Product Development

How not glamorous.

How much better would it be to just sit at one's well organised work space (ideally looking out over an inspiring vista), nicely dressed and clean (no baby snot in hair), churning out one lovely after another. I know this doesn't happen except to a few souls profiled in magazines. I would still like that to be me.

That said, I am working on some embroidered sachets to put up on Esty. I am in the experimental stages. Sketching with thread. First thing to go will be that blue flower. I like the bird, although the poor thing is embroidered with the wrong stitch. It needs a meatier one. The cloth is a gorgeous Californian flax I dyed using a natural dye. I can't remember which dye. I must be maturing because while this won't be used, I am not fretting over the "waste" of materials. If I believed in past lives, I would have had one in The Depression. So many projects have not happened because of my weird "but I'll waste it" mentality. Lame. The re-use and recycle movement has been great for me. I have always been reluctant to take apart something perfectly good even if it doesn't fit, it has a hole, a stain, whatever. Which would mean it isn't perfectly good, ideal for reuse!

Watching people tear into things and make gorgeous new things is just what I needed. That has always been in me, but there was a strange block there. Maybe I'll head over to a Carl Jung website and start exploring my psyche to see why I was so uptight. The moral of the story is the desire to create can over rule any bizarro psychological tendencies we may have. Or it can feed them. How exciting. What new bizarros around the corner...

Embroidery Opinion of the Day: French knots suck. A mock French knot is way easier. My nana tried to teach me French knots when I was little and I never mastered it. Never. The French knot must be in the same part of my brain where algebra lives. The Great Void.

Book recommendation: The Crabapple Bakery Cupcake Cookbook. I've made three recipes out of this since Xmas and they all rock. I just ate a John's Baci Birthday one. Yeah, it's not quite 10:00 in the morning. Cupcakes are an around the clock kind of food. Cupcakes are also a craft. I will debate you on this.

As I am also an aficionado of the domestic life and since I cannot start another blog about that, I will leaving each post with a quote from The Book of Hints and Wrinkles, copyright 1939.

We will start with some hair care.

Drying and Setting

Do not use a Turkish towel, but one or two old, soft face towels, linen ones for preference. Then proceed to whatever setting methods you employ. Never miss the chance to dry your hair in the sun, if there is any, but if you have to dry it by the fire, do not hold it too near.