This young lady has an incredible voice, a terrific song to sing, and just amazing imagery to pull it all together. I’m hooked.

I was a little bummed that my hubby was on duty Valentine’s Day. But of course – as always – he had BEAUTIFUL flowers delivered to me.

He also had this fanTABulous card for me – an unsigned Hallmark card (before there was even a “Hallmark” just a name in teeny print on the back).

Oh, how he knows me. He signed the card from him to me, which makes it all the more special. The value of the thing is between the two of us. It’s not to sit on a shelf until Antiques Roadshow comes to town. My husband gave me a 60-year-old Valentine’s Day card. HE IS my sweetie.

Hope yours was as sweet (and still is!)

Tammy

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

See the original page and story here.

This is a wonderful little movie… enjoy!

Everything in moderation, right? I can spend a whole day on a single chore (like cleaning out the refrigerator, dismantling the washing machine, shampooing the floor) and at the end of the day, I often can’t tell that I’ve done anything. I deep clean and the clutter on top stays. This is something I will be working on this year, as the buzz word this year seems to be “declutter.” You hear and see it everywhere. I have said it already – I am a hoarder. Nothing like you see on TV. But I just KNOW I’m going to have a use for every single little thing that comes along. My creative mind just wraps around it and envisions it as something useful, even something necessary! Which is why I have bins full of yarn, old blue jeans and t-shirts, and beads/buttons/jewelry parts.

I could also spend all day on a project and the house will just go untouched. It’ll be the end of the day, I’ll be elbow deep (or brain deep if it’s a digital project) in my craft, and thank GOD the kids can work the microwave so THEY can make ME something to eat.

Balance, right? I need balance. So. Every day, I’m going to clean something, and create something. In that order. Today it is the piles of junk mail and other papers needing going through, all over my creative work surfaces. You can BET that a lot of it got stuffed into credit card offer envelopes and is going to make its way back cross-country compliments of Discover’s postage account. Ha ha freaking ha. The rest of it went into the shredder, and will be put in the compost bin in the garden. The next time *I* see it, it will be helping my tomatoes grow up to be ketchup.

Now for create. I have a VISION. I have become enthralled with Vincent Van Gogh. There were a couple of “Dr. Who” episodes about him and then that Don McLean song got stuck in my head, and now I am just determined to make (1) a Starry Night altered bottle, which so far has gotten no further than part of 1 bottle being sanded. Can’t help it – it’s raining outside! I can’t wait until it dries back up and I can get ON with it already.

(2) I have this awesome idea for a necklace based on the same Van Gogh painting. Now, my Etsy store (which right now is comprised of 3 crocheted items), is kind of going to run on the idea that I’m going to make something for myself that I love, and then make another to sell. So for this new project, it meant that I needed to find TWO vintage brass moon brooches. Not new cheap stuff from China, but something old and classy, with a history. So how excited could I be to find someone who had TWO of these luscious babies? Do you know how hard it would have been to let go of one or the other had they been different? (that’s the hoarder in me speaking)

Here are some of my garage sale finds… can you see where I’m going with this?

So this is my “create something.” I’ve stared and imagined and pondered. I even cleaned something. Now it’s time to get down to brass tacks, and freaking CREATE!!

I hope you take the time to go read this wonderful post by Sasha, aka Lemonade Makin’ Mama. And then tweet, repost, reblog… it’s a message worth sharing.

“Lemonade Makin’ Mama asks “How Sweet Is Your Chocolate?”

Here is a link to a CNN report entitled, “The Chocolate Industry Responds.

WE ARE the people. We CAN make ripples in our world that can spread around the globe, if we all jump in the water and splash around like mad. We have that power.

Peace and love,
Tammy

It is finally the end of my work week. Paul is snoring away, because he has to be on duty tomorrow, the kids are at their dad’s until tomorrow night… Now to begin the day, I must first dismantle my clothes washing mashine, and figure out a way to clean the drainage system inside it. I have cleaned the drain hose from the machine outward (and it was chunky, slimy, NASTY). But I am still getting error messages, so tomorrow I will attack its innards. I am woman, I have a toolbox, hear me roar.

After that, I will most definitely need a shower. Then I will finish putting together this awesome little DIY project I found on Pinterest..

