Small and Simple Things project #4

We have Relief Society Meeting coming up in May. I'm calling it "The Jewels that Journeyed to Join us." It will be all about the Asian sisters in our ward, their history, culture, journey here, and their conversion to the gospel. I want to have the bulletin board up ASAP so I painted the maps tonight.
Fun facts: Laos (where most of them lived before here) is about the size of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Connecticut put together. It is a land-locked country that shares a mountainous border with Vietnam. After the Vietnam conflict a lot of people who helped us over there were forced to flee Vietnam and live in the mountains of Laos. These people have finally been able to immigrate here.

It is an honor to know some of them.

Update: The board is up, so I'm adding pictures of the finished thing.

I strung silver strands from different locations

in Laos to here and along them are the words and "jewels."

Big thanks to Bobbi for supplying the beautiful letters,

couldn't have done it without her!

UPDATE:

This is the-one-and-only-me dressed up in the traditional "Red Haired Hmong" New Year Clothes. I thought it was a joke, but apparently this is a real sub-culture and my friends happened to have the clothes. The ladies with me are young Hmong ladies that dance together. They are in "White Hmong" clothes and were very good.

I got a new name last night and everything, "Xob Liam" (said so-la, don't ask me what happened to the letters b and m...) which means "thunder," just like Thora does. I love being called Sister Xob Liam. It was the most fun I have had in ages. Oh, and Mom, you think chicken is good in a coconut milk soup? Try shreaded bamboo. I'm going to have to go to Sister Moua's house to learn to make it, just so I can tell you how.

Small and Simple Things project #3

I finally decided what to do with the scraps left from my re-covered bag. I covered a binder with them! It took a little time to hand stitch the inside so that the whole thing was taut, but it was worth it!

Now I have a special binder for organizing book stuff!

Small and Simple Things project #2

Half of celebrating the little things is recognising the things you do that you normaly wouldn't count. I normally wouldn't count this. It's just a bit of eye candy for my Relief Society meeting tomorrow night. I'll be talking about gifts and how everyone has them. I printed up over a hundred, cut them out with fancy scissors and tied them onto ting-ting. The vase was the one my darling husband picked out for my Valentines flowers (they were incredible btw.)
I think it turned out rather well and will look nice on the table with all the silver serving dishes I'm lugging over for the event.

Sisterhood

This is a sculpture I did for a friend. It was inspired by her three beautiful daughters. I call it "Sisterhood" and had a lot of fun making it.
The heads, the hardest part.


And the full thing, looking from above.

Small and Simple Things project #1

For an explaination of why I'm posting this see here.

These are some very simple Bun Buttons I made. (Cute name huh?)

All I did was slip a few old buttons from my button box onto bobby pins. I had a bracelette on that day that my friend made. It has a button on it, and I wanted to have a few more buttons on that day (plus it was a crazy hair day and a bun was a good idea, lol.)

So, here they are in my crazy messy bun, can you find all 3?.

Re-covered backpack

My husband bought a new laptop a few months ago, the other was "old" after a few years of use. (This will surprise no one that knows him.)This time instead of making him sell the old one to one-third pay for the new one I gave in and accepted the hand-me-down electronic. (This is why I have two iPods, lol.)
With the pretty blue laptop came a not so pretty bag. It was still functional, but stained and ugly and definitely not "me." So I started looking for laptop bags.
Ever notice how much it costs for one of those? Yeah, to much for me, I'm so silly about spending money on things. If it isn't something I'm in love with, I don't want it, and I certainly don't want it $60+ worth.
So I started thinking of making a bag or re-covering the old one.
That's when I went to the fabric store with my sister. (Ahh the bliss! The excitement of fabric shopping has been known to put me in labor, hence the birth of my son.)As soon as I walked in I found ASIAN BROCADE 40% off! Yes, I know, God and JoAnne's love me. I am very blessed.
So I bought a quarter yard of 5 different exquisite fabrics.
Then (a month later, you know me)I sat down to make the bag. I lovingly pulled threads to get the cuts perfectly on-grain, then sewed the 4" wide strips together. Then I cut 4" strips the other way and staggered them when I sewed them back together. I cut out pieces on the diagonal from the zigzaggedy fabric. I wanted to do it diagonally because Asian art usually has a diagonal line to it. Then I hand stitched the pieces on with silvery thread. I also embroidered the Chinese symbol for "thunder" onto part of it, and added a dragon patch I got off the rack. I did a lot of the stitching deliberately uneven and added lots of unnecessary long reckless stitches on the seams to add a touch of funky-handcrafted feel to the backpack.
It took a while to finish because I only worked on the hand stitching in my spare time (ie during swim class, in the school pick up que, at the doctor's office.)
All in all I am very, very pleased.

It's probably a very good thing I live over an hour from a fabric store big enough to fill my strange tastes.

A History of Magic

Or, ancient history anyway. I just realised that I have never done a blog post about the party I threw several years back. It was when Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince was coming out. I was INSANE about Harry Potter, so as soon as I knew the release date I started planning this party. A talking sorting hat sorted us at the start of the evening. We played an improvised tournament of Quidditch (I did have muggle neighbors you know), took O.W.L. tests on the previous books, spells, and who's who in wizarding(those with the best scores received handmade wands.)We ate chocolate frogs, cake, spider chocolates, treacle tart, pumpkin pies, and naturally drank butterbeer and pumpkin juice. We had our pictures taken with Harry, competed in trivia to earn points for our houses, fought a dementor pinata with a massive lion head mask, and generally made the muggles shake their heads in bewilderment.
My husband to this day has no clue how much money I spent on this party, because I deliberately did not keep track!
So, the evidence in a slideshow (I hope):

Included please notice:

• The dementor pinata (I made two, on for this party and one for a HP Lexicon Gathering)
• The kids, Harry, and I (it was hot, we were wilting)
• The gown it took me eons to sew. I beaded the front, hand crochet the lace on the collar out of thread, and even though I started it before the cover art was released... I MATCHED THE BOOK!!! lol
• My sister, the house elf was in an accident a few days prior, so she was on crutches, poor thing. Yes, I made the ears and the towel toga. BTW, Harry was a pic I downloaded and put on cardboard then attached to my shirt and old witch outfit on a hanger.
• My son fights the dementor (I always make my pinatas too strong, sigh)
• The butterbeer barrel I made to go over our big spigot watercooler, and the lion mask on top of it. For the barrel I used woodgrain contact paper over cardboard. For the lion mask (I wish it roared like Luna's) I used a punching balloon, "Great Stuff" spray insulation foam, paper mache', nylons, markers, and paint. You could see through the eyes.
• The snitch
• The "hourglasses" that held the house points (colored glass jewels from the floral dept.)