8 posts tagged “crafts”
I need to stop drafting posts and then not actually posting them.
I haven't been posting much lately because I'm super-duper busy as heck. Both the lead bloggers at DIY Life (one is darkmatt3r) stepped down at the beginning of March, and a couple of other ladies and I replaced them (the fact that it took three people to replace two harried ones, and the fact that all three of us are still very busy, might give you an idea of how much work we're talking about).
I wrote two long things in March, too. My article about Hinamatsuri, a holiday I think is really nifty because it involves super-fancy dolls, didn't get a ton of hits (but maybe people will discover it over time). There are some craft patterns at the end... a paper diorama, little cloth dolls, etc.
I also did a free knit/crochet pattern round-up for Easter: bunnies and lambs (or, if you prefer, rabbits and baby sheep). More cuteness per column inch than I knew what to do with. I want to make just about everything I listed, but I can't justify doing so. Anyway: Bunnies and Lambs to Knit, Bunnies and Lambs to Crochet.
I'm getting back on those "best free patterns of the month" columns, but skipping a few months. I have notes for a month that I'm not going to cover, so I will post them here. Later today, probably.
W/r/t my last post, I haven't yet bought any dolls. I did find that my local Japanese market is selling a few basic Re-Ment sets, so I bought one (single, not case) box of "Kawaii Kitchen" and one box of some food-based set. I don't think these are the new Americanized versions. Most of their other candy toy sets are based on, like, Power Rangers or some kind of mecha.
I banged my finger up pretty good last week, and in doing so, learned something: if you have a choice between Hello Kitty Band-Aids and non-Hello Kitty Band-Aids, get the Hello Kitty ones. They're bigger than the WaterBlock style anyway, and they will make you smile (at least, they will if you are me). I've been covering my bandaids in porous clear tape, then wearing a rubber finger cot every time I have to wash my hands.
I have managed to get a friend totally obsessed with Death Note. Now we are having long philosophical debates about A) whether or not we would use the Death Note, and how, and B) our deep, abiding love for L. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you clearly spend your leisure time more wisely than I do. (To be fair, though, everyone I know who sees the show becomes mildly obsessed with it. This includes my previously-animation-hating mother, who has also fallen hard for Ratatouille and anything from Studio Ghibli.)
(I'm also giggling at the moment, because Law & Order: Criminal Intent is on, and the suspect's last name is Morrissey, so they're saying things like, "I DON'T THINK MORRISSEY COULD HAVE PLANNED THIS ON HIS OWN," and I'm like, NO, HE WAS TOO MISERABLE, HE WILL BE CAUGHT WHEN JOHNNY MARR TURNS HIM IN....)
Oh, dear. So now my fiance, who I have depended on to be the Hauler of Stuff throughout our relationship but particularly since our car accident (he wasn't very injured, and healed quickly), has hurt his back.
Worse, he has no idea how! It's been bothering him mildly on and off for the last week. He drove 90 minutes each way on Thanksgiving Day, sitting in an uncomfortable folding chair most of the day in the interim, then on Saturday and Sunday, he exhibited at a convention where he also sat all day on uncomfortable chairs.
He takes stuff into the con, too, but the thing I can think of that is most likely to have injured him is his Tub O' Original Art For Sale, which is so heavy that I can't even attempt to pick it up without pain. (It's several hundred sheets of bristol board, around 12x15ish.) Don't know, though. There was no moment where he did something and then thought, "I shouldn't have done that."
He has lots of good drugs from the doctor, two days off work, and a heating pad that I lent him after his appointment this morning.
On top of all this, as mentioned in my last psot, my dog has been sick this past week. Not too horribly sick, but she had a bladder infection and a yeasty ear infection. She's still being treated for both. $400 so far; I took responsiblity for half of it. *groan*
I found the missing library book I mentioned in that post. It was right where it should have been, in my stack of library books on the part of the bookshelf that I reserve for them, only I couldn't see it. It was between two larger books. I was looking at the spines, and the book I sought was pushed back a little, so the spines of the larger books met around it! You could only see that it was there by looking at the stack from a different angle.
Button Angst
And now, to the title of the post!
The other night, as a Present To Me, I ordered this purple cashmere v-neck cardigan and the matching tank that you can see in the picture. They were on sale ($60 total), and I like to be warm in the winter. It isn't here yet.
