Happy Halloween

The last few days have been full of crafty goodness leading up to Halloween. I love dressing up!

Very long arms!

testing out the arms by picking up a cookie. hilarious.

Jemaine Clement!

and my own costume, what i thought was a very clever concept piece inspired by the embroidered heart in my shop, but it seemed to puzzle people at the party last night for some reason:

get it? get it?

and Jack-o-lantern carving! (An exacto knife and lino cutting tools are great for this.)

(and a power drill.)

There’s a big storm a-brewing here, and since we went out last night I think it’s perfect night to just cosy up with a movie and turn out the lights and pretend we’re not home!

Have a super wonderful and ghoulish weekend everybody!

Anna

turn, turn, turn

It’s funny that we treat time like this rational thing, cut it up in segments, measured, precise, mathematical pieces, when our lived experience of time passing is anything but. I feels sort of impossible that C and I have been living in Toronto for more than a year. It seems like it must have either been much, much longer than that, or much shorter. Who is playing this trick on me?

sumac branches, criss crossing the sky

Anyway. The date slipped past me with barely a glance, another year has come and gone, and freeplaycraft is one year older. I even set up an email reminder so that I wouldn’t forget, and somehow I still missed it. Tells you a little something about where my head has been, let me tell you.

basket of milkweed fluff, a vintage doily, a button i carved from arbutus wood

Oh, well.

Quince jelly and other good things

Been very food focused lately while trying to kick the last of this cold bug. See? Ripening the last of the cherry tomatoes, putting up jars of preserves, drying our own marigolds and comfrey for making healing salves, a big jar of oregano picked and dried from the farm. You should see what’s in the deep freezer. Oh boy!

Making jelly:

quince

straining the cooked quince

cooking quince juice with sugar

little jars, big pot

More of the big tomatoes are ripe now, too:

let’s make something…

Hmm, salsa!

… and roasted potatoes, guacamole, and yummy mole beans and cheese. hmmm…

But here is a little craft project, too, just in case you think I’ve gone awol. A little cheerful bunting for a friend going through a hard time.

La la la.

Let it shine…

Weekend at the farm, in pictures

a walk in the woods

mushroom hunting

milkweed silk magic

harvest

building an herb garden, before & after

feet up by the fire

findings

the herb garden needed a little something...

(man, that newspaper mulch is ugly)

... a garden idol to watch over it...

... made from found thing around the farm.

spore print from the mushrooms we didn't eat

It was a lovely weekend. I’m sick with a cold now so this is a little dis-jointed, but i think you get the gist. Happy Thanksgiving weekend, everyone.

best,

Anna

And covetting:

Oh, look how beautiful these images from Irene’s new calendars are!

fall pages from one of Irene Suchocki's 2010 desk calendars

Although, I do wish this also came in a full sized version… with no space to write down things on the days, I’d be left vacantly admiring those gorgeous photos day after day, tasks and appointments be damned! This calender and two other equally lovely additional ones are available in Irene’s shop.

Glue and scissors

I’ve been working on a series of collages this week, trying to get over my inherent bias towards practical and/or useful pretty things, trying to be okay with making things that are just for looking at. I put up so very many obstacles for myself, really.

Two dreamscapes then:

a bird flies, a fish swims.

trees in the garden, women in the field

I have ideas for a few more, too. Hope to get some prints made to put in the shop, maybe… stay tuned.

And then here is a little something I played around with today:

ephemeral stained glass!

two pieces of plexiglass with leaves sandwiched between them

aren’t the colours amazing? So glowy with the light shining through them. Their ephemeral quality, that soon they’ll all be brown leaves on the ground,  makes them even more special.

This last one is a scan of the same project, but look how much flatter the colours are.

Sigh.

Nature, you do it best.

(same collage as above, with hue and saturation tinkered)

But photoshop does it pretty well, too.  Hee hee.

Have a lovely weekend, everybody. It’s fall!

Anna

The Stratfordshire Hoard!

Just heard the news on CBC about the Stratfordshire Hoard, the largest hoard of Anglo Saxon booty ever found. I suppose you think this is an odd thing to find discussed on a purportedly craft-centric blog, but that’s because you don’t know that I did an undergrad degree in anthropology! Ha ha!

And I do love a good treasure hunt. Look how close to the surface some of the artifacts were! I can only image how frickin’ thrilled Terry Herbert was when he found all this. Gah!

Also, in my defense, this totally is on topic because the things they found are so very beautiful. Even still covered in dirt the artifacts are amazing! Here are a couple of my favourites so far. Really makes me want to take up metal smithing…

But hey, have a look for yourself – there’s a gallery set up already on flickr.

It’s so amazing to think about the people who made these things. Amazing! Look, a belt buckle!

I’m totally geeking out.

