But are you missing my real calling?

Just a little note here to let some of you know that if you are not checking in on http://www.delilahsdatingdilemma.blogspot.com then you are missing my feeble attempt at a novel.  I do not want to give it away, but I am writing ahead of what you will be reading and I have to work on it in the daylight because I am scaring myself.
You will need to go to the address above and go back to the November 6 post to start at the beginning, unless of course, you like to read magazines as I do.  I start at the back and read to the front.  But on books I start at the front.  All a matter of personal preference, me thinks.
When you read this please keep in mind that it is pure fiction at it's very best  And leave me a comment which you do by clicking on that little envelope at the end of the post.  Give me your real opinion, cause you know I appreciate honesty!
The name of it is Chapter One.

Well, the Arse is now on hold!

This is what is going on in my kitchen this morning.  Absolutely nothing.  See I invented this wonderful face cream with the main ingredient of Hemp Butter.  I mean this stuff is great and I have testimonials if you want to read them. "Lou, this is great!  I wear it under my make up and no grease.  Will be back for more."  That from one of my eBay customers.  Send some to a friend in New York and told him to let his girlfriend try it.  Told him it made my face as soft as a babies butt.  He had the brilliant idea to name it "Arse Lookin' at You!"  Course he loves it and is not sharing with the girlfriend.  says she can just buy her own.
Then he came up with the brilliant idea to put it in black or camoflague tubs and market it to men with the slogan "Every man needs a little Arse!"  I have not gone there yet, nor have I needed too.
So I made a bunch of this and slapped the Arse label on half and Hemp Butter on the other half.  Between the church and the weavers sale I sold every bit of it. So yesterday I got out all my ingredients, the scales, the tubs, and the cooking pan and stick blender.  What I did not get out was the key ingredient, because I am out of that.  Seems I got busy making stuff up for the sales and neglected to order a tub of Hemp Butter.  So I got on my trusty sight and ordered 5 pounds of it.  Checked 3 day ground because the "I forgot to order and need this bad so please rush it to me" method of shipment would have added an extra $126 to the price.  Now even I am smart enough to know that if I want to make money I have to keep my cost low.  So here I set, telling you about it instead of making it.
Now I do have some in the refrigerator, but it is for eating.  It is not refined and has seeds in it.  I put it on toast in the morning with just a little jelly cause it is just like peanut butter only different.

So now I measured everything out so all I have to do is put the Hemp Seed Butter in and finish the job.  I can put all this stuff away and get busy and make something like this:

See I have a little friend coming up from Florida to spend a few days and she has a sweet tooth that will not quit.  I just wanted to let all you people out there who think I am infallible know that such is not the case.  In my defense, however, I worked very hard getting ready for the Church sale and the weavers sale, but this Jingle Bell just snuck right up on me.  Think I have plenty of other stuff, just the Arse is missing.  Should pull it on eBay but I am sure my stuff will get her quickly.  Those people in Utah are nothing if not speedy.

Hopefully tomorrow I am going to have the pictures of the towels my friend Alex sent me from Wales.  Got to frame them because it would be a sin to actually use them!

Until tomorrow then,  

May the good Lord take a liken' to you!

As promised!

Donna Graham, like the cracker!

Drum roll, please!!!!  This is Donna Graham from Walsenburg, Colorado.  She is standing beside her art work that was actually in a New York Gallery.  Oh, I am hobnobbing with the big girls now!  I am so honored.  She explained to me that these three items are actual things she crocheted, knitted or wove and then saturated with something ( big words and my mind closed up ) and then draped them on somthing else.  See, the best part about art is that you actually have to see it and touch it.  I seen this and touched it and I was impressed.  She may be an artist and hang her work in New York, but she is still a Colorado girl!

And here is a close up of the art work as well as the tattoo she got so long ago that it had to be redone.  Seems like the original one she gave to herself when she was bored in Biology class.  Got to tell you, I have never been that bored!  Never poked myself and never let anyone else come at me with a needle either.  But as far as photography goes, I would say this picture is worth a thousand words.  We have the art work, which is absolutely mesmerizing and then we have the hand in front of it that belongs to the artist and lets us know that she is a real human.  The card from the New York Gallery which shows success.  Full Circle is what I will call it.
This is a little number that Donna knitted but first she spun the yarn.  Oh, I do envy this girl her patience.  Bet she makes Apple Pies also!                                                                                            I think this is a shawl.  I could be wrong.  Would not be the first time.  Let me go check the album captions.  Well, that was not much help because I apparently did  not know when I put the captions on the pictures.  But I will say it is Donna's until some one corrects me!
Now, I recall Donna telling me she lives in WalVeta.  That means it is the same distance from her house to Walsenburg as it is to LaVeta.  I am going to go see her next summer and hike in her mountains. She can carry a shotgun and make sure a bear does not get me!
Donna was also on the board that put this sale together.  They mostly stayed up in the inner sanctum and ran figures through the computers.  Last year they gave me an award for shutting down the computer the most times.  They gave me a pink sheep with holes all over it.  Elvira   thinks it is hers and shakes it.  The stuffing is all gone now.  I do want to commend all the ladies who made this years sale such a success.  And these are in no particular order.  Oh, wait!  They are in alphabetical order!!  Hats off to :

