It is June 5th, which means that my PCF pals and I have very few days left to do whatever needs doing before our lov-er-lee festival.  If you see me and I look, well, entirely burnt out, please pour some iced coffee or co-cola or maybe a really large amount of bourbon in my mouth.  Thanks.  In the meantime, when I’m not packing up a whole Iron-age homestead or fixing a website or helping crafters or workshop-teachers, I’ll be making bags for Tuatha.

Saturday was a big day.  I made this item much nicer:

by needle-felting the Uffington horse onto it.  And I got to do the needle felting while sitting in Lovettesville with friends chatting and eating lovely food and drinking lovely drinks.  This item is officially a pot-holder now, and will grow an appropriate loop in the top right corner any second now.  I heart it.  But I think I will end up losing it to either Virginia or Mary this weekend.  I can accept that.

The needle felting was practice for what will soon grow on . . . drumroll please . . .
El monedero del presidente!

I showed it around a bit surreptitiously yesterday during the last festival staff meeting and got lots of good responses.  I need to find a cheaper yarn alternative to make an item like this marketable through Tuatha.  The yarn alone was $60: it’s a combination of Cascade 220 and Arucania Nature Wool.   The yarn felted nicely but didn’t shrink too much, which is good considering what it cost to make this small tote.  When it was felted and ready to block, I discovered more reasons to love these three books:

I knew that they were one of my favorite art exhibition catalogs and two of my favorite songbooks, respectively.  But I had no idea that they were so perfectly sized to make the tote so perfectly right.  I hope El Presidente has copies of all three to carry about.

As wonderful as all that was, this, by far, was the best part of yesterday:

That blurry woman is a very very happy Anna-Marie, who has a very funny new hat.  I managed to completely surprise her with it–a feat unto itself–because her wonderful husband sews for her, so he has her measurements on hand at any given time, and our wonderful friend Simone knew what colors would be best.  I knitted on it right in front of her for hours when we were camping at the beginning of May,  and she apparently had no inkling of what I was plotting.  Yesterday morning I pulled up at their house with a truckload of stuff for our yard sale and muttered something about having “a couple of things you and Chip might want yourselves–I’ll set them aside for you to look at.”  When I pulled the hat out she almost fell down.  And then she jumped around a lot, and then she jumped around a lot with her daughters and husband and pals.  It was tough to get any good pictures.

I had to pry the hat our of her hands with promises to return it perfectly sized and blocked with a wired brim at the Potomac Celtic Festival.  I think we’ll needle felt something onto some of the stripes.  And then I’ll get Chip to photograph Anna-Marie and the finished hat, because he’s much better at it than I am.

For those of you feeling confused as to why a stripey handmade witch hat would make such an impression, well, you just don’t know Anna-Marie I guess.  But she has a cat named Nemesis:

Ok, I had to really work with Nemmie to make him look mean, and he admittedly looks like this much more often:

and is a fantastic purr generator, but you get the point: she has a black cat.  And a nasty rooster named Domino: her adorable leeetle daughters who want to cook and eat Domino very soon because he’s so mean.  Those of you who are unfamiliar with leeetle girls may not realize how unusual it is for leeeeetle blond cerubic girls to ask their parents to please kill the rooster, but trust me, it’s unusual.  And she clearly could blow up at least a VW bug with her mind bullets if she wanted.  So don’t test her.  Or you may end up like Domino.  Especially when Ms. Thang gets the hat back.  Which she will quite soon.  It’s in the washer now.

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