Mercury retrograde and I stop spending. Will the economy survive?

I remember looking at these about 4 years ago and filed a few photos away for all those odd brooches this house floats on.  Now they are all the rage either mounted on polystrene balls or special wire holders.

 It's why I've been trawling through ebay looking at the goodies on offer and looking at the quality and low prices.  Four years ago cheap meant cheap but now it's quite different.

I have that large bow and paid quite a bit for it about 8 years ago but worth it.  Of course one needs a large verandah for support so it's definitely a winter dress brooch.  It looks fantastic on anything I wear but everything looks fabulous on me. I was always dressed up when I visited Mother at the Home but these days, 10 years on I'm lucky to remember my knickers.

 My credit card is cringing as I work out how many of these brooches I have stored away in glass cases. I can see three of these on this wedding bouquet.
I wish I had had something like this at my wedding preferably loaded with a brick which I'd have used on the Bridal party to bring them into line.

 See those two pearlescent flowers in the front, $1 each and my mother wouldn't give them away, she wears them both.  Like all craft, it looks easy to make but takes patience and swearing but at least they don't droop in hot weather and would make a nice heirloom.

My favourite and I would love to make it now as a wall hanging.  It would be okay since fatso cat never raises a paw more than an inch from the ground.
My wish lists are full until Mercury behaves itself.  Before I start on anything like this, there is still an enormous Christmas tree to be assembled out of the ?????? Christmas brooches I have waiting.  That would have been done if the Nephew had sawn a straight line instead of being 2mm out on one corner.  

Boo to Malcolm the Miserable for the GST he's planning to put on overseas buying from ebay.

Why didn't I think of this?

I loved this idea but it would not do for our giant native birds like magpies and ravens.  The Mynah birds would give them a decent whack as well so the pretty cord would have to go and fencing wire used instead.  I rather like the thought of them hanging on the leafless branches for winter and I'm always resisting buying a lone cup and saucer at the op shop just because it looks pretty.  I have a cupboard full of 'looks pretty' and I'm still using a chipped mug.

But here's one for Miss O'Dyne and myself for those genteel afternoon teas in spring.  Wine glass tea cups with the added benefit of nosey parkers not being able to see the gin or plonk (in Miss O's case) or sometimes we do have tea. The Willow pattern is a bit heavy looking, I'd rather go for a nice Royal Albert or Aynsley.  Miss O and I are nothing but class all the way. 
 

Sheer genius this idea.  Your favourite tea cup as a bracelet.  Well, for me I'd have to cut up the teapot and that's the problem, the cutting up part. I suppose a tile cutter would do but knowing me I'd end up with a bucket of pretty pieces for that mosaic pathway I have also filed away as a brilliant idea.
 

Now I might have a chance of making this.  At last count I have 7 teapots and this would look great on the Christmas table.  Those cheap trees from the $2 emporium would be ideal with the added bonus of being able to use the teapot again.  So many ideas, so little time. 

Fancy something to do after Christmas?

This is clever and something I would never have thought of in a million years to use old glass. How many times have I walked through an op shop and loved a dish or old vase and not bought it as I didn't need it.  Now I know what to do. These are from America and are called garden glass totems.
You can build it up with tea cups and a teapot, glass vases or like the image above, crown it with a glass ornament. Doesn't he look gorgeous?

 Or how about that atrocious Venetian glass bowl you might have been landed with as a wedding present which now can be turned into a bird bath.  The trick is to bury the bottom into the garden to hold it straight and use silicon waterproof glue, the clear stuff.

This is so simple and lovely, bird bath or bird feeder depending on how deep the bowl is. I could cry at all those chipped and cracked glass whatsits that I have tossed out and can never get back. Even cleaning out mum's house there were bowls that went to the op-shop in the de-cluttering. Fortunately I have plenty of op-shops to visit and any glass bits that take my eye now will be coming home.
Even just odd glasses put together and plonked in the ivy to catch the sun would be lovely especially if coloured.  Elephant's Child I can just see something like this popping up with your spring bulbs and River, even your small plot could take a small totem. But Miss O'Dyne, the mad bird lady will have glass bird baths from here to forever and they will all look lovely.

What a load of faffola!

Knitting is a time honoured craft and I'd rather have a Prime Minister sitting and knitting than one biking in lycra.  Nothing wrong with men knitting either. Bluff, gruff fishermen of the Scottish Isles knitted their own patterns in highland wool so if they were drowned, it showed which village and family they came from.  Women took up knitting for the Crimean War, Balaclava ring a bell and it went on from there. All lycra does is say, "Look I'm an arse on a bike.".  I don't think Kevvie knits unless he's knitting his whining into a whinge.
At least she's not spending our money on a gift for the Windsor sprog, she's making do and doing it right. Aussie women rule!

Gone with the Wind and thank goodness.

 Once again I forgot to take the
before shots with the old clothes
but this is our doll with just her
cammies on.

