Craftery

In the year of our Lord, 2010, I have become obsessed with craftery of all sorts.  In the past, I had left all of the creativity and imagination to my dear mother and sister, who both have a decided flair for creating cuteness.  I was content to let them just make cute stuff for me, benefitting vicariously from their skills.

But all of that changed this year.  Somewhere along the way, I got inspired and decided to give it a try.  It all started with a website called Etsy.com.  Out of pure boredom, I was browsing one day and saw the most adorable Christmas ornaments.  They were just simple embroidered pictures on a linen background.  With encouragement from my Bestie Sarah Elaine Crane and from Gordon, I decided to steal the idea and try it myself.  I started small by stitching little Christmas ornaments out of red and green linen, embroidering simple, holiday themed pictures on them.  Some turned out better than others, but generally, I love them and they turned out so cute.  Simple, but home-spun and cozy and cute.  Of course, it helped that I had a job that actually paid me to sit at a computer all day without any actual work tasks to complete.  As you may remember, I actually spent one entire week, sitting at my desk, cutting out scraps of material and stitching away.  Sadly, I did eventually get busted for that.

Not the best pic, but you get the idea.

After Christmas passed, I was craving a new project.  The creativity bug had taken a big bite out of me and I missed the feeling of creating and designing and making things that I was actually proud of.  So I followed Bestie's lead and took up knitting.  Initially, I made a lot of mistakes, dropped stitches and gave up pretty easily.  Thus, Mother's Most Precious Barclay O'Neil has quite a few kitty scarves and "beds", aka scraps of kitting projects that I messed up on and was too impatient to fix it.  But I kept at it, learning little bits at a time via the Internet.  I swear, Google taught me everything I know about knitting and stockinette stitches and increases and decreases and cables and all sorts of stuff.  I discovered that the more I learned, the more I liked the projects I worked on and I was more apt to correct mistakes and keep going.  To date, I have only finished three scarves entirely, but I love each of them.  My proudest accomplishment is learning to cable knit.  It's not difficult, but takes time and practice.  And I'll tell you...the end product looks so good!

You can hardly tell that Mothers Most Precious is wearing his scarf, but he is.  He is the most un-photogenic animal in the world.  Very annoying. 

And now, while my knitting obsession continues, I find myself browsing Etsy.com again, looking for some hapless person's idea to steal.  I came across this darling banner today and my mind is already abuzz with how to do it myself and make it just a tad better....



I know I should feel bad about stealing someone's idea, and particularly bad about stealing the picture of the stolen idea, but I needed you to have a visual of just HOW CUTE this is!

So what are your projects this Holiday Season (and yes, it is too the Holiday Season...stop being a stick in the mud and just revel in the peace and love and happiness and red cups)?  Don't worry, I'll probably tell you if I decide to jack your idea.  I feel I owe it to you, as a loyal reader and friend.