First year - done!

I've done this for four years in a row on my personal blog, but this is the first time I've managed to pull it off on my craft blog.  Go, me!

Obligatory holiday knitting - complete!

Last night I finished weaving in the ends on the two gifts I'm making for LazyKid's teachers. It's a relief to be done, even if I can't post pics until after the gifts have been opened. That was all the 'required' knitting I had for this year. It's a nice change from the Great Sock Experiment of 2008 and the Cowl Christmas of 2009. Making your gifts is fun, for the first half-dozen people. After that, gift cards start looking like a really good idea!

Should I get out the needle and thread?

The sight on Pop Pop's gun was a little too close to LazyHusband's eye for the recoil. Oops.Hope that link works, since the whole flickr thing doesn't work too well on my iPod.

Nope, so here's the photo:

Trying out the new tech

Trying to blog from my iPod is fraught with difficulties, so it's a good thing I've got NaBloPoMo as a motivator. Dang, is this ever slow.

Didn't forget to take photos today, nope

LazyKid is undeterred by a lack of wrapping paper ...

... she just makes her own.

 She decorated it while it was sitting next to me at dinner last night, and she kept asking me for more "things I like."  That's why it's got stars, our two cats, a fairy, a self-portrait, and the Eiffel Tower on it.

Not to mention sparkly purple leaves, a heart-shaped peace sign, and apple trees.

Not sure why she thinks I love millipedes and some sort of green-antlered deer, but I'm willing to go with it.

Especially since they let me open the present a day early.  Score!

Prep work

Spent all morning prepping materials for Monday's Fun with Fiber class, then spent most of the afternoon playing around with my new drop spindle:

What?  Haven't you ever made a drop spindle out of a blank CD, a blob of Play-Dough, a highlighter, and a marker cap?  Jeez, you guys are no fun at all!

Ouch! My hands!

Nothing crafty to report, as I've spent the last two days putting in a new flower bed.

It'll look much more impressive in the spring once I get some annuals in.  Right now it's got some roses, some lavender, some thyme, and some veronica, all of which were transplanted from existing beds around the yard. Oh, and a maple tree that was a volunteer in the trash pile at the back of the yard.  It's already chest-high, even if it does only have two leaves (which fell off the day before I transplanted it).

But it's cold and rainy now, so hopefully I'll have crafty stuff to discuss sometime soon!

Relieving some aggression

I've been trying out some new techniques as I prepare for the class I'm teaching to my daughter's kindergarten class, and with the surplus of leaves in our yard, it seemed like a good time to try leaf pounding.  Here's a Japanese maple leaf on untreated muslin:

I had the best luck with the leaves that were the juiciest - the ones I picked right off the tree worked even better than ones from the same tree that had already fallen.  I got a purply-brown (the Japanese maple), a pretty bright red (from a burning bush plant), and even a spring green (from a sweet gum tree that hadn't turned yet).

I was surprised by just how much pounding was required to get this to work, and by how tricky it was to find leaves that were flat enough to show up well.  Anything with really raised veins prevented the hammer from reaching the non-veined parts easily, which gave a pretty bad transfer.  You can even see in my "good" ones above that I ran out of interest before I was able to completely fill in the outline of the leaf.

I can't decide whether this would be a good project for the class or not.  On the plus side, who doesn't have fun with hammers?  On the minus side, do I want to be responsible for eight 5-yr-olds armed with hammers?  Probably not.  Maybe I'll write it up as a bonus project to try at home ... yeah, that's the ticket!