Harry Potter, and misc. crafts

I am dying to see the new Harry Potter movie, and there's a new trailer out:



(Oops, I thought I was grabbing the low-res version, and it looks like they have substituted the high-res version instead. So you probably want to click over to YouTube or The Leaky Cauldron so you can actually see the whole thing!) (I am either going to have to figure out how to post video so that it sizes correctly on my narrow format, or quit attempting to embed video. Or change my format, but then that's another whole kettle of fish.)

In craft-related news, I went to Michael's yesterday to get clear embossing powder, which we needed for Claudine's class, and I came out with several wooden items which I did not intend to buy. But they had the most adorable sort of retro-looking rockets - I think they were actually supposed to be birdhouses - and I have several very small children on my Christmas list who I never quite know what to buy for, so my mind immediately started clicking when I saw these. (They were marked down about 60%, too - I'm not sure if they were marked down because birdhouses are "summer" items, or if it was part of the general markdown of all the summer children's craft stuff. But that makes it a seasonal markdown either way, doesn't it?) First I picked up one, thinking of the one little boy on my list, and then I thought, Wait, why can't girls have rockets? and I got one more. Now I'm thinking I might wish I had at least one more. As I recall, the little girls in question have rather violently pink color schemes in their bedrooms, but hey, I think a pink rocket sounds kind of adorable, actually!

Oh, I'm still working on my "grid project" but I have one more color mixing result:
Every blue-ish color in Claudine's paint line (which means Sky Blue, Smidge of Blue, and Classic Teal) mixed together = Turquoise. Which was not at all what I was expecting.

Early Halloween mania

I really have a thing about Halloween. I have tons of Halloween junk already - far more than one household of two people has any use for - and I am having to restrain myself from going out and buying all the new crafty stuff that's coming out for this year - for example, the stuff shown in these two YouTube videos from Two Peas. It's all just so cute! Meanwhile, what I ought to be doing, assuming I want to get in a Halloween state of mind, is making jewelry with all the skull beads I bought last year, but have I been doing that? Of course not. (Here's the Anna Griffin paper from the first video, in case you don't want to sit through it. This stuff from My Mind's Eye is also terrific.)

I did buy a Halloween punch on clearance a few weeks ago - a Martha Stewart haunted house:

(I don't know why Blogger is insisting on showing this sideways, but I can't seem to fix it!)

I think it was called a double punch, because it punches inside the punched-out area. It's cute but it's also terribly bulky - I don't really think I'll be buying too many of these! (Clearance items are my big weakness - as I imagine they are for many people. You can buy stuff and still feel virtuous. I'm always telling my husband, "But it was on sale!" and he just sort of rolls his eyes. I do try to at least restrain myself even there, and not end up with junk I don't even care about.)

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Completely unrelated to Halloween - but part of all the mass of coverage of CHA which has been coming out for the past two weeks or so - is new stuff from Nunn Designs. (look! actual jewelry! Lately you'd never know that this was supposed to be a jewelry blog!)

If I get around to doing another post, I do actually have some jewelry to show. Nothing fancy, but cute.

Stuff I bought at Paper Source

Warning: this is one of my periodic, slightly excessive I-went-shopping-and-here's-everything-I-bought posts. Just so you know. (It could be worse, much worse - at least I don't get around to doing this every time I go shopping!)

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Just last night, this postcard came in the mail:

But as it happens, I already knew that the Paper Source store in Houston was opening, and in fact is already open, and I went there yesterday. I knew it was coming - the store, that is, not the postcard - because I still get their catalogs in the mail (despite the fact that I really don't think I've ordered from them in some time) and I noticed a while back that Houston was listed in the "coming soon" list - which I was ridiculously excited about. I probably would have been even more excited, except that I have been in a Paper Source store before - the one in Dallas, back in December - so I did know what to expect. That was enough to keep me from going completely ballistic, I guess.

The Houston store is actually not as big as the Dallas store, I don't think - the Dallas store is in a mall and the Houston store is right on the street on Westheimer, which might be more expensive real estate - but it's got the stuff it needs to have and it's really adorable. It's a brand-new building (just west of Crate and Barrel, for any local people who happen to be reading) and it's tall and narrow and made to look fairly convincingly like a brownstone. (Hmm, I wonder if the classroom is upstairs, actually - I didn't think of that before. If it's downstairs I sure didn't see it!)

