overcoming blog neglect with double craft post

what did i do yesterday while the rest of the world was hard at work?

well... after recovering the homestead from the weekend's festivities, doing laundry, baking some bread, and various other acts of domestic goddess-ish-ness, i treated myself to some pure, ol' fashioned craft time!

i made a pillow from a cross-stitched basset hound picture (from thrift store). i just added the border then sewed it on to an already existing pillowcase.

(this is for a friend who has basset hounds and was recently admiring a cross-stitched pillow in my house (below, on left, found at a garage sale in San Antonio)... i wonder if she'll see this post before i give the pillow to her?)

... and then i finished up this embroidery of some Daniel Higgs flash that i saw here and fell in love with. (Coincidentally, it was tattooed by Zach Nelligan - whom I blogged about before.)

i'm probably going to overcompensate for my lack of posting by posting a WHOLE BUNCH of stuff today... thanks for looking... whoever you are out there that looks at this stuff!

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recent acquisitions & renditions

First the rendition:

A friend from highschool, who now lives way over in London, recently crossed the pond with her English man to spend some time in NYC and Ottawa. While in New York she and her beau eloped! Their pictures were so old-timey and romantic and sweet.

So when I got a chance to catch up with them in Ottawa for dinner I first painted up some old-timey/romantic/sweet flash to give them as a marriage-gift.

I want to give credit where it's due so let it be known that I painted this from an image on Zack Nelligan's website. I'm a great admirer of his and you should be too if you like traditional tattoos.

Please visit his website and know that I'm not trying to rip this guy off. He labeled the image as "Vintage Flash" so I felt not-scummy about re-painting it. This image is not going into a portfolio or for sale anywhere. It's just going on a wall (or in a box under a bed) in a friend's house.

Anyway, I really wanted to get tattooed by this fella while I was in Texas recently but sadly, I didn't have the time to make a side trip to Austin. Maybe next time though - hopefully. A yellow-rose-of-texas perhaps...


And here are the recent acquisitions:

A pelvis from some potato field near Alliston and a vertebra from Wasaga Beach.


Rusty horseshoe and wrench, also from some potato field (these are things that get dug up along with the potatoes).

And lastly, check this out!! Someone moving out of my building left a nice cast-iron Le Creuset dutch oven in the laundry room!! It was really dirty but it cleaned up really well. AND! It's the same colour as a lot of my other kitchen stuff! A match made in the culinary aisle of heaven!

That's all for now!

Again, go look at Zach Nelligan's tattoo work! It's so nice!

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