed, African batik, etc.), they also had all kinds of beads, whimsical charms and general kitsch. I won't gab about my fabric purchases, but I did find quite a few things that I had to have!
Porcupine quills. Yep, sharp and beautiful. I hope to inject resin in the hollow shaft and turn them into hairsticks for myself...soonish.
Okay, I wasn't planning to talk about fabric but this particular fabric has such a neat story to it. Apparently, the design is based on "ladies of the night dolls" that were handed out as, erm, calling cards in Mexico. The designer, Terrie Mangat actually had names for the dolls in the fabric, and these are names of her friends and family. How cool is that! 
Fiber, fiber, fiber!!!
First fiber project for the evening - felted soaps! CD chose a good selection of colours for her bar of soap...and it turned out beautiful! I opted for forest green and hunter green shades. It seemed like a good idea at that time...but in retrospect, I shouldn't have. My felted soap looks like a Brillo pad! 
Next, we embarked on making wet felted scarves. I was too excited and didn't get any pictures of the layout of the dry fibers or even take very good pictures of the process...but here's the progress pictures of CD's colourful scarf!
Prewetting the fiber prior to soaping...
Close-up of pre-wetted fiber!
Soaped and partially felted...
It's darn near impossible to take pictures with soapy hands, but here's my soaped and partially felted scarf. I opted for using white wool roving because I wanted to dye the scarf after I was done felting it.
Scarves hung out to dry!
Close-up of CD's colourful scarf...
Close-up of my boring pre-dyed scarf (which is still undyed)...
And then we dyed a couple of skeins of yarn with food grade acid dyes...because we had a microwave in the room!
Close-up of the lovely dye effect on one of the skeins (I love grape Kool-Aid!)
You'd think we would call it a night after all the fiber crafts. Nope, CD promised that she'll coach me on needlework and she made good on that promise.
Awesome scissor fob that she made for me! 
Here's the sampler she worked on to show me a variety of stitches that I could learn:
Sadly, I was getting too cranky and tired (hey, it was now Sunday morning!) to learn them. I could bearly keep my eyes open at that point :P I stitched this...
And partially got this started...
But finished it when I got home!
I can't wait to do more needlework!
And for the record, my hair had pink highlights (it was purple for last year's meetup)!