So this is what I bought:

really cool paper:
http://www.paper-source.com/cgi-bin/paper/item/Purple-Silver-Paisley-Fine-Paper/300_621/103320.html - this looks woven, almost like it's a fabric
http://www.paper-source.com/cgi-bin/paper/item/Pixel-Wrapping-Paper/3650.040/459889.html - the picture does not do this justice. I am a color junkie and this is so right up my alley.
plus a paper sampler (sort of like this one):
http://www.paper-source.com/cgi-bin/paper/item/Paper-Scrap-Bag-Warm-Colors/3325.020/39999844.html The one I got is heavy on bright pinks and yellows, colors that are really appealing to me these days!

a Halloween stamp:
http://www.paper-source.com/cgi-bin/paper/item/Happy-Halloween-Rubber-Stamp/2901.015/805840.html

red embossing powder:
http://www.paper-source.com/cgi-bin/paper/item/Zing-Opaque-Rouge-Embossing-Powder/2902.011/718813271233.html (that doesn't seem to be exactly the same color I got, though, unless the picture is bad - mine is bright bright red)

plus some useful but somewhat more mundane stuff that I won't link, like Staz-On stamp cleaner and a Versamark pen. (Really I restrained myself admirably, on the whole!)

I have no idea what I'm doing with either one of the papers but I'll think of something! The Halloween stuff was because I seem to be going on an early Halloween bender - which might be okay because I need to start making some skull jewelry if I really intend to sell some this year like I said I was going to. The red embossing powder is just because it appealed to me and I am just starting to experiment with embossing and so practically anything I buy is going to be new to me.

I remembered - after thinking about it for a minute - why I found Paper Source in the first place, long before I got interested in papercrafts in any kind of half-serious way. It was the heart cards. I don't know if I saw a link somewhere or maybe saw them in a magazine, but somehow I found out about them and ordered some heart cards and some envelopes. I sent them the first year with just "Happy Valentine's Day" handwritten on them, and then I sent them again some later year with this stamped on them. It was the first stamp that I ever colored. I've ordered various other things from them since them, but that was where I started.

(The official grand opening is not until July 24th, incidentally. Just in case you're interested in going.)

A little case of buyer's remorse

Things I bought from Ornamentea in the middle of the night last night:

1. preordered Steampunk Style Jewelry (because you getgot freebies with it - I may have gotten in at the very very last minute on that one, because the freebies aren't there any more)
2. the "Getting Started with Amazing Glaze" kit - even though I already have a different brand of resin that I haven't done anything with yet. This one comes with stamps! (I'm hoping that will prod me, somehow.)
   
3. a shrink plastic sampler and the sanding blocks that go with it
4. a couple of charms and clasps which, darnit, does not seem to include the handcuff charms (seriously, I coulda sworn I ordered them! I'm totally not joking) but does include a lock and key toggle
   
5. Elaine Ray lentil beads, because that color is yummy
6. some scrapbook paper that I thought was pretty. Maybe I'll put it in the resin charms!
7. some waxed linen, because I am still obsessed with stringing materials

It could have been worse, I took a $45 item out of my basket before I checked out. And I'm mostly kidding about buyer's remorse, I'm not feeling much more remorse than I do about anything else I buy these days. Until I have tried every form of jewelry-making known to manwoman, I will never be safe.

Seminar with bonus shopping

I'm off to Dallas for a seminar - hopefully I will be able to sneak in some shopping while I'm there! So no time to write a long entry right now. I have (Google-aided) locations for two or three bead shops so I ought to be able to find at least one of them, if not more. Hope they're worth it.

Shopping mania

Well, so I behaved myself pretty well on the round of bead stores on Friday, but I saw somewhere that Artbeads was having a 20% off sale this weekend (on a $60 purchase - and I think it's through tomorrow, actually*) and I have been meaning to stock up on these little rondelle beads anyway, and I haven't really been able to find them anywhere else, so it seemed like a good time to do that. They were 4-7 cents apiece, but I bought a selection of colors and sizes (4mm and 6mm) and I bought 50-100 of each so it added up to $60 pretty fast. And I did add in a few other things, I have to admit - but not too many.

