I know, I know. It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Ever since my kids entered school (over nine years ago now), doing much writing outside of the bare minimum between Halloween and early January has proven difficult. It’s bad enough to have Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s and all four of our birthdays mashed into seven weeks. But when you add all the school-related activities during and after school hours (especially now that our oldest is in high school), it becomes a burden. And when writing becomes a burden, the words get blocked.
Plus, this year I was determined to work on—and finish!—a book-related project that I’d wanted to start on last year and never did. And then, once January rolled around, I wanted to focus on my sequel because I was “this close” to finishing the first draft. I completed said draft last week (yay!), thus I can now focus on a blogpost…
…In which I’m sharing the project I just mentioned. 🙂 So, before we get any closer to Valentine’s Day, here is my North Pole sign post, à la Flitterndorf. (For those who don’t know, Flitterndorf is the name of my village in Tinsel in a Tangle where the elves and Kringles live.)
I created it with storage in mind. In other words, I can remove all place names but the top one from the pole (you can see in the pic that I used cup and eye hooks to hang them) and remove the pole from its base, should I want to pack it away down in my crawl space. But methinks it will hang out somewhere in the house for a long while after the other Christmas decorations are gone. Having it around helps fuel my motivation to continue progress on the sequel. Second draft, here I come!
The 12” X 3.25” wooden boards I found at Hobby Lobby. They started out as rectangles until I sheared off the two corners at one end. I found the 4’ pole at Lowe’s, 2” in diameter. And the splice of log for the base came from our own pile of firewood in the backyard (thanks, Hubby!).
I thought I could simply drill a 2” hole in the base and move on to creating the signs, but 1) the 2” drill bit needed for our drill press cost more than we wanted to spend during the holiday season, and then, when I settled for using the 1” drill bit, 2) the log base was too thick to fit between the base of the drill press and the drill bit, and 3) Hubby wasn’t around to help cut the base thinner and I was tired of waiting on this project, so…yeah.
Doing what any other impatient crafter would do, I improvised. Using the 1” bit and my hand-held drill, I drilled out as much of the 2” hole as possible and chiseled out the rest.
Ah, such an easy thing to say—“chisel out the rest.” Not an easy thing to do. 😐
And yet, that wasn’t even the hardest part of the project.
The lettering proved the hardest.
I’d never worked with a paint marker before, so inexperience was against me. And I’m a leftie. Lefties aren’t typically known for our beautiful penmanship, since the lettering system in America is right-hand biased. Thus, the direction of the swirls and the slant of the letters in the font I chose (found on Pinterest) are done in the opposite direction a leftie would naturally choose, if given the option. Which we’re not, so we adapt. 😉
To get the look of the letters just right, I had to first write the words on paper (lots of erasing involved!), then I taped the paper to the piece of wood, and traced the lines with a pencil and heavy hand to make an impression in the wood surface. Once I had a faint outline to follow, I took the paint marker in hand, said a prayer (no joke), and slowly traced my impressions with the marker, working from right to left so my hand didn’t mar the lettering.
Using a heavy hand to create an impression on the wood. 
First 3 signs are complete. 4th sign needs another coat of marker paint. About to start 5th sign. 
A pic of the impression.
It’s hard to see in the pictures, but I also stapled a length of garland to the pole and draped battery-operated LED lights along the garland. I’m still on the lookout for some wooden ball or small lantern I can attach to the top of the pole, but for this Christmas, I called it good.
So, there’s my little Flitterndorf flair for the holidays. And if any of you were also crazy enough to tackle a new project in the month of December, I’d love for you to share in the comments! 😀
After I created my snowman phone carrier a few weeks ago, I couldn’t help but think about what I could make for the interim period between the warm, summer days that we’ve left behind here in MT and the Christmas season that–aside from me–no one wants to be reminded of quite yet. 😉 I browsed through Pinterest for autumn ideas, and when I found some fun pumpkin faces, the lightbulb went on in my brain. Jack-o-lantern! I couldn’t start knitting right away, however, as I didn’t have any orange wool yarn, and none of the craft stores nearby offer that color, so I went to my go-to online store for most of my knitting needs, 
To celebrate, I’m giving away a signed paperback copy of Tinsel in a Tangle to one random winner who leaves a comment below my post at Storyteller Squad (even a simple “I’m interested!” will suffice). I hope you’ll swing by, check out the site, and leave a comment. Note: you need NOT follow the blog in order to comment. 🙂 Here’s the 
I had mentioned a few months ago I wanted to try a smaller version of the Ravenna Satchel by Marta McCall. But this time, rather than using her flower pattern, I transferred this picture I found on Pinterest to graph paper and used it as a template. Knitting the template into reality, however, became quite the frustrating mess at times, as I had to deal with so many different colors and make sure not to tangle all the strands at the back. Several rows found me switching between colors as many as fifteen times, which sloooows down the knitting process. I also changed how the handles would connect to the bag. In a sense, they don’t connect, except as an anchor point in four places near the top. Instead, they travel around, behind, and under the bag, to give it support without pulling on the felted yarn itself. (Going under would have been so helpful on my original bag, considering how much I load it up when traveling. :)) The one thing I wish I’d done differently on this second bag was to cover the straps with fabric, as I’d done on the original one. But I plan to felt some flowers (a first for me) and attach them over the few anchor stitches, so maybe that will offset the lackluster look of the straps.
Two years ago, I had knit a Tinsel carrier for my iPhone 5. Since then, my phone went kaput thanks to a software update, and I now have an iPhone 6. Which is too big for Tinsel. 😦 In making a new carrier last year, I had used fabric for the skirt instead of felting the whole thing, thinking it might look better.
So this summer, I knit another one, but instead of a reindeer, the girl is holding a wreath. These patterns are found in Sue Stratford’s 
So, here’s my snowman carrier. 🙂 By far the quickest one I’ve knit & felted to date. I was going to sew a string of tiny Christmas lights between his hands, but it looked too cluttered against his buttons, so I decided less was more in his case (er, pun not intended).
