Clown? and Poor Kitty

Above is a vintage handmade yoyo clown in my shop. Is it just me, or does he look sinister?

During morning prayer, Whitney the Cat usually sits close by and purrs. Today, she made soft distressed noises and left the room. It turned out that when I had packed an order for mailing, I had left a tangled piece of tape on the floor. She stepped on it and had to drag it out to the kitchen before it fell off. I'm sorry, Whitney.

Geography and Pre-fur Bunnies

When I was going to school at UMKC, I had a job in the Office of Academic Affairs. The Asst. Dean for AA sometimes sent packages to Beijing. I was so delighted to pack them and mail them that the office manager always saved them for me to do. I thought that after living in Japan I was all sophisticated and would no longer be impressed by foreign addresses.

Well, evidently I still am. I'm even excited by selling items from the etsy shop to coastal States in the USA. I started hyperventilating today when I got an email from the UK about postage. Do you think I've been in the Midwest too long?

Another rabbit, Snowflake, kindled 10 today. I'd put up a photo, but they're pretty primitive looking, before fur.

So I'll tell you another story to show you how I haven't yet quite grown up. I like to sing to the rabbits, sometimes pretty silly songs:

Every bunny needs some bunny sometime(Dean Martin, if you remember him)

Rudolph the Red-nosed bunny (in this version, Jesus comes to say one night...)

Jesus loves the little bunnies, all the bunnies in the world...

I began to wonder if I weren't somehow wrong to sing the last one, so I asked Mr. P,"Does Jesus really love the little bunnies?" Mr. P said, "Well, I guess He must, He gave them all fur coats."

So I hope we're all warm, or cool , as needed, and have full tummies.

The Shop

The photo on top shows the green size 30 crochet cotton. There are 4 balls of red,too.

The second photo is of some of my very favorite Christmas fabric.

The Christmas in July sale will be over on Friday.

Runaway Bunnies and What if I Wrote a Blog...

and nobody read it?

That's how I felt yesterday, since I haven't had a comment in days. Mr. P was my solace.

Then, this morning, I asked around the gym and grocery, and found out some people do read it. I salute you. You made my day.

The rabbits are incarcerated, no, housed in the basement. They're on a ledge, about waist high, so we have easy access. The mature rabbits look out and down but show no interest in escaping. We had a runaway bunny once before, and it took about six weeks to catch him. He seemed relieved to be back with his sibs, even though we had been putting out food and water for him.

This morning as I watered Mora, two of her babies, who don't yet quite fill my hand, jumped out to the floor. One let me pick him up easily. The other one lead me back and forth and around for awhile. Since the previous runaway had learned to hide under the washer and dryer, I was determined to catch this one before he learned that trick.

So I turned on the water, put the nozzle of the hose to Gentle, and kind of herded him. He did get wet, but gently. Eventually he hid his eyes behind a paint can and I was able to pick him up. The drenched bunny sat away from the others in the cell, no cage, but Mora went over and checked on him.

Below is the wet bunny, being shy. Below that is Mora and if you look left, you see another shy, but dry, bunny behind her. The photo below that is of bunnies still in the nest box.

Another Embarassment

I embarassed myself again, this time on a group for the etsy team, Mad Scientists of Etsy. To tell the short version, I wrote"everybody knows that one of the Leakeys came clean about their hoax,"
or close to that.

First of all, I was brought up better than to use words like: everybody, nobody,always, or never.

Then, I googled Leakey hoax, and it doesn't seem to be as clear cut as I thought it was. If anyone knows where I can read a fairly reliable account, please let me know.

To set the record straight, I have no problem with evolution or long earth history. It looks pretty sure that God did it that way. As I've posted here before, I like how the Reasons to Believe crowd and Gerald Schroeder discuss it.

It's just the Leakeys with whom I have a problem.

I would really like some feedback on this. Thank you.

Busy

Above are some, but not all, of the new things in the shop.

That Moment

Juneblue said I could post this here. See previous post for link to her etsy shop.

That moment...-original acrylic painting

SOLD!

Sir Isaac Rooster, pictured at the end of the last post, has sold. Again, to a buyer on a coast.

I'm extraordinarily happy with even the few sales our etsy shop is making. I think it might be because I haven't actually earned money (a few $ here and there) in the last 11 years.

Mr. P jokingly asked me last night if I felt like a kept women. We laughed and I said that if I sat all day smoking my pipe, reading books on tape, and finishing toys, while he did all the food prep, laundry,scheduling, bill paying, managing the household inventory, and being a reader to the blind, and dealing with other disabilities, then I might feel like a kept woman.