I've heard some bad things about this year's Target cashmere (like, "it's thin and itchy"), so we'll see. Last year's was great. Eucalan wash -- I use the lavender version -- helps soften most protein-fiber clothing, and you can also use a bit of diluted hair conditioner on cashmere to soften it further, as long as you can stand the conditioner being against your skin.
It seems as though the buttons will color-match, but they look whitish in some of the photos, and it's difficult to tell whether they match or not. They might have picked up a flash reflection, or they might just be light-colored buttons.
I love the intaglio/lens/cabochon buttons made by Winky and Dutch, which are a picture under a clear dome set into a metal backing and which the company itself seemingly only sells to merchants. Some time ago a friend's cousin added an entire set of their pin-up girl buttons to a sweater she had de-and-re-constructed for herself.*
It looked really cool, but the buttons themselves are pricey, as buttons go, and not all that easy to find. I'm more likely to buy something in person than to mail order it. For example, somewhere -- still in the mess of boxes from my last move -- indifferently packed by the worst movers ever, and not labelled -- I have W&D barettes, the "Sad Puppy" design in a hair-pin setting, from a shop I used to go to. Their other jewelry is not too difficult to find.
So, I noticed that ReproDepot has been having a sale on the W&D buttons, which they sell at a decent price to begin with, most of them in two sizes. It seems like they might be trying to sell through their remaining stock. The selection has decreased over the last few years; they used to carry many more "sets" than they do, IIRC, and a lot more single-button designs.
The problem is that my sweater, assuming I even want to replace the buttons on it, has five buttons. I don't like either of the Sci-Fi collections enough to buy one; I wanted the Robot or Tourism collection. No robots to be seen, and they only have a few of the Tourism buttons, one of which doesn't really match the others.
I was going to get London/Tokyo/Hollywood/Miami, all of which have blue skies, but the only other one available is Brooklyn Bridge, which doesn't. Pegasus would have been OK as the fifth match, but it was unavailable in the smaller size, about 1/3" or so, that I needed. This is the size for "shirt" buttons. There is a larger size, more like 3/4", which would work for stuff like chunky handknit sweaters. I have at least one or two of each, but not enough to work for this project.
Some searching took me to EQuilter, which has tons of cool stuff and seems to be the only other regular online merchant of these buttons. They have a larger selection (with a few more designs at the "previous page" link), but they only sell them in sets of three -- usually three of the same button, but sometimes three thematically linked buttons -- or in larger sets. They do have the robot set.
They charge, however, much more than ReproDepot does. The buttons I wanted are around $1.50-$2, depending on whether or not there's a sale, at ReproDepot. They break down to over $3 each at EQuilter, probably because they only sell the larger size (it seems). This is a lot more than I want to spend on potentially putting wacky buttons on a sweater (even $1.50 is possibly excessive, but I've wanted to do this for so many years that I was willing to go for it).
End result: I bought six Tokyo buttons from ReproDepot for about $1.50 each. The other one I really liked was London, but I didn't think that mix-and-match would work unless each button was different, which I couldn't manage with ReproDepot's current selection. Since the sweater is purple - if I use it on that - the Tokyo design both seemed like a better match for purple and more appropriate in terms of color scheme. (Purple and sky blue seems more "Japanese" than "British", right?) Obviously, I bought one extra button "just in case."
It being Christmas, and having already bought the sweater set, I had to completely ignore every other thing I want from ReproDepot. (At the last link, it's the Ayumi Uyama felt animal kits: I like the deer, rabbit, dog, and duck, in order of preference. The Minigurumi kits are all pretty adorable, too: they look like designs from a book I have, Mame Wanko, which is all about tiny fabric dogs and their accessories.)
A Mysterious Yarn-Related Project
The other crafty thing I ordered lately was Lang Mille Colori yarn in color number 68, a sort of earthtone mix. Mille Colori is a self-striping wool/acrylic blend. #68 is on color chart 2, at that link, the strip on the far right.
This is for a mystery project for which I wanted a relatively tough self-striping yarn, worsted or bulky, with non-garish colors and thin, rapidly-changing stripes.
