Craft! Bang! Boom!

It’s been a while, but the weather has finally turned spring-y, so that combined with the crazy price hikes in food is really motivating me to get my gardening act together. Yesterday we got our garlic in the mail from Pinetree. Travis was able to get out and rototill our gardening patch.

It’s going to be maybe 3/5 of the size of the last time we attempted to garden, and of that area, about half is going to be devoted to tall things, like broom corn and sunflowers. I love growing those! We’ve gone wrong in the past by trying to plant too much – too much food to harvest, and too much ground to take care of. I’m trying to go back to my gardening roots, so I got out the Square Foot Gardening book, which was my go-to book the first time we had a garden. Somewhere along the line (I’m pretty sure it’s when we moved to Ohio and built a bunch of raised beds) we lost our way and went for the uber-big over making efficient use of our space.

So I’m going to try to constantly plant things this year. If I harvest a radish, I’ll just plant another one in its spot. If my cilantro bolts, I’ll plant something else in its space. Stuff like that. I think I’m most looking forward to growing kohlrabi again. It’s insanely expensive in the supermarket, and most of the people who have it at the Farmer’s Market harvest it when the kohlrabis are really big, which I’ve never understood, since they taste horrible and woody when they get too big. I’m all about harvesting small veggies. Yum!

Anyway, I’m going to re-read my book over the next few days and try to actually get some stuff planted. First up is the garlic, and then stuff like radishes and kohlrabi. From what I read yesterday, the average last frost date for Columbus is May 9th, so a few days after then, I’ll go ahead and plant stuff like squash and sunflowers. I’m trying to be a lot less anal about the whole planting thing than I’ve been in the past.

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Double the Fug, so named because it combined two pretty fugly rovings. This one is a monster, 8 7/8 ounces, and 263 yards. I do really like the way it came out, so now I’m working on combining some more fugly rovings together.

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Behold the Hannakube pinhole camera! It’s designed so it has 4 separate compartments, basically making it 4 cameras in 1. It will fit 4″x5″ photopaper or film, neither of which I currently have, but I’m hoping to get some within the next few weeks. Might as well make the Hannakube in preparation for it.

Most larger format pinhole cameras (well, all of the larger format pinhole cameras, actually) that I’ve seen online are one-shot affairs. You load your film or paper in the dark or in a darkroom, take it out into the big wide world and shoot one picture, and then that’s it. All done. You have to either use a changing bag (a lightproof bag) to switch out film or go back to your darkroom to do it. This is just my attempt to circumvent that a little. 4 pictures in one camera! Modern ingenuity is crazy!

Here’s a slideshow – hopefully it’ll load in the correct order this time – of the steps I went though to make this. It was pretty easy, actually.

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Yeah, I know, I’ve been slacking off on the spinning lately. This is just a wee skein to prod me back into it. The wool was from a batt carded by Terrabellaspun called October Glow. 77.5 yards, 2 3/8 oz. I do like the way the yarn wound up striping. Tres cool.

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Toby step for in the bedroom! This was something I’ve been meaning to get done for forever, and yesterday the weather was nice enough that Travis dragged the box out to the driveway for me to paint and got a lid cut for it. We’ve got this big sheet of 3/4″ MDF we’re working on using up – my god is that stuff heavy! Anyway, we were able to put a dent in it yesterday.

After the box was painted and the lid was cut, I did some quick math and then we got a warp on the loom. I used some handdyed cotton as the warp, and my 4-ply handspun from earlier this year as the weft. I added about 3″ to each side for my warp to allow me enough extra to fold over and staple, and that turned out to be the perfect amount.

The weaving was done this morning:

…and it only took me about 15 minutes to get it off the loom and stapled to the lid. Hooray!

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Holy crap, I can’t believe this worked! Cameras – I make them. See below the fold for the details – including picture tute and sample photos.

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Dear Catastrophe Soy Silk. Medium twist single. I had dyed this soy silk fiber a few weeks ago, and it came out like ass, so I overdyed it a few days later, and I wound up getting weird colors with the bonus that the fiber just sort of collapsed into soft catastrophe. I spun this up today, and I think it redeemed itself. I was originally going to spin it up as a two ply, but surprisingly, the soy silk wanted to be made into a thicker yarn than I had originally thought, so I just kept it as a thicker single. Anyway, I like it now. 149 yards, 3 5/8 ounces.

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February seemed like it took forever to get through, but March just whizzed by. Whizzz! I started off with this month being pretty productive, but pooped out about halfway through. My two big excuses – we did have company for a few days and I’ve just been crafty in non-List ways.

So here’s what I did (and didn’t) get done:

1. As far as writing a new knitting pattern goes, I kind of did, but then didn’t put it online because I want to change some stuff in it first. But like I said before, this is actually the thing on the list I’m least focused on, just because I pretty much write new patterns all the time when I knit anyway. For all of the knitting books and magazines I have, I hardly ever knit any patterns out of them. I use them more as reference.

2. I wove two rugs and a scarf, exceeding my goal of two woven things per month. Yay!

3. Got 9 skeins of handspun done (the goal is one skein per week). Yay!

4. I’m counting my Egg series as falling in under the “Create 2 illustrations per week” goal, since they’re little photo shoots I have to set up. Anyway, I’m on Part 11 with Egg, so I’m doing okay with that, I guess.

5. I did make a tiny beaded quilt this month, which counts towards my ‘finish one quilt/make one beaded project’ goals that I have. I’m not overly thrilled by just getting this one quilt done because a) it’s tiny, and b) it’s not an unfinished object – I just whipped it up really quick. However, I guess anything that helps me use up fabric is a plus, and even if I didn’t use a ton of fabric in it, I did use a ton of beads, so I think I more than met the bead goal.

6. I only made 2 stuffed toys this month, the panda bear and the horse, but that’s one over my goal, so yay!

7. I got some more photos enlarged this month. Just a few, though, since I still haven’t figured out how I want to arrange the ones in my living room.

8. I’m post-processing photos left and right, so this goal is silly.

9. I haven’t started on any Blurb book yet, but I have idea for two, one of which would be the Egg book, so since I already have some photos taken, I guess I’m ahead on that count.

10. I used beads in #5.

11. I reupholstered the padded bench in the dining room, got some of my enlarged photos up on the walls, and sewed a wire bin cozy for the bedroom, which incidentally ate up a ton of fabric. Yay!

12. No news on the garden front, although I’ve been taking plenty of pictures of crocuses, although I don’t think that’s actually going to help any of our summer veggies grow.

So I guess I did okay, all things considered. I think the big goal for this next month is making sure I finish a quilt proper. I have a lot of smaller quilt tops that will probably only take me one or two days to get done. I just need to get in the mood to start busting them out. Hopefully the nice weather will encourage me to be more productive (looking back at my big quilt production periods, it seems like I always did the most quilty stuff in the spring or summer, although god knows why). If I can keep on top of the quilt and bead goals, I’ll be happy.

My main non-list goal in the upcoming month is to make a functioning pinhole camera. I’ve got some ideas for photography related things I’ve been turning over in my head, and I think April is going to be the month where I give some of these things a try. There’s something very intriguing to me about looking at the world through different lenses.

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