OWL book folding, OWL quotes and OWL jokes! Read on!
Book Folding – I’ve done two Owl books. The first one is a stylized ‘HOO’.
This is the pattern I used for the ‘HOO’ book. In retrospect, I think I would use more pages to make the letters ‘H’ and ‘O’ and fewer pages to make the owl.
I am both a night owl and an early bird. So I am wise and I have worms.
– Steve Carell –
You can’t hoot with the owls and then soar with the eagles
– Hubert H. Humphrey –
I have learned that one of the most important rules in politics is poise – which means looking like an owl after you have behaved like a jackass.
– Ronald Reagan –
The wife and I dressed as the iconic Peruvian owls for Halloween.
We were Inca hoots.
– Author Unknown –
A devoutly religious cowboy lost his favorite book of scripture while out mending fences one day.
A few weeks later, an owl walked up to him carrying the scripture book in its beak.
The cowboy couldn’t believe what was happening. He took his precious book from the owl’s beak and raised his eyes to the heavens.
He said, “It’s a miracle!”
“Not really,” said the owl. “Your name is written inside the cover.”
– Author Unknown –
Scrumbles (Freeform Crochet) is a word that describes small crochet ‘patches’. When the patches are all joined together, they are called… I don’t know, maybe Many Scrumbles? It is a good craft to do in the car when we travel between Alberta and Arizona because I don’t need a pattern and I don’t have to count stitches or rows.
These are my newest two Scrumbles:
Pinkly Purple
Be eccentric now. Don’t wait for old age to wear purple.
– Regina Brett –
The Vegetable Garden that Didn’t Grow in Straight Rows
I folded this book into a Skull for my daughter – for Halloween. I should have used a thicker book and made some cross bones too.
I live inside your face.
– Author Unknown –
Why is the human skull as dense as it is? Nowadays we can send a message around the world in one-seventh of a second, but it takes years to drive an idea through a quarter-inch of human skull.
– Charles Kettering –
I folded this book into a Gothy figure (for the same daughter) – for Christmas. I was going to embroider some dark skulls to decorate the cape and body, but that was going to take more time than I had. Instead, The Car Guy made some black epoxy resin snowflakes!
I had choosen the path of the black sheep rather than that of the unicorns and puppies.
– Magenta Periwinkle, Cutting Class –
I turned my bedroom into a bat-cave of band posters, dark curtains, and the occasional skull. I think by now my distraught parents were seeking advice from their pastor. Andy, meanwhile, calmly remarked, “I like how you’ve found a way to use Halloween decorations year-round.”
– Molly Ringle, All the Better Part of Me –
The Daughter loved both books – she is a nurse. If you have a nurse in your family, you know that their interests, stories and sense of humour can sometimes be – different.
Or maybe it is day shift explaining to night shift… either way, it was probably a ‘shit’ show, as they say.
If you know a nurse or a doctor or a person who works in a medical facility, be sure to let them know that you appreciate what they do! And when they get to telling you the story about the patient who… well, I won’t go there. So just listen and nod and smile, like they do, when you talk about gardening or other such things that don’t involve body parts and fluids.
What the Snowmen know to be true:
A person is snown by the company they keep.
Boldly go where snowman has gone before.
Dance like snowbody’s watching.
Keep your ice on the prize.
Mother nose best. Snowman is an island.
That:
I don’t want Christmas season to end, because it’s the only time I can legitimately indulge in my particular addiction: glitter.
– Eloisa James –
The Car Guy is a man of many talents – one of them is wood-working. Recently he has branched out into projects using pieces of wood inlaid with epoxy resin.
In order to keep down the costs of epoxy trial and error, he bought a few small molds to make snowflakes. Then he discovered glitter… We not only have enough glitter snowflakes now for a small avalanche, snowflakes have been slipped into every Christmas card we have sent out. Glitter has been added to epoxy drink coasters too.
I have fond memories of the Glitter phase that our children and grand children went through. They all grew out of it. I expect The Car Guy will too – until next Christmas.
The Other:
I’d like to end this post by wishing you all a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
If, like us, your government has decreed that you cancel any ‘gathering of the clan’, I hope you find a way to make this Christmas a good one anyway. You might want to consider purchasing some glue and some glitter.