I looked at a bunch of Berroco yarns: Keltic (stripe pattern too long and subtle), Jasper (composition made me worried it would pill, didn't see an appropriate color scheme, stripes also too subtle), and Foliage (the only color I liked for the project had been discontinued, plus I was worried that the spin was too loose/uneven -- it seems that Foliage is basically Berroco's version of Kureyon). I nearly chose Keltic's "Argyll" or "Tartan" colors; my friend memorably described most of the other colors as "week-old stale vomit" -- ouch. I considered Noro Kureyon (too uneven) and Big Kureyon (not the right colors for this project), and Rowan Tapestry (DK weight, too drapey).
I found Mille Colori in a weird, serendipitous way... it kept popping up in Google Image Searches, then also popped up when I did a search on "self-striping" and variations of the term at the site where I almost ordered some Keltic.
I hope people like this thing when I'm done with it, because I really have agonized over the yarn. If it goes right, it'll be a free pattern. If not, I will cry real tears of tears: I've been planning it for months, and I'm putting off another project to do it, and as I mentioned a few posts back, my last attempt went really wrong.
* The same girl, who supposedly didn't even particularly like me, gave me this great pair of black Doc Martens oxfords that I wear to this day. They were almost new, but she was moving and wanted to travel light, packing most of the stuff she was taking into her soft guitar case around the instrument itself. The shoes were too weighty and bulky for her to take. I still think of her gratefully every time I wear the things... and last I heard, she was doing OK.
I've been sitting on this for a few weeks...
I'm writing for DIY Life now. I'll be posting on general craft and DIY topics, but most specifically on knitting and crochet. (If you click that link, you can see a picture of the pitcher I use for iced tea and Kool-Aid. It came from Target earlier this summer....)
A post that I'm particularly proud of went up today: Pottercraft. Check it out!
That post just about ate my brain. What happened was that I found a bunch of things myself, with the help of Flickr and Wists and the Craftster search function and so on, along with some patterns I already knew of. Then I found out that most of that material was completely obviated by the Leaky Cauldron and Freshisle Fibers sites, and could be condensed to two paragraphs. There was much gnashing of teeth & I was really mentally exhausted. I feel like I approached the topic backwards, and could have saved myself a lot of time if I'd looked to see if the Leaky Cauldron had a craft area first. They've gone around the internet asking almost anyone who comes up with an original pattern or way to duplicate a Potterverse item if they can use the pattern on their site.
I don't really do Harry Potter-inspired crafts, but I like the books and I have a lot of friends who are deeply into that fandom, and I've been aware that stuff is going on. One thing I didn't put in the post was about a woman in the UK who was trying to make over her wheelchair for book-release night; I left it out because she hadn't finished the project yet.
Another post I wrote this week was on kanzashi, which ppl might like. I actually want to review two books that do really interesting things with kanzashi forms (& other traditional Japanese craft stuff), but I think I will space out the Japanese content a little. Kanzashi are the hair ornaments associated with kimono - there are metal ones that tinkle, but I wrote about hana kanzashi, which are detailed flowers made of fabric.
Traveling across West Africa, it's easy to tell when you're coming to a town or city: the spindly brown trees become decorated with plastic bags like Christmas tree tinsel. Caught in shrubs and on fences, the bags clog sewers and water sources. They are ubiquitous; simple plastic bags are handed out with practically every purchase at a market stall or container shop.
Unlike in the United States--where the same litter is often visible but where waste bins and recycling are common--streets in many West African cities are devoid of garbage bins and there are few street cleaning crews to collect the waste.
This is a really interesting article about women in Burkina Faso who started an initiative to collect and recycle plastic shopping bags. Their goats were eating the bags and dying, so the women, troubled, started collecting and cleaning the bags and turning them into yarn. With the yarn, they make small saleable crafts, like the dolls shown above, as well as bags in various styles. They formed a collective under the Houet Women's Action Group for Economic Reliance, and both sell their crafts within Burkina Faso and to exporters. (Their stuff will be coming to the Hunger Site, if it isn't there already.)
For many of the women working in the collective, craft-making has become the only source of money-making. Many of the women are widows and single mothers who have come together to find ways to support their families in a country where incomes average around $1,200 annually.
Totally worth a look. The dolls in the photo above are crocheted and represent brides. Thanks to what these women are doing, their city is cleaner and more people have work.
First of all... the lack of posts around here is illusory; I've been working on filling in the archive with content from my old blog. I also wrote a FAQ, but haven't posted it publicly and wanted to look at it a lot more before I do. (Sometimes my sense of humor doesn't read well on the internet.)