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You can click the image to go to the original site for the tutorial. I have already got all my paper strips folded and sewed, waiting now to be woven and put to use. It’s going to hold all the denim quilt squares as they wait to begin becoming the dream blanket for our bed. You know, those little cube storage drawers that go into those cute cube shelves run about $6 to $12. To make them myself with paper I’ve been…. yes, hoarding, okay? I hoard packaging supplies. I might need them one day. Anyway, I decluttered a box of packing paper to make this basket, and I’m decluttering a HUGE bin of old blue jeans and shirts to make the quilt itself, so this really is a battle against me and the clutter. Using my arsenal of creative tutorials online!

Quick tip – how to recycle junk mail, especially credit card offers? Very simple. The MINUTE your junk mail comes in, open it all and shred any part with sensitive information (like your name). Then go through the credit card offers and pull out the postage-paid return envelopes. After shredding all the actual applications, fold up all the rest of your junk mail, INCLUDING THE ENVELOPES IT ARRIVED IN, and stuff it in those postage-paid envelopes and send it BACK to Discover, or CitiBank, or Capital One, or whoever. Just think… every time one of those envelopes is scanned and weighed, it’s billed to the company that originated it. Plus if it’s REALLY stuffed they get charged extra. And even more than THAT if it’s too stiff to bend. So here’s another tip. An entire Pottery Barn or similar catalog will fit inside most of these pre-paid envelopes. Open to the middle pages and tear straight down the center. Then grab several pages at a time and fold neatly in thirds, pressing a nice thin crease. You can get the whole thing in there. Use tape to close it if you need to. But you’ve just boosted the US economy, and provided work for the US Postal Service, AND your junk mail pile is empty. It’s a creative alternative, and it feels like “stickin it to the man,” which even at my age feels kinda cool.

This week’s pile is rather small… last week there was a stack of about 10!

Okay, well, enjoy Superbowl Sunday. I plan (we will see…) to host a Google Hangout during the game for those of us who KNOW there are better things to do with a perfectly good Sunday afternoon. Hope to see you then! I will come back and post a link on tomorrow’s blog post for the hangout. Be prepared to sit in front of your computer and crochet, draw, bead, knit, or whatever it is you do, with a few new friends keeping you comfortable!

Nitey night!

Well it’s Thursday, and today I do have the time, so I’ll be doing the first chore in the “31 Days to Clean” project. Paul’s on duty, Dan’s at school, Zach and Michael are at work, so that leaves just Jessyca and me. After the fridge is clean and a load of laundry started, we’ll put on Groundhog Day, because it’s tradition. While watching, I’ll be cutting out circles of denim to finally begin on the denim quilt I’ve been promising Paul for years. I did make one for him to keep at work, but I’ve been hoarding every old pair of jeans since then and promising one for the bedroom. While looking for ideas online, I came across this and fell in love:

You can find the free pattern here from Crazy Creek Quilts.

or, How I Learned to Stop Looking at My Watch and Learned to Love Waiting Rooms.

I began crocheting in earnest in 2007, when I was accidentally sent a book of crochet patterns instead of scrapbook layouts. Mom had taught me to crochet when I was a little girl, but all I remembered was to make a long chain and how to double crochet. But this book had a picture of a cool skirt I wanted to make for my stepdaughter for graduation, which was about 3 or 4 months away. Paul gladly took me to a yarn store he’d seen a story about online, and I purchased everything I needed to get started. It was NOT going to be a cheap project, it turned out.

Let me back up. When Paul and I were dating, I had bought about 10 or 12 skeins of Red Heart Fiesta Yarn and was going to make a giant blanket. I made a chain the approximate length, and then began double crocheting my way back across it. It was very, very, very boring and after I was about a foot or so into it, I set it aside in a pretty basket to work on. That yarn is STILL in that pretty basket, though I pulled all the stitches out and rolled the used yarn into big balls, just waiting for me to figure out something to do with. Yeah… that was 10 years ago. Since then I have amassed BINS full of different colored yarn, mostly acrylic but some much nicer, depending on the project, and made probably 100 awesome little things and maybe 10 or 12 bigger projects. But that Red Heart Fiesta yarn is still waiting quietly to be turned into something. I feel sort of sorry for it.

