Wriggle, My Mighty Harbingers!

The full moon came late in March; it's still shining down outside, bright enough to read by, provided the font is at least 12 point and not something intended for effect only like Skunch or something.

This is the Raven Moon. Ravens are symbol-heavy birds. Ravens have carried the messages of the gods, echoed the screams of battlefields, and burned down barns and storehouses (no,really, that last one is a physical fact.).

Ravens are clever, and inventive, and dangerous in the way only the clever creatures of the world can be (I'm not kidding about the barnburnings). And the members of the Fantasy Artists of Etsy have been inspired by the Raven Moon to come up with all manner of lovelies. Yes, I've got something there too, over on the FAE team blog, where everything is shiny and mystic and enchanted.

But over here, it's just me and--holy snakes, about 140 of ya'll. You know, intimate. So I can just be grubby and a little odd, and celebrate the much cooler...

WORM MOON!


Worms are brainless, useful, and never known for starting fires. They possess amazing regenerative powers, can turn absolute rubbish into fertile soil, and feed an amazing array of fauna including, yes, ravens. Even worm poop is useful! They give us food instead of stealing ours, serve as basic science projects, and help us identify the squeamish, so we don't mistakenly plan to include them in our zombie preparations.

And now it's coming up spring, and the noble Worms are once more free to move through ground no longer frozen by winter, spreading life and goodwill to all who depend on the soil. Long may you dance beneath your Moon, noble if squishy invertebrates!



(As a side note- this is all true. About the moons and the barns and everything. I thought about doing an April Fool's joke, but hey, how would anyone here know the difference between that and my usual posts?

Seriously. If you can think of a way, please let me know.)

(Also also: OWOH folks, I am still getting your prizes together, indeed! But they are alllmost ready to send out, according to my development department, i.e., me. Thanks for your patience!)

In Which Some Things Are Grand

Hi, folks! Miss me? Sorry to fall off the face of the planet. I have, as I've indicated elsewhere, been Experiencing Technical Difficulties, and all my non-email posting has been painfully curtailed.

But I had to post today. March 21st is important.

No, not because it's the first day of Spring. That's important! But it's not personal.

No, not because it's the day my ISP finally decided to function and reconnect me to the world, after a week of mockingly timing me out of every single forum and thread I frequent (to all my dear forumites: I miss you, too!). That's certainly essential and cause for rejoicing, but I had no way of knowing it would happen.

Today is important because, 12 years ago, I made a ludicrous and ill-advised decisions to stagger down a row of pews, stammer through some vows written by people who died a long time ago, and let a crazy man lead me off into a hall of mostly strangers. I was ridiculously young, he was unemployed, we were both horrifically unprepared for marriage or indeed independent living of any sort.

Today we woke up early so we could celebrate before he had to go to work. Celebration, in this case, consisting of him giving me things and me being thrilled.

And I really am thrilled. It's our silk and linen anniversary, apparently-- he's the one who keeps track of these things-- and he bought me two square yards of jaw-dropping emerald green silk, three sets of buttons in four colors, and a custom four-color linen skirt. And a green band major's shako. Which last is insanely awesome, and which I have been wearing around the house all day. Washing dishes takes on a whole new dimension when one is wearing a green leather shako.

I think there is maybe one person reading this blog who has any idea at all of the full extent of awesome involved here. For everyone who doesn't know, well, it involves a sort of obscure fandom, and a long-stifled urge to cosplay one extremely minor character (she takes over a kingdom with knitting needles! Essentially so she can eat chocolate! And then begins a fantastic artistic career among creampuff trees! It is everything I aspire to.)

So to get me all this, in theme, he had to pay attention to a wee minor fixation, come up with the costume plan himself, hunt down a seamstress (thanks, Etsy!), remember my measurements, and hide multiple packages in the house. And plan it all weeks in advance.

Twelve years ago, I made a stupid, lunatic choice, for a stupid, lunatic reason.

Now I have an awesome hat.

I have an awesome husband.

And good sense and sanity can leave a message, but we're not likely to answer any time soon.

New Thing : Knitting! And Extended Metaphors!

I am, as per my resolution, trying to do something new every week. Not all these endeavors get posted about, because I Am Lazy, and also, how many recipes do you really want to read? Not many, I'm guessing. Though feel free to correct me. Really!

