Dlp2015 week of 6/13

Can't even remember the prompt, something about routing your travels, and too lazy to look it up. Pic of my dad's mom on a bench and me in a lake. She was a wonderful grandma, the only one I remember much of. We visited at Easter and I was fascinated by all the lizards in their covered parking area.

vintage knitting instructions

This great old paper was in an old composition book I bought a couple years ago and just never looked all the way thru. Most of the dated items in there were from 1895 so this Normandy Lace knitting pattern is prolly somewhere right around there. Amazing that it's survived.
She gives abbreviation explanations at the bottom but I'm not sure what "n" means. Looks like she wrote "narrow." What does that mean in knitting?? I'll have to ask Senor Google.
Love the spidery fountain pen writing. I'll use it in a collage or maybe a journal page about my own knitting.

flowers in the house

Pretty much the only time I manage to think of bringing flowers inside is when SmallButCharming does her occasional Monday call for flowers in the house. I don't have a lot of cutting flowers but did manage to come up with some lavender, a few springs of tea tree, and a couple salvia stems. Very pretty on the mantle. No idea who the wedding couple it. It's just a vintage photo from an antique shop. I have about a hundred of them and change them out now and then.

2 postcards

Got fired up and made a couple postcards over the weekend. Acrylic paint backgrounds with some gel stick and oil pastel blending. The photo is one of the houses I lived in as a kid. I'm gradually using up most of my old family pictures. There's no one to leave them to after me and I'd rather get the enjoyment of arting with them than have them end up in a junk shop or the trash.

That's me on the porch in one and by the swing set in the other. I look about 7 or 8 there and don't remember much about it except that we had a German shepherd named Jim Bowie. Added a torn strip of book text, some circles from a magazine, and a few words from a large print book.

oy... so behind

Cleaned up the studio a bit and found a pack of paper frames that I bought years ago and never used. No more of that, I'm going on a use-it-or-lose-it campaign, so I found a pic and made a post card. It's on the way to a mail art pal who shall remain nameless but will now recognize this card when it shows up in her mailbox.

The background was a fail from a painting experiment, if I remember correctly. Or might have been the newspaper I use as a table covering while I'm working. In any case, I added some more color with Distress Stain, used some Tangie grunge stamps, stamped some circles with the cardboard tube from something or other (I save pretty much every cardboard tube I come across cause they make such good stamps), did some doodling. Wa-la - art!

first child journal page

Using up my old family pictures is very enjoyable. Most of them I'm just cutting up and putting on a journal page or a post card or an ATC. Not scanning them first. Not worrying about never having them again. Many of them go off into the world via the mail system of one or more countries and live out their lives far from home.

Altho they're far from home here with me, too, I guess. Home was mostly Ohio and Michigan. I'm in California.

Long ways. In distance as well as years. But it feels good, letting them go. No one to miss them but me, and I don't.

Gelli print background. Circles stamped from various circular items - empty scotch tape center, empty toilet paper roll, empty adding machine paper center. Hardly anything goes in the trash around here anymore lol. It's all in my studio.

Some pen work. A little machine stitching.

more postcards

ingredients: gesso washed cardboard, vintage picture of
my aunt Helen, magazine text, used tea bag overlay,
doodled border. The back is a gelli print on deli paper.

Just can't stop making them. 

Love the size. 

Love the fact that they go out into the world and have a life making smiles. 

ingredients: kraft card stock background, corrugated cardboard
stamping, hand carved scallop stamping, edge of about-to-run-out
adding machine paper, vintage photo of 2 kids, square frame stamp
made from flip-flop on photo, definition from cross word puzzle
dictionary, dress pattern tissue, free motion machine stitching.

freebie farmer's almanac pages

NOTE - use these pics, not the ones in the first post I put up, in case you're using a reader. Those scans were only at 72dpi cause I'm a muffinhead today.


More scans from that 1946 farmer's almanac I picked up someplace or other. 

One of the pages has the answers to the puzzles from this post. One of you asked if I would publish them and here they are. (hopefully you're still reading me lol)

Another page is called the Principal Holidays because back in 1946, the US had no national holidays! They've all been established since then, which is practically in my lifetime. I had no idea.

As always, please don't sell them. If you make something with them, I'd love to see it. No one has ever gotten back to me that they've used it...

Have fun.

freebie vintage book pages

Some of these are from the Sept 5th, 1912 issue of The Independent, a weekly magazine from New York. It sold for 10 cents an issue or three dollars for a whole a year. Quite a deal.

I get a kick out of examining the fashions and imagining myself going about my normal 2013 day all gussied up like that. And the ads are fun to read.

I didn't bother changing the orientation of the sideways one, since you're prolly going to print onto 8.5x11 anyway. Saves you the trouble of switching them back or fiddling with portrait/landscape in your printer settings.

The paper it's printed on is old and thin, so there's some ghosting in the unprinted areas from whatever is printed on the other side. It can be cleaned up in photoshop but I don't have the time, sorry. The images themselves are fine since they're dark.

Grow Your Blog Party Giveaway!!

Well, today is the kick-off of the Grow Your Blog Party, hosted by Vicki at 2 Bags Full.

The idea is to go to that link and cruise thru as many of the blogs listed in the comments as you can manage between now and Feb 1. Consider signing up to follow the ones that blow your skirt up, since that's what this party is all about. Many of us are having a giveaway of some kind. Leaving a comment on those blogs should enter you into their drawing. Or maybe you'll have to become a follower, not sure so check as you go.