That’s a whole ‘nother post, too… the repurposing of unloved things. But I digress…

Back to Brittany’s skirt. This was in about February, graduation would be in May… she got it for Christmas. But by gosh and by golly, as Grandmother would say, I learned those stitches. I stitched for hours, then held it up and looked at it, and would pull it all out and start all over again, or going back to the place where it started to look “wrong.” For weeks and weeks I did this. Stitch, unstitch, restitch, look… wind it back into a ball. But when I gave it to her for Christmas, all the stitches were right, and it hung straight instead of twisting off to one side.

In the meantime, I’d discovered Annie’s Attic (have no idea how I stumbled onto that) and Annie’s Crochet Newsletters from back in the 80′s, and began hunting Ebay and then Etsy when I discovered it, and began amassing patterns. Patterns for everything from clothes to dolls to stuffed animals to play food. That’s right, play food. But I’d also experiment with what I called “yarn sculpting,” which was sort of just staring at a picture of something and crocheting until it matched. Here was one of those efforts.

A couple of weeks ago, Jessyca and I went to renew her driving permit. The DMV here was so packed, it was raining and a line of people with (and without) umbrellas wound around the building outside. So we drove to Boerne. Well since the last time we did this, the secret of the Boerne DMV had somehow been leaked to the general public, and it was packed, with a line that ran outside. So we admitted defeat and got in line, pushing our way first through the crowd gathered in the foyer to get a number. People were out in their cars, too, and would come up and ask what number we’d heard called last, to see if their number was getting close. They were on 65, and we were 93 when we got there. And it was raining, and cold. Well, I just pulled my knitting needles (I’m teaching myself to knit) and started working on a big loopy scarf. Everyone was grumpy, cranky, angry, even rude. But I just knitted and put up with the cold, waited until room opened up in the foyer for both me and Jessyca… even traded numbers with the lady who had 99 because she was so afraid of how late she was going to be for work. Seats would open up inside and we would let older people go take them. Later when 2 seats opened up, everyone insisted that Jessyca and I take them. Just the wait from arrival to leaving was 4 hours. I loved it – uninterrupted time to play with yarn. When I got home I had only enough time to grab a piece of buttered bread and sign on to work. But for that whole time waiting in line, I got to play. Other people waiting in the same line for the same amount of time were miserable, but we actually had a good time.

I learned this when I first started taking crochet projects with me everywhere. When you have kids, you have appointments. They can tie up all your time. But they can also be YOUR time. Generally if you’re on a plane, on a bus, in a waiting room, in line, you can listen (or just read) a book. But you can also draw a picture of something you see, or knead a small piece of clay into something, or crochet or knit something. It’s YOUR time, and the only thing you’re EXPECTED to do with it is just be there. At home there’s vacuuming, laundry, cooking, phone-answering. At work there’s… well, work. Heck, I once sat on a pile of lumber at Home Depot and crocheted on a project while Paul looked around for whatever he was looking for. He got to take his time and not worry about me being bored, and I got to work on this… which by the way took me 2-1/2 years and over 2000 yards of thread. I did it ALL while sitting in traffic, in the few minutes before church service started, and waiting. It was grungy and grimey from being handled and hauled around everywhere. More than once I would mis-count and have to rip out rows and rows of stitches. I really learned not to mind that, either… it taught me to enjoy the time spent on the project, whether creating or correcting, so that the picture would come out right. Anyway, all that effort turned into this:

Patience isn’t something you “get,” like the flu. It’s something you go get, like lessons to learn ballet, or to play the piano. You don’t have to find any more time, you just have to love the time you have. It’s a choice! Plus, people REALLY like you when you trade numbers with them in line at the DMV, you get to feel good all day long about it, and your karma skyrockets. Be patient… I dare ya.

This morning I finished this scarf, and listed it on Etsy. Like everything else, the more I rushed the more stitches I had to rip out. I was trying to do it in between important things but instead I just did it WHILE doing important things. Like, watching “The Apple Dumpling Gang” and “That Darn Cat” with my kids, and the first 10 episodes of Hawaii 5-0 on Netflix.

Click here to see this listing in my Etsy store.

Thanks for spending some time with me! Have a wonderful day!