Brain... Seriously?

Click on the picture to be taken to this
Etsy listing!

So between two colds back to back that lasted a month and the monthly uterine rebellion, my brain has been fuzzy, over clocked and refusing to cooperate when I want to go to sleep.

So what does my brain do last night as I'm laying there in the hour after me and DR had gone to bed do?

"Hey I wonder if people look up stuff via DnD alignment types? Wouldn't it be fun to make a Chaotic Neutral series? Or even a Lawful Ebil? ...how the hell would make a Lawful ebil even work? What color schemes would I need to use?"

GAH!

I'd already been planning a series based on the core classes. The thing with ideas like this is that while it's cool and fantastical... those who would actually be enthusiastic about buying such in limited numbers and limited budgets.

Biggest drawback to being a hand crafter: Making the cool pretty shit versus the more practical every day shit that appeals to a more broad demographic. Occasionally making one of the fantasy things here and there to show that I posses the skill level to do such is okay but not at the expense of the things that sell.

The little things add up quickly. Hell one of these days I dream of waking up and finding I'm out of Dice Bags would be great! Then again I enjoy making those, so running out probably isn't going to happen anytime soon. ^_^

I found out not too long ago, finding baby and toddler boy themed blankets is a bit harder than I had originally thought. So I'm definitely going to be trying to keep a few of those in the shop from now on. 

Other than that, it's just a finish other projects day. Hopefully I'm feeling well enough at week's end to list some more things on the shop but staging, taking pictures, editing them and creating the listings can be very menial and mentally tiring. Definitely best for days when I've been staying on top of eating and other self care that's crucial for certain stuff to behave.

Fuck off Murphy....

punk ass.  I can see you over there just waiting for your chance.  It was a bitch ass move to make the Fiance's boots a half size too small, but those little things are the only thing you better fuck with this November.  Bitch.

Well I am back to just as normal for me as I can get.  The muscle pain is gone and well my appetite is not quite still there yet, it's recovered as well as can be expected.

With the recovery came being able to double down on work again. How much you work you ask?

Allow me to breakdown my orders for you.

Order #1, what's left of it anyways:
A green coat
A light browns coat
A messenger bag

Order two:
2 Toothless (yeap, cute little bugger)

Order #3:
A Ma Cobb hat
A dark blue and black scarf

Order #4:
Another Ma Cobb Hat

Order #5:
A large green shawl

Order #6:
Three Christmas stockings

Order #7:
Dolls (though how many of these I'll be making I'm not sure yet...)

"That's a lot of work there..."

Well kinda.  I have all the patterns, I know what and how these are all going to look like (save the messenger bag, I keep changing my mind on it.)  However I've also got pictures I need to take, and my fiance is never home long enough to doing nothing for long enough to get drafted.

I need a kid... Well... maybe not.  I need more space, which we're going to get when we move to Arizona.  Which means more cooking and baking (yay!). And I digress....

Anyways, that means you guys who take the time to read here, may be getting stuck with cheat articles of pictures of projects as they are coming along and videos of cute stuff.  Maybe some prepping or survivalist videos if I can find some I like.  (Yeah, key term there.)

Sadly I do not have any Samhain plans (pronounced Sow-in) aka Halloween for you mundanes. I'm fairly certain it'll rather simple, spiced cider and a good meal with the Fiance.  I'm rather content with that actually.

Anyways, I hope you're all having a good week, a great Thursday and I'll see ya'll Saturday.

Meanwhile, I'm going to enjoy some more coffee, and then get cracking on work.

Oh Monday, Monday...

Almost back to normal from Thursday kicking my almost-non existent ass.  All that's left is the small meals I'm eating around 4-5 times a day, mild fatigue and some still serious back muscle pain.  I'm just over here thanking the Gods that it's not spasms (!!!).

Been thinking about either doing an auction on the Jade Rose Zen facebook page or doing a "12 days of Christmas/Yule" flash sale event and having about two things a day.

