Rumi Ornaments Tutorial

A few years back at Christmas-time someone gave me a calendar with poems from the Sufi poet Rumi. The calendar had 12 pages of short poems accompanied by beautiful imagery of oriental carpets and middle eastern artwork. I kept the calendar after the year ended; such beautiful artwork needed to be saved for some special crafty project.
The other day I was wandering around JoAnn's Fabrics (as I generally do) and came upon a scallop-edged Squeeze Punch made by Fiskars. I counted the number of scallops around the circumference of the punch and realized there were 15 - easily divisible by three. Whoo Hoo! An idea sparked in my mind - I could use the punch to create three-dimensional ornaments out of the calendar images.
At home I dusted off my Rumi calendar, cut out some of its pages and started punching scallop-edged circles like the mad woman I am!

Each ornament requires 20 circles, but I found that a couple of the designs on the calendar pages weren't large enough to accommodate that many circles so I punched a few extras out of the parchment-colored plain portions so I could write out portions of Rumi's poems in my chicken-scratchy (read that as non-calligraphic) handwriting.

Working on another ornament, I realized the punch created a lovely medieval-esque arch design out of the leftovers. Note to self: file that baby away for a future project!

The next thing to do was fold the scallop-edge circles into triangles. Remember the punch has 15 scallops? That means each side of the triangle equals five scallops, so it was super easy to fold them.

The ornaments are essentially two segments of five triangles each flanked by a middle section of 10 triangles.

I created the top of each ornament by glueing five triangles to each other, then left that to dry as I worked on glueing the middle bits together. They're stuck together in a sort of zig-zag configuration. As anyone who knows me knows, when I even get close to glue it somehow spreads out and mysteriously ends up on everything within a five mile radius. I swear I don't know how it happens. That's why I used Elmer's transparent school glue. It (and everything it's stuck on) is washable.

Here's a shot of one ornament almost completely assembled:

And here are a trio of finished ornaments. I added a tassel to each one by attaching them to a string I threaded through the body of the ornaments, then slapped a couple of large fire-polish beads on top in accent colors.

Oh by the way, here's that ornament with the Rumi poem on it.

The entire poem reads:
I see my beauty in you,
A mirror that cannot close its eyes,
A moth caught in flame's allure.

Shakespeare and QR Codes

Okay, so I have been having some fun creating QR Codes with lines from Shakespeare embedded in them because I had the bright idea of using QR codes as punchcard patterns for machine knitting. Like this one:

It reads "When love speaks, the voice of all the gods makes heaven drowsy with the harmony"
I had envisioned using quotes like this as edgings for cardigans.

However, it dawned on me that punch cards can only be 24 "punches" across and QR Codes are more than 24 squares across...sigh. I'd have to get a knitting machine than can handle more than 24 punches... Alas! Back to my idea of using a random pattern generator to create fair isle patterns...

Lacey Lace and some Groovy Patterns

I've recently taken classes in advanced machine knitting and was thrilled, thrilled I tell you, to learn how to use my trusty old Toyota 901 to make lace patterns. OMG. OMG. O.M.G.

I then tried to knit up some rather scratchy hand spun lavender-colored yarn JoAnn had in her stash, but to no avail. The yarn was too unevenly spun and plied and my machine simply DID NOT APPRECIATE IT and immediately began dropping stitches left and right as if to say "Oh, did I do that? Sorry!"

Alas. in consolation I hit a local Value Village and found these groovy groovy patterns.

Now tell me, is this far-out hot pink paisley barkcloth not perfect for the frock in the background of Simplicity 7673?

I'm Just Mad About Saffron

Well talk about a brain dump - it's what you're about to be subjected to, if you dare to read on...
I found out that Donovan is appearing at the big Faery Festival in Eugene, Oregon at the end of July, so naturally I had to get tickets and create a very special hat to wear to the concert:

But I was also intrigued by the idea of going as a Maenad, so I've begun making a horned headdress to wear during the day at that festival:

Eventually, I will add flowers and ribbons and googaws to make it resemble something like this:

Or this:

The original inspiration was this:

Snow-homish

Stuff in the Mail

This week has been an ever-so international week for me, mail-wise. Earlier in the week I received some needle lace books from Italy:

"Bordi" featured 8 gorgeous border needle lace projects. They look very very Renaissance-y.

Punchetto is a deliciously colorful type of needle lace done in Italy. A few years ago I saw a short video on Youtube of a woman creating a piece of punchetto with just thread and a needle. I was so enthralled by it I had to track down some books on it. This book is a little advanced for me, but the beginner's book was out of stock, so I'll have to wait for that one.

Ricami d'Assisi featured delightful renaissance creatures in a type of cross stitch.
It is so exciting for me to see these wonderful examples of embroidery and needle lace. I have a new passion!





And today, our esteemed postlady had me sign for a copy of Perlen Poesie, which is a German beading magazine published in Hamburg. Their November issue featured an article on micro-macrame and included photos of some of my pieces and Joan Babcock's too.

Dragonfly Protoype

I've been creating dragonfly protoypes for an upcoming tutorial for a beading magazine...after a point I realized I had been over-designing the poor critter and backed off to a much simpler design...

Etsy Swag

I have been busy lately knotting up 50 (yes 50) micro-macrame owls for the etsyRAIN holiday sale in 2 weeks. I don't have time in my life to actually participate in the sale, but I am part of the 20 or so artists who created swag for the swag bags that will be given out to the first 50 customers. I got bored making these critters in monotone so I started getting all creative with colors...

I even knotted up a couple of 'em in the University of Washington colors of gold and purple: go dawgs go! Just don't eat my owls...