Old Lady Learning New Things 🧶🧵

I have been steadily weaving away at a slow tartan yardage and it will appear here once I have it to a finished end result.  In the mean time I have been doing a lot of grown up type things such as taxes, medical appointments etc.  

This time of year saw both Hub and myself reaching birthdays with a zero in them so we celebrated both times with friends.    I turned 70 and it sorta bothered me some as it really feels like a slippery slope now.   Time to clear away the distractions and attend to what truly matters.  Well, that's the plan anyhow.....

Our local guild has a lot of great talent and one woman, Katherine, generously held a 4 hour afternoon workshop on making raffia wrapped coils on a ceramic base.   Her sister in law made the bases and they are lovely!

Here's Katherine explaining  the process to us newbies and we all selected our length of rope to wrap.

Here's mine underway and it doesn't look anything like the teachers finished bowl! 😳

Here's Ben who sat across from me just racing along. Another Katherine is working on her basket in her lap.  She makes beautiful Indigenous baskets so this was sort of like a 'busman's holiday' for her. 

At the end of the day, mine looked like this and everyone admired my cute scalloping. I blamed my arthritic fingers!  I had plans for it when I got it home. 

So here's my end result.  I checked through my bead collection and found some suitable candidates and some fine, tough line linen thread. (Having a stash is great at times like this!) I needle wove through the coils and secured the bowed portions and added beads at the ceramic hole sections. It tightened everything up. I then shaped it carefully and then dipped into warm water for 10 mins to soak.

The result after fully drying was that everything tightened and feels stronger.   Sort of a metaphor for Life I guess......