Here at One Woman's Hands you need only leave a comment in this post. We'll all draw our winners on February first and announce them on our blogs, so you have a chance to win at more than one blog.

 I sewed a bunch of old lace to one of those dollar postcards from the other day to make a little hanging piece. All the laces are older (some are very old), and the hanger is very fine gauge vintage tatting. Looks like 80 weight crochet thread maybe. Real skinny.

I put a lot of pictures of it here so that you'd be real tempted to leave a comment!

I considered covering the back of the card to conceal the stitching, but decided I liked being able to see the old graphics and left it except for a label with my info.

Thanks for visiting and good luck in the drawing!

Happy blog hopping, Leslie

Here it is hanging amongst other goodies in my studio.

I love the pop of red from the flowers.

shopping 011413, pt 2

The two antique stores yielded some good vintage stuff, altho I was appalled by the prices on just about everything. I am not totally out of touch with what old stuff costs and both these places were high, but I still came away with a few things.

This frame and the printing are gorgeous.

The old photo was $4. I find cabinet cards regularly for $2-3 but this was the cheapest one in the pile. The rest were $5-8 for cards that were nothing special. But I liked this one and knew I'd get some good use from it.

The postcards were all a dollar each. There was a big stack of them, and instead of going thru them from the front and risk falling in love with a $5 one, I went thru them from the back and set aside all the $1 ones. Then I put the others back and went the the $1 ones from the front, keeping the ones I liked. Good system for not spending too much!

Love the moss roses.

I plan to make some stuff for my Etsy shop which currently has nothing in it cause I haven't fired it up yet. Wanted to get a bunch of things together so that it didn't look too bare.

I'll be putting several crazy quilt items in there also. Lovely stuff stitched by me back when my hands could handle those small needles and tiny stitches.

You hardly ever see a dog on one of these old cards.

?????
I'm not sure what the hell this caption means.
Anyone got any ideas?

Jack in white

My San Diego friend Julie lent me a bunch of her old family photos to scan. Among them was this marvelous picture of her father Jack. I just love it. His big grin, his crossed ankles, his little knee socks. Too effing cute!

When Christmas rolled around, I came across that pic while looking for something else and knew I had to do something with it. Julie and I always exchange something handmade, so I printed off the pic and went to work.

I swathed it in old lace, draping and stitching as I went with no real plan. My inspiration was the totally scrumptious things that Suzy makes. Go look at her blog. Scroll thru a few posts so that your brain can really take in the sumptuousness of her work. I can't even imagine how much lace she puts into each project. Gorgeous work.

Anyhow, being such a ohmygodIcan'tuseitallup!!! person, I did my level best to go crazy, but it still looks pretty skimpy compared with hers LOL.

I hung a bit of old chain with a Tim Holtz metal tag that says 'cherish' on it, and glued a fancy vintage button up in the corner. Click to embiggen altho it isn't crystal clear. I scanned it but should have taken better pictures.

The back is a page from a geography book her mother made in 8th(?) grade. She knows I love old paper and actually use it, so she gave me the book. I was amazed. It is so cool. Full of her handwriting and pictures she clipped and glued in. Lots of the red highlighting that you see in the picture. Very very cool.

Julie loved it!

a good swap

The neat card she made me. Love the sprigged paper along the edges.

I ran into Jan somewhere - a swap, a forum. Now I feel like a dolt cause I can't remember, but anyway we decided to swap prayer flags. Actually, it was prolly via Lenna's flag swap.

We both like old lace and vintage stuff, so here's what went back and forth across the ocean. (she's in England)

The beautiful flag she sent.
It's so much cooler in person cause the fabric flower
is totally squished by the scanner.
The old rayon seam binding is great. Love it all. 

It's so rewarding to have a swap go well. My package took forever to get there and I was just about to start working on another flag for her when she let me know it finally arrived. Good thing - I was about to go down and picket the P.O.!

Thanks, Jan!

She included a bunch of neat Christmas ephemera.
I used the kid on the sled on my December
calendar page here.

The flag I sent her. Lots of vintage lace and bits of
an ancient shawl.

A little cluster of clippings on the back.
The green backing is an old piece of silk, lovely stuff.

thank you...

this image is a PNG that you're welcome to use in your art

My mother's first sweetheart, the one she would never admit to when I found out about him and asked her, was a sailor, killed while they were engaged.

This image isn't him, but this guy was someone's son, some girl's sweetheart, a friend to his buddies.

I don't know who he is, if he made it thru the war or not, which makes him perfect to stand for all service people on this Veteran's Day.

Thank you.

freebie vintage images

This is my aunt Carolyn, my mother's younger sister, around 1939.
A bit blurry but I have a whole collection of kids on ponies,
so I love using it.

Had time today to scan and fix up some more images to share. 

A couple of them are PNG files, which means if you're a digital artist, you can download them to use in Photoshop or Elements or other art software. They can also simply be printed out and used. 

All scanned at 300dpi. If you don't have an art program and need one of them re-sized so you can print it out, let me know.

As always, please do not sell the images, but you're welcome to sell items made with them.

Someone saw fit to stick this baby in a tree. ???
Whatever the  reason, he seems ok with it.
Cracks me up every time I look at it.

An unknown woman in front of a barn.
Not sure why I like this one so much, but something about her expression,
the dark barn, and the bare tree branches just grabs me.
I'd love to know who she was, why the picture was taken...

A PNG frame from a cabinet card.
Print it out and cut out the center or use it digitally.

Unknown smiling child.
So many old pics show solemn, if not downright grim, kids,
so I thought this one was really fun.