Fun event of the morning: at a canning demo by the Food in Jars author. The Book Larder is a really cute little shop.

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The annual calendar post.  Not as many as last year, possibly due to delaying until January to bother to get them.  I still haven’t found a new desktop calendar (I’m anxiously awaiting Geninne’s, though), so I’d appreciate any suggestions.

Lab: Rifle Paper Co. 2012 Botanical Calendar.  A splurge, but so pretty.

Craft room: Letterpress cross stitch calendar by Pistachio Press and Aesthetic Artwork.  Two great tastes that taste great together.

[Photos from the relative designers’ websites.]

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I had a fun time at Urban Craft Uprising today.  I didn’t end up buying anything, but I did pick up a bunch of promotional cards for future reference.  Here are some of my favorites this year (all photos from their respective websites):

• Material & Movement, beautiful jewelry cut from china.

• Dottyspeck, silver jewelry in organic and geometric patterns

• MuchoDesign, neat leather and embroidered jewelry and art.  She also has a show at Assemble right now.

• lumafina, more jewelry (you might sense a theme brewing)

• amira mednick, macrame jewelry

I wish I were going tomorrow for Jill Bliss‘s drawing workshop!

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collection of embroidery hoops scored for a couple of bucks at the Value Village last month when Becket and Amy and I went thrifting:

The Clover one (the green one top left on the bottom of the pile) is a beautiful thing of craft engineering.  Look at how the screw is recessed so you won’t catch your thread on it.  The plastic ones all have a little lip that helps keep the fabric taught.  I think the blue ones are destined to join my be calm sampler.

These join my budding collection of embroidery hoops, including a neat set I got in Switzerland and some cool vintage ones lisa s sent me a long time ago.  If you happen to have any interesting hoops for my collection, I’d be willing to trade for them!

[craftlog factoid of the day: searching for “hoop” brings up more “whoops” posts than “hoops” posts.]

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I saw this at the airport Dunkin Donuts and had to have it.

Normally it would hold three colors of slushie.  The cashier was quite confused when I agreed to pay full price for just the empty cup.

But it will be worth it!  It’s perfect for painting.  I always get annoyed that I have to use two cups of water to get my brushes really clean between colors.  Now I can just use this one cup.

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I saw this necklace in a shop in the International District a few months ago and regretted not getting it.  Luckily, I had kept the artist’s card! The site is called Tenzome and she also makes them in green and blue. I’ve been getting compliments all day.

[picture from the site, which doesn’t do it justice]

I love the mix of materials.

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We spent the long weekend in Portland visiting friends and taking advantage of Oregon’s lack of sales tax.  I have still been on the hunt for an encaustics torch, so that was my mission.  In the class, we had either a little creme brulee torch or a big propane torch available to use, neither of which I liked.  The creme brulee torch was difficult to control, heatwise, and the big one was difficult to handle, size-wise.  Searching around, I saw a lot of people recommending the Iwatani butane torch, a higher end kitchen tool.  The torch attaches to a canister of gas about the size of a hairspray can, and it gives you lots of control.  Also, kitchen supply stores seemed to be carrying it for just about the same price as the bad kitchen torches.  I wanted to find a local source so I could get a look/feel at it, and so I wouldn’t have to pay hazardous materials shipping for the butane cans.

It just so turns out there’s a completely amazing encaustic supply store literally down the street from where my friends live in Portland: Muse Art and Design, who also run encausticsupplies.com.  They stocked the Iwatani torch and gas (though I did pay a little more than I was able to find it on the web).  I also got some nice cheap white wax blocks, and some wax sheets.  I’d been looking for wax sheets everywhere!

The store was small, but very packed with neat stuff.  I will definitely be back.

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Perhaps the silliest thing I’ve bought off Etsy in a while: behold, my new stack of random pieces of paper from jamaica makes:

(picture from the etsy listing)

I ordered it knowing I’d like it, but looking through it in real life, it’s like she downloaded my brain.  There are at least half a dozen pages I recognize from notebooks and pads of paper that I have almost bought.  And there are half a dozen more that I have bought.  Maybe I should show off my graph paper collection some time.  It is mostly a woeful tale of my quixotic search for a replacement for my favorite discontinued lab data pad.

Anyway, jamaica makes has a blog and makes notebooks from the many papers.  They are very pretty.  I’m not entirely sure yet what I’ll make from my collection.  There are the address files by lovely design.  Most of my papers are too flimsy, and I don’t really need an address file.  Here’s a nice tutorial for little mixed paper notebooks (and a good idea to use a card as a cover).  Whenever I’ve tried to make little books before, I’ve never been happy with how even the edges look, though.  I suppose I could probably die cut them or something.  Hmm.  Need ideas.

Side note: jamaica makes also contributes to the group blog Effer Dares, which has like a scrapbook challenge theme.  It may be the first scrapper blog that has ever appealed to me.

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I found this set of 6 amazing placemats at an antique store in West Seattle a while back.

I especially like how the registration is a little different from print to print, so their eyes are all a little off.  Let me introduce you to eyerolling pigeon and paranoia pigeon.

Searching on the C. Årfelt signature at the bottom, only a few expired Etsy listings come up.  If they are to be believed, these are Swedish circa 1960s and came in several colorways.

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The chickens have almost eaten/wasted their first 25 pound bag of food.  Between that and the aforementioned leaky waterer, it was time for a restocking trip.  Last time I went to the Grange Supply, out in Issaquah.  This time, we went to Bothell Feed Center, out in, well, Bothell.  It’s closer to where we live, and I wanted to compare.  They had a really nice chicken coop out front, and a great selection of fancy chicken feed.  I just do not care enough to get the organic omega 3 supplemented feed, especially since they’re not even laying yet, but it’s nice to know where to get some just in case I decide to go that route.  I got a 50 pound bag of plain old pellets for pretty cheap, and a sturdy new waterer (metal this time).  They were very helpful and had a surprisingly good music selection playing in the store (Metric and Florence and the Machine are not bands I would first think of in connection with farm supplies).

The next place I want to hit is the Seattle Farm Co-op warehouse.  They look like they’ve got some cool stuff and neat people, and I just joined their mailing list.  We’ll see how long it takes the girls to get through this 50 pound bag first.

Oh, and I started a new Chickens category to keep the Home and Garden category from getting out of hand.  This week’s new chicken trick: they come running when I call them :)  They could probably do this for a while, but I only just today did the experiment.

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