All aboard the train of thought

So I was just reading a bit of Art and Fear today over lunch, I’ve started reading it again from the beginning, and as is often the case it feels different now than it did a year ago. You can’t step in the same river twice.
What I noticed now is that the first chapter begins by delineating the very  same trouble that Elizabeth Gilbert identifies – namely the difficulty of making art and staying sane when faced with a society that doesn’t understand or particularly care for or support artists:

It may have been easier to paint bison on the cave walls long ago than to write this (or any other) sentence today. Other people, in other times and places, had some robust institutions to shore them up: Witness the Church, the clan, the ritual, tradition. It’s easy to imagine that artists doubted their calling less when working in the service of God that when working in the service of self…

-Bayles & Orland, 1993

Which made me immediately think of this Banksy piece:

Right? Right.

Okay, back to my lunch now.

Pretty things for a rainy day

Rain today for the first time in 3 weeks, it feels so strange after such a long sunny dry spell. May, June, July, August seemed like just one big thunderstorm.

Unrelatedly, I joined the 21st century last week and started using an aggregator to assemble my crafty and gardening blogs, and boy, is that an efficient little tool. I have so much more time now… to read craft blogs.

Rain and an empty house and other crafty people’s joyous seeming lives overflowing with beauty and wit and brilliant ideas makes for a melancholy evening. There could be such a thing as blog overload, I suppose. I never thought I’d utter those words.

Bah, here are some pics of the fascinator I made for the lovely J’s wedding back in August. Much happier thoughts!

Photo by Irene Suchocki

The flower is a sort of kanazashi-esque thing I made out of some vivid magenta raw silk. The colour here is a little off. Have no fear, it matched her shoes.  The centre of the flower features a pearlescent and rhinestone brooch and beautiful black crystal beads with an oil-slick/peacock sheen, both of which came from the great grandmother stash I keep mentioning. J’s earrings came from her too!

Photo by Irene Suchocki

Tucked behind the bloom are a few little leaves I made out of upcycled aluminum.  Behind them are the feathers that I dyed myself to accommodate J’s request for ethical feathers. Although there is a wide selection of beautiful feathers available for purchase, you can be reasonably sure that the beautiful birds that grew and preened those feathers were harmed in order for you to have them.  Not a happy thought for an animal lover on her wedding day. So! The feathers you see here are actually pigeon feathers that I scavenged in the parks near us, given naturally to the grass and by happy, cooing free-range pigeons. A thorough soaping to kill any clinging beasties, then 24 hours immersed in a bath of warmed dylon cold (funny, right?), with vinegar rather than their brand fixative. I think they turned out pretty nice.

Here I am pinning the fascinator into her hair. Doesn’t she look glamourous? Seriously. I used the same dye from the feathers to dye my dress – not that you can particularily see it here – but this is my own wedding dress, a linen sleevless number that I made two years ago when I had my own special day. I love how the dye changed it. The tatting that trims the neck and hem was handmade by my blind great aunt, and it absorbed the dye differently then the linen, turning a lovely mossy kelp colour.  I had expected the linen itself to be a much darker turquoise too, but I love this shade now – a pale smokey winter sun on stormy ocean colour. Perfect.

Ah, here is a better picture. That shiny sash is actually 2 meters of the most expensive ribbon I will (hopefully) ever buy. The necklace I’m wearing there is a found shell pendant I made ages ago that just happend to be the exact same colour as my dress. Thank you, ocean.

Sigh. I know yesterday I was all pro-fall, but rain rain go away. I miss summer already.

ps. Thanks to Irene for the use of her goreous photos! Check our her lovely photo blog too, why don’t you.

Harvest circle

Wading through the stimuli of the summer, the bounty of ideas and inspirations I’ve collected and documented in the past few months. It’s hard to believe we’re now coasting into fall, the equinox is just a days away and it’s harvest time, both literally as the garden and market are overflowing with that rich glorious autumn produce, and figuratively as I scurry to pack away all the bountiful sun-inspired ideas in my brain before the frost comes and hunkering down for winter begins in earnest. Here is a harvest of photos from the summer that I revisited today, riffing on circles and dots and holes and such. The first few images are from a day at the beach in Deep Cove, and this motif stayed with me all summer, showing up everywhere!

yoyos and embroidery on a tee shirt I made for my friend T

I found this nifty chest on the street and it begged for collage

I bought a big roll of mural paper, and now every time we have people over we make it a doodle party The dots always make an appearance...

M&A: I've redecorated the kitchen in your tomatoes. It's a good look. Thanks for sharing your bounty!

I painted this found purse to cover up some bike grease stains

It will take me many many months to absorb and reflect on all the inspirations of the summer months, all the photos and thoughts jotted down. I’ve got them put up like glowing jars of jam and pickles lining the shelves of my mind. But I’ve cracked the spine on a new journal, and even though I’m no longer a student, the crispness of the air of September still feels like new beginnings, there is still that thrill and new motivation to muster focus and strength to take on new projects.  The first red maple leaves showed up here yesterday overnight, vibrant and glowing. Here we are again.

Hope you are all enjoying the gold coloured afternoons and pulling out wool sweaters.

Anna