littlewaif.com Blog

I am not in my right mind

Originally uploaded by littlewaif

SFARC, not a very good acronym. I can’t be the only one who doesn’t feel like crafting glitter and goodness every day of their life. Some days I feel like chain saws and fangs for everyone. Some days I don’t even have the energy for chain saws and fangs. Today, embroidery floss on linen. No iron or embroidery hoop envolved. To hell with blocking or even lettering. I’m even surprised I spelled anything right. I’m just glad I didn’t accidentally stab myself with the needle, else this beauty wouldn’t have survived for the whole world to see. I am not in my right mind.

Owl Time Traveler

Originally uploaded by littlewaif

Just playing around with brushes and stuff on photoshop. Anthropomorphic figures are love.

Banshee Time Traveler

Originally uploaded by littlewaif

Not to be outdone by her nemesister, Banshee goes further back in time to visit merry old England.

Callie Hates Her Easter Suit

Originally uploaded by littlewaif

Even the cat isn’t safe from my mad photoshopping skills. Okay, so this is my first attempt at this sort of thing.  I have screaming bad neck pain so I can’t do anything crafty and it hurts to pick up my left arm, but my mousing arm is okay so playing with computer programs it is.

The bunny dance fabric

Originally uploaded by littlewaif

This is the cutest fabric ever, dancing bunnies! It is like a decorator weight fabric, can you imagine this as curtains? Except my husband asked if the one image, where the male bunny is lifting the girl bunny in to the air, if he is smiling or his throat is cut.

The Birds Discuss

Originally uploaded by littlewaif

The birds discuss which one of them should be listed first on etsy and whether one should be priced higher than the rest, because she is royalty after all. Even if she is only made out of a old housecoat.

Yes, I machine wash wool clothing. Call me crazy, call me foolish. But, I really have an aversion to dry cleaning chemicals. Great grandma didn’t have access to the chemicals on her little house on the prairie and I would guess she wore wool clothing. Granted she probably didn’t wash her clothes as often as we do nowdays. But she still needed to wash her clothes every now and then.
Here are my tips:

Before you try to wash your $200 sweater, make a trip to the thrift shop and purchase a sweater that is 100% wool and one that you wouldn’t be heartbroken to see shrunk just in case your experiment goes awry.

Put your sweater in the wash with a couple of equally not loved items, maybe some old t-shirts and set your washer to the gentle cycle with cold water. I add regular old laundry detergent, liquid is best. Just don’t use as much. Right now I have a front loading washer, but before I scored the front loader my top loader worked just as well.
Go watch tv. After the washer is done, pull out the sweater. If it smells like a wet old dog, you’ve got clean wool. Now here comes the important part. Gently stretch each sleeve and the sweater from top to bottom. Don’t stretch side to side. For some reason, sweaters seem to get shorter and fatter in the wash, not longer and skinnier.

Put your items in the dryer for about 10 minutes on medium heat. I always put in a dryer sheet, I think this softens up the wool fiber and saves me from the smell of drying wool. Your intention is not to dry your sweater very much at all. You just want it slightly less wet and heavy.

Now gently stretch the sleeves and sweater top to bottom in the same manner as you did after the wash. You now have two options. You can lay your sweater flat to dry on a towel, and periodically stretch the fabric as it dries. Or, and this is my preference, hang the sweater from the towel rod in the shower on a nice thick plastic hanger. You still might have to stretch the sweater a little, but gravity helps more in this method. Every now and then reposition the sweater on the hanger so you don’t have hanger marks on the sweater once it dries.

I haven’t lost one sweater with this method. And I wear a lot of wool in the winter. I have had some luck with wool jackets, but generally lined ones do not work so well as the lightweight lining stretches out as it hangs on the rod. Cashmere works great. Don’t be afraid of wool. Be afraid of sheep.

I think it is like dumpster diving. Except it involves digging through boxes of stuff from someone’s storage locker that they stopped paying the rent on. Pretty much every Saturday or Sunday I go to the local flea market and see what sort of stuff I need. This weekend was epic. I thought about not going. I just had a root canal and can’t eat anything (darvon) and my old whiplash injury is acting up. But, the weather was nice and my theory is that if you want to get healthy, you have to start to act like you are healthy. So off I went.

One of the first stalls I visited was a buyout from a person who used to make wedding and fancy dresses. I got a HUGE bag of wedding and bridesmaid dress appliques, you know the ones with the sequins and pearls that make your dresses all sparkly, for $5.00. I feel like Vera Wang I have so many. I have no idea what to use them for, but I imagine that anything I make will have some sort of pearly applique stuck to it.
I walked through the market, thinking to go home since the bags I already had were heavy enough and my tooth and neck were killing me. But I decided to go back to my car, dump my stuff, and go in to the farmers market and have a mango/banana smoothie since I can’t eat solids. (The seller at the flea market has the absolute best smoothies. They chop the fruit as you watch, no artificial flavorings there.) Anyway, the smoothie was yum so I decided to take one more turn at the outside market. There is a seller there who always has interesting/good stuff…. they purchase up storage units and just stick the boxes out for buyers to sort through. Sometimes the stuff is mundane, but judging by the number of women sorting through stuff, I knew this day was different. Apparently someone who had more cash and love for shoes than imelda marcos had forgot to pay the rent on their storage locker and decided to make it my lucky day… the shoes were all designer brand names and size 5 1/2 and 6. We are not talking skeechers and nikes. I got gucci shoes, i got more high-end italian leather shoes and brands I’ve never heard of that I’m sure are not cheap. And the person who didn’t pay the rent on their locker was my size small. I got about 20 pieces of Betsey Johnson clothes, more cashmere stuff than I have ever seen (I even got cashmere pants!), purses,…. Women were literally swimming over the top of boxes grabbing for stuff, most moaning that the woman whose stuff we were all pawing over must have been a tiny little gnome or something, everything was so small.

I think I snapped up at least 25 pairs of shoes, 15 purses, gobs and gobs of clothing for $60. Over two days. Yes, I went back. Most people I recognized on the second day. People were holding on to one of a pair announcing “if anyone finds the other one to this one, please let me know”. An older man and a woman had to flip a quarter over who would get the set of one pair of shoes, as both had claimed to find their one shoe first. (the man won, I hope his wife loves him).

God bless flea markets.