Last night I actually went to the craft store and spent money, which is notable for two reasons. One is that I never have any money. The other is that I don't usually go anywhere alone, particularly since that car accident a few months back, and since nobody ever wants to go to the craft store with me, I haven't set foot in one in a while.
So, this was a trip to Jo-Ann Etc, where they're having a big sale. I went in armed with the usual 50% off coupon from the mailer. Nothing I bought was earth-shattering, but I thought people might like to come along with me for the ride anyway.
I was looking for this fabric, which I saw there a year ago, couldn't afford, and haven't been able to find in a store since. It's by Alexander Henry and it's called Star Sign. It is my number one fabric crush. One day I will get a yard or two of this fabric and make a tote bag or pillow or quilt or something, and then the madness will end. I'm not even into astrology; I just like the style of the illustrations. (I borrowed these photos from Cia's Palette, to avoid direct linking.)
Can you see and feel the cuteness? CAN YOU? At any rate, I struck out again this time. It doesn't seem like they've restocked any "hip" novelty prints (Alexander Henry, Michael Miller, etc) since last year, alas. It's a good thing I picked up "Mini Calaveras," below, at that time, in a pink colorway: I could only afford one yard of fabric, and I was looking for something to line a small purple bag with. "Mini Calaveras" has gold glitter accents just about everywhere that looks yellow in the scan. I didn't pick up the pink and white "Flora de los Muertos" faux-lace pattern, either, and I regret it.
I still haven't lined that bag, primarily because I now want to use the pink "Mini Calaveras" in a much more visible manner. It's so cool that it would be a shame to hide it. I think Alexander Henry is my favorite fabric designer.
But the subject of this post is supposed to be last night's trip, and all I'm saying is that they didn't have any of these fabric designs that I was looking for, so I left the fabric department and headed for patterns. Butterick patterns are on sale for 99 cents, but it happens that all the patterns that interest me right now are by Simplicity. I looked at a few pattern books for a while, then moved on to yarn. Well, I detoured in scrapbooking and beading, but wasn't really into looking at those supplies last night.
I have a serious lack of basic, plain, worsted-weight, solid-color yarn in my stash. There are amigurumi I've wanted to make and/or design, but I haven't been able to do anything about it due to the sheer scarcity of appropriate yarn at my disposal. I wanted to take advantage of the sale to remedy that. Unfortunately, I was completely unable to make up my mind, and running out of time, so I ended up with a skein of ecru Red Heart Soft and another of Mushroom brown Wool-Ease. Not very exciting at all, but appropriate for things like bunnies and deer and Totoros.
Knitting needles and crochet hooks are mostly 40% off, but a few were on clearance. The clearance needles were Jo-Ann's store-brand tubular plastic needles in very large sizes. They normally go for about $7-10, but are currently less than $2. They have #17, 19, and 35 for sure; not sure about 15 and 50. I've needed some #19 needles for a while, to knit a single small project, so I picked some up. I don't know how the quality is, but since I'll only be using them for a few hours, I'm not too concerned.
Sugar & Cream kitchen cotton was on sale for $1.79, so I picked up three balls. I've wanted to make some washcloths for a while, not because I enjoy washcloth knitting (dear god, NO), but because I like the finished product. When I finish these, I probably won't even post them here, because they're really not the sort of knitting you brag about much. My favorite pattern is the plain, diamond-shaped garter stitch one with a square of eyelets around the edge, because the first knitted washcloth I ever had - made by a relative - was in that pattern, and I think it has an elegant simplicity, as utilitarian household items go.
I bought this yarn because I have it in an unbleached shade, but the pattern is so mindless that I can't actually bring myself to use that color... YAWN. I made it in a purple/berry blend a couple of years ago, and that was tolerable because I at least got to see the color blend happening. Solid beige yarn requires something much more difficult, maybe a lace swatch.
Anyway, here are the colors I chose: Swimming Pool, Summer Splash, and Beach Ball Blue. They go together pretty nicely, and they will go with my bathroom gear. Erika at Red Shirt Knitting did some "garterlac" cloths with what looks like the first two.
