Wow

Let me just start this by saying I am one rather unlucky person when it comes to things and I have never won anything in my life (not even those crane games). But I recently entered a giveaway over at Blaze 'n' Crochet and won. *Gasp* Shana has tons of amazing photos on her blog and she has a horse!  

On another note, I was all geared up to get some sewing done for me this past weekend during the football games and had all the patterns and fabric pulled and I had three people call asking about alterations. Now I don't mind alterations because it means I get paid, but I want to make something for me. So today you get pictures of the fabric and patterns.

They really are the same color, just different textures.

Black with blue contrast. Hey look! Cat fur!

Navy blue and white stripe

I have got to find a better place to take pictures, maybe outside, so the colors look like they should. Oh well, first I would have to clean off the porch, it's rather messy at the moment. You know, leaves, some dead plants in pots, plants outgrowing their pots...yeah. There is also a white with light blue stripes that I want to use for the last pattern, but I can't seem to find it at the moment.


There are also a few of my grandmother's dresses that I have and love and want to remake in different material so I need to take a pattern from them. I really think clothing-wise I was born in the wrong time. The clothing now is blah (a technical term) and I can't stand wearing most of it. My new idea is that we should all dress in whatever time period looks best on us. So you might see someone walking down the street in victorian garb while someone else is in 50's clothing is having a conversation with someone wearing a toga. Could be fun. Sorry for the rambling, I'm going to post before this gets and more crazy.

Buttons and a minor road bump in a project

The owl punch needle finished picture from JoAnn's.

So this past weekend when I went out of town I grabbed my punch needle owl piece with me to work on in the car since there were going to be eight hours spent on my bum in the backseat. Well everything was going well until I went into the box where everything was and found a nicely mangled color chart curtsey of my cat. Sufficient to say I was rather annoyed and am now trying to match the colors via the internet which isn't hard, but I couldn't do over the weekend. Luckily, I brought a few books so I got some reading and napping in during the trip.

A size comparison of the main button box with the 15" laptop sitting on top.

So instead you get pictures of my ever growing button collection. The vast majority of it is from an amazing find by my cousin. About 4 pounds of vintage buttons for $5 at an estate sale and she got it all for me! How lucky was that?

Some cute buttons still on the card. The little beige ones on the right are tiny crocheted buttons maybe 1/4" across.

Most of my buttons live in this box unless they are for a specific project and with the fabric or are newer and still on a card, then they get taped to the side of my book case above my desk. When ever I get my desk/craft area and the rest of my room cleaned up I'll try to post pictures of it. There are also a few mason jars full of more buttons floating around my room.

Costumes

Just a small sampling of costumes I made during four years in the costume shop. And a little bit of randomness at the end.

Sorry for the sideways picture, but every single stripe of the six gores match and I'm dang proud of it.

Interesting things would occur around exam time.

I've been out of town for the past few days at interviews and am heading out of town again tomorrow, but will hopefully have some little things to show when I get back either hand sewing or embroidery.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Israel

Really neat candle

Yikes, where has the time gone? I wish I had something exciting to show that I'd made over the past week, but I've been doing other non-crafty things and have only made a pair of pants that are not finished yet. And it is the Jewish New Year so Shana Tovah! I'm going to show you some pictures from when I went to Israel two and a half years ago. It was an amazing trip, but jet lag is no fun at all when you have to go back to classes a day after you got back.

First view of Israel through the bus window

The trip I went on was 10 days and started from Houston really, really early in the morning. It was seriously around 4 am when we had to be checked in to make the flight to Toronto. From there it was a long flight across the ocean to Israel with a broken movie projector, luckily one of my flight mates had a portable dvd player so we watched Futurama and something else until the battery died. 

Camel ride!

Camel ride! That is one of the guys on the trip Will and I and you can see the donkeys in the background. We switched off later and the donkeys were no fun to ride. The camels were fun, but it was kind of scary when they get up from laying down or when they go back down so you can get off. It is a very steep incline. But there was no spitting on our camel's part.

Yad Vashem

A very emotional part of the trip was visiting Yad Vashem. The way the museum is set up is in a zig zag pathway where you can only go forward or turn around.  The end of the building (the triangle shaped building in the picture) opens out on to an amazing view that I wish I had gotten a picture of. A description of the building from the The Holocaust History Museum

A central 180-meter walkway (prism) was built with exhibition galleries on either side. Between the exhibition galleries are impassable gaps extending along the breadth of the prism floor. These gaps constitute a physical obstacle, guiding the visitor into the adjacent galleries, yet always enabling eye contact with either end of the prism.

 It was an amazing place full of artifacts, stories, memories and much more of those who survived and those who perished and I really learned a lot from the visit. Yes, you do learn about the Holocaust in grade school, but there is so much that is left out.

Western Wall

The Dead Sea

Small scale model of what ancient Jerusalem and the temple looked like

In the wading pool during 40 something degree weather

Never found it

Hebrew graffiti

It looked fine until he bit into it

ss

It only took 5 months

No matter how many times I've seem it, it never fails to get me that schools can be exceedingly cheep about somethings. Like renovations of old dorms, fixing leaks in other buildings, getting next equipment when the very old things break. But doing something for the sports teams? No problem. You need another locker room? Ok. You need another weight room on top of the three that are sports teams only? Here you go! Anywho, this leads me to the point of this post. I finally got my ceramics class pieces back from last year. All four of the kilns died which isn't all that surprising because they are something like 15+ years old, but the school just won't pay for new ones instead they spent time looking for replacement parts to try to fix them. They died in February and they just got the part at the end of July and were able to fire our pieces. So day trip up to college to pick them up and here they are!

For this project we had to hand build a teapot and two tea cups and they had to have a theme and when you tell me this during tech week of a show the results are going to be interesting. So here you have the theme of a sea creature taking down a submarine. It has three little portholes (the white rimmed circle in the middle) and it did have a propeller, but that got taken over by the tentacles on the left. The top with it's little dome suffered an accident so I think I'm going to have to make another one. I wasn't able to get the best shot of the set (stupid overcast sky) but so you can get the idea this will (hopefully) do. The glaze on the two little cups came out very different than the teapot due to the firing process because of their location in the kiln. The tea pot glazed more place with the green showing through and had some tan/brown/white accents and turned out very shiny while the cups showed more green and had more of a matte finish. But I like them anyway.

And the first two things I ever made on the potter's wheel.

There were a few other little projects that we did throughout the semester, but they didn't survive. I have perfected the art of dropping things but they were very wonky anyways so it's probably for the best.