Happy Howl-o-ween! AND MY FAVORITE FASHION FRIDAY

I <3 Halloween!

It has been a favorite holiday for a while and certainly since I learned to truly dress myself.  It is the one day a year that you are allowed to dress any ol' way you want.  I already view most days fair game so it is just another good excuse to dig out some odd and end accessories.

This year Marcel dressed as a very dapper and super smart looking Sherlock Holmes.  Or something close, he needs a pipe!

My costume was a thrifted but handmade dinosaur costume, that really makes quite the lovely vest.  It is cold here, snow on the ground to start the day, so this dino is bundled, pending any ice ages.  I also got to pull out my fancy handknit booties and don a sweet updo to mirror my spikes.

Hope those little trick 'r treaters are ready for us!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Ok, so what are we doing?

Woolen Wood as this blog is aptly named also applies to our brand.  We are a husband and wife team creating handmade items from soft and hard fibers.  AB spends time in the basement turning and I spend time in the basement hooking ;)  AB's wood turning skills have developed over his lifetime, but he first learned the skills from his father.  I have lots of art skills and I like to use them all but I have been honing my knitting machine savvy since a fateful workshop in grad school.

We have slowly been building this brand for a while, even while I was still living in St. Louis I was daydreaming of our collaborations and came up with the Woolen Wood name.  It really hasn't been until I got more comfortably settled in Madison that we have collaborated on items (certainly we have the house project always on the list) but it has been a recent thing to pool our talents towards handmade wearables and other functional home wares.  I originally went to AB looking for a good solution to fasten my scarves.  AND he came up with a great solution!  Check below for his wood pins.

Together over the past months, we have been making items to get onto Etsy.  Thus building a bit of a collection.  Recently the opportunity to join in a craft show featuring cozy items presented itself and we were selected to participate.  So on October 25 we will pack up and head to Poynette, WI to be a part of Apple-Palooza at Lapacek's Orchard.  We spent this last week prepping the booth display and trying out our borrowed tent to make sure we could figure it out.

We will use rentals from A la Crate in order to display things in and around, and we think these amazing vintage items will really help our pieces shine!

Here are some preview images from the setup:

Shawl Collars with various dye and felt techniques.  These are perfect for the cooler days coming, you can add distinction to any plain shirt by simply wearing one of these all day long.  (I firmly believe I survived last winter due to my wearing of these styles.)

AB's bowls will be proudly featured on little mini wood pedestals!  We used bowl blanks, elm bases, doilies and white enamel table from A la Crate!

On the left side of the table, we have a small but certainly important container holding the turned wood pins that AB has made.  These pins are the very key to keeping a shawl collar on and allow you to wear it in multiple ways.
There are some felt bags that coordinate with some of the shawl collars and a few quirky and warm head pieces as well.  

Here we have one of our ladies displaying the shawl/pin system.

Overall booth layout should provide good room for browsing, trying on and getting to know us.  We are going to get our logo onto the chalkboard on the right, and use that as a way to get people into the tent.  The chalkboard is the Raggedy Ann chalkboard from A la Crate.

A second table for bowl display and another mannequin named Penny, showing off a different collar style.  The mint green metal folding table and orange folding step ladder are from A la Crate.  

Close ups of these marvelous pins! 

Another bowl closeup... there are some really lovely pieces in here.  AB's turning has amped up and in no time we will have enough wood curls to insulate our garden plants over the winter with!  Double bonus!!

Next weekend we will work on pricing and getting ourselves set up to do money exchange.  But for now, it is back to the knitting machine for me!

Fall off the blog wagon

Whew! Sorry for disappearing for a bit there.  Things have been busy on the work/life front and have prevented my word-smithing for a little while.  I am back and hoping to get back on a two a week track here.

Since last post... it is Fall! We are putting away the shorts and digging out the sweaters.  We have had a cute new couple of arrivals at work and new moms are getting the hang of things.  New dads too! I have learned plenty of new baby rearing tricks by being in such close proximity.  Today I had a good lesson on swaddling.

AB and I are busily prepping for our first ever craft show!  We were able to get into Apple-Palooza with Woolen Wood items to be featured.  On Saturday, October 25th from 9am-6pm Woolen Wood will have a booth at the craft fair!  Come by in order to pick some apples, have some cider, try some pie and shop the shops.

So we've got about two full weeks of prep time left and things are shaping up well.  He's been at the lathe while I've been at the knitting machine down in the basement.  He's made several great bowls and is making a variety of types of pins to hold my felt collars together.  

This is an example of the small knit clutches I am pulling together.  The technique is a process that draws the stitches up from a lower portion of knitting and creates great ruffles.  Felting the wool then works to make the ruffles more pronounced.  I have vintage zippers that work to close the bag and become handles too.

Finished collars and shoulderlets hanging ready for display.  We will refine our booth display this weekend with luck.  We are going to use A La Crate for our display and I am excited to incorporate our items with some awesome vintage pieces.

Here some knit pieces off the machine await the finishing touches.  They will get cleaned up and felted.  Then they will be sewn into bags or prepped for shawl-dom. 

The final phase is to hand sew the labels into the piece.

Don't be fooled by the bag labels, these turned wood bowls are hand made.  But they do require proper seasoning and moisture monitoring.  The shop bags make for a helpful environment to keep the roughed out bowls the proper moisture level.

