Dream Catcher

What is dreamcatcher? 

Native Americans believe that the night air is filled with dreams both good and bad. The dream catcher when hung over or near your bed swinging freely in the air, catches the dreams as they flow by. The good dreams know how to pass through the dream catcher, slipping through the outer holes and slide down the soft feathers so gently that many times the sleeper does not know that he/she is dreaming. The bad dreams not knowing the way get tangled in the dream catcher and perish with the first light of the new day.

How is it made?

Using a hoop of willow, and decorating it with findings, bits and pieces of everyday life, (feathers, arrow heads, beads, etc) the dream catcher is believed to have the power to catch all of a person's dreams, trapping the bad ones, and letting only the good dreams pass through the dream catcher.

read more about dreamcatchers and how to make them at dream-catchers.org

I found a picture tutorial on how to make a small dream catcher by Veronika aka livejournal user virienn ;) it's so easy!!! Tutorial is Veronika's step-by-step instructions, the text is in Russian, but it is pretty clear without the text, what to do ;) 

let's try and share pictures ;) post yours in the comments to this post ;) 

Color, you make me happy!

Delightfully blogging, still... it feels amazing to just be home, at my beloved iMac, for once. Black tea with a dash of cardamom, turbinado sugar and milk (run out of half-n-half, uneven seams!)... Listening to Bob Marley... Finding great inspiring everything everywhere!!! ;) 

Here's what can be done with used crayons, you can create your own color confetti! Now if I only could find what to do with dried up play dough that my niece has laying in tiny bits of color splashes all over her play area ;) On the search for it!

hmmm if I remember correctly, this post is via Mountain Girl

"Ben! I have one word for you: PLASTIC!"

I not always have a grocery bag with me. In such a case I ask a cashier to fit everything in as few bags as possible (it's always no more than two) and to not double bag it. I get all kinds of puzzled looks (human nature is incredibly vast in it's beauty of expression), lost looks, and even comments like "she's crazy". Sometimes, a kind clueless soul warns me, that my shopping bags are going to be to heavy, if not doubled. And then I say: "You know what's heavy? The build up of plastic on the Earth." A response, as a rule, is the look, that's even more lost. There are places, like Whole Foods, where not only customers, but all the staff is aware more or less, but not in the area of Brooklyn, where I live... I keep hoping that one day I'll see understanding and approving smile from a sales person. This is why, I collected as many bags as I did, with the help of my food-shopping loving family, and made my first shopping bags, which I'm intending to take every time I go grocery shopping. 

It is so darn easy and rewarding to make a bag like this, that I am to share a pictorial process, in hopes that it can be handy for some, if not all :)

Fold a bag lengthwise, cut off the bottom and the handles (those parts can go to recycle bin for plastic at your local supermarket).

Cut the folded bag across into several pieces, approximately 1 inch wide.

Unfolded, each piece will have a circular seamless shape.

Here's a seemingly tricky (but it's not) part. Take two "rings" of plastic that you unfolded, and interlace them, like shown in the picture. You sort of wrap one circle around another, making a loop, through which you pull out the whole thing eventually. 

Here it's more visible.

Dozens of bags are made into yards and yards of plastic yarn, which is then rolled into a ball.

I hope you can crochet. If you can't, you're missing out on a rather pleasurable pastime making many beautiful things for yourself and your friends and family. 

Here's my grocery bag. I like how there is a blue and red stripe going around - it happened totally by accident, a nice little gift from my own effort ;) 

p.s. oh, and the rug is the one I made out of old t-shirts, i blogged about it earlier ;) It feels soooo nice to step on it in the morning, a sudden splash of color... boom! makes me happy!