I wasn't brought up to be this kind of woman. It's harder than I had thought.

With Mr. P confined to his smoking room all day, we don't often see each other until dinner. So after dinner has been OUR TIME. But last night, I was listing on etsy and doing market research. I think I'd better cut off the computer work at 5pm.

The local hospital had a computer program that required information about the spouse's employment and my options were "retired" or "unemployed." Once I said"reader to the blind",
but the clerk didn't buy it.


I found a painter from Manhattan, KS who obviously understands the beauty of Kansas. I really like this one. http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=9198447

P.S. The above link doesn't work anymore because Miriam is temporarily closed. You can see more of her work at www.juneblue.etsy.com, especially after the middle of Sept.


Gratuitous photo of needlepointed flowers.

sghulett.etsy.com

S G Hulett is having a "Help My Daughter" Sale. She does good work so check out her shop and see if there's any item you see in your future.
Daughter is pregnant, and through no fault of her own, must leave her home.

I found, on the same digest that I read about the above situation, a post I'd made, saying that I agree heartily with most of the cast opinions. The ones with which I don't agree? Well, I can't really respond to them. Sometime, in the 5 decades I've been a Christian, I would have said the same thing. Once in awhile on etsy, I see something in the CAST shops that I don't consider tasteful or modest. I couldn't possibly say that to the shop owner, because sometime in my life, I have worn clothes just like them, which I now feel are immodest. So, I understand.

Recently in the heat and humidity here, I've thought about pulling out some of that immodest stuff. However, it just doesn't feel right any more.

I've become increasingly fascinated with the items for sale on etsy, and comparing them with the same thing offered on ebay. I probably need to find another selling venue, and everyone knows about ebay. To cover the higher costs on ebay, the sellers generally charge more than on etsy. but there's probably more exposure on ebay. Do you have to sell to the highest bidder, even if it's lower than what you need? I desparately need the advice of someone who has sold on ebay.

Above is a gratuitous portrait of Sir Isaac Rooster.

PHOTOS

Following is the link to the photo of a beautiful handpainted bookmark. All of Catherine's things are beautiful. I bought this one.


http://www.etsy.com/view_transaction.php?transaction_id=9555327

I particularly liked this bookmark because, the first time I met Mr. P, that song, El Shaddai (maybe there are several?) kept running through my head. Truly He is great. Mr. P and I keep saying, after 11 years, that God gave us to each other to prove that He exists and that He loves us.

So, here are some photos of things I listed in the shop today.

Three Autumn ornaments with eccentric yoyos and felt. They are two sided, for many uses, including wearing as a bracelet with a costume. Below are the backs.

Sorry about the bad photo.

We got all excited at our house today because Mr. P's toys sold. More are on the way. I guess I'm easy to impress, because I'm all adither that the buyer is from a high rent district on a coast.

The image adder on this blog is very slow tonight, so I'll just refer to our etsy shop for the new orange tote and the vintage yoyo clown, etc.

Post a comment to let me know you've been here.

Currently there is a little problem, shared by some other sellers, that I can see no photos on etsy. At all. In any shop. Etsy support is tracking it down. So, in the meantime, here are some pics. The following is the link to the photo (WOW! I did see one!) of a beautiful handpainted bookmark. All of Catherine's things are beautiful. <a href="http://www.etsy.com/view_transaction.php?transaction_id=9555327"> http://www.etsy.com/view_transaction.php?transaction_id=9555327</a> I particularly liked this bookmark because, the first time I met Mr. P, that song.El Shaddai (maybe there are several?) kept running through me head. Truly He is great. Mr. P and I keep saying, after 11 years, that God gave us to each other to prove that He exists and that He loves us.

Discussing Women

I really appreciated Marvia's comment yesterday, and recommend you look at her website, discussing women.com.

Please look it over. I guess it's more important to leave comments about it on Marvia's site, but I'd really like to know what you think.

Pricing on etsy is widely varied. Very successful shops, like whimsiedots, whatshername, AprilAdriance, and sally1, have low prices. (Low enough I could afford to shop there.) On the other hand, I have wondered how much that works out per hour for them, and myself. Perhaps we're trying to compete with THAT store. Other shops , usually based in NYC, I think, are successful with higher prices.

One issue is inflation. When I hear that the average American income is $65,000 per year, my first reaction is to not believe it, and my second is to say, "We're selling our products too cheaply on etsy." But with food and fuel so high, how long are families going to buy from the internet and pay shipping? Shipping, of course, may be cheaper than driving to the mall. Perhaps the prices don't seem, on the coasts and in large cities in America, to be so high.

