Czech It Out

Another one of my favs. I'm not completely sure that there is another soul out there who can love and care for this necklace as well as I can, so I'm not sure if I can really part with it. We shall see. The point is though, this pink piece is a combination of buttons and a charm from the Czech Republic. I bought it from a man with a glass eye. Ask my cousin Mary, she was there. She too bought some loot from the one-eyed Czech. You could kinda tell he had some wild stories to tell, but there was that whole GIGANTIC language barrier. Cousin Mary and I went on a whirlwind tour of the C.R. by visiting Prague, Brno and Olomouc (which is pronounced more like O-lo-moutz). We searched high and low for antiques and wonders the likes of which we'd only seen in catalogs and movie sets. We found Heaven when we found the one eyed man's shop in Olomouc. We loved it so much, we came back and shopped there again. And somehow because of the crazy conversion rate, we each thought we were buying way out of our price range amounts of stuff. But later we realized that we'd each spent somewhere around $20 for arm fulls of former Soviet stuff. That's just a little travel story to bulk up this post. You see I'm finding it harder and harder to come up with new ways of describing these necklaces. I love them all, I made them all, but eventually one's proverbial well runs dry. And thus you hear about the one eyed man.

I don't know why I like this picture so much, but I think the quality is really good. Note the texture of the button! Wee!

Wipey Board Wonders

I'm still having difficulty getting too much crafting done. Or perhaps I should say that I have recently crafted and then forgotten to take pictures of the completed craft... Doh! For my church retreat last weekend, I did a calligraphy project. I scribed the same Bible verse on 36 cards, which were then tied to red roses for our retreatants. They looked simply marvelous darling and naturally I forgot to take a picture of the completed project. Rats! The women really loved the calligraphy project and many of them told me last night that they planned to keep their cards for a long time. Yay! My craft projects have gone to live in other people's lives and that's what really matters. So today I'm showing you some recent drawings from the wipey boards at work, all done by me of course. Above you'll see my Pooh and Piglet. Monday was in fact the birthday of Winnie the Pooh or as they say in Russia "Vinni Puh." If you've got a wee bit of time on your hands, you should watch that link's video. Russian Winnie the Pooh is awesome (thanks to the Russian coworker, I know of his greatness). Normally I don't blog about Soviet cartoons, but just this once... In my drawing, you'll see a particularly trim Pooh (I couldn't quite get the rotundity) with a honey pot and his buddy Piglet giving him a birthday balloon. We like to mark the important anniversaries around this office. Clearly.

And here's my front door. The quote about the hurricane was contributed by one of my coworkers... I'm not that bitter about baseball. I just wanted yall to see what the office mates get to see when approaching my door.

And of course to gloat about defeating the LA Angels of Anaheim or whatever ridiculous string of words and locations they are going by today, I added a dead rally monkey to my door. Enjoy. I promise I'll be crafting soon and then I'll post some cool actual crafts instead of just useless stuff.