The hair is just not able to be
combed so I just cut off the
scraggy ends and made sure
there were no spiders.

The trick is to make the clothes then decide
what goes on first. In this case it had
to be the hair up and the hat made.

 Here she is in all her finery and showing her the soft
green silk petticoat which went over the cream silk
petticoat which went over three layers of tulle.
And I can tell you I'll never make a ballet tutu, I hate handling tulle unless it's pure silk tulle and that's a whole other ball game. That ruffle was hand stitched.

At seven of the clock this morning, I decide, half awake, that she isn't finished without a trailing bow.
And here you can see the back of the finished hat. It was finished with just a silk bow but it needed a ribbon rose.
Her hair is now in a net fastened with pearl and diamonte pins.

Not a good photo of the hat but it's made from the green lace in the overskirt with off white feathers and while I hand stitched every inch, I drew the line at plucking chickens.  There are hand made ribbon roses, pleated georgette and pleated dress lace.  Around the brim I stitched pearls.

 This didn't show up as well as it should have.  The lace is pleated down the bodice of green velvet, finished off with a strip of guipure lace and stitched with loops of small pearls.
The bottom of the bodice jacket is also stitched with pearls as are the sleeves.  'Leg of mutton' sleeves at the top, pearls and tapered sleeves at the bottom which had to be the last thing stitched.
The brooch can be taken off and worn by the next owner.

 Don't look at the floor, by the mess I should have been
completing an entire Paris couture collection instead
of one doll. Trouble was sometimes I needed her to be high up then low down.
The lace in the overskirt is fine net with embroidered
flowers and silver spinkles.  Around the bottom are
diamonds which had to be glued on leading to an
unfortunate experience involving my hair and the glue
stick I was holding in my mouth.

And back where we started with the hat.

Don't look at the floor, didn't I tell you.

She's now safely at the Home, behind glass and hopefully will make a lot of money for the activities fund being first prize in the Christmas Raffle.  The girls are canny, they have decided on a cash grab by having a small lottery on who comes closest to her name

which hasn't been decided yet, Scarlett or Charlotte.

How did I ever do it?

When Mum and I started crafting in the early eighties, it was imagination all the way with very little in the way of craft books or patterns unless we're talking knitted tea cosies or baby stuff.  The massive boom in patchwork and quilting was still 12 years away and making your own jewellery no more than stringing round beads together.

The brooches came about when I had felt ovals left after embroidering photo frames. I mean they did have to have somewhere for the picture to show through. The one on the left, cream one isn't as delicate as the black. I exchanged green thread for gold metal and later instead of freehand embroidery of the bows, I used small gold metal bows. Then I moved on to embroidering on pure silk, highlighting with very tiny pearls and putting them into gold and silver surrounds.

With the first brooches I did everything. The internal support was cut from cardboard after being traced from my template. My thumbs did ache after cutting out a hundred 6cm x 4.5cm ovals and not one to waste, small pieces of cardboard became smaller and cheaper brooches without bows. 

The guipure lace trim would never go around and lay flat without a small piece cut out of the edge.  Something that one woman never got the hang of when she tried teaching a class using one of my brooches as her own. A loyal customer came to the market and told me.  So the roses followed the same pattern on each, just the colours changed and those bows were a horror to get even. The felt was glued to the cardboard and pinking shears used to make the zigzag edge which was then glued down without buckling.  The back went on with a simple safety pin pushed through the felt. I did have a photo but the computer went on strike when I was trying to load it.

At first it was just the guipure but I thought it was a little too plain so in between the tiny arches of the guipure I'd drop a little glue and then with a darning needle, pick up the pearls and drop them on the glue making sure the holes couldn't be seen.  I think the most I ever sold was 35 at the Christmas market of l989 and I charged a whopping $6 each. I made more money at that market than I'd ever seen and I bought a Hoover vac with it. The vac's still going strong even if I'm not.

By l992, the brooch market was dead and so were my photo frames. I was ahead of the times for embroidery, during the nineties it became big, ribbon embroidery, Brazilian, petit point, cross stitch and books for it all.  Then came Tracey Marsh with her 'How to make' books and suddenly every woman and dog became a crafter, even later came the smarties who cut out the fabric and sold ready to make kits.  Mum and I managed to keep ahead of the pack by changing the things we made, babies everything for mum and I found a hole in the market for wedding favours.  That was until dressmakers began using left over from the wedding dresses and made to match.  One of our fellow stall holders said that if we saw an idea in an American magazine then we had 6 months to make and sell it before it reached here and everyone was into it. She was dead right.

Kristina Logan "The Dot Queen"

She loves her dotted glass beads, dotting with a shaped glass rod instead of glass stringers so that she can be precise. After each dot is placed she starts melting them at the same rate before adding the next layer and finally adding transparent dots on top of the opaque dots. The surface tension squeezes the dots into diamonds and squares according to how tightly spaced the original dots and transparent glass were placed.