The store was about to close, so I only had time to pop into the embroidery department to pick up a pattern I've wanted for a while: Clover's "Animals." Clover's patterns are made for their punch embroidery tool, but they're just heat-transfers like any other embroidery patterns, so you don't necessarily have to use them with the tool. I like Sublime Stitching's patterns as much as the rest of the kids do, but these Clover patterns are also very appealing, have a different, quirky line-drawing style, and are maybe not as hipster-trendy. They're identifiably craft products from Japan, with the cute style that implies, but you can probably actually buy them at your local store! (Or you can, indeed, buy them at SuperBuzzy.) This pattern retails for $3, so I used my 50% off coupon on it and got it for $1.50. Almost everything else was on sale!
No time, alas, to look at buttons and patches.
Total spent? About $15 for 5 balls of utilitarian yarn, a set of #19 needles, and an adorable embroidery pattern. This satisfied my desire to add a few little new things into the mix, without completely breaking the bank.
Here are the other embroidery patterns that I know of in Clover's line: Kitchen, Garden, and Flower. (All the Clover embroidery pattern pics are lifted from the Hancock Fabrics site.)
Have you gotten any craft bargains lately?
I spent some time at a bookstore tonight, and the evening would have been bland if I hadn't found this book:
A reviewer on Amazon said that it came out in the UK last year, but it's new in the US. This is a book with features on a bunch of people who run well-known craft blogs and small online shops, but who have not received a lot of book coverage or become the go-to people when craft book writers want to talk about crafters on the web (Jean Railla, Megan Reardon, Leah Kramer, Jenny Hart). I'm pretty sure they are not in the Austin or Portland "Craft Mafias" (Super Crafty, DIY Network's Stylelicious). They're people like Hilary from Wee Wonderfuls and Maitreya from CraftLog, blogs I really enjoy. (Also, the girl who does One Good Bumblebee: I'm so sorry, but I can't remember her name just now.)
In the book, the crafters talk about things like their personal histories, what inspires them, and what sort of workspace they have. You will be able to see that there is a wide range of women (and they are almost all women) aged about 25-50. Each person profiled also contributes a pattern: there is a bookcover, a utility tray made of thick felt, a cute tissue cover that looks like a house with eyes, and so on.
I don't actually own this book, and I wasn't able to spend more than a few minutes looking at it tonight, so I can't give it a fair review. All I can say is that I was impressed with what I saw: it looks really promising. The only thing is, it seems like the focus of the book is largely sewing-crafters, so just about all of the patterns are for small things to sew.
Last year, I spent a lot of time looking at this book, but ultimately didn't review it:
To be honest, I felt that this book should have been called Organizing Your Fantasy Craft Space, because it quickly becomes apparent that the women profiled are not average crafters. These people own companies... and I'm not talking about small online shops, I'm talking about companies that make products that you buy at the craft store. Suze Weinberg is profiled here, for example... this is a woman who's had full page ads in rubber stamping magazines pretty much since there was such a thing, so of course her workroom is a showplace. A lot of suggestions in this book are impractical for actual organization, and a number of popular crafts are given short shrift. Some of the crafters involved in it have workspaces that are pretty, but don't seem extremely functional... more like a decorator's idea of a way to make a room look like it belongs to a person who creates things.
I mention this book here because I think The Crafter's Companion is, in its photos and descriptions of the workspaces of crafters who may have small businesses but are not too far removed from the average crafter, a lot more useful and accessible in this regard. There are some similarities in storage systems between the two books (I really had no idea how many people who work with fabric a lot just stack their fabric on shelves), but The Crafter's Companion probably has more to do with your real life. Or mine, anyway.
Incidentally, has anyone seen The Crafter Culture Handbook? Given that I haven't been totally in love with the spate of "alternacraft" books in the last year or so (Craftivity, Bazaar Bizarre or vice-versa, AlternaCraft, etc), will I like it or hate it? The library doesn't have it, and I haven't seen it in a bookstore yet. Amazon reviews are few and completely mixed, suggesting that you've probably seen the stuff in the book online already, if you hang out on teh web.
And if you didn't hang out on "teh web," how is it that you are reading my blog right now?
