doh! tannenbaum

i left to visit my family for a few days on thursday morning, and so hans thought it would be nice to spend wednesday evening together decorating a tree. we'd agreed to get a small tree this year for many reasons, but i was still looking forward to going to pick out a nice noble fir together. hans decided to surprise me with a potted tree - a spruce! first off, i'm allergic to spruce. and then that it's potted...

i haven't gotten gift tags yet, please excuse the neon post-its!
1. our little tree / 2. tree close up / 3. alpaca soft trees / 4. pine gnomes

in my experience, potted trees kind of... die. they never really seem to recover from being ripped out of the ground and stuck in a pot, nevermind the trauma of spending a good fortnight in a warm, dry home covered in decorations. even if the tree makes it through its life indoors it then has to sit outside in a pot until the ground thaws enough so we can dig it a hole. poor little potted tree... hans of course said "poor potted tree? at least it's still alive. you think the one we'd have cut down would have had it better?" good thing trees aren't cognoscente.

so anyway, i am allergic to spruce. this was a problem in my dendrology classes at university where i was often laughed at while i'd sniffle and itch my way through tree identification labs. poor hans, how was he to know? needless to say, we did not spend wednesday night decorating said tree. what a bitch i am!

i went away for the weekend and made some crochet soft trees, and whittled myself some pine gnomes (not allergic to pine) pictured above and inspired by a swedish blog, but which i can't remember. then yesterday morning i broke down and tried to put lights on our little tree. the sad little thing couldn't support the weight of them though, but by the time i finally accepted our tree would have no lights i was covered from elbows to wrists in hives. i called my mum: "I HATE THIS TREE!" she was unsympathetic. they got a noble fir.

so no lights, no twinkle... why had hans gotten us this tree? he knows that i'm a control freak. i added the red wooden beaded garland, and the tinfoil chains a brother and i made years ago while spending christmas in york. i then discovered that 90% of our ornaments were too large and/or heavy for this sad little, hyper allergenic tree to support. i added some of the smallest vintage kugels we have, along with the eggs i bought at a market in prague a few years ago. but it was lacking, and the angel i'd purchased at an oxfam store in york looked ridiculous as a topper. don't even get me started on the god awful, black plastic pot this thing came in...

i used some left over cotton cinched with red rickrack to pretty up the pot, but it was still lacking. then i remembered how pretty i thought a tree i'd seen in domino looked and i knew exactly what to do. i used the turquoise satin ribbon i'd intended for gift wrapping to save our little, spindly, hive-inducing, lightless tree. and now i can't stop looking at it. it's still a bit of a "pathetic" charlie brown tree but i love it anyway.

it's so easy to get into the habit of picking out the same tree, and decorating it with the same ornaments year in and year out. it took a tree that had me yelling "I HATE IT! I HATE IT!" to break me out of that nostalgic comfort zone, and now that the rashy hives have gone i can honestly say that i love this awful little tree. so in the end everything worked out, but we will never again have a spruce in our home.

arctic front meet pineapple express

alba and lavender

this past weekend it snowed and snowed, and since we still haven't managed to have our snow tires put on i stayed in. i ventured out on saturday afternoon to drag the dog around the park. she's not a fan of the cold, and i actually had to get behind her and shove her along for part of the walk. there were footprints everywhere, but my favourite tracks were the ones left by the long haired miniature dachshunds: two sets of two paws followed by a dash left where their little tails drag behind as they hop along. dachshund tracks look like morse code in the snow.


lavender

the rest of the weekend was spent stitching and stuffing. i finished this little rabbit as part of a swap with hadley hutton. she's stuffed with soft roving and is made of merino, and hand dyed icelandic wool. i spun lavender and cream yarns together to create the mottled detailing on her smock.

it seems like hadley's been adding new work to her etsy shop everyday lately, and i love, love, love the spotted owls below:


new pieces from hadley hutton:
spotted owl // two blue // butterfly, did you take my spots, asked little bird

i also finished a camel for my mum over the snowy weekend. she collects camels. she collects a lot of things actually: baskets, kohl pots, opium pots, shadow puppets... mostly though, she collects camels. this one is made of super soft alpaca, and its little ruff collar is beaded. i'm thinking about adding little white or red french knots to make it look like a christmas wreath, but i'm still mulling over that one...


christmas camel

so i pretty well spent the entire weekend making stuff and staring out the window. i think that birds are always great to watch in the snow. there were a couple dozen crows on the railroad tracks pecking at things they found the the snow. i wonder if grain, jarred loose by the trains breaking and shunting, falls from the freight cars.

and then there were the pigeons, which took to the sky flying in formation like schools of fish every time the snow stopped.


pigeon flight


pigeon flight

i am randomly closing this post with the video to a terence trent d'arby song i was briefly obsessed with as a child, before i moved on to the more important task of memorizing every word of paul simon's rhythm of the saints. please note the shoulder pads, and wicked dance moves.