I don't really understand the way people behave on Black Friday. A guy at Hobby Lobby told my sister that they had opened an hour earlier than normal, and there were 20 or so people lined up when they opened, even though they didn't have any sales that were any different from the sales they have all the time. (They had, y'know, 50% off Christmas ornaments, just like they have had for weeks.) It seems to me sometimes that people just go kind of crazy when they think they're getting a bargain.

I like to shop, don't get me wrong. (I imagine if you've been reading here for a while, that's obvious enough!) I just think people get kind of carried away. They get up and go to Wal-Mart at 3am to get a flat-screen TV for $599, or whatever, then half the time they probably buy a bunch of other stuff that negates whatever they saved. Let's face it, that's what the retailers running those sales count on. People just aren't very logical, a lot of the time. And I'm not saying I'm immune from this, not at all - I just don't do it at 3am on Black Friday.


*I checked on the Artbeads sale: it ends at 9am Pacific on Monday. So get in there early if you're interested!

Home again

So we made it to three Austin bead stores yesterday (Nomadic Notions, Sea of Beads - which are right down the street from one another in North Austin - and Bead It, in South Austin) plus a scrapbook store which might have been called Memory Depot. I really didn't buy a lot of stuff, though - a few odds and ends, but nothing big, and not so much as a single string of beads. (Single beads, yes, but strings, no.) What my sister really wanted was a tutorial on how to finish her decoupage beads, and people at all three places were really helpful, so she was happy.

We had a lovely Thanksgiving, but now that it's over, what I really would like to do is to sit down and make some jewelry that's not donuts. But I also have studying to do, and before you know it, it's gonna be Christmas! Still, hopefully I can make some time somewhere in there.

Black Friday

There will not be much of an entry today because my sister and I are going bead shopping - w00t! (I think she has drunk the jewelry Kool-Aid. At least she is showing signs of it.)

Like a lot of people, I guess, shopping on Black Friday has a long tradition in our family - since long before anybody started calling it that. When I was a kid we usually spent Thanksgiving at my grandparents' house, as I mentioned yesterday, and this meant that the post-Thanksgiving shopping was generally conducted in Bryan, Texas - hardly a shopping mecca, back in the day, but we managed. I am old enough to remember when shopping malls were a new invention and going there was still very exciting. (Even when it was Manor East Mall in Bryan - anybody who's familiar with Bryan/College Station will probably think that's funny. I haven't been there in years but I gather than Manor East is pretty down-at-the-heels nowadays!) I also remember going to this sort of semi-hippie store that I swear was called Sokowiki or something like that. I'm surprised my grandmother and aunt would set foot in that kind of place, but they did. Like I said, the options were somewhat limited. And before there was a mall, we would go downtown to the big Woolworth store. Man, that seems like a long time ago, and I guess it was!


Note: I wrote this entry and it was supposed to have posted yesterday and for some reason when I looked today (Saturday) it was back to saying "draft" again. It posted with the right date and time when I re-posted it, so I don't know what happened, exactly - but I tried to post yesterday, darnit! So if you're looking at the time on this and wondering why you didn't see it yesterday, that's what happened, just for the record.  :)

Sugar skulls

I've got my "Black Friday" promo up on Etsy - I'm offering free shipping anywhere in North America, and reduced shipping elsewhere (either $3 or $1, depending on the item). And I reduced the price on the wirework pendant - I knew I had set it a bit high in the first place!

