"Christmas" bottle cap tree

For this year's Christmas party at work we used a drawing I had seen at Tumblr (thank you, unknown painter) and made our own seasonal tree from bottle caps.

Bad eyesight?

That one was added 5/2017.

The lonely overshoe

Well, I am really getting into this gif-thing....

Gif the old age

My very first gif-tutorial!

Green beans and zucchini

Sometimes, they sell those vegetables in sturdy green nets which are great for all sorts of applications including bags for airing shoes.

Here, I used them for pockets inside a ladies shoulder bag and a cosmetics pouch.
 
The former was made from regular flimsy one-way nets which were knit. Leather was used for the sides and the flap; the inside was lined with fabric.












As for the cosmetics bag - the material I had liked for the outside was not strong enough so that I strengthened everything with potato net sheets between lining and cover. 

 


 

 

The mattress and the footstool

 Although I do like the one-way nets as a raw material, once in a while I need to do something else to reset. Triggered by the upholstering we had done of mypartner’s kitchen chairs (him being the woodworker, me the sewing lady), I felt like upholstering some more for the fun of it. I had kept an old mattress in the basement for just such a purpose (Ours is not one of those dusty, moldy cellars, so the mattress did not smell). There were tree branches left in the garden shed and fabric I have galore. Trouble was, I did not actually need new furniture. But, I figured, I could use a footstool. Actually, I would have liked bright colors on it, but I could not come up with a proper design. The sisal sack eventually brought it all together fitting the pallet table we had worked earlier. It received a print made with a stamp recycled from one of India’s textile factories. The corners were sewn with leather donated by a dancingcompanion.

 

My lesson learned – after breaking down with my footstool in a very unladylike manner - was to observe the growing direction of wood when building anything which is supposed to hold some weight. Fortunately, I had an expert on my side, who, shortly after, felt in need of a footstool for himself. So, I did get my chance to make one with bright colors in the end.

Oh, I wanted one with this fabric, too!

Naked wreaths, apples and potato sacks

When I was a child, my grandmother used to earn a few Pfennig (Pennies/Cents) by removing decoration and greenery from the wreaths people had taken from the gravesides of their loved ones and thrown away. She would carry them to the garden shop for re-use. I was allowed to help every now and then and I remember vividly the red hands from the rusty wires and the prickly fir-tree green. It was not a pleasant job. If my memory does not fail me, I received 5 Pfennig per piece.

Forty years later, my mother still un-wraps old wreaths, but she also redecorates them herself for the family’s gravesides. Each year for the Sunday of Commemoration of the Dead she sends a package across Germany with a wreath to be placed on my second grandmother’s grave. 

And each year my aunt returns a package containing the used wreath base. It arrived when I visited recently and contained, in addition, tasty apples from my aunt’s garden. All content was protected by padding made by the one-way nets of produce she had collected for me for some time.

Yes, I agree, looking at the whole procedure from the outside, it has its funny aspects. But hey, it is not junk, we move across the country, but crafter’s raw material…

Ground cherry

They sell physalis in cute little plastic baskets. They worked great as a base for a bottle carrier ennobled with red leather.

 





 













 

A square or not a square

Some of the plastic net material potatoes are sold in is quite stiff so that I figured that it would do well as a base for needlework. It seemed to provide perfect anchors for cross-stitching and I thought it to be good material for needlepoint training of children. However, when I tried it myself, I realized that the holes are not perfect squares but rather trapeze-like. That messes up your orientation within the planned pattern considerably. I got off the track all the time. Nevertheless, with the right application such as Kelim or Florentine needlework it works just fine.

Bath sponge, the second

You know the joke: The worst nightmare of the birthday kid is a present you have made yourself. 

I am sure there are lots of gifts one would be overjoyed to receive especially when handmade. The challenge is to figure out when this is the case. I am well aware that my particular hobby does not meet wide acceptance but I do know of a few people who like the work. It was thus my great pleasure to give the Bath Sponge Bag to Anne, my Scottish Dancing Companion and craftswoman herself. She is one of my sources for one-way nets and also the donor of the leather pieces which made their way into my foot stool. Thank you, Anne, also for the photograph!

Special topics in calamity physics

Being an avid reader there are few books which keep my attention (about every fifth even after pre-scrutinization of the cover information at the local library). Marisha Pessl (Penguin Books, 2006) did it big style. Not only did she keep me shackled to hundreds of pages, small print, spiked with quotations (science-style referencing complete with page numbers) of the life of a teenager (an unusual one, I give you that, but still – I am from the dinosaur generation), she also placed a constant (inward) grin on my face (I have not entirely figured out how that works). She managed to have me fully content reading on about the routine day of a high-schooler (quite an achievement, if you know, what I mean) so that I found it completely superfluous when the story suddenly (after 2 cm paper worth of introduction) became a crime novel (unthinkable, since most what I read in my off-time are thrillers (sorry, cannot stomach Virginia big W. and Rilke after a full day at work)), and was almost angry, when on top of everything political issues were brought in. However, Marisha managed the perfect ending which left me sort of flabbergasted (although I did not appreciate the final finish of the end – well, one cannot have it all). This is a book I can relate to (like I can to the “Big Bang Theory” (the soap; and the theory, come to think of it, but this is not relevant here)) and would wish to study for its craftsmanship (if I were not so eager for the next new book on the library shelf). There are a number of Pessl-quotations I am happy to go along with and which I should have written down for further use like (I will mess it up now having the memory of a sieve): “I have been raised a sceptic not believing in anything until the evidence lines up like presents under a Christmas tree.” Or so.

Oh, and yes, here is more on potato net couture.