Project Warm Hearts – Year one is done!…Almost!

Well it’s been 5 months but, the first year of Project Warm Hearts is complete!  We are finishing up the last blankets as we speak!

The response to this project has been HUGE.  There have been almost 100 corporate volunteers and numerous volunteers through out the community.  I have received squares from churches and second grade classes, as well as from family memebers of  corporate volunteers not to mention the corporate volunteers themselves.  Hundreds and hundreds of squares have come together to make well over 20 blankets with more being worked on. This is the first volunteer project that has been successfully worked on by both our corporate offices in Appleton and Minneapolis and the volunteers have logged over 700 hours of volunteer time on this project.

The project has been so much fun! I have met so many people and I am really excited to finally wrap up this years work and donate all of our hard work to the Harbor House.  The variety and the craftmanship of work that has come in has been amazing, and the support from people who don’t knit or crochet has been huge!

Below are a few of the blankets that have been completed and I’ll post the rest as soon as I can:

Americana 1

Pinks and Plums

Natural

Brights 1

Project Warm Hearts is gaining steam!

Well it has been a while since I have written.  Life has gone from a meander to a full out sprint.  In addition to working full time, I took up a second position at Sephora to meet my product addictions (in addition to my yarny ones. 🙂 ), I am volunteering as a tutor with the Fox Valley Literacy Coalition, am teaching crochet and knitting at the Harbor House, and am leading a volunteer event at work called Project Warm Hearts.  I mentioned this project before, but it is finally underway!

The Harbor House will be the first recipient of the hand made blankets.  I have also been invited to teach a class at the Harbor House (a domestic abuse home) on knitting and crochet which I am really excited about.  I am also training to be a regular volunteer there and the stories that these women have are just horrific.  I am happy I will be able to teach these women a new craft to give themselves some sense of accomplishment and ownership. Something that is theirs and their abusers cannot take away.

In the month of October we collected a ton of donations and starting in November, employees have been stitching away to make 12 inch squares for blankets to be donated throughout our community.  I was expecting maybe 20 or so volunteers but in only a few weeks we are well over 60 with more coming every day! I am so excited about the fact that I actually get PAID to knit and crochet! Fun! I wish I could do that full time. There must be a sign up sheet for that somewhere…hmmmm….how can I mesh my BA degree in Ops Management with my love of art and fiber goodness??? I must explore this further. 🙂

We are making blankets with 20 squares and have received roughly 35 so far.  My favorite part of this project is that I get to teach people how to knit, crochet, and do Tunisian crochet. There are a lot of folks who are now volunteering because they also have an opportunity to learn, and a lot of people who used to crochet or knit and are picking it up again.  We are also having ‘Get Stitchy’ events where we block out 3 hours in an afternoon where everyone can bring their projects and work on them together. There will be talking and general yarny merriment, and I of course will be providing some tasty goodness to fuel our creative needs. 🙂

Feel free to let me know if you’d like to help!  I have a long list of non profits and hospitals in the area who are thrilled to accept our donations so the more yarn and squares we can round up the better!

Here are some of the squares we got so far!

 

Crafty goes homemade beauty

Ahhh a blissful quiet Friday night.   After a busy week I am enjoying my new tea light holders from Embellishments in Waupaca, WI, and some pretty darn tasty fudge from the Main Street Marketplace, also in Waupaca.  Now that I’m all settled in, I decided to do some YouTube surfing and came across a series of videos by Michelle Phan.   She has a bunch of video tutorials on everything from making your own facial scrub to doing different make up looks to saving your lip glosses to creating romantic curls.  I decided to give the homemade facial scrub a whirl.  You take a couple of tablespoons of honey, couple tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, and about 1/3 cup of sugar, and mix it all together. Then viola! Home made facial scrub.  I tried using extra virgin olive oil as a make up remover as she also suggested, however not so sure on that one.  The face scrub worked pretty well however.   I am also very intrigued by this video on how to make your own homemade pore strips.  This will also be on my list to try this weekend once I frolic off to the store for some gelatin.

Note: So I tried the homemade pore strips….If you decide to give them a whirl, I recommend using the mixture almost immediately after pulling it out of the microwave (otherwise it solidifies too much to apply correctly). It works ok, but does have a slightly gross consistency.  Give it a whirl!!

 

The Flame

The employee giving campaign at work is coming up next month and this is the third year where I am donating my ‘service’ of drawing.  Folks who get the highest bid win any drawing of their choice of whomever they want.  So to prepare, I am getting some sketches done for examples of what I do.  I forget how much I enjoy drawing.  All these years I’ve spent with my nose in a book, I’ve been neglecting doing anything that I love, and drawing certainly is high on the list.  Just for fun last night I drew a comic book drawing of my co-worker, Becki.  She’s been needling me for years to draw her as a flame throwing hero and so I did some experimenting and this is what I ended up with.  Just call her Becki ‘The Flame’.

The Yarn Impulse

So last night my friend Jen came over (a fellow crocheter) and I decided it was a good time to go through all of my yarn. I have a huge stash of the Vanna yarn which I use for those kilim afghans, but I found I also have a copious amount of one skein wonders.  These are the result of wandering yarn aisles at the store and seeing something that catches my eye…I don’t know what I want to do with it, but maybe I want to do something with it….. So I buy one skein and there it sits.  Some of my yarn choices are just ridiculous (remember the muppet mitten?), and others are just ugly when compared to the rest.  Example being what I call my ‘dead cat yarn’.  In the store it was all fluffy and reminded me of my mom’s cat Dudley (see the resemblance?). Now why would someone buy yarn that reminded them of a cat??!? I blame this on a sugar high I had that day.  Needless to say I attempted to crochet it into something only to realize that indeed, it looks like dead animal fur…and when I unraveled it and rolled it back up? Yup, cat roadkill.  Sigh. So if you have any ideas as to what to do with this yarn monstrosity, do let me know.

