With a little help from my own personal knitting support  group (thanks guys!) I worked out how to knit up my lovely Noro yarn into (the beginnings of) a stripey chevron scarf. See?

So far so good! Except I’m pretty sure I’m going to run out of yarn. [Oh no, I will have to buy more Noro... what a tragedy.] I’ve 3 different dye lots and my plan is to alternate chunks from each ball to mix up the colourways a bit, but overall it will be shades of grey with brighter swaths of turquoise and other greeny, bluey, purpley tones. Nom.

If anyone is curious, that nice pointy chevron shape is brought to you by a ridged double decrease, as follows:

Insert R needle into 2 stitches as if to knit them together. Slip BOTH stitches simultaneously over to the right needle. Knit one stitch, and simultaneously pass both slipped stitches over the knit stitch and off the R needle.

I really like the way the centre of the chevron is raised up, and I’m adding randomly spaced ribbed/garter rows to echo that on the perpendicular axis. The combined effect is reminiscent of leaf veins…

And here are a couple more journal pages,

i dreamt that one of my incisors cracked and came loose

at a very grey intersection i saw a tree with a halo of bright orange berries

And a painting I made as a birthday present for my friend K, who is an excellent cook (and who writes a killer food blog that you definitely want to peruse):

sweet, sour, salty, bitter, spicy and umami

Happy Monday, everyone.

I’m trying to keep this post text-lite post because I’m working through a bout of pretty bad carpal tunnel/arm anger, but everything is great so i wanted to share. [and i still have too much to say! sorry, wrist.]

There is a chorus to this post – sing along if you like.

• Two powerful new books: An Illustrated Life and Live Through This : taking me by the shoulders and giving me a good loving shake: what a break through!

one of my favourite pages from An Illustrated Life, by Penelope Dullaghan

The two quotations I love above are:

God dwells within you, as you. Exactly as you are… To know god you only need to renounce one thing – your sense of division from god. Otherwise, just stay as you were made, within your natural character.

-Elizabeth Gilbert(!!), from Eat, Pray, Love.

and

If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living.

-Joseph Campbell, from The Power of Myth

• A new medium and a new habit: water colours & art journalling: what a break through!

birthday lilies and a geometric dinner

things that made me happy on my birthday

• A new project: self portraits: what a break through!

feeling conspicuously disconnected

on my walk i found a mirror

• A new love: Noro yarn: delighting in the joy and indulgence of gorgeous colour: planning a cool project with it: yeah yeah yeah!

• A new age: a new perspective: what a break through!

Loving my work and feeling it is emerging true and easily, seeing and feeling things to paint everywhere, constantly. It’s been a long time coming.

What a break through! Whee!

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

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.

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…

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

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.

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

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.

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.