Craft Books

Unfortunately, I tend to spend more time thinking about crafting than actually crafting. Part of it is that I need to feel really confident before I cut into the fabric horde and part of it is that I'm really lazy. Oh and I need to clean my room to get to the sewing machine. Anyway, I found two books lately that are great providing inspiration.

Zakka Sewing

Zakka is Japanese for household goods and this book has a lot of ideas for making cute everyday things around the home. Of course that squirrel tea cozy on the cover is exactly why I checked it out from the library, plus there is a ton of zakka type items on Etsy that I continuously drool over.

Cool Spaces For Kids

Is this really fun book that looks at how to develop kid space in areas both large and small, indoors and out. I love the projects in this book because they look so fresh. Some of them are diy constructions of items I've seen in kids catalogues that cater to the Waldorf set and some are just beautiful alternatives to the commercialized kids decor that seems to be invading our planet.

In the midst of this crafty creativity, my mom dug out an old Better Homes and Gardens Treasury of Needlecraft book that was stuck in her bookcase from 1982.

It was really interesting to see the resurgence of some of the projects in this book. They could easily come out of an Etsy shop now (appliqued owls and rainbows, stylized creche figures for Christmas, patchwork place mats, modern stuffed animals). While the photography was really cluttery-country and dated, I was still amazed that there were many projects that if taken out of their backdrop context would be very au courant. Still I don't see me making that doily appliqued quilt or the old school afghan made from day-glo poly-blend yarn.

Too Much Going On

Can I tell you how much I want to go to this? I'm already double booked for Saturday during these times, I know I can't make it. Can someone else go and drool for me? Tell me what I missed? Hint: my birthday is next month and I Heart Card Catalogues. AAAARRGGGHHHHH!

ST. LOUIS PUBLIC LIBRARY SURPLUS PROPERTY SALE

Surplus Property Sale
Library and Office Furnishings
(Including Tables, Chairs, File Cabinets, Children’s Seating, Library Furnishings)

“ITEMS SOLD AS IS”

DATE: Saturday, March 27, 2010
TIME: 9:00 AM – 1:00 PM
PLACE: St. Louis Public Library – Central West
1415 Olive Street (14th Street Loading Dock Entrance)
St. Louis, MO 63103

No Preview of items for sale
No phone calls please

ALL SALES FINAL
Cash and carry—no checks or credit cards accepted

Walk In the Woods

Our first Walk In The Woods event was this past Sunday, a very wet and cold day for the 2nd day of spring. Amazingly, we had friends who were willing to join us - Steven and Mary and their girls and Caroline and her two children joined us. We traveled to Mastodon State Historic Site where we spent about 2 hours hiking a short gravel trail. Hiking isn't really the descriptive word: puddle jumping, pebble collecting, rock splashing, mound climbing, stick finding and nature gazing are all probably more apt. It was a wonderful time despite the drizzle and the chill. After the "hike" we spent some time enjoying blondies and exploring the little museum on site. My camera's battery power was giving up by the time we reached the mastodon bones, but be assured that they were wonderful to behold. So was the Giant Ground Sloth re-creation. This was well worth the journey. Tune in next month to see where we might travel next!

What's Going On This Week?

ACTION! Join the People's Settlement - I'll be down there on Saturday afternoon for the bakesale, and probably wander down for the kick-off too. Events keep getting scheduled:

Frustrated with Corporate Control of Politics? Angry over unjust Housing Foreclosures? Big Bank Bailouts? Continuous War? No Change?

That is why a group of us has decided to take the power back and come together on a broad based front, united against a common threat. Join us at the People's Settlement, a week of action dedicated to focusing on various corporations in the downtown area; from Bank of America's bailouts to Peabody Coal's unethical energy to the prison industrial complex to Anthem's blocking of real healthcare reform.

This is the first step in building a genuine broad-based anti-corporate movement in St. Louis. All of us want an end to injustice--from issues of from local control, to clean energy to peace to jobs to healthcare to equality and everything in between. And we have been working separately for too long. It's time that we stand up and stand together on a united front! Many of us have worked hard on political campaigns and activist campaigns attempting to bend the ears of our legislators and it has been to no avail. Why? Because corporate power divides us on every issue and blocks us from effecting real change and legislative action.

We hope our work can harness anger endemic in corporate control of politics, the economy and corporate personhood and serve as a rallying cry for similar actions across the nation. It is also noteworthy that for the first time, all of the major federal campaigns--Healthcare, Financial Reform and Immigration--are emphasizing the need for there to be significant, mass movement in order to achieve anything meaningful in DC. So join us to "break up with your bank", participate in guerrilla street theater, campout on downtown, demand clean energy and a real economy, or simply raise your voice.