I gave in yesterday and went to the Michael's store in Houston that's carrying the Crafty Chica stuff. It seemed kind of silly to drive up to Houston just to go to Michael's (considering that there are Michael's stores within 5 or 10 miles of my house in about 3 different directions) but the more I thought about it the more I really wanted to check it out. If anybody local happens to be reading, the store is at Bissonet and Weslayan - it's a nice big store, considerably bigger than the suburban ones I usually frequent. Because it's big (I guess) it's arranged a little differently - it has the scrapbooking stuff on the left as you come in, and the jewelry stuff is on the right, instead of being on the left where it is in the store I go to the most often. Which meant I automatically veered to the left, and the jewelry - and the Crafty Chica display, which was nearby - was practically the last thing I came to. Never fails. But it looked good, when I finally found it, and a lot of the stuff was nearly gone so I guess it's good that I didn't wait any longer!

There were Day of the Dead charms! I had to get those!

I don't know how well you can see the little drawings, but they are all little line drawings of skeletons - Catrina and the like. So cute! (There was another set that was color, but I've forgotten what they looked like already. Aha, here are both sets, and yeah, that's what I was thinking - they weren't Day of the Dead related so I forgot what they looked like immediately!)

Then there was some non-bead stuff: papers

with sugar skulls and hearts and such, so of course I had to get them too. And then there was the great big sugar skull (an iron on):

I have no idea what I'm going to do with it but I had to have it. Actually there are two: the big skull and a smaller loteria-card skull. I could put them in my long, long delayed Day of the Dead quilt that I've been saying for years I was going to make, or I could put them on a tote bag or something. I haven't made up my mind.

Polymer issues

I guess I ought to do a post - if I wait until later today I'm liable to get busy and forget! The only beading-related activity that went on today was a trip to Hobby Lobby and Michael's. This mostly came about because I have been watching for Hobby Lobby to put polymer clay on sale and they finally did. I went ahead and bought Kato, because that is what I already had. I looked at Fimo and it has a lower recommended baking temperature so you can't really mix the two. And I went looking around for a teflon sheet because I thought that might do for a work-surface. I know they sell them for quilters, but HL didn't have them that I could find. I finally bought a sheet meant for doing fondant from the Wilton aisle - I think it might do. I want to start playing with this a bit. The only other jewelry-related thing I bought was some (non-Swarovski) crystals to try in the donuts. Oh, and I bought some acrylic paint to "age up" my theoretical polymer clay beads with, too. We'll see how all that works out. I will definitely report on my clay efforts when I get there.

I have decided that I'm not going to try to get a lot more jewelry up onto Etsy right away. All I said originally was I wanted to get the shop up and a few things into it before Christmas, and I've done that. I'm spending too much time on jewelry when I really need to be studying. If I get a few more things in, fine, but if I don't, that's fine too. (I may put some stuff on sale right before Thanksgiving, actually - or offer free shipping. I haven't worked out which, yet.)

The Bead Society, and other methods of stash enhancement

I came home from the Bead Society Show with a very small bag of beads that cost quite a lot of money, all told. I was trying to restrain myself, but somehow every time I bought something, it ended up being several somethings costing anywhere from $20-50 at each vendor. Really, I did restrain myself, because I could have bought so much more - I think I only bought things from four different vendors, and I spent something like $150 altogether. (Really, somebody needs to buy some of my jewelry, so I can tell myself I have an income to pay for this stuff!) I'll try to get some pictures of what I bought later.

It really is a nice show. It was on two different levels in a lot of different rooms - it seemed like the real business was getting done on the 2nd floor, though. I bought several different styles of things - I bought some charms, and some cute polymer clay beads, and then I bought some strings of glass that were on sale, and a cute clasp, and then my last stop was downstairs where I had seen some rather gorgeous pendants with bali-style silver on them. I forgot to ask about what kind of metal I was getting - I don't think it's sterling at that price. But it's damn pretty, whatever it was. (I didn't buy any lampwork, which I'm sort of sorry about. I love lampwork.)

My Fire Mountain order did show up today, which is good because I am intending to use some of that stuff for the class tomorrow. I got utterly carried away ordering Delicas - I wanted a range of colors but did I really need two tubes of yellows and three tubes of purples? (The yellows especially make me annoyed with myself because they don't look very different, unless you look very closely.)

(One yellow is "yellow silk" and the other is "lemon ice", as I recall. You can tell they're not exactly the same, and it's even more noticeable close up, but will it show up different in a piece? I have my doubts.)