This week, though, I stumbled by sheerest coincidence (and the graces of Facebook) on a chance to learn knitting. Knitting! A skill I had always longed to possess, but thought the province of wiser and grander dames than I am or ever will be, sheer Witches of Craft, who can also do things like force prickly pear tunas to jell and strawberries to become wine.

As it turns out, I can indeed knit! A lot! With great enthusiasm!

And, uh. Great enthusiasm!

Because I had fully accepted, going in to knitting, that I was going to be awful at it. Really unforgiveable. An offense to the sheep that gave its wool to the yarn I would abuse (or, being that I'm learning with acrylic, possibly the Plastic Bags that gave their lives to the recycler. Whatever.).

So I wasn't even trying to do it right. Once I got the basic knit-purl down, I set about Experimenting. What happens if I drop stitches on purpose? Add them on purpose? Exactly how can I add stitches? Lose them? Can I make the stitches super loose? Can I do this left handed? Both handed? If I fumble massively, can I recover?

And the thing is, I know the answer to these questions, and many more! are available for the price of a quick Google search. But I don't care. I'm not ready to listen to the voice of experience just yet. For me, this stage of a new craft- where I know nothing, not what's possible or impossible or sensible or anything-- is like the rush of first love. I need to make all the mistakes, and make them hard, not to figure out how this particular craft works, but how I work with it. Is it fun even when I'm frustrated? Can I make something good out of a mistake? Is this, in short the beginning of a beautiful friendship?

In time, if it turns out that this is more than a passing infatuation-- and I'm seriously enjoying myself, and there's lots of room for play here, so I think it will be-- then there's time enough to pick out rings and argue over the caterer and fight over how to hang the toilet paper. I'll start trying out patterns, and reading tutorials, and looking for specific gauges of yarn. I'll curse and swear when I miscount a row of stitches, and giggle with glee when I make my first successful felted piece. I'll settle down and explore the deeper joys that come with a committed relationship, like sharing new friends and having something a little more popular to sell at the local craft shows.

But for now, it's just me and some screaming green yarn and a couple of bamboo needles, and we are having a whale of a time.

What's your latest love?

TiLT Bags: Fear The Pretty!

'Scuse me folks, pardon our dust; I know things haven't been as busy here as they might be. I've been working on my OWOH winner prizes (so fun! But time consuming...) and my Etsy shop, and plenty of other stuff that I'm afraid isn't too relevant here (at least yet..) and the blog is falling down a bit, I know.

Also there was SNOW, the Apocalypse I Am Not Prepared For. So that slowed me down, what with Ragnarok and the killing of Fenrir and the ship of dead men's nails riding across the sky and all.

But I am digging myself out of the Pit of Productivity to help the Etsybloggers team share news of a great threat, Tilt Creations.

Now it might seem, on first examination, that Tilt is just a sweet, very slightly geekish blogger that happens to make gorgeous handbags. That's the impression given by her shop....



Aw, it's pretty.

Or go read her very sincere and chatty blog. Aw, she's sweet!

But look closer. There are dark secrets hidden in that innocent patter. And if you examine the dark corners of the TiLT shop, you find....



ZOMBIES!

Yes, it is my grim but real duty to inform you that TiLT is, in fact, not a sweet crafty woman with a flair for accessories, but a dark corporate concern building a Zombie Army of denim and gabardine! The store, the blog, these are distractions, made to lead the eye away from the nefarious master scheme of TiLT (and look at that capitalization! Clearly an acronym! Total Industrial Life Takeover, perhaps?)!

But we can turn these cover schemes back against the would-be overlords, if we work quickly!Buy every handbag; comment on every blog post! Keep TiLT so busy preserving their facade they don't have time to work on their zombie army! It's our only hope!

No, Seriously. SNOW.

I was going to share a post about TiLT, one of my Etsyblog buddies, today. But instead I opened the door and saw THIS:







And everything was canceled.

Seriously. There is snow on the ground, it's STICKING, and it's already thick enough to cover cat feet. I don't know if I'm excited or terrified, because this is deeply unnatural, but either way: this is what has my full attention, now.

So enjoy your day, and may your weather patterns be less alarming! I will be making emergency cocoa.