A bit before my last post here, the one from March, my fiance and I got in a car accident. The car behind us was hit by a drunk driver. That car then hit us. We've had varying degrees of whiplash: Tom is bigger and stronger than me, and has a healthier back in terms of fitness, so he was better within a few weeks. I seem to have wrenched the entire right side of my back from neck to lumbar. Things are improving but I'm still really uncomfortable. I definitely can't knit, crochet, or embroider: I'm right-handed, and all those things cause me to be tense in the shoulder, and I can't handle any more shoulder tension than I already have.
(I imagine I'm doing better than the passenger from the car that was hit and then hit us: she had to go to the hospital wearing a cervical collar and strapped to a board immediately after the accident.)
That said, I picked up some knitting for the first time tonight, and I did OK. Still working in an intermittent manner on Knitty's "Branching Out." Recommended pattern: easy, relatively fast if you do a motif or two each night, good introduction to lace. I ought to have finished it ages ago, but it's a project I pick up for a few nights every couple of months. This time, no serious pain for me, so I can probably get back to a restrained amount of knitting.
A few days after my last post, I came down with a really bad cold, and have spent the last few weeks getting over it & fighting off a secondary sinus infection. I think that's all OK now. Ironically, I'm pretty sure I caught the cold when I was in the emergency room; colds usually take 10-14 days to take effect, and I came down with mine exactly twelve days later. It delayed physical therapy, which is one reason I'm still in so much discomfort.
In the second week after the accident, along with my last post, I was working on some stuff for my commonplace book (I feel pretentious calling it an "art journal," because I'm not very good at drawing). I have a stack of tea-stained photocopies dating back to a 2-D Design class that I took in 1999, and among them was a cool anatomical engraving of a pregnant woman by Pietro da Cortona. I thought it would make an interesting cover for my journalbook, on a dark green background, with gold edging, so I covered it in gel medium that I tinted a sort of sepia-gold after some trial and error. (The only paints I own, aside from a tube of Interference Gold, are black, white, raw umber, primary cyan, primary yellow, and primary magenta, so I mix up every color I use... it's nice to know how, but it's also honestly kind of tiresome when you aren't really a painter!) I set it aside to dry, but then I couldn't find a sheet that was the right size and color for the background of the cover of my journal. I was still thinking of that when I got sick.
(In the meantime, I'd taken the background of the engraving and put it over a page from an old prospectus from the Museum School in Boston, which was itself a repro of something from someone's sketchbook, that showed through in the shape of the female figure I'd cut out. I think it's pasting it into my book which makes the whole exercise disturbingly meta. YOUR sketchbook in MY... thing. I Don't Sketch. It's Not A Sketchbook. Or an Art Journal. Etc.)
I didn't do anything for a few days, then came downstairs one morning to find out that my dog had found my little cut-out anatomical drawing and "investigated"* its shoulder. Square one. I wasn't upset, except that I have since discovered that my current library system does not have the Pietro da Cortona book (you can see more of its engravings here), and that I think the similar engravings they do have, in a book by Vesalius, suffer by comparison. Vesalius is justly famous, but he doesn't deal with women much in his work, and his engravings, supposedly executed by the studio of Titian, tend to have stockier proportions and less harmonious layouts than those by da Cortona. Vesalius was a very great medical practitioner and professor of the mid-sixteenth century, and his anatomy books were done, not precisely by him, to provide a reference for his students. Plenty of da Cortona's work is redrawn from Vesalius, actually; it's just that I think he's the better artist, compared to the executors of Vesalius's drawings.
(And if you have enjoyed the last paragraph or two, you will probably enjoy Medical Sight Lines, a blog about medical illustration. "Knowledge Pictures," the most recent post as of this writing, is probably the most relevant to what I've just written, and includes a copy of one of the most admired of Vesalius's plates. It should be noted that Vesalius's work was in the form of woodcuts, the original blocks of which were destroyed in WW2, whereas da Cortona's was in the form of engravings, allowing for more detail. Since I'm more interested in elegance than medical accuracy, you can understand my preference! Also interesting: Visionary Anatomies, a splendid essay by Michael Sappol presented by the National Academy of Sciences, which contains the following: Given the complexity of the interior of the body, you couldn’t just describe it, you had to show it. And what was shown was the dead body. Early modern representations of the anatomical body took death head on: the dead mocked the living; the living mocked the dead; the cadaver was an effigy. It served as a reminder of our mortality, our fallibility, our folly — the fragility of human life and civilization.)