Either way, I'll be cross posting to Google +  plus as well and here to the blog.  Among everything will be some of the really popular stuff, like the dolls, shawls and blankets, but there will be some surprises in there too. =)

In the meantime, I'm going back to bouncing around youtube listening to music, working on orders and sitting in my comfy chair.

In the meantime, here's something I found today.  Enjoy:

Glorious

So yesterday was eight hours in the car.  We left, I chilled in the vehicle while he dealt with a court thing and then we grabbed some .22 and 45 and started driving.

This morning I wake up in a gloriously different place from LA.  Yeap, Arizona.

"How can Arizona be better that California?"

Ah my dears, that is because you might be forgetting that everyone has different priorities.  I'm a Witch, k?

Here in Arizona the vibe...it's the difference between stepping into cool water on a hot day and looking at dirty, muddy, been tramped in for weeks on end and knowing you can't get out of going in.  The latter being California.

The vibe is just better.  It's cleaner. It's less artificial feeling to me to be honest.  Plus there's constitutional carry.  ^_^

Now onto the gross bits...

Gross bit section begin:
An update on the ongoing project of using re-usable cotton pads.  Ever since I was started my periods, my right ovary has been the real cunt of the two.  Everything from when the cramps hit of collapsing at work and getting sent home to being violently ill for about four days.  My left one is not as bad.   Hell the left one is a little angel compared to this bitch of a right one. The left one about 75% only causes cramps for about a day and 100% of the time cravings for red meat.  (The rawer, the better!)

Well since using the cotton ones I made, the right one has been reduced from four days to two days.  This is a major improvement.

Another thing I've noticed is that the tissue lining (this is what you end up bleeding during the period) seems to be having an easier time of coming loose.  I've gone from 4-8 days of periods to 3-6.  Yes this means heavier periods, however that just in the first day or two.  This means I'm back on my feet and able to be fully productive again faster.

Read that last sentence again and understand that that is incredibly important to me.  If I'm not feeling close to 100%, I can't do my crochet work.... this leads to other problems.

End Gross Part

Another thing that has cropped up that is going to be crucial to address, is the fact that I have lost my familiarity with guns.  This pisses me off to no end.  Hence why grabbing a bit of 22 from storage and 45 was so damn important yesterday.

I'm one of the girls who used to work for Oleg Volk for fuck's sake, I knew guns and they were
merely objects.

Really fun to shoot objects, but pistols and rifles held no power.  Now, because of losing my familiarity with them...they bring back a few memories that I don't need.  Like the fact that one of my first firearms teachers was also treating me like a cumbucket ("You have no concept of how to easy on yourself do you?" Nope.) and was also one of my rapist when it was all said and done.  He was a lousy fucking teacher.  Can't handle shotguns because of it.  (Fuck him by the way.  Karma ain't done with him yet.)

This is going to be one of the harder projects to work on as I refuse to let this stand.  I will be pistol packing again full time once in Arizona full time and I'm not going to do it afraid.  I will not let something that helps me be able to walk unafraid of other piece of shit wanna be humans, be a fucking PTSD trigger.

I will not be afraid.

Fear is the mind killer....

Oh that's frustrating...

So I get messages from time to time on Etsy from friends of friends being sent to me looking for a particular crocheted thing.

Most of the time, after they hear/see the price they almost always "Thank you for your reply."

Which among us crafters is code for "Why the fuck would I pay that when I can get it from Wal*Mart for 3.99?"

The item in question this time was a beautiful crocheted cloche with flower embellishment.  22-25 bucks.

That covers the materials (which would need to a bit finer of a yarn for the flowers and leaves) and barely covers my time.

This is one of the most... derogatory things that happens on a weekly basis for all crafters I think.  Someone asks us to make something and for how much and then what happens?  The above.

Something else that coincides with this response is almost always the fact that the person who does this, 95% of the time is the same kind of person who bitches about "American jobs being sent overseas".  Here's a newsflash for you oh stupid one, stop fucking taxing businesses out of existence.
Here's a little background for those of you who aren't familiar with how hand crafts like mine work.