The Problem With Painting

The problem with painting- and, I suspect, with any craft- is that it takes so darn long. So for instance, I spent alllll day Friday plotting out pictures, and allll day Saturday painting, and I have...this:

...which is to say, a scannerbed full of embryonic paintings. Two, actually; I ain't even showing half the work I cranked out. I know some people out there are saying "Well, why not focus on one painting until it's done, instead of making a whole bunch that aren't", and the answer, dear darling readers, is that paint needs time to dry. Especially for the stuff I'm doing, here, which is a lot of playing with textures and overlays. So the best use of my paint-time is to do a bunch of work in a setting, rotating pieces as they hit the dry-and-wait stage.

The deeper problem, with me, is that I have a brainspan of maybe a day. I can always come back to a project, yes, but my working time before a migraine/seizure knocks me flat is 8-16 hours. And if I can't get a project to a pretty good level of completion before then, I'm liable to forget what the heck I was trying to do, and unlikely to remember in the next couple weeks. I have projects it took siz months to finish, just because I totally forgot about their existence or purpose.

This is why I don't drive, by the way. "Huh, that light's red now! Pretty! Wonder why it changed..."

Anyway, I'm staring at these now, and I think I know where to go with them. But only because I made some detailed careful sketches and notes along the way. So today's question for you, gentle readers (and violent readers too, of all people I want the violent ones on my side) is: How does your internal art department function? Can you work on a thing daily for weeks? Do you need a deadline? Can you crank out whatever you need whenever it's asked for?

One World, One Heart, Six Winners!

Wow, what a wild crazy blogtastic carnival it's been on the OWOH Magic Carpet Ride! Thanks to everyone who came by and said Howdy, especially those of you who had to cross oceans and mountains and vast linguistic barriers to do it, and especially especially all those from everywhere who decided to follow me afterwards and see what kind of mess I stumble into. I suppose now I'll have to actually be interesting! Scary!

But this post is sure to be interesting to at least six people, because it's time to reveal my One World, One Heart WINNERS! And since you amazing people left almost 600 comments, that's six names drawn! Six fascinating people to get Mystery Prizes! Drumroll please:

JULIE SMITH, who likes ballet, longswords,and foreign films!

BIRGIT, who favors the Old West, Mystery books, and the color Teal!

ANGIE HALL HAVILAND, who like purple, nifty fibers and paper, and cows!

JENNIFER HALL, who likes fabricky craft supplies, Retro Kitsch, and Montsers!

And finally, two people with something in common,

CONNIE! From Chicago! Who likes pale pink roses, postcards, and anything Japanese,

and

MISS KOOL AID, aka Sophie, who likes cats, tea, and vampires!

What do those last two have in common? They also apparently like living the whirlwind life of super spies, who are very hard to get hold of through blatant cover investigations like "email". I hope they appear soon, because those are awesome art prompts! Connie! Sophie! Let me know you're out there! And, well, where. I need a place to send the prizes, you know! If I don't hear back from you by Thursday, I'll have to draw other winners! And that would be sad.

Everyone else-- thank you, very sincerely, for playing along. I loved the answers to my question, and am deeply touched at the faith some of you have in my craftsmanship (I can't create children, folks, no matter how much you love them! Well, I mean, I can. But it would take nine months, and be rather more involved than a simple blog prize can reasonably justify.) In those 500 + comments I've got enough art inspiration to keep any artist hopping for years! And writing, too, since I am absolutely writing to everyone who took the time to leave a personal message. Ya'll are fascinating!

And for everyone who joined in OWOH, whether you left a comment here or not, another thank you. Lisa, the brave founder of the event, calls this a simple blog giveaway, and says it won't change the world, and she's probably right. I visited every blog on the list, which meant about a thousand people- a thousand people who opened their doors to strangers from all over the world, people I would never have encountered or read otherwise. All of us are carrying different labels, different political views; we're all busy with our own lives, and maybe most of us wouldn't talk if we met in person. But for a few weeks, with the room for just one blog post, everyone on the OWOH list was able to tell the world one thing, and everyone shared their passion, their craft, the things they love, for no other reason except to let other people enjoy it too. That's not exactly World Peace, but it is pretty darn awesome.

Thank you, Lisa, and thank you, fellow bloggers!