Happy Holidays and Have a Wonderful New Year!

Thank you all so much for your wonderful comments on the Solstice Stone giveaway. I have to admit that I have visited my own site a lot lately just to re-read all of your lovely sentiments. I wish that I could send out a Solstice Stone to every single one of you, but my hands have only so much time left in this crafting year. Cassi is the winner of this stone, but I will be holding more giveaways in the new year, so please stay tuned.

I will be signing off for the holidays and won't be back until early January. I wish you and your families a wonderful, warm holiday season and a tremendous start to a promising new decade. I feel hopeful, and much of that hope comes from the people that I have been crafting with and from creative craftbloggers like you.

I started blogging to feel a part of a community of like-minded parents and crafters, and I've gotten so much more. Most of all I've gained confidence that living a creative life and weaving its components into family and work life is not only possible, but necessary for us all to thrive as individuals and as a society.

That may sound extreme, but I want to live in a world in which I know where and how my food is produced, a world in which individuals can make and fix things with their own hands, a world stripped of excess and waste and focused on the fundamentals, a world in which children are encouraged to dream and craft and invent and explore, a world in essence that we make ourselves. You are all doing that, and I laud you and urge you to keep creating and exploring.

With much hope,
Pat

Solstice Giveaway

Solstice Stone

Working with wool and stones has a healing effect for me. I've spent the last few weeks in the evenings embroidering felted stones. (Check out my Flickr page for more photos of what I'm calling the Crewel Stones.) This handwork helps me work out the normal, everyday stresses that otherwise would build up into big anxiety for me. My mind flows to different places, mulls over a problem from my day without needing to solve it, while my hands are solving their own design problems.

I use thrifted crewel wool in a random assortment of colors, and the colors I have on hand guide my designs. The shape of the rocks and the loft of the felted wool inspire the stitches. Katherine Shaughnessy's The New Crewel: Exquisite Designs in Contemporary Embroidery has helped me explore some new-to-me stitches, and I've approached each stone as a sort of mini-sampler.

The matryoshka stones have been especially healing to create. They were inspired in large part by SnippetyGibbet's lovely handmade matryoshka cards, available at her new Etsy shop. I chanced upon The Art of the Russian Matryoshka, by Rett Ertl and Rick Hibberd, at the library, and was tickled to learn that the matryoshka were likely insipired by the import of Japanese nesting dolls to the city of Sergiev Posad in 1899. The book is beautifully photographed and shows artisans making the nesting dolls at every stage in the process.

While sewing late into the quiet night, my mind often turns to how much I have learned from reading craft blogs and having my own blog. I've gotten lots of inspiration and expanded my repertoire of techniques, and I've also learned to approach each project I take on as an excellent opportunity to solve problems, both creative and practical.

An integral part of this process is you: my friends, my readers, my co-conspirators in craft obssession. As a thank you to all of the kind, generous, and inspiring readers of Zen Crafting, I'd like to offer a little Solstice Giveaway. Please leave a comment by noon (Eastern Standard Time) on December 21, and I will select a winner from among them to receive the red Solstice Stone shown at the top of the page.

Happy Solstice, and have a wonderful holiday season and New Year.

Tree Glyphs

The deciduous trees are decisive in autumn.
They cut off the flow of sap to leaves
And shed them.
The trees release their flapping flags, their green finery,
and offer their skeletal selves, like an open palm,
To the wind, ice, and snow.




A late November rain, viscous and on the verge of ice,
Clings to naked branches.
The drops yield slowly to my touch,
But pierced, finally trail down my glove in a mercury-like trail.
The trees must wait, breathless, to see if a sudden fall in temperature
will crystallize those drops into deadly ice,
Its weight dragging down and snapping twigs,
Or worse, arm-like branches that crack the silence of a winter night.




Would that I had the strength, the fortitude of thick bark and a sleeping cambium,
To bare myself in winter, offer myself up to the rawness and risk of it.



But though the trees and I speak a different language,
when I read their signs—
a dead leaf laced by time,
an open, heart-like seedpod,
a lichen-covered stick—
I see a common grammar:
Hope.