My Vegetable Garden Gems ...

Hello my dear friends,

I LOVE making my strawberry pincushions but after finding the antique carrot pincushion recently, I thought it would be neat to make a vegetable pincushion instead of another fruit one. 

I can't tell you how happy I am even today, over 2 years after finding the large stack of cotton velvet samples. I can't believe that I even wasted a thought for a very short moment debating if I should buy it or not back then! I would have missed out on making some lovely pieces if I wouldn't have left the store without it but thankfully I didn't and I am still enjoying that buy today. 

Just look at all of those beautiful colors!

I don't have too much of it left anymore these days because I have made quite a few pincushions from it already but I was fortunate to have a dark orange/rusty colored piece of it left. Perfect to become a carrot in my eyes. Even though I was using velvet, I knew that my little streak of primitive would come out in this creation.

I also had this stunning sari silk ribbon in a nice shade of green. It is fuzzy sari silk ribbon because of all the threads that have been exposed when it was torn into strips.

Different ... isn't it?

The velvet and sari silk ribbon put together have now become my newest pincushion creation and I think that my newest creation worked out quite nicely. I just had to add something special as the finishing touch and I knew what that was going to be.

I had this large jar full of the most beautiful crystals from an antique chandelier and I am sure you know already where this is going!

And this is my newest creation, my first carrot pincushion.

I just love the little dimples I gave it!

But as you know, even carrots can become lonely after a while, so I just had to make a friend for it and this is that friend. It is a little smaller than my first one but just as neat.

It is a little smaller and this one is filled with crushed walnut shells so it is perfect to sharpen those needles and pins.

And last but not least ...

Before I end this post today, I would like to tell you a little story about myself when I was a child.
 It is a story about carrots and me. My Mom told it to me many years ago and I had to think about it whilst I was working on my vegetable garden gems.

... When I was little, about 3 or 4 years old, we visited my Grandma in Melville, Sask. for the summer as we did every summer. My Grandma had such an amazing garden filled with lots of beautiful flowers but also a vegetable garden, in which she grew many vegetables including carrots. Every afternoon she would go to her patch and pick some of her vegetables for dinner. One day she came back into the house looking puzzled. She said that she had wanted to get some carrots but found that several of them had been pulled out of the ground already and pushed back into the earth again. This went one for days until my Grandma decided to stand guard to find out what was going on. And this is what was happening ... apparently I would wake up at 6 am in the morning and being hungry, I would head out into the vegetable patch and pull a carrot out of the ground. If I didn't like it, I would push it back into the earth and pull another one out. Once I found the right carrot, I would sit down, eat it and then happily return to the house again.

Remembering this puts a smile in my heart. I was told that I didn't just stick to carrots though. Apparently I had a thing for peas too. I would open up the pods and take the peas out and eat them and leave the pods hanging on the pea bushes which puzzled my Grandma just as much until she again stood watch one early morning.

... Happy memories!

Thank you for taking the time to stop by today and visit me here at Todolwen. Make sure you come back some time again because you never know what I might have to share.

I hope you are well my dear friends and life is treating you kind.

Have a peaceful and creative day.

Little Metal Boxes ...

Hello my dear friends,

these days I don't go out shopping often anymore because I have done so in the past and that is why I have a several drawers and boxes filled with all sort of lovely bits and pieces hiding away in my studio. (At times, I think there might be a little too many of them!)

In one of those drawers I just "found" these two pretties again. 

Little ornate metal trinket boxes!

They are such pretty things that will hold all your tiny treasures. This is something I fondly remember from when I was a child. I was gifted such a trinket box when I was four years old and I still have it.

I had bought these two boxes last year some time and was delighted with the thought of working with them, whenever that would be and now was that whenever! I have lately and  still am working on a few new pincushions but it is so nice to have a change.

 I have only worked with one trinket box before and this is that little metal box.

Before ...

... and after ...

It was so much fun to transform the inside of it and now I am excited to work with these two!

They both had that typical red felt glued inside them which had to go and after a little scrubbing they were ready to be transformed.