We'll use a beanie, as an incredibly simple example.

The basic beanie, can be down with one thread or two.   With any of the stitches know as single, double or treble and hell all the ones in between.

It takes 1-3 skeins of yarn, depending on how nice of a yarn or color variety you want. These range in price from 3.14 for 236 yards of thread (215 meters) to 8.99 for 174 yards.

Then the average crafting time is anywhere from an hour and 45 minutes to five hours (this is dependent on skill level and experience level).  I average an hour and 45 minutes on simple beanies.

Now, let's just say that for a really nice cloche I decide to go with a finer thread for the flowers.  This finer thread costs 6.99 a skein, and I get two in two different colors.  Then one skein at 3.14 for the main hat.

Now that puts me at 17.12 already.  And I haven't even started working on the hat yet.

So we'll say there's four flowers.  Each flower takes me 45 minutes for a total of 3 hours.
The cloche takes me 2 hours to make.

So that's five hours for this hat.  Now at the higher quoted price of 24 dollars minus the 17.12 leaves 6.88.

Now divide 6.88 by 5.

That is 1.376 an hour.

We won't go into any of the other things I make.

I put five hours of time into a hat, and am only asking 24 bucks for it.

Do the crafting community a favor: If you aren't willing to pay for quality and for the investment of our time, don't even open a fucking conversation with us.

In case you're wondering what it would cost if I put in the 8.75 min wage just to give you a baseline:
43.75 and that's just the cost of the time.  Plus material and shipping... try 60 bucks at least.

Do me and the rest of the crafting community a favor: don't get snotty, snobby, condescending, arrogant, snide, rude or belligerent with me when I give you a very reasonable price, when I'm the one who knows how much time goes into my work, not you.  I know my work is going to last you for several years when that junk you buy from some chain store is going to worthless in less than a year.

Stop your bitching about sending jobs overseas when you won't even invest in small business here.

*Stitch, stitch, stitch....*

"Just keep stitching, just keep stitching."

There are many days and times were this is the only mantra that I have going through my head.  It certainly was last week.  Concept called mindful knitting or crocheting.

I had stumbled onto this on my own a few years back but a friend recently pointed it out to me online, and a rabbit hole later I'd found a lot of information on it.

Why mindfulness is great?

Pretty simple actually.

You're are preventing events of that day/moment from draining you of energy you need for other things.  You're removing the power an event or memory has over you, by focusing on the yarn and project in your hand.

We are all aware of the significance of last week (9/11).  Being the passionate woman that I am (Yes, I heard that chortle) I decided for my sanity (what little of it that's left) would be better spent knitting or crocheting last week. As I had two personal anniversaries that make me cringe still that week, one of them being my first wreck ever at 26 (yes, I was pretty lucky to go that long, but there were a lot of things I could have done to avoid that wreck. No one was killed or badly injured, but it still bothers me a LOT).

And as we all know, 9/11 brings out the idiots of various conspiracy theories and just plain bullshit of people who can't seem to grasp the manner.  I hate that entire bullshit.  I repeat, HATE that bullshit.  It's one of the disrespectful displays of arrogance, bubble syndrome and plain naivete.  It spits on the graves of those who were lost when people quibble over what happened.

I still have the image seared into my head of them showing what used to be a dozen floors squashed into a space less than, if I recall correctly, four feet thick.  I'm still stunned by the news from friends who lost folks, that they are still identifying remains even today.

Those two reasons are part of why I won't engage in the endless roundabouts of what happened.  It's rude to the dead and disrespectful to the people who survived the events and the folks that the victims left behind.  Then you have the repercussions of those events, that increased all who were affected.  Which is a whole other kit and kaboodle of worms that need thrown on fishing hooks and drowned while sitting on the banks of a lake or river, while sipping cold beer and enjoying those who are with you.

