Bonnets, spinning and some sassy booties

I've been making some bonnets lately, a bear one (which I sold on Etsy yesterday! Yeahhhh! Thank you to my customer.) and then I made this pink one but of course .... I had to change the pattern around ... turned out bigger ears and a ruffled edging compared to the bear one I had made. So now I don't think it looks like a bear, more like a cat I would say. Anyway, it still looks cute which is the important part. Hopefully somebody else thinks that way and will buy it.

My spinning adventure hasn't gotten much further then trying it out at the meeting the other day. I just haven't had the time to sit down, relax and try to spin some yarn. But ... I've promised myself during the coming winter months I will manage to spin some yarn, for now I just keep thinking about it, the doing part will have to wait a bit.

So how about those sassy baby booties! I again managed to change a pattern which means they turned out totally different looking then what the original pattern looked like. Good thing I remembered to write down what I changed on the pattern since I had to make a matching pair I figured I better do so.

I also finished felting another scarf. A pink one with some wild alpaca handspun yarns (not by me! ... yet!). I need to work on it some more before I take some pictures of it.

And ... I promised Sofie we'd start painting her room. I showed her how to patch up all the holes in the walls from where her posters used to be so she went to work earlier this evening and patched them up. We're waiting for it to dry so tomorrow I will show her how to sand it all down. She's already taped off the doors and windows in her reading nook which will be the first part that gets painted. She changed her colors from the original wanting to have Twilight colors (black and red!!!! Vampire style! Yikes!!!!!) to a totally different color scheme now purple, mint green and white .... sooooooo much prettier I must say.

Time to start felting some more so off I go.

Whimsical Blue Bird and Funky Beanies

So what do you think? I managed to make a whimsical little bird, well he's actually not that little I guess. You have to understand I've always had a hard time making silly and funky things. For some darn reason my stuff always ends up looking more elegant versus fun and/or silly. I've been trying to figure out why that is ... and I really can't explain it. I guess as an artist we all have our own way of making things look a certain way, which ends up being our very own, I guess, signature look? I never gave it much thought until I started making beanies for the beanie festival in Alice Springs. My kid and husband both kept telling me to make something more crazy, outrageous, etc. Well I tried, I tried for 3 yrs but each time I ended up with something just not crazy enough, again my hats turned out looking elegant ... except maybe for this last one I made. I had basically given up on trying something crazy until I started digging into my bags of yarn and found a bag full of metallic yarns my mother-in-law had given me. I just picked a yarn and started crochetting, not trying to think of what the end result would look like. So I kept on going thinking what else I could use to make it more silly, I remembered a huge bag of emu feathers my husband had purchased for me (thanks honey!) he figured some day I would find some use for them ... so I did. As you can see in the photo I used lots of emu feathers on that thing hoping to make it look more silly ... not sure if that really added to make it a more fun/funny beanie but I tried my darnedest.