Wednesday, December 27, 2006

It's been awhile

Finally, a bit of time to just breathe.

Christmas has come and gone. The socks were all finished in time for gifting and everyone, even SIL, seemed extremely pleased.

My DD2 is in the midst of her first pair of socks. In the new year she would like to knit mittens. For a look at a huge amount of beautiful hand knit latvian mittens go to

http://habetrot.typepad.com/habetrot/

She has pictures and a link to the NATO site where there are over 500 mittens archived.
DD2 will not be making mittens so intricate, but these are inspiring.

I am in an ATC swap. An Alphabet swap, my letter is "I". I have brain stormed with the family over
"I" words that have interesting images that I can use to create cards. I need to make at least 13, but I'll probably make extra. The image I am concentrating on is this years Christmas stamp of Mary and Jesus.
I want to make a mini Icon ala the Russian icons only updated. I'm having trouble finding enough canceled stamps. You'd think they would be plentiful. I might have to resort to internet images instead.

In case you haven't heard of ATC's they are Artist Trading Cards. The cards are the size of baseball cards
2 1/2 inches by 3 1/2 inches and must be traded not sold. A good explanation of these little bits of Art can be found at
http://www.cedarseed.com/air/atc.html

or do a google search.
There are a lot of groups online that you can join to trade cards. They have themed swaps. I have participated off and on for over a year. I'm picky about what swaps I join and time is an issue. Of course
sometimes I have something like writers block, I can't seem to do anything creative except knit.

To look at some interesting ATC's go look at a few blogs:
http://somethingsublime.typepad.com/
http://www.christinemmatcs.blogspot.com/
http://somanystars.blogspot.com/

and something similar
http://www.soulcollage.com/home/index.php

I hope everyone had a wonderful "Winter Celebration of choice"
Our choice is Christmas and it was a good day.
This week is for relaxing and recharging the creative juices.

Viki