I didn't quite get as carried away with the 4mm Swarovski bicones that are the other thing needed for this class - partly because I already had several colors. The colors I have are primarily pastel colors that I use for accents on earrings, and I wanted some brights.

One of those darkest colors is mocca; I'm not sure about the other one but I think it may be siam. The red-oranges on the right are padparascha and indian red. The pink is just rose, I believe. I'm blanking out about what the purple one is, but the blue is Capri blue AB because they were out of regular Capri blue. And the two greens are palace green opal and erinite, I believe, and they really don't look that different from one another in the picture, but they are.

(Obviously I don't really think I'll use all 14 delicas and all 9+ colors of bicone tomorrow at the class, but at least I'm prepared! And I have an idea that I want to make some more of these, maybe for Christmas gifts.)

Oh, also, notice the fancy-pants packaging that Swarovskis come in, now. I can see that it might cut down on theft in retail stores, but otherwise, I think it's kind of overkill. Even a single "cosmic crystal" oval or whatever they're called, comes like this. It seems silly.

Still more shopping

This is part of the stuff I bought at the quilt show. For those of you who don't already know this, the big quilt show in Houston has sort of a "bead corner" - officially called Embellishment. There weren't as many bead vendors as there have been in other years, I thought, but there was enough for me to go seriously over budget with, just the same. (The show was earlier than usual this year, which probably threw everybody's schedules into disarray, I figure.)

This is basically in order from lowest to highest expenditure:

1. Beyond Beadery mostly specializes in seed beads, which are not my weakness, but I still managed to buy quite a few things. They had a lot of really cute charms and drops, plus I got this idea to use the biggest size of seed beads (3/0) to do something with a sort of 60s boho sort of vibe, as demonstrated at the bottom of this picture:

My mother had this really goofy necklace in those colors along about 1969, I guess that's why that screams 60s to me. Anyway, I'm not sure what I'm going to do with those wreath charms, quite, but I'm in love with tricolor things these days so I'm going to figure something out. And the others are probably earrings-to-be.

2. April Melody. Somebody on the Texas Beaders list said that April specializes in "fancy glass" and that's one of my weaknesses, but I tried to restrain myself by sticking with one color:

I love love love those both of those spirals, the green ones and the copper. (I'm wishing I had bought some more of the copper ones, they are too perfect together.) The rounds at the top are vintage. And I had a fake-Pandora bracelet that had room for a few more beads, so that's what the three silver-core beads are for. The beads I had already were blue and white, so the green goes really well with them. I'll have to remember to take a picture of it.

(And I don't have pictures of my third and most expensive stop yet. That will have to be a separate post.)


Oh, and in case anybody's thinking, "But weren't there any quilts at the quilt festival?" There were, and I didn't take any pictures again this year - I didn't even have my cell phone with me - but here are the quilts that won awards. (If you're a geek like me, you will especially appreciate the Tolkien quilt, which is on about the 4th row down - and you can click on the picture to see a bigger version with more detail. It's really really cool.)

More shopping

I'm going to do a quick post because I feel like I'm getting behind - these are the things I ordered from Lima Beads last week:

The Flickr version is all annotated, if you want to know exactly what things are.

Halloween crafts, and a shoparrific day

Ooh, remember me saying (in that looong post about Hobby Lobby last week) that I really wished I could think of a use for a boa? Well, Alexa at The Swell Life came up with an adorable Halloween wreath made from a boa, as part of her 24 Halloween Crafts in 24 Hours marathon. (The logo is currently on my sidebar, but of course it won't be there forever, so I'll put it below, too, for future reference.) That wreath idea could easily be converted to use for other holidays, too, as somebody pointed out in the comments. She's really got some cool ideas, there - she's also had, so far, a really elegant vase and some cute button earrings and several things to do with pumpkins, and more! And I don't think she's even done yet!