snowy mountains, mushrooms and mistletoe

good morning snowy mountains
one of the best things about vancouver in november is waking up to that morning when the snow line reaches the north shore mountains. the first week or so it melts by noon, but eventually it sticks and that's when it's really winter. people always point to the northwest and say "how can you live with all the rain in the winter? isn't it depressing? i think i'd kill myself." to which i reply "but we have colour, and you have grey and brown, dirty snow and trees covered in burlap." some people get seasonal affective disorder from short winter days. i have seasonal aesthetic disorder. in vancouver the snow's rarely around long enough to get dirty, and the snow that sticks stays up in the mountains where it belongs. everything's green and blue and crisp and clean and shiny. i have the added bonus of all the red of my view across the port. it's very christmassy don't you think? that said, it rained all weekend and i was a shut-in. a very productive shut-in, but a shut in nonetheless. here's what i did:


mushrooms and mistletoe
the past week has been an assembly line of holiday ornaments for the swap, (and gifts for family). i originally wanted to do bunnies because i love bunnies, and to top that off design sponge recently declared that rabbits are the new birds. i told a friend of mine about that and she said that's totally wrong, because mushrooms are the new birds. first i made the wool crochet mushrooms, then i felted some white berries, and then i made crochet alpaca leaves which were embroidered and beaded. and THEN i embroidered and beaded the mushroom tops and used a candy cane striped bamboo blended string to tie it all together. it's a lot of work, and i have a lot more to do.

holiday ornament swap, group 4

holiday ornament swap, group 4:
1. swap packs by nicole, freshly blended / 2. brown flowers by jennifer, swallowfield / 3. elizabeth dye
4. mattie le oobee by leslie, onegirl designwrks / 5. wood walnut evergreen tree from janet, three potato four
6. dachshund combat by caitlin keegan / 7. jessica williams / 8. shoulder bag by emma, showpony / 9. ulrika nilsson

during last week's holiday ornament swap sign up leslie and i decided to make an extra ornament to send to each other. what are the odds that of the 600+ taking part in the swap, we'd wind up in the same group? pretty slim, but it happened. when i got the list of people in my swap group i did a little dance. they'll be glad to know that i've almost figured out what to make them.

the holiday craft disaster that is soon to be my living room

lily the pug, originally uploaded by squirrel_of_snooze.

i finished my first custom order this morning, and i think it might be the best thing i've done! when i was asked if i'd be able to do a pug, i knew what i wanted it to look like but wasn't sure that i'd be able to make it exactly how i was imagining it. i picked out some very puggy colours in very soft merino wool, and it turned out even better than i'd hoped! i think there are more pugs and bostons and frenchies in my future...

the next few weeks are going to be busy! yesterday morning i signed up for the holiday ornament swap organized by freshly blended and cake and pie. i just missed the sign up last year and have been looking forward to this ever since seeing the beautiful, amazing, and original decorations everyone made. i rarely get things in the mail so this is something i'm really excited about! take a look at some of the ornaments made for last years swap and you'll see why. now i just need to figure out what i should make...



from top left:
1. liquid paper - home sweet home / 2. emikw - felt ornaments / 3. gasup the zamboni - swaptopus
4. emiee - a pack of monkeys / 5. creative kismet - little birds / 6. fluff life - robin nests / 7. sara - hannah the hen
8. lula louise - hanging strawberry ornament / 9. chat du rouge - pinkville / 10. yukimo - crochet bobbles
11. sarah van wijck - trees / 12. jenn knits a lot - penguins

i also finally pledged to buy (or make) handmade this christmas at buyhandmade.org. it was something i'd been meaning to do the past couple of weeks, but i just have a problem filling out forms and coming up with quotes. what was i supposed to say? "i can't wait!" or "this year it's all handmade for me!" attempts at witty quotes aside, i am looking forward to it, though this means poor hans will have to live with a messy apartment the next few weeks with yarn and batting and god knows what else all over the place. now that i've made it sound so great, would you care to join me? or perhaps you'd like avoid the mess and work in favour of buying something of the crochet persuasion?

LED christmas lights don't have soul

garlands and bobbles, originally uploaded by squirrel_of_snooze.

now that the holiday season is almost upon us, i've noticed a few blogs posting about how important it is to use LED christmas lights this year. before i dive into everything wrong with the LED christmas light, i should first point out that i consider myself a pretty environmentally aware person. i studied conservation in university, and when i was 6, during a family outing to a christmas tree farm, i yelled at a little boy for throwing his styrofoam cup into the wiener roasting fire because it was going to "release CFCs into the atmosphere and destroy the ozone layer." i was precocious. so even though in vancouver we're blessed with a seemingly never ending source of relatively clean(ish) energy in the form of hydroelectricity, i still know that it's important to cut down on energy consumption. i don't leave things pluggled in, i live in the dark, etc... but christmas lights... i just can't go there!

the trouble with LED christmas lights is that they have no soul. unless you want to go super old-world, and risk burning your house down with candles, only tungsten lights twinkle. i don't know about you but i don't see the point of putting lights on my tree if they're going to look dead and cold. LED manufacturers try to cute them up with cheesy snowflake or icicle "festive" shapes or ice-like detailing, but they still look like the holiday lights from a brave new world.

LED lights might get programmed to flicker in the vain attempt to mimic a twinkle, but all that programming is tacky, and so very '80s suburbia in a bad way. in a tasteful world, these lights would be left to teenagers decorating their family rec rooms for their days of drug experimentation and all-weekend video game tournaments.



1. oversized, dull, and blahhhh
2. decorations for a holiday rave
3. soulless and cold

i understand that LED lights cut back on energy bills by 90%, and it's pretty amazing just how significant that is really. it's one of those things you can easily do to affect actual change and i'm sure these things make al and leo all warm and fuzzy inside. the problem is that they look like crap. so this year i will decorate my tree with tungsten lights, but only turn them on 10% of the time. will that concession get me any green karma this holiday season?