American Visionary Art Museum

Today, DH took me to the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. He had purchased the Groupon, so we got a good deal on the entrance fee.
Afterward, we went to Elliott City for dinner. We also attended Yappy Hour at The Wine Bin and bought delicious gourmet chocolates.

Random Stuff

So, I got more of the planting done. Lots of purple flowers - deep violet globe amaranth, bright yellow marigolds, clear blue lobelia. I have lots of peppers still to do and more herbs. I have a yellow blackberry bush to plant.

Our garden clay soil needs a lot of amendments. To keep the beds from getting full, I have started to sneak the clods of dried clay into the trash. In the past, I tried to move them around the yard, but now the yard is lumpy.

The fish printing went okay, but less paint got onto the shirt than I really wanted. I touched up the shirt by hand and added some foam stamps that I got for .50 on clearance to create undersea plants. I trimmed the shirt and want to add lettuce edging, but my test edging didn't go so well, yet.

I got a lot of spinning done. Finished a braid of hand painted roving and started a bag of roving in several shades of yellow that I got at the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival.

I have one more fish (for printing) in the fridge that I got at the Asian market. He(she?) is a porgy and was very fresh when I bought him on Tuesday.

I have to tidy the house because DH is arriving home today. My ADHD clutter making skills have run rampant without him here to monitor me.

Since DH was away, I got a Hawaiian pizza last night and watched North and South. I just love Elizabeth Gaskell's stuff.

I finished watching "ADD and Loving It" off of the Tivo. I know a couple of people who would probably benefit from seeing it.

I got a set of assorted antique finials off of eBay and they should arrive this week. I am hoping one of them looks good enough to add to the 1801 wool winder that my friend, Will Pownell, and I are restoring. I got it at a going-out-of-business sale at an antique store in the Sparks/Hereford area. It was 50% off! Will did an amazing job restoring the function of the winder's clock. He hand carved a new clicker, a new clock hand and a peg for the base. He got the wooden gears to function and everything works rather smoothly now. The wheel turns 144 times before the click tells you the skein is complete. Will even bought me a bottle of wood polish for antiques, so the whole thing has a nice gleam.

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Gardening in the Heat and Messy Crafts

This morning, I took DH to the airport. A few days ago, his office realized that he was needed on the west coast for something very important. It shouldn't take long and hubby will be back before I can make too much of a mess of the house. ;-)

I spend the morning planting until it got too hot. I got in most of the tomatoes and all of the okra and a hyacinth bean plant that was a gift. There is also a volunteer tomato plant in the garden, so we should have plenty of tomatoes. Our yard is probably too small for the okra, but I had to try it anyway after I saw it growing at Great Hopes Plantation in Colonial Williams burg. There are plenty of other plants waiting, so I hope it gets cooler soon. Planting in our yard involves digging up the dirt with a shovel and then adding compost and peat to the soil and then mixing it up. I am concerned by the severe lack of worms in the soil this year. It may be time to research buying some.

I plan to do some spinning, knitting and fish printing onto t-shirts while DH is away. I will go to the Asian market to see what fish they have to use. I picked up t-shirts and fabric paint yesterday at the Jo-Ann's in Columbia. Fish printing or "Goyotaku" is the Japanese art of taking a print directly from a fish. Actually you can now buy rubber fish to print from, but I'll try it on real ones for now.

On an unrelated note, I have two female Betta fish sisters in one tank together. They have always gotten along well together and used to swim side-by-side. Recently, they seem to be getting on each others nerves, so I may have to separate them. My pet store crowntail male died of old age last week, so I have a free tank ready if needed.

My Shrinking Experiment with #6 Plastic

Using some online tutorials, including the ones linked in the last two entries here at TRF, plus information from the Official Shrinky Dinks website, I made my own (almost) FREE SHRINKY DINKS!

To make the image above, I laid my templates and my finished SDs on a flatbed scanner. All distortion you see is the actual distortion of the finished pieces.

For this experiment, I used a couple of food containers that were destined for the recycling bin. One had cookies in it, the other had fresh herbs. The containers need to be recycling category six to work. I made templates in Photoshop CS2 to create some knitting markers, tags and buttons. I have been wanting to make markers to use when I knit hats, so that I can remember how many stitches I cast on at the beginning.

I used a set of Sharpie markers to trace and color my designs onto the plastic. I used a regular sized hole punch to make the holes. (You can see that I forgot to punch one of the small tags.)

The online tutorials said to use 350F in the oven, but 325F worked for me just fine. I lined my cookie sheet with parchment paper. Most of my pieces were done shrinking in about 2 minutes or so. By the time I left them in for the 30 seconds extra recommended on the official Shrinky Dinks instructions, it was very close to 3 minutes.

I opened the oven to peek and take some quick pics with my camera phone. (Don't tell my service provider on me!)

Most of my plastic had ridges for stability, but all of the pieces baked to a nice smooth flat surface. The one small blue tag with the funny bump on the side was me trying to eek out another tag from a piece that was too small. I continued the design up the side of the plastic tray.

I tried sealing the color with clear nail polish, but it smudged my design. I will try something else and report back.

In conclusion, this experiment was a lot of fun. I would totally do it again.

More Shrinking

Here is an even better link to directions for shrinking #6 plastic.

Free Shrink Plastic - #6 Plastic Food Containers

I just found out that you can use #6 plastic and permanent markers to make your very own Shrinky Dinks! All of those clear plastic food containers are not trash after all.
You can see more info here at Skip to My Lou.