OK, enough gushing. (I just like her taste, I guess.) I don't really have anything beady to report today. I went to Ikea and they don't have beads, unfortunately - although I still managed to spend plenty of money. I did buy some garland for my - still imaginary - Christmas tree. I keep eyeing trees in offbeat colors so there's no telling what I'm going to end up with. I bought a few useful things, like a dustpan and brush set, and then I bought a bunch of candles, because I really love candles this time of year, and a few children's Christmas presents, and some other odds & ends. The candles were what I really went for, because I have some candleholders in that jumbo-tealight size that nobody but Ikea sells the refills for, that I know of. And then I got an Ikea flyer in the mail that said they were having a sale starting today, and hey, I had an excuse and everything, so off I went.

Oh, gosh, I almost forgot, I did buy some beads today - I ordered from Lima Beads. I have been admiring their website without buying anything for some time now and I finally succumbed and ordered some stuff. Quite a bit of stuff, actually. So I'll report back on that when my order arrives!

Not quite

You know how I said the skull necklace was done? Well, I changed it again. It was all balanced and then I decided the stone bead was throwing the balance off as far as the way it hung, so I took the stone bead off, and now the right/left balance is off. It's intended to be somewhat asymmetrical but right now the beads go further up on one side than they do on the other, and I don't like it. So I'm doing some more rebalancing before I declare it finished again!

In unrelated news, I really want a pretty picture to put on the header here. I don't really necessarily want to re-do the whole layout right now, but I need to think about the picture issue. I am always loath to play with layouts because I am not really html-literate - although I can do an href link, which I guess puts me ahead of a good many people these days! - and I am too cheap to pay somebody to do a layout for me. Hmm. I guess I'm going to have to decide which one of those is gonna give.

Aaaaand.... did I say that I ordered some more skulls from Ornamentea? Well, they came, and they are adorable. (They should be, really, 'cause they were not cheap, considering their very small size.) They don't go with this skull necklace, because they're very festive, candy-colored things and the not-quite-finished skull necklace is very earth-toned, but there is clearly going to have to be a skull necklace #2, anyway. And possibly some skull earrings, or more likely more than one pair!

Links and pictures

I added some store links and links to magazines - I'll probably add some links to other weblogs, too, later on. For the online stores, I mostly stuck to ones I've ordered from myself and had good luck with - and the ones with locations after them are local stores that don't seem to sell online. I also added a bunch of books to my Amazon store, just for fun.

I did take pictures; here's some of my Hobby Lobby loot:

And here's some other stuff I've bought lately: resin beads from Natural Touch Beads and Happy Mango Beads (see sidebar for those links):

Here are some (not near all) of the leftovers from my skull necklace - I didn't end up using many charms because I decided I liked the way it looked without them. Plus, I just have way more stuff than will fit on one necklace, period. Obviously there's going to have to be a series!

Some of these came from Bead Boutique and I think some from one of Nomadic Notions' San Antonio stores. Quite a few of the others I bought on Etsy. I also have tons of other skull beads left over, which I didn't try to put in the picture.

I would post the picture of my finished necklace but I'm not really happy with the picture; besides, I changed it after I took the picture. So I'll post a new one later. (If you can't stand the suspense and want to see, the ones I have are on flickr.)

Craft shopping

Things I bought at Hobby Lobby:
First, the non-bead things -

• a few Christmas ornaments
• some fall-themed napkins
• a candle in a Ball jar, in a cinnamon-y fall kind of scent

(I am a sucker for the seasonal department, in general)

• a couple of rubbers stamps on clearance, also holiday-themed
• a few pieces of scrapbook paper, which I've been using for photo backgrounds

I noticed that I am starting to think like a jewelry-maker even for things that aren't jewelry: I saw an ornament I liked, except that it was awfully elaborate - a glittery bow above a glittery pointy-oval shape. I like glittery but this was a little big for the small-scale tree that I am planning on buying (see below for more about that), and then I thought, "Oh, look, it's just connected by a split-ring - I can just take these apart and use them separately!" So I bought it. (It helped that it was on sale.)

and then the beady stuff:

• two tiny silver bumblebees, which I found in the clearance section. I am into charms lately.
• a tube of gold 6/0 seed beads, which I am thinking of as spacers
• 5mm wooden rondelles (with a really pretty variegated effect)
• a string of glass puff coins in purple, with a geometric design on them. I will have to see if I can get these to scan, or get a picture. I was thinking they looked like they'd make good earrings.
• a string of filigree charms, all the same shape but different metal colors, gold, silver and copper all in one set. They had a bunch of these in various shapes.
• some more of the Aunt Lydia's crochet thread, in green, this time. I have been doing some crocheted jewelry that I will be posting pictures of later.

