My pastime is making midnight mushrooms…

I’m not exactly sure what I was expecting this autumn and winter to look like, way back in March when things started getting crazy in earnest. I know there was a big difference between what I was hoping for and what was actually going to happen. Sure enough, another lockdown seems to be barrelling it’s way towards us, and even if it isn’t formally announced, I think the smartest thing to do is to hunker down again.  Anything I can do to help keep people safe seems like a no-brainer to me, and I’m still frustrated and frightened by all those people out there who can’t even do the most basic stuff to keep other people healthy.  Not least because we’re such a vulnerable household right now. This is the time period I was the most nervous about when I was still working with the public, and right now I’m grateful beyond words that I can stay home over the winter. I realized it’s a lucky, priviledged position to be in, and while I feel some real guilt, I fight it with relief that my chances of giving somebody I care for Covid are so much less this way.

So I’ve been preparing with Matthew for a long, quiet winter.  It’s mostly the usual winter prep, with caulking and plastic over the older windows in the house, and leaves and burlap over the more sensitive plants outside. The pantry just got restocked; I have canned peaches for ages. The fresh stuff gets delivered to the house, and wiped down carefully. And apart from doctor’s appointments and whatnot, neither of us go out. Thanksgiving and Gothmas are being spent here at home, pestering our loved ones on the phone as much as possible.  I’ll miss my sweet people, but what else can we do?

For extra cosiness and a spot of cheerful light for the darkest part of the winter, I’ve been putting plants in the dining room, with a full-spectrum light for the really dark days, it’s turned into a pretty cosy place to eat or write or play with various crafting supplies.

Yeeeees, I put an Audrey in the dining room window.  It’s going to stay there all winter long!

I’ve also been busting out extra crafting supplies for projects over the winter. I stressed out my knee, so instead of using the spinning wheels for a bit, I thought I’d have some fun sculpting a few things, like toadstools…

*Not recommended for ingesting. Because you’ll break your teeth.*

So I feel like here, we’re ready to hide from the world again for a while. At least this time we don’t have the shock of the first lockdown, wondering what was going to happen. We know what’s going on a little better, and with the new vaccines coming up there is a light at the end of the tunnel, if we can get there. But first we have to get there, which means staying the hell out of the way. Please, everybody, please be careful,  I want to see you all again soon. You all deserve good health and safety, and I can’t wait to see you all online until we can have better days…

The new normal. And a new, new normal…

So this is the new normal. While we’re still very much in the throes of the pandemic things are (sorta) opening back up, which honestly frightens me on a deep and visceral level. We are now seeing levels of violence and levels of social commitment that are new, defining moments for our country.  My hometown is at the same time a memorial to a horrible act of police brutality, shellshocked ruins of places that are trying to rebuild and large and small acts of incredible kindness to try to pull us all through.

And right in the middle of all of this–the middle of the protests, the tear gas, the riots and the strange arsons in my neighborhood–my husband had a stroke.  There’s never a good time for a major health emergency, but this was an extra layer of worry and suffering for us both. For a few days my husband’s hospital had the National Guard  surrounding it, to keep it from burning to the ground. He was allowed no visitors, which was the hardest part for both of us. And I held the fort at the house, alone with a bunch of fire extinguishers and my phone for the Neighborhood Watch updates. There was nothing better in the world than when I could see and hug my sweet husband again.

And now that he’s home, I’m on leave from my job for a while so I can take care of him. He’s recovering nicely, but still needs help here and there, and I’m glad I’m home to be there in case of a stumble. And while I’m home helping Matt out, I’ve started embroidering. It started out simply enough, with little flags that said, “Tea, and Maybe Poison!” But the more I tried things, the more I liked it, and after I had tried out some cobwebs on a black fabric background, I knew I had something else to offer in the shop…

Cobwebs are always fun. Always!
My spider was clearly quite sozzled when she wove this web…

Sometimes it really is some of the little things that pulls us through the bad stuff. Like sitting in the back yard. Appreciating the grape vine taking over the fence and anticipating grape jelly.  Being happy Matt and I can sit out there together, after all that time apart. I’m so grateful to have him back.  And I’m hopeful that we can get through the rest of the year together too…

Ms Mausi and the Inherited Stash…

Inheritance

Greetings, fellow knitty-fiends! I realize it’s been a while since I put something up in this space, but I’ve been busy, in ways I didn’t intend to be. Quite a few things happened over the summer, but what really took up a lot of head space for me was losing my mother. She died in June, and I spent (and spend) a lot of time processing her death.

The hardest part is going through all of her things. Like me, she was artistic, and I’ve been going through her paints and projects, many unfinished. It’s the unfinished ones that really hurt the most to find.  Some of it’s glorious, some of it’s awful, and it takes time to really sort everything out. There’s also huge tubs full of movies. so many movies. And mostly, except for the odd animated film, the kind of wonderfully grody, cheapy-budget horror films we both loved so much. I now have every Saw movie, however many they made so far.  And other great movies I’m looking forward to watching, like, “Doll Graveyard” and “My Mom Was a Werewolf.” There’s also loads of books, also mostly scary horror or weirdo mystery or funky things Nostradamus said.

But the unfinished projects are the saddest.

At one point I couldn’t look at the unfinished crocheted farmer couple she had been working on any more, and busted out some of her yarns to crochet tentacles for the lady’s unfinished legs. Oddly enough, not only did it make me feel a little better, but the couple looked much more…interesting…

And while I have a photo to share of the couple, It’s not loading right at the moment, and the dolls themselves are in a huge stack of boxes by the china hutch… Yes people, we’re moving! To a larger house with a very nice attic space that will become my new craftroom. It’s a very bright spot after some very dark times.

