Little Pieces of Me

The other day I was rummaging in a box for something else and found a length of 12" white flapper fringe, some green and blue ombre dyed fringe and a 9 inch long incomplete tassel that I had completely forgotten about. I seem to remember buying the fringe at Designer Fabric Outlet in Toronto and making the green tassel sometime in the  last  century. I love tassels. OK, you can get on with all the jokes that come to mind. I'll wait. Better now? Good. As I was saying, I love tassels. I love their silky strings and the way they move. I have used them as decorations on things as diverse as gifts and window blinds and I routinely use them as pendants for necklaces. I like them hanging from door handles and cupboard knobs. If I had drapes with tie backs, I'd probably use them there too. I have a shoe box full of small ones, just waiting for their call to duty. And I like making tassels. Especially big luxurious ones. You can make these from any kind or yarn or...

After last week's T shirt scarf project, I was left with a bunch of non-loop tubes. And a few days later I received a big pile of men's thin white undershirts, the kind without side seams. There was no choice but to make more scarves. Hey look at me... I'm up cycling! First off, I dealt with the left overs. The trouble with those non-loop tubes is that they were too short to use for a double wrap, and too long (and not enough of them) for a satisfying single wrap scarf. So I needed to find a way to add length. The solution was to make a band to extend the length. This has worked out very well. The flat band is invisible once the scarf is double wrapped. It actually sits very comfortably at the back of the neck and reduces the bulk of the material when worn under a jacket or coat. The sample shown could certainly be sewn better… had a little trouble with my bobbin thread for some reason… but you can see the general approach. Then it was time to deal with some of those...

I've been doing some dyeing and that means that for one afternoon all the patio furniture on the deck was draped in drying fabric and trim. Lovely day for it too. For some reason all this was of great interest to the gold finches. When I went out to check on things, several males were sitting amongst the black and purple items. Not that I was expecting purple... but such is the nature of dyeing. I was preparing some materials for a black scarf in the shabby chic mode. The grey linen that I dyed came out nice and black. But the white and off-white cotton trim and recycled lace items from the doily department at Value Village all came out a very dark purple, even after a repeat soak. What was to be a black on black scarf is going to be purple on black. More goth than shabby chic ... So it was once I had these bits dyed and hanging out to dry that I discovered The Unexpected Legacy. When I was a kid my grandparents lived next door, and my grandmother loved to dye...