JANET ANZLOVAR ........DEMONSTRATIONS              

JOAN ARCHULETA.........CASHIER TEAM                  

INA BERNARD.................ADVERTISING

MARJORIE BRATZLER...REFRESHMENTS         

LYNNE GNAIZDA............ADVERTISING

DONNA GRAHAM............CASHIER TEAM-INVENTORY & INVITED ITEMS

MARILYN HOISINGTON.STANDARDS & CHECK-IN

BETTY KOCHEVAR.........PROPS & SET UP

TARA MATTHEWS...........SCHEDULING

JUDI PATTERSON.............GUILD PRESIDENT-EX-OFFICIO

TERRI ROSTAD.................GUEST ARTISTS

KAREN SMITH..................STANDARDS AND CHECK IN

COLETTE WRIGHT...........CO-CHAIR & CASHIER TEAM-TREASURER

DONNA GOWER................CHAIR & CASHIER TEAM-HEAD CASHIER

CAROLE SNOW.................SCHEDULING

CAROL SALAS...................STANDARDS & CHECK IN

                       Tomorrow I will post just a slide show of the closing day of the Handwoven Holiday Sale!  Watch for it!

Five Minutes on the soap box.

Well, I know I am in the middle of something with my ladies, but I have got to hop up on my soap box here for just a few.  I know they will not mind this little diversion.
America, what in the hell are you thinking?  Riots over Penn State coach firing!  Is a ball game that important?  Where have I been all my life?  I see acts of cowardice on the news when a 2 year old girl was hit in the street and people walked past and paid no attention.  I think that was in China.  What did the world say?  They said  "Things like that happen in the United States, but not here."  We have become known as a country of callous beings.
Where else are athletes paid millions of dollars to play a season of ball, put them on a pedestal, and then riot in the streets because a 10 year old boy got himself raped and the adults who were supposed to protect him turned blind eyes?  That particular coach was to be excused because he had a winning team!  I am sorry, I just don't get it.  Sandusky is the guilty one here, you say?  Sandusky is not the only one to share in this debacle.  There are laws in place to protect the weak and young and they are there for a reason.  There were a lot of responsible people who turned a blind eye on this one.  This one and how many more just like it?
I am so sick of turning on my television and seeing some one with down cast eyes making their little spiel about "Oh, well, I am so sorry.  I should have done more."  The politicians who lie directly to the camera for weeks and then when confronted with the actual picture of them with thier hand in the cookie jar tell us, "Oh, well, I remember now.  I am so sorry.  I am an honorable man, but there was that one time."  And Lord only knows if all of Tiger's women were ever uncovered.  (Well, we know they were uncovered, but I mean in the sense of publicly discovered.)  I do admire his wife, oh, excuse me, his EX wife. 
I rather live in my own little world and try to just do what I think is right, and people, this is not right.  I look at my world around me and I am so happy that I am old and this is not going to be my fight that much longer.  Man's inhumanity to man is just about more than I can stomach for many more years.  I see the "Occupy " forces over on the corner and I watched the Tea Party blossom, falter and splinter.  I long for the days before technology when we did not see what was happening in virtual time. 
If I indeed do get to come back for another shot at this life, I hope I can come back in the time of the Pony Express and no phones, no television and I can eat fresh cows cream on my cracked wheat in the morning and top it off with a pat of real butter!

This is Marilyn Hoisington who taught me to weave.

This is Marilyn Hoisington, my teacher and mentor who taught me to weave at the Sangre de Cristo Arts Center up there in the class room. I had wanted to learn to weave since I was knee high to a grasshopper.  I think it went back to the days when momma would tear rags into strips, cut a slit in one end and link them together and have us kids roll the rags into a big ball.  This was then taken to the "rug weaving lady"  who took the balls and in due time returned to mother a rug six or 7 feet long.  That always amazed me.  The cost of the weaving was about $3.00.
While looking through the paper the Arts Center put out periodically I saw that I could take weaving lessons so I was all over that.  I remember how scared I was that first night.  Marilyn was very understanding as to my intimidation by the loom and all the threads. Just did not look like anything I could possibly master.  But under her tutelage I not only learned to weave, I learned how to measure a warp and warp the silly loom.  When classes were over, I bought her floor loom and it and I have become inseparable.