Right now I am still at the stage of choosing which fabric to use for the inside and also on how to decorate them too which I will hopefully have the answers too soon, so I can start the actual work.
As always, once they are done I will make sure to share them with you.

So do come back and visit me some time again and see what I have been up too.

I hope you are well my dear friends and life is treating you kind.

Have a peaceful and creative day.

A Valentine Pin Keep ...

Hello my dear friends,

for some reason I keep falling behind in sharing things with all of you these days and I am not sure why but like I have said before ... better late than never. I don't think that I have ever made a pincushion for Valentine's Day or as the matter of the fact, for any particular holiday. I have made seasonal ones like my pumpkins ones for the Fall but that is it, so I thought it might be nice to actually make one for Valentine this year.

One of the reasons for me wanting to make this creation, was a set of tiny vintage rhinestone earrings. I had found them in an antique store a year or so ago and the "right time" for me to work with them had never arrived. That was until now and I said to myself  "why not?!" ... And so I did and it turned out to be a lovely piece.

Dark red velvet, hand dyed seam binding, a small silver chalice and one of those little earrings were beyond perfect and have now become my newest pincushion/pin keep creation. I couldn't stop myself from making another strawberry, there is just something about them that I like so very much.  But I am glad that I went with this idea. And here it is!

I named it simply ...

... "Heartberry".

I like this little pin keep so much and I hope you have enjoyed my Valentine's Day creation.

I am staying busy, working on a few other project right now and hopefully I will be able to share something new with all of you soon again. 

Thank you for stopping by and visiting me here at Todolwen. It is always so nice when you do.

I hope you are well my dear friends and life is treating you kind.

Have a peaceful and creative day.

There Are Guardian Angels ...

Hello my dear friends,

you will read the word "thankfully" many times in this post because this is what it is all about. 

When my husband was a serving soldier in the UK, I was always worried to get "that call" when he was away but thankfully it never came. These days he works away from home and apart from the big fire in Fort McMurray in 2016, he has been safe.

This past Saturday morning, I was sitting at our dining table with my daughters chatting and laughing when I received a call. ... It was my husband. His voice was all out of breath and he was telling me that he was in a car crash/pile up but he was OK, that his car was possibly a write-off  and he would call later because the police had just arrived. After a few hours of very worried waiting with my daughters, which seemed to take far too long, he finally texted me to call him.

Once he answered his phone,  he told me that he had been out shopping and that he was involved in a pileup of 5 or 6 cars. He said that all of the sudden a strong gust of wind blew up some loose snow from the side of the road and caused a total white-out and that within 4 seconds or so, several cars had crashed into each other on a flyover of highway 63 in Fort McMurray (a dangerous place to drive). He hit a car, then his car car hit from behind which moved it into the left lane and then he was hit again by a large pickup truck on the right side of his car and not on the left where he had been sitting. Thankfully other than being banged up, bruised up and some minor cuts and his hand being badly bruised, he was OK. His car new car might be a write-off but it is only a car.  He further told me that thankfully everyone did the right thing and stayed in their cars. He was the first to call 911 and a huge array of fire trucks, police cars and ambulances arrived within a few minutes. Thankfully no one else was injured badly, just a few minor things and of course shock. I was upset but then again happy and very, very thankful. He was at his home, resting and just breathing, taking time to calm down of what had just happened.

I am so grateful that guardian angels had been watching over each one of the people in this accident and everyone was able to go home that day, shaken up but alive and well. 

Thank God! No one was hurt badly, it was only metal that was broken because it could have been so much worse.

Here are a few pictures my husband took with his phone once police and ER services had arrived.

Everyone got out of this wreak without injuries! Angels were for sure watching over them.

   

This is my husband's car.  He was so fortunate that it didn't get hit worse. 

Things can happen so fast, unexpected and intense. 

Thankfully there are guardian angels out there watching over us.

I hope you are well my dear friends and life is treating you kind.

Stay safe!

Hugs.

Renew, Reuse And Remake ...

Hello my dear friends,

reuse, renew and remake are some of my favorite things to do these days.

