New Work in My Shops This Month - more cork and magnetic, recycled lockets!

Even though the holiday rush has left me a little burned out I have added a few new pieces to each shop this month - I also have some new artist sets that have just launched or are launching within the next week or so and will post about them soon!
Have a wonderful weekend everyone - don't forget to enter this week's giveaway (top left) ending on Sunday at midnight!

xo- Cat :)

this DECIDING thing is a pain in the a--

So, my very first decision this year

(well, maybe not my first decision, I guess my first decision was to make more decisions)

was to take better care of myself

and part of this take better care of myself thing is to cut way back on diet soda.

And this is a very hard thing for someone who has believed since high school that calories should not be wasted on beverages unless those beverages are chocolate milkshakes or wine coolers.

So, I am transitioning over to unsweetened tea and the "w" word and skim milk and trying to stay sane with a lowered caffeine intake all the while conjuring up images of myself doing backflips and benchpresses at 80 because I will have these amazing bones that will not have had all the calcium leached out of them from another few decades of diet pepsi.

I bought a beautiful glass pitcher to keep cold water in my studio - something about seeing that crystal clear water and the sound of the water as I pour it just makes me happy and makes me feel all healthy and grown up and very much a decision maker.

Now, this is a process

(I'm not exactly going cold turkey here - maybe more like warm chicken)

although I have crossed a little something off my mental checklist.

Don't worry though there are many, many more things for me to be working on like writing the great American mystery novel

(whose protagonist is a crafty mom whipping up recycled valentine's by day and solving the puzzling disappearance of the mailman between dinner and bedtime)

and learning how to make donuts like the girls of Madderroot and doing the laundry without tripping over it for a week first

(have I mentioned the laundry "room" - ie tiny little corridor holding the washer and dryer - is right outside my studio door - this seems like bad feng shui to me although it does come in handy when I get cold and need a sweater as long as I don't mind that the sweater has food stains and smells a little bit like wet dog ... which I don't)

but I'm up for the challenge. Life is short and moves fast, folks. And I have a lot of decisions to make this year ....

*here's the dilemma penguin by living feral

Upycled Rubberband Valentine Tutorial or when good tutorials go bad ... ah the heartbreak

Sometimes when crafting, the thing you end up with is not exactly the picture you had in your head when you started.

(and this is the beauty of handmade and I really truly believe this, even when things go ... well, kind of bad -

maybe not life in prison with no chance of parole kind of bad, but more like a couple weeks in county with a roommate named Ginger who really, really likes your hair -

not that this has happened to me)

So although this project has some problems with it I decided to post it anyway because - 1. perfection is highly overrated and 2. many of my mistakes you can avoid

Although I am giving you a step by step of what I did I will add a little instruction for the way I would do it if I was to do it again

(which I never, ever will, trust me on this)

You will need: rubberbands (now, maybe there is a reason stringart is done with actual string, but I had a bag of rubberbands in my kitchen drawer that were just screaming Valentine's Day at me - use your own judgement on this), nails, cork, a back board (I used a second piece of cork flooring under the first tile which proved to not be strong enough for the rubberbands which wanted to pull everything inward so I would recommend the wood backboard the pattern suggests - ugh), a hammer (I started out with my trusty mallet, but soon had to switch to the slimmer hammer head), the pattern, a calculator and lots of patience

1. Lay out your pattern and hammer in 80 little nails, yes I said 80
2. Tear out the pattern center (the instructions say to remove the entire pattern at this point, but I don't see how this project is possible to do without the numbers, so leave the numbers)
3. Follow pattern section 1 (this one is easy peasy)
4. Follow pattern section 2 (good luck with this one, maybe remove small children from your immediate vicinity because your language is going to be rough - also pour yourself a drink)
5. Pull out the little pieces of paper with tweezers
6. I cut my cork to fit in an embroidery hoop, but this would look just as cool on a clipboard or something simple

<----Now, I admit I did not end up with anything nearly as amazing as this and you may have to squint a little bit to see my heart, but as I tell my family sometimes when I am accused of heartlessness, it's in there, trust me.

Also my pattern went wayward when I tracked on the right side and I didn't quite manage the gorgeous circular fold with my heart - not sure if this is a result of the rubberbands or my own placement mistakes - and my nails, without the solid backboard and because of the rubberband pressure, have gone a little wonky - but I will just keep everyone 5-10 feet away from it and don't think anyone will notice the flaws.

(I find this is good advice for most things)

Happy MLK Day - wishing everyone the time to slow down and think about his lessons of peace, brotherhood and forgiveness

When his home was bombed as his wife and four young children slept, Dr. King could have held it up to the world as an example of the kind of barbarism that is fueled by irrationality and extremism. He chose instead to practice the forgiveness he so often preached.

“Love has within it a redemptive power,” Dr. King said. “And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. Love your enemies. Because if you hate your enemies, you have no way to redeem and to transform your enemies. But if you love your enemies, you will discover that at the very root of love is the power of redemption. ... there’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive.”