On the left is one of her items for sale.  It is a tapestry wall hanging of some sort.  And on the right is the tapestry work that greets the customers at the front door.  You should know that all the tapestry work she does is designed by her and she has wonderful taste.  I just kind of look at a blank piece of paper and all I see is a piece of paper, but she sees visions and all sort of designs.  And colors and dreams, I think.

Tapestry is not all she does.  She started weaving 30 years ago and the tapestry came to be her medium several years back.  I think in another life her name was Rapunzel and she spun straw into gold.  I have never seen anything come off her loom that was not a work of art.

But look at this one.  She says this is a failure.  Remember when Aunt Grace gave you a baby blanket and you washed it and it shrank up to be the size of a dinner napkin?  We called that "not taking care of something handmade and ruining it."  Now they do it deliberately and they call it "felting" and it is very much to be desired.  So she was trying a new technique called 'bead leno'.  That involves using a bead between the heddles and beater, I think.  She said it did not work so she felted it or something.  I got a little confused, but here is the important part.  When she held it up to the light, a design was inside the scarf.  It could not be seen looking at it on either side, but it could be seen through the scarf. And that is just cooler than anything!

Here is our little Marilyn doing what she does best which is teaching someone how to weave with nothing but a piece of cardboard and some string.  This is called card weaving.  And see the things over on the right side of this page? Those were all made on card looms.  The round ones were made on the paper plates.  Isn't that about as ingenious as you can get?  She embellishes with beads and whatever happens to be laying around.  I think her mind goes 24/7.  The little brown bear you see in the pictures is Star and he has his own little hand woven scarf that Marilyn made on the card loom.  She says when she is away from her loom her hands need something to do and this is quite easy to pick up and requires very little equipment.  So as I left Marilyn today she was busily making another scarf for little Star. Such a good Mama Bear!

 I have decided that there are so many ladies in our Guild that need to be spot lighted that one week is not nearly enough time, so I will be continuing to present more of them to you as I can catch them and beat them into submission.  I will drag them kicking and screaming through the pages of Lou Mercer's Words of Wisdom or know the reason why!

See you tomorrow when I think I am going to corner that wily little Joanne Caldwell.

Joanne Caldwell can do way more than warp a loom!

Meet Joanne Caldwell.  Doesn't she look innocent there?  She is showing off one of her many creations.  This one just happens to be a shrug or some such thing.  Isn't it pretty?  If at all possible you should wrangle an invitation to her house.  The woman probably has 15 looms, all warped and all in various stages of work being finished.  She also has yarn up the grommit and handles sales for other people.  And she hosts classes and dye days and stores the rental equipment and her husband Bill, is an absolute jewel.  Have yet to figure who got the best end of that deal!  Just kidding there!
Now what did she teach me?  Among other things, the Inkle Loom and this old gal is very good at what she does.  In case you do not know what an Inkle Loom is let me tell you.  It is used to make narrow bands like this:              

But over here she is getting a neck massage from yours truly.  She was demonstrating so I showed her how to relax.  Sue shot the picture cause Sue is a good girl.  Now let me go see if I can find a few of her Inkle Looms that are all dressed and ready to be used.

Well, and there they are, just like magic.  I love the rainbow one there on the right.  I guess I will dig out my Inkle loom and make me a pretty rainbow one like that.  Wonder if I remember how to do that.  Surely I do. 

 Now in case you think dragging all this stuff from her house to the Vail is easy I want you to know it is not.  I have a few candid shots here that I want to share with you.  Here is Joanne coming in the front door and it is easier to bring everything in one trip then to make two trips.

And here she is looking for something in this suitcase. I think it may be Bill! You know I would never put these pictures on here if this was someone else, but it is dear Joanne and she is more fun than a barrel of monkeys and keeps me in stitches all the time. A great sport! I love you, Joanne Caldwell!

If you ever get to thinking that the Weaver's Guild is just for fuddy duddy's you are very sadly mistaken. You know me and you should know that I do not go for the mundane. The Guild is just a bunch of women who like to have a good time and share secrets and tips on how to produce beautiful pieces of art. That is what weaving is, you know, art.

The sale is just about over for the year.  We have Friday and Saturday until 3:00 PM.  Then it will be packed away until next year.  But we have a meeting every month, so if you are interested at all in this ancient art you can contact me through my profile, or leave a comment.  We would be most happy to have you in our midst and maybe you can teach us something!

See you tomorrow.