more manyhands busyness

Sometimes it feels like all I do is work. Our holiday market event is just about two weeks away. I've been busy every evening making more tidbits; about half the items on my "hopeful-to-do" list are now colorful reality.

These little pincushions are known on-line as "biscornu" ("that which has irregular form, with projections" or "complicated and bizarre") I like that.

All work and no play makes Alison a dull girl. Inspired by some decorative sewing pins I saw out in blog-land I decided some playtime with colored pencil and shrinky-plastic would be fun. A quick trip to Collage over on Alberta (I like having an art stuff store fairly nearby that isn't a big box store), and I came home with a package of "Polyshrink^tm - artists grade shrink plastic" made by "Lucky Squirrel" (is it only me that finds these names peculiar?, our heroine wonders to herself) Having never before experimented with "shrinkydinks" my first attempt came out waaay too tiny, but on the second try, I made these three little pins… (which you can actually see in the previous picture too). They're about 1/4" wide, a nice size, if a bit difficult to get my camera to focus down on.

I've been bustling about getting the house picked up before the assessor inspection yesterday, so Acorn Cottage is relatively tidy, with lots more stuff piled in the workroom. I did find a whole carton of outdated catalogs mislabeled as "useful books" (well, they were useful once, but now are merely recycling), but most of the boxes will need to be actually sorted and organised. It does look like there will be room for everything once the storage shelf wall is built, 'specially if I do something similar in the future sewing-guest-computer room, and it is obvious that I need to come up with some good way to store the wood bits (molding and lumber and wood, oh my!) that I seem to be accumulating.

Since the house is more accessible, with the boxes consolidated, I'd like to do more social things here. I'm thinking of having Monday night be open-house-drop-in project night, since I am usually home working on one project or another anyhow. And I'm also thinking about starting up the (formerly Not-Just-For-Sewing^tm) once a month tea party, on the third Saturday of the month. Feedback anyone?...