Vintage gloves and Christmas gloves

I love vintage clothes but suffer from one major drawback when it comes to buying them: I'm overweight.
Truth be told, even if I got down to my ideal target weight, I'd still be built on somewhat hefty lines for most vintage clothes. So when we were at an auction, the only things I thought might fit me were a men's dinner shirt and vest (I was correct; they are great) and gloves. As a result, I got a bit trigger-happy with my bids on gloves. I ended the day with 27 more pairs of vintage gloves than I'd started with.

Many vintage gloves - these ones fit me.

More vintage gloves - these ones are a bit tight.

Even more vintage gloves- these ones don't fit at all

My mother got quite excited when I posted some photos of these after I'd bought them and when she was over for my sister's wedding she tried on a few pairs. She fit into and took some lovely small kid gloves.

Vintage kid gloves. 

She also liked the look of some chamois gloves, and I agreed to decorate them with some embroidery as a Christmas present. I was happy to have gloves that weren't a fantastic fit given to a new home, and I always like giving gifts that I've spent some time and love embellishing.

These fit me but are a little short in the fingers, so I was happy to gift them.

  I decided on a small spray of fern stitch leaves and colonial knot berries to make a pattern around the hem of the cuff. Very Christmas gloves.

The decorated gloves.

A close up of the embroidery.

Among the gloves I bought were a few with embroidery; unfortunately those ones were too small for me:

The most gorgeous embroidered kid gloves. It looks like tambour chain to me. 

Lovely embroidered vintage gloves. Shame these were too small.

The next glove project is to select some of the many cream pairs that fit me - see the first photo, above - and embroider them in the style of these ones.

A Thank-You Hat

This year I was teaching 9 periods out-of-faculty. Even though this was in TAS, my first area of qualification, I haven't taught it for years, and hadn't taught any of the projects I was asked to teach. Suddenly in the workshop with classes in front of me and lots to learn, I was pretty well lost.

Luckily I had a colleague come to the rescue. Show me what to do. Come to my rescue with questions I couldn't answer or resources I couldn't find. Come into my class and help my students. Encourage, support, and inspire me.

Where would we be without colleagues like that.

So I wanted to make her something for Christmas. Something to show my gratitude and give her something my time and skill created, to pay for all the time and skill she shared with me.

Sorry for the photo. It was late at night when I finished and I had to gift it the next day. She loves it though, which is all that matters.

Gifts that people actually want - Wedding, Part Two

When you start considering ethical issues, gift-giving becomes an issue. Does this person want or need this thing? Will they use it? How wasteful is it if they don't? You have to think a lot about the individual and make sure you aren't wasting resources on a gift that will be thrown out or sit unused in their home.

So trying to think of a gift to give to 50 people that would not be wasteful was quite difficult.

One obvious choice is edible things. We ended up getting rainbow heart lollipops from Designer Candy. They were good value and a good company to communicate with, and they sent us flavour samples to try first. The lollipops also looked cool on the tables. Ethically, I'd call it a mixed success. Of course each one is wrapped in plastic, so not so great, and then I suppose that although it is edible, perhaps not all of our guests actually want to slowly work through a large lollipop. Since it doesn't have our names on it though, I hope that anyone who doesn't want it will gift it on to someone who will.

The lollipops were also useful to tie name tags to. I drew the tags myself, which was fun, although I knew as soon as I drew the pigs and whales that I was running a big risk! No one was too offended.

Then, as we looked at numerous gardens to be our wedding venue, we came up with our other gift idea - pot plants. What we loved about this idea was that we could buy some pretty plants, use them as table decorations for the night, and then people could take one home. This, in my opinion, was a complete success. There were no decorations of any kind wasted that night, nothing left to throw out. Not everyone wanted a plant, but there were plenty of people to pick up the slack. Those left towards the end of the night had a great time picking and choosing from the leftovers to add to their collection. We ended up with about six plants to take home, including a fern from the gardens where we got married. Let's hope I don't kill it.

Then Rhiannon gave me another plant when she came to visit this week - 'Blushing Bride'. Nice.

All Hallow's Read

Thanks to Ruanne, I have a great jumping off point: All Hallow's Read. If you can't be bothered to read the link, basically it's a new tradition to give people scary books for Halloween, inspired by the thought that there are not enough traditions that involve giving books.

I like this for a lot of reasons. I love gift-giving traditions. That's one of my favourite things about Christmas. And I love scary books. I have lots, because I sort of left home and took them with me, but I actually haven't read that many, because I mostly read at night, and that has often gone badly!

In late October I'm having a Halloween Craft Party, and I'm using this exploration on the blog to develop ideas for it. So I'll start with this one. I'm thinking a Secret Santa style gift arrangement (Secret Skeleton perhaps?) where everyone gives a book to one other person.

There is a list of recommended titles on the All Hallow's Read site, and Dover Publications have recently emailed about recommended Halloween books (also if you subscribe to their free samples you can download lots of Halloween clip art and some activity pages like colouring-in). But perhaps wandering a second-hand bookstore and finding something you've never heard of would be fun too. Most of the ghost/horror books I have are odd obscure old collections. And some of my favourite creepy short stories are not from "scary" collections as such (100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories has some gold - I like Trace, Fire Sale and A Cup of Hemlock for slight chills).

Also, consider e-books. I quickly checked Project Gutenberg and found some authors I recognised from my short ghost story collections, lots more promising titles and even one of my favourites - The Judge's House by Bram Stoker.

Ahh the internet is a wonderful! I searched for another favourite - The Cat Man, by Byron Liggett and found it on community radio audio!