Snow is still falling and it is cold outside and even though I love the Winter so much with all it's white beauty, I am thinking of Spring with all it's bright colors and flowers. I was also thinking of my happy place that lives in my mind which is "At The Forests Edge". That is where my lace mushrooms grow and my nests live. Nothing has to be perfect but everything is lovely and nice in it's own way. Imagination can be so lovely - you can go anywhere you want and today we are visiting my happy place (I think that Bob Ross would like this place!)

In a previous post I had told you about how I went a little overkill making many of my Alice in Wonderland nests and how I wanted to take them apart again. Well, I actually did and now they are redone and finished. The nests have changed a little but are still somewhat the same.

Today I am sharing my new Spring nests and their story that goes with them.

"This has happened before at the Forest's Edge; On a cold Winter day a strong wind blew so harsh again that two nests that had been living in a tall tree fell to the ground. Fortunately they didn't break from the fall but became a little crooked and lopsided. From that day the two nests happily lived at the bottom of the old tree from where they had fallen. Mother Nature had taken a liking to them being there. Winter left and Spring arrived and after all the snow had melted, she decided to be very kind to the little nests. She turned them into blooming pretties. Flowers started to grow and bloom all over the two little nature homes and even though they were not high up in a tree, the birds liked them so much that they decided to lay their eggs in the midst of them".

And these are my "new" Spring nests. I named them "Mother Natures Touch"

This is the larger nest of the two...

 It has white and pink primroses, yellow buttercups, little white daisies and lovely purple violets growing on it.

... and this is the smaller one of the two...

I am so very pleased with the way my "new" nests have turned out and I am also very happy that I have decided to only make these two. Both nests will be for sale soon along with a few other of my new creations if any of you should be interested. Once I have listed them, I will let you know here.

Thank you for taking the time to stop by today and visit me here at Todolwen and I hope you have enjoyed your stay.

I hope you are well my dear friends and life is treating you kind.

Have a peaceful and creative day.

Covered In Many Years Of Dust ...

Hello my dear friends,

not only do I love creating pincushions but I also love owning pincushions.
 You would think, that I would own many of them but I actually don't. If I count them, I don't even have a dozen that I can call mine. 

I was very fortunate several weeks ago when I was out and about. I had decided to make a quite stop at an antique store that I visit few times a year. I wasn't actually thinking of buying anything but just look around the store but changed when I came across a pair of earrings that I liked. My thought was that I could use in a creation maybe one day which I did. I recently used them in my little  brass tub creation.

On my way to the cash register, I spotted a wooden insert/tray from an old trunk sitting there with all sorts of bits and pieces in it. Not wanting to miss out on anything neat possibly, I had a quick peek at everything and there amongst all sorts of stuff that was covered in years and years of old dust, something again caught me eye. It also put a smile on my face. I quickly picked what I saw up and once in my hands, I went to ask the person that was working in the store if they were for sale and how much they would cost. To my delight they were for sale and the price was an added bonus for me. Of course they ended up coming home with me. I would have been silly not to take them really at $3 a piece!

This is what I had spotted laying in the wooden try ... antique pincushions!

Two beautiful antique fruit pincushions!

 Don't you think they look amazing for the age they are?! ... I just love them!

The one is obviously is a carrot and at first I wasn't not sure what the other one really was. Maybe two pears on a twig with a leaf? I have seen many carrots like this before but never anything like the other one. I did a little research about them. And yes, as far as I can tell, it is a twig with two pears and a leaf. If any of you have a little more information about  these two pretties, please drop me a line nd tell me all about them. The one thing that I do know for sure, is that they are old. Late 1800's or early 1900's.

It didn't take much to tidy them up. An old toothbrush and a little time spent gently brushing the years of dust off and that was all. 

The carrot still has the actual original dried grass attached!

I am so buzzed to have found these two beautiful pieces. 

They are going to happily live in my studio where I will be able to enjoy them every day.

I wonder what I might find on my next outing. What ever it might be, I will be sure to share it with all of you. What have you recently found that has made you smile? 

I hope you are well my dear friends and life is treating you kind.

Have a peaceful and creative day.