Month: February 2017

DIY Rope Flower Basket

~ C ~ 1 Comment

I am loving the weather this week! I swept off the back porch and sat out and read one night, and we took a few walks.

I’m still working on getting the house together. I’m missing some furniture. I have plans for a farmhouse table and a sideboard for the entrance way, but those projects are still in the future.

Right now I’m working on the living room/dining room area. I have some curtains up, but they aren’t my favorite, so I’ve been on the lookout for something better, and I think I found something unexpected, but good. I’ll share that with you in a later post, once I have everything up.

For today I want to share with you my latest DIY project. I have been trying to keep up with keeping my mantle decorated for each season, but since Christmas it’s felt a bit bare. I’ve toyed with the idea of these DIY boxes as wedding centerpieces and wanted to make a mock-up. It was super easy and looks great next to my white owls.

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Supplies needed:

Cardboard Box
Rope
Hot Glue
Fake Flowers

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I used an oatmeal box to make my box. Since I already had made a large one for the side, I cut the box down a bit to make it shorter. The top edges were raw, so I started at the top of the box to ensure they were covered. From there I wound the rope around the box, hot gluing as I went.

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I love the result! What do you think? Wedding centerpieces?

Tournament of Love and Beauty

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Saturday I went to the SCA event I had been looking forward to – the Tournament of Love and Beauty.

I’m truly enjoying these smaller events. It’s easier to focus on what is happening, to pay attention to the fine work as these events are on a much smaller scale and less overwhelming than Pennsic.

A dear friend was honored in a small ceremony where she became apprenticed (this may not be the correct term) to a Pelican. I’d try to explain what a Pelican is, but I fear it would be confusing, so I’ll let the website here explain.

It was so nice to see some friends, both from my household and a group we neighbor with at Pennsic. I watched a little of the fighting, sang in a bardic competition, and entered the arts and science competition.

There has been some conversation on a friend’s Facebook page about arts and science competitions and their merits. I’ve thought a lot about this, but with my being a novice, I hesitated to chime in. I’ll leave my thoughts here though. I like the chance and excuse to dig into something specifically with a goal to recreate it. I enjoy  researching and designing a project for a specific purpose and then sharing the knowledge I learn along the way. My things are crude at this stage, but I like to put them out there as a “Hey, I learned about a neat thing and tried my best to make a version of it and holy cow! How did they do this in medieval times?!” It may introduce something new to another person. By looking at others’ displays and entries, I learn as well.

My projects for this event were a comb and mirror, both items which were commonly given as love tokens in the 1300s.

Medieval H Comb
Mirror Case
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My Display

 

My Mother, the Mobster

~ C ~ 1 Comment

Mama likes to keep to herself and doesn’t want any Internet presence. She stays off Facebook and just last year updated to a Gmail address from her old school Juno account. So I had to ask her permission to share this story with you.

Ever have one of those days when you’re just tongue-tied? You think one thing but say another, and it comes out twisted?

Well, recently my parents and I were up in PA to run some errands and visit with my grandmother. Daddy wanted to swing by this antique shop we had stopped at in December to see if they still had a wrought iron chandelier he had passed up. Their plan is to use it at my brother’s wedding and then again at mine before finally hanging it in their “outdoor living space.”

We stopped at the store, and the chandelier was still sitting out front, but the store looked like it had gone out of business.

After doing some Internet research, we found a number associated with the store and my mother called them. The call went straight to voicemail so she left a message: “Hello. We were in your store in December and saw a chandelier which we were interested in and saw today that it is still there. We live nearly two hours away and are in town for a short while today and would like to purchase it from you. Could you please give us a call on this number to discuss if you want to get rid of us?”

Not – “if you want to get rid of it” but “get rid of us” – nothing mildly frightening or cryptic about that sentence. Daddy and I asked her if she realized what she had said, and she swore she said “it.” We laughed so hard about that, just imagining this antique dealer getting this bizarre threatening message about a chandelier.

Thankfully, she got the message’s  meaning, and they were able to arrange a meeting to get the chandelier on a different trip.

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Finally February

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It’s finally February! It seems like January just dragged on and on. I apologize for the delay in posts. It’s been a busy week.

The fellow and I made the first batch of mead. It’s sitting in the craft room just  bubbling away. I’m anxious to see if it tastes good, but I’ve got a long while yet to wait.

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Happy little mead jug

Next weekend there is a SCA event, and I’m staying busy getting things in order for it. I have decided that I want to hand-stitch a Viking under dress and an apron dress. I’m moving toward more obtainable period colors (a lot of the fabric and color combinations we use now are a result of our accessibility to colored linen and while they are possibly in period – especially for the wealthy – they were not common), and I want to create some lasting garments. The goal is to have pieces which I can mix and match.

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All of the tiny stitches!

Right now I’m working on the apron dress (the outer layer) and it’s going well. I know that I cut it a bit small, but I plan to add extra side panels in a looser stitch so that they can be removed when I have a size change.  I hope with some luck to be able to wear it next week, but we will see.

On another note, it seems that love is in the air! I tried to hold out until February, but I put up some Valentine’s Day decorations last weekend. Yesterday I put up the bulletin board at work. I wasn’t sure if it was cheesy, but my team said that it was cute, and dinosaurs never go out of style! What do you think?

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