Hello, Tomorrow!

 What's tomorrow? Tomorrow is the first of September!! I'm so happy to wave August good-bye, with all its heat. September might not feel much better right away, but at least it is an "-ember" month, and it must usher us into the cool delights of the ember months.

I hibernate indoors during summer and do creative things, as you know. This has been The Summer of Felting. I showed you the hats before. Then I moved on to slippers! Oh, what joy! 

I think I've felted about eleven pairs of slippers.

Felting is unpredictable and time-consuming, and I may have finally perfected the knitting pattern that I use to make these slippers. It took a lot of knitting, trial, and error.

This week I moved on to wet felting. Rather than knitting an item and then washing it to felt it (shrink it), wet felting uses straight fiber, wetted, soaped, and rubbed for hours, in order to make a piece. I started with a rectangle that I may turn into a book cover. It's about 8"x7".

I immediately made a larger one that was more challenging:

I like the colors, but I don't like making objects that seem to have no use. So yesterday I decided to make a bowl. I watched a long video by an expert felter called Nicola Brown, set out all my wool fiber, and launched into it!

That's more like it! I'm quite happy with that bowl, but it took 4 hours of hard work (as in, physical labor) to produce it. I'll wait a few days before I do that again. I love the look of felted wool. I hope to be doing this for a while.

Adam is back teaching school now. His health issues continue, and we plug away, one day at a time. It's not easy. Our lawn mower has been broken and in the repair shop for nearly 2 months. A very kind neighbor did mow the house lot a few days ago (with many thanks from us!!), but it doesn't look like the rest of the weedy property will be mowed anytime soon. SIGH.

I took a trip with a friend to Montreat, in the lovely mountains of North Carolina. Then I visited my mother and family in West Virginia. Both trips were designed to let me escape from August's unrelenting heat, and I knitted and felted slippers as I traveled. Now the temperatures have dipped into the 80s, thankfully. 

You'd think I'd be truly sick of crafty activities, but I'm not. If I do get tired of one, I just rotate to another. I haven't been doing a lot of painting, but I did finish these three "sleeping animals" pieces, which are 9"x12".

I think I like the rabbits best.

Here's a photo of Leo, and of my mother's geraniums, and then I must dash. 

All the best, dear friends! God bless!