Seventh Anniversary

Recently, it was my husband's and my seventh anniversary.  Every year, we try to find creative and personal ways to take the traditional gift ideas and make them unique - and sometimes silly, as we try to guess what the other one is giving us.  This year, the theme was copper/wool.  My husband went with copper, giving me a lovely handmade (not by him, but by a talented artist on Etsy) copper necklace.  It's an oyster with  a pearl inside and a pretty print pattern on the outside.  I decided to go the handmade route also, and made him a copper sheep with the help of my kids.  :)  And it's practical, too, since it holds a copper wool pad.

Love and Creativity

Here is a rug that I sewed for my daughters' bedroom (I still have to sew on the backing, so it looks a little wrinkly).

The way this rug came about is a long story.  The gift theme for a third anniversary is "leather."  Since I love representations of elephants, my husband went online and ordered a funky elephant figurine that was made out of leather for our third anniversary.  When the figurine arrived in a box from China, it wasn't protected with bubble wrap - instead, the packers had wrapped it in rectangles of upholstery samples of different colors, with a hole punched in the corner of each sample, probably where a metal ring had held the samples together in a "book" to show customers.

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Well, that was unusual enough to catch my attention, and it gave me an idea based out of a book by Tanith Lee (one of my favorite authors of all time).  In The Silver Metal Lover, the protagonists are very poor, but they use their love and creativity to decorate their home.  They get free carpet samples and glue them together to create a beautiful patchwork rug.

So I did the same.  I sewed this rug together from those samples given to me from a representation of love, and cut out the little animal figurines from felt to cover over the holes in the fabric patches.  My daughters really enjoyed this project, and helped tell me what animals to put on.

Et voilà, a rug made out of love and creativity.

Father and Daughter

          Every year for our anniversary,
          my husband and I try to out-
          creative each other.  For our "paper"
          anniversary, I gave him a jigsaw
          puzzle with a photo of us before we
          were married.  He made me paper
          flowers. I painted this for our
          "cotton" anniversary. It's one of my
          favorite memories: my husband
          sitting by the window and making
          faces so our oldest daughter would
          laugh.

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Catnap

                         I drew this to go with a poem
                         of the same title about a
                         dreaming cat. One of my first
                         forays into trying to do more
                         formal work on paper (rather
                         than on my kitchen cabinets, haha).

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Kitchen Art

                                                    Art drawn on my kitchen cabinets - see blog entry "A Black Sharpie, A Wall" from 6/21/2014.