A couple of cherry bowls, a walnut bowl and a variety of shawl pins waiting to find their forever homes.  Fingers crossed that they pair with my collars and shawls at Apple-Palooza!

A couple newer bowls awaiting final finishing touches on the work table.  Currently not remembering which kind of wood these are...AB can help me out later and I will update!

And  the real star of the show... this wonderfully perfectly spherical walnut bowl! 

Some of our favorite collaborations

AB and I have always worked well together, we do well to talk out our plans and can execute things together that I know I couldn't do myself.

Some of my favorite projects that we have created together include:

 * Our deck, we have posted about that project here.  It was lots of fun and just a tad more work than we anticipated.

 * Our upstairs vanity project, which I recently realized I missed a post on! You should find it just below this one or by clicking here.

* Most recently, I completed a machine knit bag and AB engineered a handle to work with the nifty texture of the bag.

Front with button closures.

Open with silk lining.

Handle detail.

Cherry wood handle.

Bag Back

We had a fun time on this one, and I enjoyed his take of the waves of the bag.  I hope this will be one of many to come. The bag is listed on Etsy, and if it doesn't sell there, better believe I will be carrying it!

Handmade from scratch: walnut sink vanity

Things began here, this was our large piece of walnut laminated plywood.  We tried our hardest to keep those sweet hearts incorporated into the main body of the exterior pieces of the vanity.  We also continually measured the sink purchased from the Restore to be sure that we would have enough material.

AB routed the edges with some special bits to accomplish really nice edges using walnut trim. 

Finished routed edge awaiting walnut trim piece.  There are several photos left out that don't show the work sanding, planing and finally finishing the vanity.  The finishing took by far the longest to complete, partially because it was rainy and partially because it just takes time.

Once finally in place, we worked carefully to get the vanity level.  This took a couple of shims to accomplish but worth the extra time for making everything even.  We ended up having to trim out a portion of the back to fit over our tile edging to accomplish true level.

If we ever sell the house and someone else rips out our vanity they will see our calling card.

Before

After :  Let it be known that the drawers were also custom made in order to fit neatly around the plumbing.  The bottom drawer is the only full drawer.  The first and the second have compartments that help divide our items and that fit around the pipes.  We used medium duty drawer slides that help close with ease and we opted to use three different sizes of handles to create a cool visual effect.

…Take and old desk…make a new desk…

So I’ve had this old computer desk that my dad gave me years ago when I got my first college apartment.  You know the place…that first pad you went in on with a couple of friends from the dorms…where you each crammed all of your worldly belongings into your own room (8 ft by 12 ft … no closet… mattress on the floor…and come to think of it, that apartment had no real living room).  Anyway, the desk… the desk was perfectly adequate back in the days of desktop computer systems, huge CRT monitors (single color) and bubble jet printers.  This fine specimen of particle board and tubular steel lay the sturdy foundation upon which many a weighty undergraduate paper in history and philosophy would be crafted with such scrutinized care that the only possible grade that could be given was that of my own namesake – AB. 

Even "new" it almost appears to bow in the middle...

Well there were good times with this desk, and so many moments of doubt.  Almost annually I considered placing it “under the hippie Christmas tree” (read: on the curb) for some wide eyed child (read: broke college student) to gather up and make his/her own…  Yet, each year, the desk remained, only to be weighted down yet again with another towering CPU and larger full color monitor…  It continued to serve me well over the years...

Well, that old grey mare of a desk had been rode hard and put away wet so many times that it was time to send her out to pasture…but, being the cheap bastard I am, and acknowledging the need to reduce, reuse and recycle…I set out to break down the old beast and build it anew, from the ground up…

And there you have it…

 ...and there it is.

Working from nature

Recently, I did a couple of small projects that worked with the world around me.  I have to imagine this is some sort of preparation for the impending winter...

On an early morning walk without Marcel, which coincidentally was kind of a nice change of pace, I found this cool specimen in the road.  The tree from which it came was not anywhere nearby so I am unsure of its origin.  I picked it up to carry it back home.  I thought it was really a lovely thing with all of its leaves and their exotic twists.  I also like the little visible nucleus/seed in each leaf.  

Once home and seated with a coffee, I pulled out some of my sparkly colored pencils and some of my prisma colors that are ancient, going on about 20 years old at this point.  The pencils are tried and true and work like the first time they were used.  I began to sketch from my little bit of nature.  I am still working on the drawing, but it was nice to collect a neat item and spend some time studying it in the studio.

I have, since grad school, been toying with how to dye without all the chemicals.  In my home, there is no safety ventilation system in place.  How do I get to play with color without being toxic to myself and the other family members?  Usually, I am using koolaid on animal fibers- that method will continue to be a favorite.  But, I am still experimenting with dying using more natural ingredients, things I can feel comfortably placing in my cookware.  

On this piece of white tablecloth, with existing stains, I played with some sewn shibori methods and some standard rubber band resists in a coffee dye bath.  Shibori is the Japanese term for tying and then dying.  Vinegar was added to the mixture to assist with color fastness- but I have to say that thus far, I was unimpressed with the results.  I may soon be wrapping the cloth with veggies, stains and other things and laying them in the yard in order to harness the sun's power for helping to dye.  In the end, the coffee grounds did not really adhere to the fabric.  I have also tried purple cabbage, but it too, seemed pretty pale.

Thanks mother nature for your lovelies- I will continue to experiment and keep my eyes open for the curious things you have to offer.