On the other hand, I'm about to have access to a scanner again, attached to the computer I actually use to post! I lent mine to my fiance a few years ago, on the premise that I'd sometimes come over and scan things, which I never do. This new scanner around the house means that I may actually start to post more images. Or not.
Newer people, I swear I usually talk about pretty yarns and beads and whether or not certain books suck, rather than illustrations of dissected cadavers. But for some reason, just after my injury, the idea of using a historically-distant anatomical illustration of a woman appealed to me.
*Chewed. But she's a very well-behaved dog and rarely destroys anything that doesn't belong to her!
Over the last few years, the television show Trading Spaces has grown in popularity and then faded. Not everyone who sees it realizes that it was based on a slightly different (and, to my mind, better) British show called Changing Rooms. Everything on Changing Rooms was a little more avant-garde and modern-European than the rooms and projects on its American counterpart; a typical Trading Spaces episode is also twice the length of most Changing Rooms episodes. Both shows share a concept: two people do a thematic total makeover on a neighbor's room with a fairly small budget under the guidance of an interior designer, while the neighbor is doing the same thing at their place. A carpenter and the show's host pitch in where they can. At some point in most episodes of either show, the designer will assign a craft to one or two people, which will almost always wind up being something mildly epic and vaguely pointless (motivated mostly by budget) which neither of the people has ever done before, and which needs to be completed QUICKLY. The Changing Rooms crafts usually have a different, artier feel when compared to the Trading Spaces crafts.
This, then, is basically a book of Changing Rooms crafts.
Oh, I don't mean they're actual crafts that have been done on the show, although a few of them have been in some way or another. Nor do I mean that A Comfortable Home: 100 Cozy Projects for Easy Living is an official tie-in to the show. No, what I mean is that they have the look-and-feel of the sort of projects often featured on the show, and that some of the projects are about as bewildering. Furthermore, many of them are not things that most people would want to attempt if they didn't have most of the materials on hand, and need a way to use them up. Some use techniques that are unnecessarily complicated, where the same results could have been achieved through easier means.
The book is organized categorically, and actually has six project designers aside from Moss, all of whom have published books of their own in the past. The categories are
Window Dressing - curtains, blinds, screens
Furniture - mostly recommendations for decorating existing furniture with paint or tile
Linens - a hodgepodge, some things made from scratch and some just decorated, table linens and bed linens and sofa cushions
Storage - potentially the most irritating section, in my opinion, full of corrugated cardboard and an unnecessary amount of cutting, painting, and glueing, given the results
Lighting - lampshades, lamps, and candle holders
Display - another hodgepodge: more candle holders, as well as photo albums, vases, photo frames, soaps, wire baskets, and so on
Entertaining - a section wherein almost everything could have been sorted into other sections: placemats, decorated bowls and utensils, beaded fruit, a raffia table runner made of crocheted leaves
Christmas - ornaments and things to do with ornaments, window decorations, stockings, gift boxes, etc
Outdoor Living - things for the garden, many of which could have been put in other categories and are not specially adapted for the outdoors; however, a few of these items genuinely involve plants.
There are several major problems in the book. First of all, some of the items are things that, yes, you CAN make by hand... but why would you WANT to, especially by the methods displayed here? A perfect example of this is a cardboard "laundry box" in the storage section. It's made from 24 long (almost 5-foot) strips of corrugated cardboard that have been colored with six different colors of wood stain before being woven together; three colors of thread are stitched, each separately, around the rim. I suspect that by the time you've collected all the supplies and managed to do hundreds of feet of clean-edged and precise cardboard cutting, all to make a small box that isn't even two feet tall, you'll have been better off in terms of time and finance by just picking up a hamper at the store. In another sense, at least one project designer is very keen on the idea of you cutting and mounting your own rubber stamps, but the stamps are used in such a way that the same work could easily have been done with a stencil, or even (for the brave) freehand.
A second, larger problem is the fact that most of the designers assume prior knowledge of a technique. Thus, there are several crocheted projects in the book, but none have basic crochet instructions. Mosaic designs abound, without any real tips or tricks beyond the barest instructions of how to do that particular design. Instructions for a blanket decorated with ribbon embroidery basically come down to "Do ribbon embroidery on a blanket. No, we're not teaching you any stitches, but we recommend Lazy Daisy." I don't sew or crochet, and I'm a little afraid of anything involving tin snips, so it's possible that I just find those projects intimidating.
