The Edge of Empty

When I am not seeing the beauty or humor in the world, I know it is time to make something. I have found that I am a much happier person when I take time to create. Making things has been a part of my life since I was tiny and playing with my grandmother's button box. Last semester, I brought only paper craft materials with me to school. Over the winter break, I spent days making chain maille. I took that as a sign that perhaps I should bring my supplies back for this semester. Because the school had us take a Contract Negotiation course this past weekend (woohoo-1 credit in a weekend!), we have been going for almost two weeks without a day free from school. Last night, I was studied out and decided to take a break. I rummaged through my rings and found that I had the supplies to make this pendant called Dragon's Eye by Lisa Smeltzer. I bought the tutorial from Blue Buddha Boutique ages ago, so it was fun to finally tackle it. The finished pendant is fairly chunky--abo...

My friends and family know that I do not like snakes at all. In fact, I can honestly say that snakes scare me. This fear stems from several incidents in my childhood. The first incident occurred at my great-grandfather's home. Grandaddy Findlay was a cantankerous old man in his 80's. When I was very young, he took me out to the chicken coop and sent me in to collect the eggs. His chicken coop was low and dark. Once inside the coop, I reached into the nest, found an egg, and pulled it out. Unfortunately, this egg was wrapped in the snake who had swallowed it whole. Needless to say, this was a bit traumatic and I have suffered from ophidiophobia (the fear of snakes) since that time. To be honest, I don't even like to touch pictures of snakes in books. I know this is unreasonable, but phobias are irrational. During the first semester of law school, I missed having time to craft so one of my main goals over the winter break was to spend as much time as possible making things. ...

Recently, the Hubster's division was moved across the base.  This was a great opportunity to change things up in his office.  Even better, with the move he gained a window.  While we were decorating his office, we came up with the idea of creating a curtain from some of his dive shirts.  For Navy divers, dive shirts are a big deal.  Starting with the shirt from dive school, divers collect shirts from their duty stations and trade shirts with other divers.  Most of the time, the shirt itself is navy blue with gold (yellow) lettering.  Occasionally, shirts will feature full color illustrations.  Just because all of the shirts were blue does not mean that they matched though. One of the shirts was 19 years old so it was quite faded while one was relatively new.  Matching all of those shades of blue and gold proved to be quite challenging.  Fortunately, we found a Moda fabric called Marble Star in yellow that worked beautifully to tie all ...

My grandmother was a quilter.  She taught me a lot and I spent many evenings stitching on quilts with her, but I have never created a quilt by myself.  I have thought about quilting many times, but I have never taken the plunge. When I came upon In Color Order's Half-Square Triangle Block of the Month  tonight, I must have been feeling very optimistic about the amount of free time that will be available to me this year.  What really excited me was that I would only need to learn to make half square triangles and then arrange them in different patterns. Even better, I would only need to create one quilt square per month.  This seems totally achievable.  So now, I am publicly committing to this project and have placed the button on the sidebar. I am getting started late so I am giving myself permission to make the blocks the month after they are introduced. If you want to join the LATE block of the month club, hop on over to In Color Order.   The Hubste...

Shortly after we brought our ferret home, we realized that he needed someplace he could call his own.  We went to our resource of choice--the book  Ferrets for Dummies . The book describes how to make a nest box out of a storage bin and a pvc connector.  On our next visit to the home improvement store, we picked up the items necessary to make a home for A. G. Ferret.  Much to my surprise, the house turned out great and you can see that he loves it.  He did the decoration himself.  That blanket started the day on the lower level of his cage, but he dragged it upstairs and into the box.  Here, he is looking mighty pleased with himself and ready for a nap after all the hard work.

My parents recently moved to be closer to my sister and her family.  My niece has already claimed a room in their house as her own. I know how exciting that can be because I too had a room at my grandparents house.   I am pretty sure that my cousins were all jealous of me and still have a bit of resentment, but I don't care.  The summers that I spent at my grandparents are some of the best memories that I have and I wouldn't trade them for anything.  Besides, my cousins were several years younger than me so the room could have been claimed by somebody else once I had gone off to college.  To my knowledge, only one of my cousins ever stayed the summer with my grandparents so it remained my room until the house was no longer their home.    I hope that my niece creates as many wonderful memories of the time she spends at my parents house as I have of the time I spent with my grandparents.  I also thought she needed to make that claim official so I sp...