I also took some notes while I was there. I always go wandering down random aisles in craft stores, when I have time, because you can often find cool things in some very odd places. So I figured I'd better take notes or I'd never remember again later. For example, I found some oversized buttons in the drapery department, in really cute colors, and I stood there for several minutes trying to think how I could use them. They are very big - there were round ones that were about 2" in diameter, and slightly smaller squared-off ones that I think were meant to fit on top of the round ones. They could make a very cute brooch, for sure - but they are too big for most other jewelry uses, I think.

I have also gotten interested in tools, generally, and so I was eyeing the tack hammer, also in the drapery department, of course. But I've already bought a couple of hammers lately (a chasing one and a nylon one) so I couldn't really think of a dire need for another one! They also had those lampshades with the self-adhesive surfaces, which are interesting.

In the needlework department, there were lots of things that interested me:

• wool roving and premade felt shapes
• magnifiers of all shapes and sizes (you pass 40, you get much more interested in these)
• all sorts of crafts that I forget about, like plastic canvas and latch hook kits
• another brand of crochet thread besides the Aunt Lydia's, which is what I've been buying, and also metallicized "Knit-Cro-Sheen" thread (which I think I remember from back in the 70s)
• in the middle of the yarn, a book called Knit with Deborah Norville (I'm sure the knitters know about this one already, but it amused me)

Hobby Lobby has soooooo much decorative stuff - you know, vases and platters and picture frames and various knick-knacks. Somebody is clearly buying this stuff, but it sure isn't me.

Then there's the department with fabric paint and such - what would you call that, the t-shirt department? although clearly people are painting and decorating lots of things besides t-shirts; there are even items apparently specifically intended to decorate flip-flops. (When did decorating flip-flops become a craft unto itself?) Flip-flops don't interest me much, I have to say. They had all sorts of stencils and cute iron-ons and such, though, and that did interest me more. And boas in all colors, which I can't resist trying to think of a use for - usually without much success. (Maybe I'll get one to wear to Quilt Festival or something.)

I suppose the flip-flop decorating market would largely be kids - at least I think so. But it's not like I'm uninterested in crafts aimed at kids, in any case. (I mean, look at the above comment about boas. Honestly, I'm either 49 or maybe 9 years old, depending on the moment.) And we won't even discuss the Ed Hardy (temporary) Tattoo Shop. I didn't buy it. I didn't even look to see how much it was. But I definitely can't say it didn't cross my mind.

I found that one out on a main aisle, next to a bunch of kids' Christmas crafts. But on the main kids'-craft aisle there were interesting things too. I have a bit of a fetish for stickers - I have since I was a kid - and I spent a few minutes trying to think up a use for some of the foam stickers I found there, but I didn't really come up with anything. (I have been trying to replace my sticker habit with buying the occasional rubber stamp instead - at least they're reusable.) They had, like, everything in the world made out of foam - foam shapes and foam stamps and 5"-high foam letters in various almost-primary colors. I thought the colors were a bit odd - like the red wasn't really a bright red but sort of an orangy, dull red - but there was also special foam paint ("Won't crack!") to repaint them with, if you cared to. I was tempted by an set of foam alphabet stamps in a cute, funky font, but I resisted.

Oh, and the also on that aisle was the squares of felt, in every color of the rainbow. I have some adorable felt Christmas ornaments that my mother made when we were little (at least, I think I still do, if they survived the storm!* I need to check that) but it's not the kind of thing I'm likely to ever do myself.