One thing I look for when I review a book here is the clarity of the instructions: the best books have an illustration for every step. This book has illustrations for every second or third step, which is certainly helpful (you'd be almost completely unable to complete several of the projects without them), but which is not enough for some of the more complicated projects. To their credit, the authors have included an extensive appendix of templates for various designs used in the projects. However, it seems odd that some projects, which do not seem easy, are made from scratch, and others, which seem easier (especially with a slightly different choice of materials) begin, "Go to a carpenter/welder/electrician and have them...." Another issue is that the book was initially produced in the UK, and it doesn't seem like too much effort was made to translate certain terminology for an American audience. (This is fine if you are, in fact, in the UK.)
A third issue is one of safety and permanance. There is a lovely "Japanese Lamp" that has some of the worst instructions in the book: have a wire frame welded together for you (well, that's basically the whole lamp, isn't it?), cover it with shoji paper that you've decorated, glue a panel of MDF on the base to support the light fitting. Problems? You're never instructed to drill a hole in the MDF for the light cord, you're never instructed to purchase a light fitting, and the shoji paper is merely stuck to the frame with - wait for it - double-stick tape! I like this particular project, but I can think of five better ways to design and make it. The idea that you can make and/or decorate your own lampshades is a valuable one, but the majority of the designs here are duds.
There are several candle holder designs that basically involve taking ordinary glassware and repurposing it as a candle holder, maybe with some wirework: must be careful with this. Most glass will be fine, some will shatter under the heat. Some of the materials recommended, mostly certain adhesives and paints, should not be used indoors without a lot of ventilation, and this is not mentioned in the instructions, though there is a quick word about safety in the introduction. Anyone who chooses to do any of these projects should use common sense and think about any safety issues that might come up.
When a book has one hundred projects in it, it's difficult to sort them into a binary, yes-or-no list; even if I did, people with different tastes might disagree with me. So I'm just going to mention some representative projects that I liked and disliked. I think many of the storage projects are pointless (the aforementioned "laundry box", or the cardboard shoeboxes that have been lovingly carved with a cutwork design and painted; they defeat the purpose of keeping off dust). I don't like many of the furniture projects. Most just involve stenciling or stamping, and you have to like the stencils or stamps being used. The denim tab-top curtain would most likely be cheaper and easier to buy than to make; it's a common style, at least in the US. Small wire baskets - the book has patterns for several - are also common and inexpensive in craft stores. In general I like many of the window coverings and some of the display items. I like the stencil-frosted windowpanes for Christmas, and most of the mosaic projects. I like the idea of the Japanese paper lamp (execution leaves something to be desired), and the momigami lamp - which will teach you how to make a real Japanese lantern. The woven cane lamp is also lovely, but a little difficult for the average crafter, as are many of these projects.
A Comfortable Home is apparently out-of-print, but it isn't hard to get, either from used book sources or from libraries. It was released in 2003 and retailed for $22.95, which I suppose is a fair price for a book of its size. It may be available as a remainder in the bargain section of major chain bookstores. Nonetheless, it's very difficult to decide whether to recommend that you hunt it down. It came to my attention when one of its projects, a magazine rack made of stacked cuts of corrugated cardboard, was recently featured in an issue of ReadyMade, and certainly, some of its projects are worth attempting. If you have a chance to flip through it and something you see or something you heard described here appeals to you, by all means check it out, but be aware that you may need supplementary materials to figure out how to do a project correctly. The editor states up front that part of the point of the book is to promote creativity, that perhaps you won't want to make the items as shown in the book, but they may inspire you to a new use of a technique you've already mastered. In that respect I can see the book being valuable. Otherwise, you will probably have to approach any project with supplementary beginner's instructions that you've found on your own.
I don't really know if I've managed to explain why this seems like it could be a sourcebook of vaguely punishing household crafts for the designers on Changing Rooms - maybe it's only a concept that other viewers of the show will really understand. If you like the projects they've done over the years, you might like this. But don't expect it to be any less bewildering than having Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen standing over you and trying to explain while simultaneously trying to hang a chandelier. My final conclusion is that A Comfortable Home would have been better if Moss had been more selective about the projects she chose to include in it, and taken slightly more care to eliminate vagueness in the instructions. The result would have been a shorter book, but possibly also a more useful one.