So I put my headphones in or talked to my fiance or we went and watched the sunsets.  I just kept stitching.  Mindfulness extends to not just knitting or crocheting.  You can apply it to washing dishes, walking dogs, reading books, sharpening tools, cleaning guns, sitting with a cup of coffee and just watching the sunrise or sunrise or a thunderstorm move, etc.  It's healthy.  It counter acts depression.

It lets you have a few moments of just you. Of sweet, lucid, calming sliver of time that is just you and the world.  It lets you step back and reevaluate what's going on.  Re-establishes your boundaries, your balance, your center.  It takes the edge of this rape victim's PTSD flashbacks. It shortens them. Makes me lucid faster.  Yeah, the project ends up a bit wet from crying (yeah, I just admitted that), but I'm out of it faster.  It lets me work off the anger over careless from people who should know better and it let me work off the hatred over ignorant dipshits who don't know what the fuck it is they are talking about.

I've received a lot of criticism in the past year or so, over an increasing reluctance to commit to "pet causes."  There's been a rash of "warm fuzzy" causes, that you do for less than a minute and you get to brag you did for a couple of days and then what?  That was shallow, fleeting and you're back at square one with...well, I can't classify what for you as I'm not you.  And yes, this me criticizing several things all lumped together.

When you decide to champion a cause, you need to do it every day, even if it's just for a few minutes of sharing relevant information or laying out plans for the next event, etc.  You need to actually champion it.  You need to wear it like a tattoo.

So in response to a rather snide cunt, who may or may not be female, I'll listing out my causes again for all to see.  I don't really care if they are you "flavor" nor do I give a flying fuck if they align with your politics.  These are my babies, that I want to help as much as I am able to help. Many times, all I can do is help spread the word they exist but at least I'm trying to stay consistent.

The Battle Buddy Foundation  

Hats for Our Veterans

Right now, that's because I can't find the others or even remember which folders I have them bookmarked into.  Hats is run by a sweet lady, and donates several dozen (I think this year they managed a couple hundred hats) to organizations that work with homeless vets.  It's not much, but a warm hat, scarf and gloves is better than nothing, which is what I otherwise have.

For TBBF, it's sharing as frequently as I can and spreading the word.

So there.  That's my ramblings for today.  Now if you'll excuse me....*stitch stitch stitch stitch stitch...*

It's crunch time!

As I don't have anything off the top of my head that I'd like to rant about, talk about, etc. as I'm in the middle of a crunch time and quite possibly frogging one of the jackets (again!)  so a copy and paste from my notes on Jade Rose Zen on Facebook will just have to suffice.

"Hey everyone, wanted to give y'all a heads up.

The last day of this year that I'm willing to accept to orders for the Holiday seasons is November 16th.  There will be NO MORE ORDERS ACCEPTED AFTER THAT DATE FOR THIS YEAR.  

I'm establishing this policy because I got rushed with orders last year at the last minute and I ended up being late with a few of them.  I don't like being late, I don't like being surprised with stuff at the last minute which I'm sure you don't enjoy either.  

If you are interested in something for Christmas, start telling me now!!!!!

It takes some serious time to get everything made, because I'm working designs and ordering yarn many times for your orders.  

I've already one order that I managed to convince to let me start on it back in June (And boy am I glad they agreed!!!).   

So if you are interested in buying from for this coming winter gift giving season, LET ME KNOW NOW!  

It's okay if you are on budget, and need to put the money back, but please remember I do have a PayPal now and we can work payments if you need to.

This year (after including other current orders) I have room to start designing and settling on yarn:

• 1 Doctor Who scarf.  Full sized, or reduced, this one is the good yarn that is incredibly close to color but a bit more expensive.  Please see the Note, Product list, for pricing.
• 2 twin sized afghans
• 1 coat (I only have time left to work one right now, this might change, I'll update this note if I can take more orders)
• 12 Ma Cobb hats
• 6 dolls
• 12 baby afghans and hats
• 6 shawls
• Tote and Messenger bags - 4, Purses, sized neck to small - 10

I do not have room to take orders on the following:

• full, queen, King sized afghans

 Thank you kindly for being one of my clients, and I'm looking forward to hearing from you!"