This doesn’t solve the problem of what I should do with all of these one off skeins of yarn.  Perhaps crochet them into pillows?  I went through this phase where I bought vintage scarves on eBay.  I now have an unused collection of them. I was thinking maybe crocheting a lace pattern over the scarves and making them into pillows….Or maybe I could crochet up these cute bowls I saw in one of my books, or experiment with felting with some of my wool yarn.  I think the bulkier yarn will turn into mittens if I have enough of it.

I’ve noticed now that I have started knitting,  the yarn that didn’t work with crocheting worked better with knitting….such as the muppet mitten.  I took that yarn and started knitting it into a scarf.  Now it looks slightly less muppet and more just fuzzy warmness. What do you think? I am debating on getting some more of it to finish it, or just cast it off into my reject project pile….Decisions decisions!

Knitting as my Nemesis?

Not so much.  If you read any crochet/knitting magazines you are aware of the rivalry between those who knit, and those who crochet. I myself am a die hard crocheter. I’m even contemplating purchasing this t-shirt (http://www.ragingwool.com/cgi-bin/store/cpshop.cgi/toolegit.ragingwool-340285870+too-legit-to-knit-dark-t-shirt.html) to proclaim my crocheting solidarity. 🙂 When my mom bought me my first hooks and needles back in the early 2000’s, I thought knitting was a breeze and crocheting was hard. But now it seems the opposite. However I have recently been bitten by the knitting bug. I came across a pattern for a fantastic cabled knitted afghan and I’ve become hooked (or needled I guess…). After about 10 tries and two or three flings across the room, I think I’ve got it!   As I was laying out on my parents deck yesterday afternoon, the needles started clickin’.   So now I have the beginnings of this great olive green cabled afghan.  Hopefully when it’s done, it will look like the one below . And since my last crocheted afghan ( the 4th finished kilim afghan I completed) has gone off to Minnesota to keep my friend Sarah warm, I am thinking that this one will grace my couch to keep ME warm. 🙂

New Website

So I finally took mom’s advice and created a new website at www.wix.com/MelanieSchallow/photographyandart.

Check it out and tell me what you think!

A Traditional Christmas

With the weather making one feel like getting slapped with a wet washcloth, I can’t help but look forward to a drop in the temps.  Ahhhh fall, and even winter, would be a welcome relief from the heat. Even while I was walking the farmers market yesterday amongst the crowds of people and  along the scorching black-top streets, my ipod had Bing Crosby crooning White Christmas in my ear.  I figured it was mind over matter. Maybe if I mentally thought of cold wintery weather, I would ultimately feel cool, and not like I was going to melt into the earth. It didn’t work.

I do, however, have the holidays on my mind.  This shall be the very first year that I get to have my very own Christmas tree. My tree will be a blend of my own personal style, and tradition.  So to prepare, I’ve been whipping up these crocheted snowflakes.  My mother told me that my great grandma McPhee used to make these as well. They crochet up pretty quickly and I love the look of them.  I’ve been researching ways to starch them to make them stiff and came across this great website (http://crochet.tangleweeds.com/stiffeners.html).  I am a little wary of the exploding sugar mixture so I am going to attempt the corn starch version (even though apparently that one can also be a bit perilous and I fall into the Murphy’s Law category….). Plus apparently my mother used to suck the sugar off of Grandma McPhee’s snowflakes when she was a child. I guess to avoid people eating my snowflakes, corn starch it is!!

My Yarny Volunteer Opportunity

So a couple weeks ago I submitted a volunteer idea to the volunteer committee at my work. I just got a call today that they really liked the idea and I get to plan the whole event.  Score!  A while ago I was curled up on my couch looking through old projects that I had never finished, when I thought of all my fellow yarny advocates out there and all the projects that they’ve never finished either.  What if we all got our unfinished projects together and finally finished those blankets? Or what about all that yarn that you have sitting in your house? What if it was donated to make blankets for those in need? So that’s what we are going to do! I get to organize a volunteer opportunity where people can donate their unused skeins of yarn or squares that never made it into a blanket, or they can crochet/knit them up especially for this project, and then a team of people will get together on a regular basis to stitch them up and share the warm fuzzies throughout the community. 🙂 There are tons of programs that create blankets for those in need, troops overseas, nursing home residents, sick children, cancer patients, abuse victims…… And I love the idea of all the different types of patterns and colors representing different people coming together to make one blanket.  It sounds like it’s going to be a fun project and I’m excited to get to plan and lead it!

Yesterday the camera came out

Yesterday was a good day for me to flex the ol’ camera muscles again.  I really wish I could work in some sort of setting where I was able to be creative all the live long day, but alas, I sit in my cubicle as I write this with my grey walls and generic calendar. So alas my photographic endeavors must be kept to my weekends, and last weekend I had a request to photograph two women who were friends of my sister.  It was fun! Sad that they are moving to Platteville because they were a lot of fun to work with and I’m always looking for people who will subject themselves to my creative brain. 🙂  I have whole sketchbooks full of ideas for photographs and all I need are the willing subjects!  I should put out a sign up sheet. 🙂

Anyway to supplement my lack of photographic opportunities, I have decided that my good friends and family shall be my next fully documented endeavor.  I’ve been sitting and staring at the blank wall above my couch for ages trying to figure out what gigantic piece of art to make for the space.  I have changed my mind however and decided to go with a collection of black and white photographs of all the people in my life who mean a great deal to me.  So if you are a close friend or family, expect to be on my wall! I want to capture everyone in their ‘natural habitat’ so don’t expect any posed photos. I’ll be the roaming documenter of life. 🙂