In the jewelry department, I've already listed what I actually got out the door with. I used to be very snobby about HL's jewelry department, mostly because early on I bought some stuff that I thought was metal, only to get home and find out it was metallicized plastic. But I think all of the chain craft stores - that is, Hobby Lobby, Michael's, and JoAnn's, which are the ones we have in this are - have improved their bead departments a good bit in the last year or two. Hobby Lobby now carries those short strings of beads very similar to ones you'd find at JoAnn's and Michael's, although they may or may not come from the same distributor. (I think they still could stand to label things much better. It's not too much to ask what the beads you're buying are actually made of!) Michael's still does the best, I think, on having a good assortment of "trend" kind of beads - like the vintage-looking ones that have been so popular the last couple of years, and stuff like that. But JoAnn's has a good bit of that stuff now, and HL is starting to get some too. (Even Wal-Mart has some now. But mostly I still think the quality of Wal-Mart's beading stuff is pretty inferior.)

I do think that those charms I bought were metallicized plastic, still. They're very light. But they were in an open package where I could shake them around and tell what I was getting before I bought them, so that makes it okay. And they're cute.

Hobby Lobby now also has Vintaj charms, but those were locked in a case, and I'm usually too lazy to hunt down an employee to get them to open it up for me. Plus, they weren't on sale, and I usually think it's a waste to buy anything that's not. I also was eyeing those Soft-Flex "Trios" of coordinating wire, but they seem really overpriced, to me. I'm not buying them without a sale, either.

Let's see, then... further down, on the other side of the kids' crafts, was an aisle with leather-tooling supplies. The thing I looked at there and didn't buy was leather laces - I've been meaning to try those out for necklaces. And then the next aisle down was the unexpected gold-mine - I guess I would call it the "miscellaneous craft" aisle because it had a bunch of different things - stuff for soapmaking, and to make your own stepping stones, and stained glass. And a lot of glass for mosiacs. But next to that was a line of stuff called Fuseworks, for making your own dichroic glass - has anybody tried this stuff? I may have to try it out, if I don't end up taking a dichroic class later. (Hmm, Annette seems to be teaching one later this month!) Across from that was the clay - several different brands. I need to watch for them to put that on sale, too! And a lot of supplies for that. I have been DV-R'ing Beads Baubles and Jewels and I have gotten very interested in clay, also. You see my problem? I'm interested in an awful lot of things!

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* All the ornaments, and the two small artificial trees we had been putting them on, were in the utility room on the back porch during the storm. The ornaments and other decorations were mostly in plastic boxes but water got in some of them somehow, and I threw away a whole lot of ornaments, and both trees. (I figured the metal frames of the trees were liable to rust.) We did a good bit of decorating for Christmas last year but what we didn't do was buy another tree, and I've been planning to buy one this year. I need to get in those boxes and check to see what all is left before I go buying a bunch of ornaments. I had an awful lot of ornaments - we've been married over 20 years and I actively collected them for much of that time - so there are probably still plenty for a small tree.

More blasts from the past

Here's another early piece of jewelry, and an LJ entry I wrote in Feb. 2008. (And ooh, the pictures copy right over - that'll make doing this much easier!) The bracelet isn't anything spectacular and neither is the entry, but I'm just trying to get all my meanderings about jewelry over here in one place.

I made another little bracelet Friday night:



It looks better in person than in this small picture, particularly. These are some of the garnets from the beads-of-the-month package - there were some more, better-quality ones this same size but I'm saving the rest of them for later. The rest of it is just random spacers, but I think it looks nice and it fits my wrist perfectly and I really love it.

I also made some more bracelets and a pair of leaf earrings that I have on right now and I really like a lot. I will have to see if I can figure out what kind of beads the leaves are - they look like glass and I'm pretty sure they came from a Fire Mountain Gems order several years ago. (Fire Mountain Gems used to have a fairly large minimum order policy, as I understand it, so back when I was crazy quilting several of us did a big order and split it up. And that's where the leaf beads came from. They are the oddities in that set of beads because almost everything else is very small beads. Like, everything else is 4-6mm and these are 20.)

As I said, I've been picking up beads here and there for a number of years, so now that I'm using them I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out what some things are in order to find more of them. I just looked, for example, for those leaf beads on Fire Mountain's site and I don't see them, even after paging though all 700 listings for "leaf". I also had a couple of strands of little 4mm beads that are sort of a dark pearlescent color, and I made a two-strand bracelet with them that I like - but again, no idea what they're called or where I got them.