You can still find me on Etsy - Jade Rose Zen until December 14th.  That's the last day I can ship things and (hopefully) still get them to folks on time.  After that I'm not having an open shop on Etsy.  I won't be uploading anything new there.

Now on Zibbet- Jade Rose Zen I am open there now, and will be for hopefully several years.  There is new inventory up there and will continue to uploaded through out the season.  On November 16th, the custom order option will be coming down until January 14th.  Between December 14th and January 14th... I'm taking a VACATION!

Shop updates!

So as I mentioned earlier I have a new shop home, over on Zibbit.  So here's a quick run down of my newest listings and links back to them.

 Granny on My Shoulder

Done with Granny Square stitch (well duh), this incredibly colorful and bright shawl is 31 inches from top to bottom and 55 inches from side to side.

Pre-washed, soft and ready to go!

 Purple Triangle Shawl

This particular shawl is a bit smaller than the previous or next one at 25 inches from top to bottom and 57 inches from side to side.

Excellent for a child or teen.

Pre-washed.

 Dusk and Blue Triangle Shawl.

(Yes that's me being goofy.)

This is a beast of a silky shawl at 34 and a half inches from top to bottom and 75.5 inches from side to side.  (That's a little over 6-7 feet I think.

Pre-washed.

Sandstone Bands Purse

This purse is 10.5 inches wide by 9.5 inches deep, with a strap of 24.5 inches.
Pre-washed, does not have a fabric lining due to how tight the stitching is.

My fascination with Shawls.

This is one article that is going to earn a weird look from some folks.  I dearly love shawls.  There are few other articles of clothing that can be functional, elegant and unique like the shawl.  And yes, I realize that one of those things pictured is actually in fact a shemaugh.  Well, on me it's big enough to be a shawl.  In fact I've used it as such on chilly mornings.

Shawls have intrigued me in that they are used for so many damn things.  I'm sure everyone at this point has encountered a Prayer shawl ministry or a recipient of such a ministry (which by the way, this Witch thinks are awesome ideas!)

History of Shawls:

Now this part is a bit muddled.  Some of the first citations of a shawl, are within Jewish history as prayer shawls, while as many dances done today by the First Nation remnants are "Fancy shawl" or "Shawl praying."  (Dancing is praying in many of the Tribes.)

One of the more interesting references in the Bible, to me at least, is the story of Ruth and Boaz.  Her shawl plays a small role in this story in revealing to Boaz that she was indeed true to her word, a daughter of Naomi and would be a daughter of Israel.

One of the earliest modern references to the shawls appears out of India and seems to link to a wide scarf that was (and I think still is) popular with Hindi women.

This is an example of the Pineapple Shawls I personally make.
If you'd like one click the picture, it'll take you
to my Etsy store listing.

Do shawls appear among other cultures?  Yes, it does seem that shawls were a simple enough concept of clothing that they do seem to appear in records and stories with the advent of fiber weaving.

Types of Shawls:

They can be squares, triangles and long rectangles. Circular or Half circle.

Shawls can be made from just about anything.

They can be simple triangles of fabric for covering your head from a dusty day or your face on a cold one.

They can be something elegant covering your shoulders and accenting a luxurious evening dress.

They can be a heartfelt gift to a grieving loved one.

For my christian friends, if you'd like to check this out further there is the Shawl Ministry.

For my pagan friends (was that small squee I just heard?), I have the Stitch `n' Witch  .  Those lovely folks work with Christopher Penczak (Macha forever bless and shield brother!) and I've had the privilege of donating shawls to them in the past, though I haven't been able to yet this year. (That will be changing.)

"Evelyn, that's pretty cool and all but why are you fascinated with them again?"

They are most likely one of the oldest pieces of clothing that is still in use to day all over the world.  Yet, it's one of the simplest things.  They intrigue me, because the bold variety of forms they've taken over the years.  From Irish lace shawls of yesteryear to today's simple Granny Stitch shawls, they are an example of the tenacity a good concept can wield.