But there’s still lots of packing to get through first. Le siiiigh…

 

 

Inheritance
Crochet needles, Acrylic yarn and Bad, bad super-bad horror movies. That’s how my mom rolled…,

 

Brains? Brains!! Braiiiiiins!!!

Gory wool

It’s been a hectic month, with not much posting from Yours Truly. I have a pretty good excuse, though–I got married! And so far, married life is pretty wonderful, with loads of great surprises. And more than a little paperwork. Eh, whaddaya do?

Anyway, I thought it might be nice to get some normal Maus stuff back on track, and dyed up some roving this morning. A coworker had given me her late mother’s fiber stash, along with several very nice balls of white milled wool. They looked like they would take dye very well, so I mixed up some black and red Jaquard dyes for a nice blended black-cherry sort of thing…

Black Cherry Roving
The roving turned out really nice, good and saturated!

While I was adding the red dyes, the pot looked rather…ominous…

Gory wool
What’s in that pot, Maus? What is it? Wool, you say? You sure? It looks…not good…

Sure enough, the minute I put up the photo on my facebook page, all my friends started weighing in with, “That looks…gory!” “It looks like brains!” “Entrails!” “Don’t lie to us, Ms Maus, you put brains in there, didn’t you?” “Brains!!”

So, for the record, I did not stick brains, entrails, or any other unnatural substance in with my lovely, gory looking wool. Because then it would be terribly sticky and hard to clean. Also hard to spin and knit. Gore is nobody’s friend in the fiber arts, my darlings.  Though what goes into my gumbo recipes? Wellllll…

 

 

Pirate Peg the Foster Wheel…Yarrr!!

Pirate Peg

Recently a friend of mine had given me the remains of her yarn stash. She’s had some serious medical issues, so she doesn’t really crochet or spin anymore, which is a crying shame. She also gave me her old Kromski wheel to fix up. It used to belong to another friend who wanted to be a spinner but lost interest, and it had been in boxes for a good long while. Of course I felt protective of it the red-hot minute it came into the house…

Pirate Peg the spinning wheel
Nothing like a spinning wheel in a box, whispering, “Please love meeee!”

The poor thing came to my house with a broken bobbin, several pegs missing, a part of a metal cable tying her treadle to her driveshaft, no flywheel…and no legs. No legs?! Zero legs!!

Happily, the flywheel and two of the legs turned up in another box. The flywheel has a big chip out of the side, like somebody dropped something heavy on it. As for that third leg Matt was sweet enough to cut down a dowel to the right size.  At first we thought it would be a temporary leg until I could get a new one from Kromski. (I’ve heard glowing tales about their customer service; getting new parts shouldn’t be a problem.) But the more I looked at it, the more I became enamored of that goofy wooden leg…and named her Pirate Peg.  And immediately started thinking of modifications for her–a new tension knob with a skull on it, copper around the bottom of the peg leg and a garter around the top to hold her orifice hook, black and walnut and cream and possibly gold leaf in a paint job that would wow anybody who saw her.

Pirate Peg
One of these things is not like the other…

 

At first I had doubts. Would this be too silly, even for me? So I talked to various fiber artists of my aquaintance who unanimously responded with gleeful enthusiasm. “Yes! Oh God, yes! Holy crap, this must be a thing! Where will you put the eyepatch?! Will there be a flag? Yarrrrr!!” and so on and so forth.  Nothing makes a weird idea better than more happy weirdos who like it too.

So I spun up a little yarn on Pirate Peg to see how she did. Even without her tension knob and that flywheel chip, she made some lovely, lovely yarn.  And lots of it, 110 yards of fluffy orange fun!

Orange yarn
Really nice, even yarn…Not bad at all for a wheel that just needs some love…

So this weekend between other things, I’ll give Peg a little lick of paint and sculpt some wood putty into the flywheel chip. And think piratey thoughts…Yarrrrr….

 

Steampunk made easy…

Gothic Side-eye

I finished up the pendants I wanted to play with last week. Here’s what I ended up with:

Purple eye pendant
I have a few leftover taxidermy eyes from a haul I made at Axeman, years ago. I hoard them like treasure. But this turned out nicely!
Steampunk pendant
Polymer clay plus watch gears equals rainy-day fun!

It’s been great goofing off this way. It kind of helped me get back into knitting things again after a short break. I thought of this pendant, and then though how cool stitch markers with gears would be, then thought about various projects that needed stitch markers…and before you know it, bam! A scarflette finished!

Of course, a lot of my knitting has been on breaks at my work. I also do a little sketching here and there to help with stress. I’ve had this look on my face pretty much the entire week…

Gothic Side-eye
Just a tiny little dollop of side-eye and annoyance…

So there you are…

 

The Joys of Puttering…

Polymer clay and watch parts

It’s my personal Saturday today. Which isn’t actually a Saturday. But that’s all right. And because of it, I can relax and get some well-deserved puttering in. I carded up some wonderful wools, and I intend to spend the afternoon spinning it all up while watching horrible tv or equally horrible movies. And this morning, I plan to goof off with polymer clays and old watch parts a friend donated to my artistic whims. Think of how cool a new drop spindle would be with watchparts embedded in the clay…

Polymer clay and watch parts
You see polymer clays and funky watch parts. I see…potential…*evil cackle*

It’s always such pure joy when I have a few moments away from work and busyness generally to just play with something cool for a while.  I’ll take photos a little later of the fun, but I have to go and have the fun first…