The Marvelous letter ‘M’ at work:
My mother makes a mouthwatering mincemeat muffin.
Most monsters make messes.
Many merry maids milked many moody milk cows.
How many ‘M’s can you use in one sentence?
The Letter M – one row up, one row down, one row up, one row down!The Letter M with curls and flowers
Directions:
Height of book: 9 inches
Number of pages used: 234 Pages (117 leaves)
First 12 folds: 1.5 inches from bottom Row 1: 24 folds starting at bottom; first fold 1.5 inches from bottom; remaining folds .25 inches from each previous fold Row 2: 23 folds starting at top; first fold .25 inches closer to bottom than last folds in Row 1; remaining folds .25 inches from previous fold Row 3: 23 folds starting at bottom; first fold 1.5 inches from bottom; remaining folds .25 inches from previous fold Row 4: 23 folds starting at top; first fold .25 inches closer to bottom than last fold in Row 1 Last 12 folds: 1.5 inches from bottom
Fringe Flowers:
There are quite a few web sites with instructions for fringe flowers. This is one of them: Exotic Fringed Flowers.
This is my latest crochet Scrumble – I call it Red Hat Ladies at the Berry Farm.
The project started off with a few red yarns. That got boring real fast. So I went shopping – but all the red yarns were fairly close in colour to the yarns I already had. Time to rethink the Red Theme. Green seemed like a logical addition; purple a bold choice. Pink and gold just crept in, uninvited, but reasonable choices, as it turned out.
When the project was finished – and I have no idea how that is determined – the piece announced it was Red Hat Ladies touring a berry farm.
You’ve heard about the “Red Hatters” haven’t you? The Red Hat Society is an international social group for older women. The inspiration for their attire (red hats and purple clothing) came from the poem Warning, by Jenny Joseph.
When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
– Warning by Jenny Joseph –
We’re at the Bland Beige House in Arizona now. The weather here has been much better than Alberta – where the temperatures turned brutally cold soon after we headed south.
I haven’t been feeling at my best for a few months – interesting how life can throw you a medical curve ball and recovery takes more time and effort just because you are older!
The up side of feeling down is it gives you more ‘down time’. I spent some of it folding this book, which is the easiest book fold project I’ve done so far. I call it Easy Angles.
I ‘spruced it up’ by adding a black paper background on the two end pages, and some curls (See ‘How to make curly hair’ at Book Fold Angel.)
Instructions:
1. My book was 9 inches high. (22.8 cm) I used 176 pages, which is 88 book leaves.
2. The design consists of 4 ‘rows’. Each row takes 22 leaves.
3.The first fold (bottom fold) in each row is 1.75 inches (4.5 cm) from the bottom of the page.
4. The second fold in each row is 2 inches from the bottom of the page. (If you prefer to work in metric, pick a nice round number for each dimension.)
5. The third fold in each row is 2.25 inches from the bottom of the page.
6. Continue in .25 inch increments for the 22 folds.
7. When you have completed the 22 folds of the first row, start the second row… then the third, and then the last row.
8. If you want more rows than 4, then you either need a book with more pages or…
you could make fewer than 22 folds per row.
9. If your book is less than 9 inches high, you can either make fewer folds per row or…
you could make make each fold less than .25 inches from the previous fold.
Easy Peasy, right!
Do you know where ‘Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy’ comes from? In a 1970’s British TV commercial for Lemon Squeezy detergent, a little girl and an adult use Lemon Squeezy detergent to clean a stack of dishes quickly. At the end of the commercial the girl says “Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy”.
The following is my attempt to further explain Book Folding. I say attempt, because writing instructions is actually quite difficult. I have a new found appreciation for people who write manuals…
Paw Print
The Basics of Book Folding are covered in this post: Book Folding 101. Here is a video that will help you visualize what I explained in that post and what I am explaining below: DIY Marta. Though Marta isn’t the greatest at making videos, she is a big help in understanding what the process is. (I don’t do everything just like she does – but close enough.)
