a little taste of ocracoke, nc

View from "Jolly Rodgers," a little eatery in town...



Beautiful sandy coast.


I finally saw some "banks ponies!" A childhood goal of mine.


This tender bud so young and fair
Called hence by early doom,
Just came to show how sweet a flower
In Paradise would bloom.

This was on a headstone in an old old cemetery behind the lighthouse.

crocheted cushions!

I was incredibly inspired by this artist: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/garden/13rugloft.html?emc=eta1 (thanks so much for showing me this, Carol!). She makes these gigantic felted rugs and cushions--the cushions actually crocheted out of what appear to be whole skeins of wool rather than individual strands of yarn--they're just that thick. So, ultimately, (and this is what got me) her hand was the crochet hook! Excited by the idea, but unemployed and without the millions of dollars to spend on the skeins upon skeins of wool required for the specific project, I looked for an alternative medium. And, I felt, it needed to be a "recycled" medium. So, I ended up with these babies. They're made out of old bedsheets. Crocheted, using my hand as the crochet hook! How exciting!

Matching dish towels!

washcloth!

plastic bag woven rug in the works!

So many plastic bags in the world! Think how many awesome rugs we could make!

Once in a while I forget to say, "no bag, please," and then I'm stuck with it. Or the bags come with a product (bread and other such groceries), and are such an odd shape that they can't be used as garbage bags. And I can't bear to just throw them out, but pretty soon we had so many that they were just taking up so much room in our kitchen. We needed a rug, and we had the bags for it. Perfect solution, and actually, as it turned out, we didn't have nearly as many needed to make the rug the size I wanted. I'll be finishing it as the bags add up again.

They don't have to float around in the massive heap in the ocean, they can sit right on our floor. It's pretty downright durable as plastic bags tend to be.

Reduce Reuse Recycle!

new home!

The living room...
The backyard view
The kitchen "eating nook"Bedroom (unmade, of course, it wouldn't be a bedroom if it wasn't...not mine, at least)
The lovely living room. Yes, our current table is made up of cardboard boxes. Elegant, eh?

I had a standoff with nature

...and nature won. I have been trying to do laundry today--there is plenty to do after our move to Asheville and there's something fishy going on with the dryer (literally, there are things in there that must have sat in there forever, and it smells like dead fish), so we're hang-drying everything until we figure it all out. Long story short, it went from sunny to thunderstorm in zero seconds and it was a race to get all of the "dry" things down before the drizzle turned into a downpour.

That was ten minutes ago.

Now it's sunny again. Do I dare put the clothes out again? I'm finding Asheville weather to be very erratic...