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…

 

 

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…