So I have to work out, in my head and heart, what I want to charge. Opinions?

The Giggle Hat

Above is a photo of a hat for the etsy shop. The yarn is 50% wool and 50% acrylic. It's ModaDea Swerve in the color Giggle. Herrschnerr's had a sale on it for only $1.49 a skein and I got free shipping on it. It took two skeins, so the yarn was only about $3.

By the common method of figuring prices for knit and crocheted items, I should charge $9-$12 for it. I have a little problem with that, both plus and minus.

Women have never earned enough money for their handwork. Through the centuries, widows have taken in sewing, knitting, etc. (not to mention laundry) and have barely kept themselves alive with the proceeds. So in this century we respect Women's Work. Really? Perhaps we respect the women working in factories in Bangladesh, but if we knew the reality of the situation...

So, I'm all for buying handmade for enough money to show that we value the work.

On the other hand, I've made a lot of gifts for family and friends and usually felt that the making of them incorporated my prayers for them. Recently when I knit, etc., even though I'll never meet the ones who will wear it, I try to remember to pray for them. I should make money on this?

Enough obsessing. I think $9 during the Christmas in July sale and $12 starting in August.

The Dress , Hypermiling, and Mora

I tried having a picture taken of myself in a dress I'd made, several years ago, from the princess pattern shown below. Aside from the fact that my chin is more than double today, it turns out that the dress doesn't fit me as well as I thought it did. A photograph is much more revealing than the mirror.

Fortunately I've learned some things about fitting a pattern, since I made that dress. For one thing, it's meant to have shoulder pads, which I always leave off because they're just one more layer to hold in the heat. So, it's too wide on the shoulders. Also, while it fit my bosom when I made it, things have changed. I can fix the dress. Enjoy your youth while you're young. (Later note: I won't fix the dress. It was also made before I learned to finish seams, and has raveled so much that it doesn't seem worth my time.)

On to gasolene economy. We drive a gas hogging van. However, we do so little driving that we only buy about 10 gallons of gas a month. I try really hard to conserve what we buy, gliding into yellow lights and starting slowly. When I see people doing jack rabbit starts and and riding both the gas pedal and the brake, I wonder that there aren't more discussions about gas economy. Maybe there are, and I've somehow missed them.

I did find one blog post about it, hypermiling, discussed on a blog called Old Testament Ecology.
It's on wikipedia too.

Mr P has had some Amish friends, and he thinks they might, as they drive their buggies and feed their horses hay, be quietly and gently laughing.

Mora ( the Rabbit Formerly Known as Fillmore) stopped eating as soon as she had her babies. We feed rabbit food pellets with alfalfa and other nutritious ingredients, with the occasional carrot, as a treat. She stopped eating pellets. We plied Mora with carrots, cabbage leaves and a little milk, with little success. The babies weren't dehydrated and were warm and wiggly, but their ribs were obvious. We cajoled, we prayed.

Then I remembered reading on The Adventures of Chrystal and Godiva that rabbits eat raisins. We offered them with great success. Mora now eats all the fresh produce we offer and is even eating a few alfalfa pellets. The babies are thriving. Thank you to all involved.

Dress

I love this vivid, vintage dress. I tried very hard to think of ways to enlarge it so I could wear it, but I was never convinced I wouldn't ruin it. So it's in the etsy shop.

It's labeled Grande, but Large means different things in different decades.

Which leads me to discuss the meaning of Plus Size. It astonishes me to search for Plus Size dresses and be presented with a 38 in. bust. Are they kidding?

I look around when I go shopping and there are a bunch of us for whom there were no dresses on the rack to fit us until the 80's. (Of course, in the 70's I was smaller and could find dresses on the rack. There were just none that would fit me now.)

There seems to be a real need for stylish clothing to fit the woman of brave proportions, and doesn't cost an appendage.

However, there are some marvelous clothes available at PetronellaFashion.etsy.com.

Giveaways

Mandi, at 3lilmonkeys, has a knack for finding giveaways.

New Items in Etsy Shop

This lovely vintage angel ornament arrived at our home today. I've added the tag Easter, as well as Christmas, in the etsy listing. I've wondered for years why we don't seem to have Easter scenes like we have Nativity scenes. There'd be an empty tomb, of course, and an angel or two. There would be a Mary or three, Peter, John, and if the artist has courage, Jesus. I can easily make a baby Jesus for Christmas, but I'd have a little hesitation about depicting the Risen Lord. Probably Father has given that talent to some artist.
The wooden vehicles shown above were hand finished by Mr. P and sealed with non-toxic polyurethane.