We will kick-off the event at 3pm on March 24th with a “real economy” demonstration in Kiener Plaza.

Tentative Schedule:

Wednesday, March 24
3:00- Kick Off Rally
3:30-Foreclosure action at Bank of America
6:00-Settle! Set up the Settlement

Thursday, March 25th
7 a.m. LGBQT Action against Laclede Gas Discrimination
http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=376221911371
2-3:00 p.m. Break Up with Your Bank!
5-6:00 p.m CWA-Revenue Action

Friday, March 26th
3:30-5:00 Anti-War Action

Saturday, March 27th
11-1:00 Literacy for Social Justice Teach In
1-3:00 Privatization of Education Bake Sale

Sunday, March 28th
1-3:00 p.m. Faith Based Action-Catholic Action Network
3:30-5:30 p.m. Labor History Tour
http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=401545241423&ref=mf

Plus great stuff every evening! Come check us out!

What You Can Do: We need you to come for the kickoff! We need you to camp-out in the evening. We want you to invite your friends and family. Most importantly, this is a movement, we want your ideas on programming and actions.

Sign Up to camp:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BZ3XC2V

Remarkable Creatures

On the way to and from Chicago, I took up Tracy Chevalier's Remarkable Creatures, a book that I've been meaning to read, but kept putting off. I've been a long time fan of Chevalier's, since Carol told me I need to read the Virgin Blue (she was right) and I have no idea why I let the book languish for so long. Fortunately, the library wouldn't let me renew it, so I had to read it.

Remarkable Creatures is the story of two women, separated by age, class and education, who build an unlikely and often strained friendship through their obsession with finding fossils in the early 1800's. Young Mary Anning sells the fossils she finds to tourists to support her family while spinster Elizabeth Philpot keeps her finds in carefully curated cases. Both are viewed with suspicion and ridicule by their seaside neighbors. When Mary finds the fossilized skeleton of what can only be imagined as a monster, their world changes as the religious and scientific community begin to debate the ramifications of the find.

Chevalier returns to themes she has explored in previous novels: self -determination, gender roles, the life of a person who does not conform to society's expectations, and the everyday lives of people living in watershed moments of history. One of the most interesting aspects of this book is that the characters were actual people. Mary and Elizabeth's conversations with each other and other historical (and more famous) figures are fiction, but the main actions and their role in the early work leading up to Darwin's theory of evolution are our history. And while the history is 200 years old, it is incredibly relevant to today, as witnessed by the actions of the Texas Board of Education last week.

Arkansas Songbirds

I saw this on the Arkansas State Parks Facebook fanpage, this commercial is in the semi-finalist round and honestly I've fallen for it (yeah, I know it's a Folger's ad), anyway, I love it. Give them a listen and vote if you can. The first singer is the receptionist at the Ozark Folk Center and a recent transplant from KC. While she didn't plan on singing for an audience, the folk center got her into it (she's got a few video's on You Tube - Ruby Pine and the Old Saps). I don't know how the commercial came about, but I love it. Maybe it's the chickens, def. her voice, but also that nostalgic 70's feel. And of course the AR connection makes me want them to win even more.

Spur of the Moment

Last weekend, while packing for the Memphis trip, I realized that we'd lost our little factory made ipod cozy. It was sort of crappy anyway, but I didn't like hauling it around with minimal protection. So this weekend, in and effort to put off cleaning out the bathroom, packing, or freaking out about this upcoming week, I decided to whip up a little ipod cozy. I'd been thinking about how to do it for awhile (sometimes it takes awhile for me to get my head around things). I had done some research earlier, and I ended up sort of following this tutorial, with regards to the lining. I've been doing these button cover hair thingies, so they got incorporated too. All in all, I'm quite pleased with it, and it gave me an excuse to use one of my favorite fabrics and to reuse an old pair of pants that had worn out (for the lining - faux velvet is nice for cushioning) as well as an old receiving blanket of Nora's for the batting layer. It took me less than an hour since I had everything on hand and the sewing machine seems to be permanently out, and I'm really happy with the final result. Here's how it turned out:

The claspy thing at the top, is basically two upholstery buttons that I covered with a hair elastic slipped through the shank of one of them. It can be "buttoned" around the other so the ipod doesn't slip out.

I recovered some more buttons and added the hair elastics for Nora's pigtails. I'm so pleased I've figured out how to do this. I've seen these at craft shows for about $5 a pair and up, and this is a great way to use up fabric scraps and it's not really that expensive to make, especially since mom picked up a bunch of button covers at a store clearance. If I were super crafty and super matchy I could make an outfit to match the ponytail holders. But I'm not, so she'll just have to go with these.