Edison Bulb Jewelry!

This is what you get when a lighting designer makes jewelry...or when a crafter works with light fixtures all day. When I found these tiny glass bottles, they reminded me of perfect little Edison lamps. All they needed was a filament, a metallic base, and a chain or ear wire to display them properly. I gave them all those things and I love the way they turned out! 

Everything you see here is now in my Etsy shop, except for the round earrings on the right. My mom ordered those as soon as she saw them. I plan to make more soon, so don't despair if those were the ones you wanted too. All of the metal is hypoallergenic: the necklace chains are sterling silver and the ear wires are surgical steel. 

Happy weekend!

Assunta

A Busy Weekend

This past weekend was fun but busy, with lots of painting and crafting!

First things first: the sun finally came out again and I was able to take a picture with my rainbow sweater!

Next, here are some pictures from painting this weekend. I still haven't found my good camera in our moving boxes or figured out if I can take a wide-angle picture with my cell phone, but you can at least see that our bedroom walls are now a cool gray with white trim, as opposed to many different pastel colors with hunter green trim. I'm so happy with how much better they look, and we're almost ready for new carpet! We also hired someone to scrape the popcorn ceiling a couple weeks ago, and that was also a huge improvement.

Master bedroom after:

Guest bedroom after:

Closet and bedroom doors to hallway:

Master bedroom before:

Guest bedroom before:

Isn't it amazing what a little paint can do? 

And, just because I thought it was pretty, here is a picture from Newport Beach on Sunday night. We made it down their for a quick walk right after sunset.

I hope you had a great weekend too!

Assunta

Rainbow Sweater!

This is going to be a very short blog post because I have been spending a lot of my spare time painting bedrooms. I will try to have pictures of that for next week. In the meantime, here is my rainbow sweater, which I have finished and is now blocking! I'll try to post a picture of myself wearing it later when it's warm enough for short sleeves again.

Have a great week!

-Assunta

Out with the Old...

Sometimes celebrating a new year means saying goodbye to things that aren't working anymore. The same can be true of a new house! Since our escrow finally closed at the end of December, my sweetie and I have been having fun doing some demolition work on parts of our condo that we don't like or that need to be updated. 

One of the first things to go was the built-in furniture that you see behind the bed here. (This picture is from before the previous owners moved out.)

Here are all the pieces of that furniture after we deconstructed it. The room already feels much bigger!

Next was the soffit in the master bathroom. It housed a lens for a fluorescent tube light that we won't be using anymore, and was much sturdier than it needed to be anyway. It also detracted from our nice, high ceilings.

Adam and our new reciprocating saw made short work of that. He has since cut it down all the way to the wall and patched and textured the wall so it's ready to paint. Will still have one more soffit to take down in the other bathroom.

Speaking of paint preparation, here I am getting ready to sand down some doorframes so that we can paint them again without them getting too thick.

Here is one of our door frames before sanding (left) and after (center). It is so nice to see natural wood under there! It turns out this green paint (that seems to have been the unifying theme of the house) comes off much easier than expected. The image on the right shows a chunck of paint I took off a door in one piece, just by grabbing it and pulling. I only really needed to use the sander for some stubborn spots, and for the layer of paint below the green one.

Another thing we need to do before we can paint is get rid of the popcorn ceiling. The contractors are coming today to scrape it and I can't wait to see how it looks when they are done! We want to do most of the work ourselves but decided it was worth it to hire this one out.

Are you making any changes this new year that you are excited about?

-Assunta

Happy 2017!

I can't believe how long it's been since I've posted. It's a whole new year already! I have been busy traveling and crafting for the holidays. Also, our home sale finally closed so my husband and I will now be able to put our creative energy toward fixing up the house! Here is a barage of images to show what I have been up to for the past month. I hope to resume my regularly blogging schedule starting next week. Apologies for the image quality, many of them were taken during our holiday road trip and all without the aid of my light box.

Before we left on our trip I knitted this dress for my niece for Christmas. She is about 1 1/2 years old now!

These crocheted stacking animals are also for my niece. The leaves on the palm tree took me forever! I was working on that tree for a big part of our journey north.

While visiting my husband's aunts and uncles in Sacramento we came across a shop called Rumplestiltskin. Since I love everything to do with fairytales and yarn, I just had to go inside and pick up some gorgeous wool for spinning!

While in Portland I made this baby mermaid costume as a custom order for a friend who is expecting in February!

I received a Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer amigurumi kit for Christmas.  Here's Rudolph in a hotel in Redding, on the way back to SoCal. 

Now I am working with my Sheepicorn yarn from Electric Sheep.  This is how much I had knitted at our last stop in Santa Cruz.

I hope your year is off to a wonderful and crafty start!

-Assunta

Handspun Yarn for My Mom!

My mom is one of my very best friends, and she's also the one who taught me to sew and crochet! Ever since I started learning to spin, I have had an idea in my head to make beautiful yarn for her. Of course, it took me a few test skeins to get to gift-worthy yarn, but I think I finally did it. My mom's birthday was yesterday, November 22nd, and this is what I gave her:

I even made my own custom label, but I must give credit to Blarney Yarn for her super-soft wool blend and gorgeous hand-painted autumn colors.

You may recognize this wool from my past post on the Vista Fiber Fiesta!

I spun and plied the yarn on my trusty Ashford spindle.

Stretching the yarn out on my noddy-noddy showed the colors to their best advantage and got it ready to soak. 

Yarn soup! Soaking the yarn helped clean it and set it.

Last, I hung it to dry on a hook that was left in front of what will soon be my craft room. (I can't wait to repaint or replace that door, though!)

What do you think? I want to try dyeing my own yarn next!

-Assunta

PS- I had a great time at Hearts & Hands on Saturday. I brought a friend and we each made a few spool knit hats for refugees. Making the hats was fun, but the best part was being around people from different backgrounds all working together and using their creativity to help others! It was wonderful to see!

Hearts & Hands 2016

I can't believe it's been almost a month since I last posted! My husband, kitty, and I are all successfully moved into our new house. We are still renting for the time being, but as soon as the home repair projects begin, you'll see them here.

In the meantime, some of the goings-on in the world have made me feel a little extra motivated to have a positive impact. This weekend I plan to participate in Hearts & Hands 2016, and event where volunteers complete craft projects to help refugees and victims of human trafficking. If anyone is reading this in Orange County, you should join me! If not, I'll let you know how it is.

Please see the flyer below for those who are interested:

As we move into the holiday season, I hope it's full of love and laughter for all of you!

Assunta