Good morning, friends! Hope you are well!~ Today I thought I’d join Frontier Dreams for her Crafting On series and show a bit of what I’ve been working on this week….as always, I have about 25 projects going on at once, but these are a few of my favorites 😀

   I just finished these little gnomes for my son to give him tomorrow as a St Valentine’s Day treat! I got the idea from Sugarhouse Workshop, as she has a tutorial on making little Waldorf gnomes on her website. I highly recommend it! They were simple and a pleasure to create. I used some my dyed wool for rug hooking and wool applique for their hats and capes and I love the earthy colors of them. This wool is a bit of a hoarded stash for ‘someday’ projects but I decided “well, I have a project NOW and I’ll use it!” So, here they are….I also painted a little paper mache box I had on hand to look like a little cabin to store them in. So they have a house as well 😀

   I’m also thrilled and very relieved to have the loom up and running again with a fresh warp. I have decided that warping a loom is very much an activity that takes a village. I have tried to do it on my own, but I cant get the tension right. Luckily my mother-in-law used to weave a lot and she was able to come over and help me get this thing operational. It is still a bit of a work in process— when I got the loom it didnt have its crank any longer, and to buy another one is about $80– at least. And, well, I just can’t bring myself to spend $80 on a crank! So I do it by hand 😉 seems to work alright! This is what I’ve got on the loom right now:

   I’ve woven a tartan style cowl for myself, and at the moment I’m just playing around with some multi-colored yarn that I handspun myself, and I like the colors its weaving up. Looking at it here, it sorta goes with my gnomes, doesnt it? Maybe I should sew it up as a little gnome bed to put in their cabin when I get the whole warp woven and cut off the loom.

   I think on my next warp, though, I’m going to cheat….you can tie a new warp onto an old one by tying the old strings and the new ones together and then winding it all on again…that way there’s no need to re-thread it all. Isnt that deviously clever? (I did not come up with this old idea, haha, but I’m happy to swipe it!)

   As well as a multitude of projects, I’m always reading a multitude of books (or simply hoarding them!) but the latest one on top of my reading pile is this new-ish biography of the Romanov sisters, called, well, The Romanov Sisters. I’ve just started but its very well written and very readable. The story of the Romanovs and old Russia is a fascination I’ve had since I was a teenager, so when I came upon this book at a bargain book store I couldn’t just leave it there, you know?

   And on top of all this…I am painting a bit! And always sending out orders! I also just made a fresh order for new prints and restocking much beloved prints, and those will all be in the shop ASAP!

   thanks so much for your visit today!~ Talk more soon,
h