Birth Announcement

Mora (the Rabbit Formerly Known as Fillmore) is the mother of 8. See June 7 post for the story.

Tried and True(TNT) Patterns

Diary of a Sewing Fanatic blogger, Carolyn, introduced me to the term TNT patterns. I had thought only my family got stuck on one or two patterns.

My Grannie used the same pattern from the time I was born until she stopped sewing. It buttoned down the bodice, which was attached at the waist to the four panel skirt, and had set in sleeves. It always had self covered buttons and self-covered belt. The tissue was quite worn by the time I was noticing patterns, but I think she could have cut it without the pattern. After a car accident, in which her collar bone was broken, her shoulders were of different heights and she also developed a dowager's hump. Somehow she knew how to compensate for all that and made very well fitting dresses.

When I started sewing for Sister, we settled on two patterns. One was The Dress, which falls free from a yoke. The other I call The Elastic Dress, since it falls free from an elastisized or beribboned neckline.

I prefer princess style dresses. The pattern shown above worked well for me for several years. Then, the last time we moved, I lost a piece (side front, I think.) I consulted with an expert friend and we came up with a couple of ways I could remake the piece. However, I kept putting it off and looked obsessively in pattern books for other princess patterns. During one midnight hormonal cleaning fit, I threw out the parts of the pattern I had, thinking that there are many other princess patterns out there.

As it turned out, the others didn't fit me, even with a lot of tweaking. Sometimes, I suppose they fit, but they just didn't feel right. So for several years I have occasionally searched the web for The Pattern. I can only think that many women liked the pattern and didn't want to give it up.

Last week, I found it! Since I bought the first one at a $.99 sale, I had to pay several times that for the new one, but I'm really pleased.

Grannie used her tissue pattern for many years. I found that after only three or four dresses, my patterns are pretty well used up. So I learned to paste them to wrapping paper, and more recently, to iron them onto interfacing. I can never refold them to fit the envelope so I use 1 or 2 gallon freezer bags to store them. I used to use file folders, taped up the side, but it didn't work well in my file cabinet. That's how I lost the piece. The freezer bags go into a milk carton.

Do you have a TNT pattern?

Photos and sewing

The photo above vaguely reminds me of the hyperbolic plane. I wonder how the Fibonacci numbers work out in this growth.

I had really believed the above sweater would be wearable in warm weather, since it had short sleeves. Hahaha. It's the Bombshell from that wonderful book, BIG GIRL KNITS.
Now you know why I never get the quilting done. Whitney loves it so much.

We've recently gone back to the Wellness Center, which is like a gym, and I discovered that all my warm weather exercise clothes had worn out. So, sew.

USA

I love living in this country,especially in a smallish midwestern town.

I don't deny there's a lot wrong here, but we can have hope we'll muddle through.

Where something's wrong we can talk, organize, vote, send emails, flood offices with letters, or stand on the street with a sign.

No, it's not utopia. There is gross misuse of power and a lot of selfish near-sighted people. Gas is expensive, groceries are inflating rapidly...

Most of us only think we believe in equality.

I'm depressing myself. I'd better not mention social security and medicare.

I will NOT publish a post ending on such a note, so I will remember the kind, the generous, the devout, the competent, and those with good character(which means truly doing the best you can). Today I will remember why America is beautiful.

Laminan

Sheree, a member of the CAST team on Etsy, brought the laminan molecule to our attention.

It holds our molecules together.

I joyously recommend you watch the video below. The speaker is Louie Giglio.

Local Babies, etc.

I know a couple of little girls, one of whom has arrived and one of whom is still on the way. So I knitted away and then made some totes, to use instead of giftwrap.

The lady above is Misharee the Library Clerk. She's so happy because, after two boys, number three is a girl.

The pink and purple sweater is for the daughter of Sean who we know from the Wellness Center.

I made two totes, like the photo on top, because I figure no family has enough bags. It was all a lot of fun.

The sweaters are Caron Simply Soft acrylic yarn, from The Yarn Basket.

The Mad Scientists of Etsy have a monthly challenge, on some theme. For July it's "platypus" and I made a quick and dirty entry, using a purchased shopping bag, from that infamous store we all would like to avoid. I suppose none of us would like to be caught using a bag from there, so I embellished it with frog fleece and a stylized platypus, covering the store name. Frogs beware. The platypus is coming.

The orange hyperbolic plane also made it onto the etsy store, minus Mr. P's long-suffering face.

If you haven't checked out the Christian Artists Street Team Christmas in July sale, you might. Plenty of bargains.