But she doesn't just use the beads for necklaces, in her hands they can become anything. The Amber tea pot is 16.5 x 16.5 x 9.5 cm and is one of a series.

And don't the dotty beads look gorgeous as candlesticks. You can see here the surface dotted beads and the worked dots under transparent glass.

The large green bead in the 3rd row down is her famous cactus bead. Every dot of glass positioned equally across the surface. I couldn't scan the photograph of her work bench but I was happy to see I'm not the only person who works in a 2 foot square space in the middle of a room full of equipment.

The best for last

Janis Miltenberger makes divine glass objects. This chair called 'Softly Held' is 34 inches high x 9 inches length x 9 inches width. Nearly 3 feet of intricate glass making and I love the flowers.

This chair is called "Sweet Discovery" and is 37 inches high x 9.5 inches in length and 9.5 inches in width. The image below is a detail from the top of the glass chair.

I do love these candlesticks though, it is the birds again.

As much as I like the candle sticks, I have to go for her drinking glasses. Not that I'd ever drink from them, I'd be terrified to even pick them up. They are gorgeous.

For more of her work click on and drool.

One cannot have too much glass!

James Minson is an Australian artist and he created the cloud mobile above. It took a lot out of him physically. At a gallery show in 2008, the mobile which hangs on a stainless steel umbrella,
was hung on a cable not able to take the weight and it crashed to the floor. At the same gallery, he had a blue chandelier which a very tall man walked straight into, crash. The perils of being a glass artist.

So now we have the silver cloud mobile with what, I presume, are glass raindrops.

But this has to be my favourite, a jelly fish chandelier. When I win the big Lotto and I have my house on the cliff overlooking Bass Strait, with the giant windows, I will have jelly fish chandeliers in every room. James also makes perfume bottles but nothing went to my heart like this chandelier.

I have a new book

The Penland Book of Glass is fabulous, several glassworkers show masterclasses in pictures. I've always been fascinated by glass and how it is made but glass as art is a whole other discipline.
The little birds here are by Shane Fero and I couldn't have enough of these in my house. The one above is called 'a conversation about eggs'.

Deceptively simple looking but such work goes into each little bird. Even the legs are put on in two pieces, the first before the joint is hollow then the pieces down to the feet are solid and the feet are arranged and melt glassed to the leg.

He's cute and has personality. The body is gently rolled in powdered glass, heated then rolled in another colour to give a graduated shading.

I like his little beady yellow and black eye

But this one is my absolute favourite. Shane Fero named him the "Rings of Saturn" bird and if you've seen photos of Saturn from the orbiting Cassini spacecraft, he couldn't have named him better.

Another artist showcasing his work is Vittorio Constantini, who not only works the most amazing fish but lifelike insects but I've fallen in love with his fish.

DO NOT HOARD, THROW IT OUT!

It should be my motto but isn't, that belongs to my sister.
So I'm sitting in the middle of 25 years of craft makings and lace and satin and it's taking all my willpower to not put something on the 'to keep' pile.

There is a little craft group who will take everything, no matter how small. I don't know if they really meant that but they're getting everything except the stuff I really must keep for poverty reasons. I'd never be able to afford this or that lace in today's money.

I found receipts for 1985 when we were offered a deal to take a huge amount of discontinued lace worth $6,000 and yes, we did pay just under $3,000. It was a lot of money in '85 but I'm still wearing some of the lace collars on my dresses. When the dress wears out, I put the collar on its replacement.
I'm surprised Mum and I both didn't faint when we got home realised what we paid but when that box arrived we couldn't have cared less. Now it's come back to me.

I've spent two days just looking in boxes even though I'd been through them twice in the last 3 years but always anticipating that Mum might take up a bit of craft again but now it's the final act. I don't think she ever threw a scrap away and just as well I had a clean out a few years back so I can appear righteous.

It's surprising how rough on the hands lace can be until one picks up a glorious piece of Swiss guipure just after putting down a cheap knock-off Chinese copy. Nothing beats the rich colours, run through with gold, of Thai lace either. Now it's all computerised and made in India or China.

I have emptied 7 plastic boxes so far but there are 11 bags sitting in my sewing room.

I have a headache and handache but I've found half a block of roast almond chocolate in the cupboard, so bugger off Hoarders Anonymous.

THIS IS A TOLLIDAY

I love the ships, love the minerals, love the shape, love the little hoists going up from the harbour quay on both sides of the rock mountain.

CASTLE LIZZADRO

Another of William Tolliday's masterpieces. He created this castle in 1984 as a memorial to James "Chris" Lizzadro, a grandson of the founder of the Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art .

On a large slab of Brazilian agate, the 18ct gold castle rises from specimens of amethyst, malachite, azurite and vanadium. His signature diamonds are set as windows. The sculpture in in the museum rotates slowly to music and at the push of a button, the sound of preparations for battle are heard.