Moving on. In Book Folding 202, I’ll tell you how you use a printed Paw Print design. (If you have never folded a book before, use a practice book to test to see if you are on the right track…
1. Here is the pattern for the the Paw Print. If you right click on the image you can download it. Save it as a .jpg file and print it full size on an 8.5X11 sheet of paper. This should give you a paw print that is about 4 inches high.
2. If you use the pattern as printed, you will need a book that is about 8 inches high and has at least 200 numbered pages, which gives you 100 leaves of paper. (1 sheet or leaf of paper has two numbered pages.)
3. Each line on the pattern represents one leaf of the book (two numbered pages) – but only where there is one element, like the left and right toes where there isn’t a second element (the foot pad) below it.
4. Where there are two elements (the toe and the foot pad), you will use two leaves per line on the pattern.
So, although this paw print pattern looks like it only needs 60 leaves, you are actually going to need a book with at least 99 leaves (200 pages). The top element is always folded on one leaf, the bottom element is folded on the next leaf.
Fold Line at the top of the pattern. Elements of the pattern: four toes and the foot pad.
5. Once you decide how the paw print will be positioned on the page (lets say the top of the paw is 2 inches down from the top of the book), then you will fold the paper pattern on a fold line that is 2 inches above the top of the paw print (see ‘Fold Line’ above). You will align this fold line with the top of each leaf of the book.
In the photo below, you can see how the pattern was folded on the fold line. The folded over piece of the pattern creates a ledge that makes it easy to align the pattern on every page.
6. The photo above shows the pattern if you were at about the half way point of folding. You can see that the toe and the foot pad are both shown on a single line of the pattern.
7. The toe element will be made with two folds on one leaf – from points #1 and #2. The foot pad will be folded on the next leaf from points #3 and #4. (The top element is always folded first.)
8. You can either make the folds directly from the pattern, or you can make pencil marks on each leaf, remove the pattern, then fold. Either method works. Put a tick mark on the pattern to show what you have finished folding or marking.
9. Folding always starts at the front of the book, but there will probably be some unfolded pages at the beginning and end of the book. So, to find the first leaf you will need to:
a. find the middle of the book.
b. take the number of leaves that you need (99), divided by 2 which gives you 50 leaves. Count back 50 leaves from the middle of the book to the front of the book. That will give you your starting point.
The Car Guyretired permanently a few years ago. He thought we’d have enough money and he knew his body and brain were no longer interested in the work routine. I sort of retired when he did, though my career as a stay-at-home domestic ‘manager’, wasn’t one I could just walk away from. (Well, I could ‘walk away’, but that would probably mean I was either dead, or The Car Guy had decided to replace me with a younger ‘manager’…)
I used to have some ‘staff’, but they left home many years ago – so I turned to The Car Guy. Turns out he was willing to take on the evening sustenance routine and culinary procurement duties – but he balked at any task that involved removal of foreign substances from hard and soft surfaces. His foodie help was great, but it still left me many hours and tasks short of a leisurely retirement.
That led me to ask and answer my own Retirement Question – what does Enough look like? What is the intersect between dirty enough and clean enough? Enough stuff or too much stuff? Enough or not enough exercise? Enough or too much news? Enough or not enough…
I don’t have all the answers yet, but regular rounds of rightsizing – belongings, tasks, routines, etc – has given me the mental energy to carve out more free time and be more creative.
Which leads me to a new craft I started in November. Scrumbles (Freeform Crochet). Apparently Scrumble is the word that describes a small crochet ‘patch’. When the patches are all joined together, they are called… I don’t know, maybe ManyScrumbles?
This was my first Scrumble. I started this one on the car trip we took last fall from Alberta to Arizona. Three days of sitting in a car, in the silence that comes when the other person in the car is not a talker… I call it “Snails lost in a Flower Garden”…
Going on a trip. Need about 4 skeins of yarn. I’ve packed 152 just to be safe.
– thecrochetcafe –
Ta da! Crocheting is a bit like being a magician… you mumble to yourself and waggle a stick around and no one else has a clue how you did it!
– crochetnow uk –
This Scrumble took exactly one ball of yarn. It was one of those yarns that changes colour every few yards or so. I wonder how they dye it so it turns out like that. I call it “Snails and Pacman with Octopus Tentacles”.
This is where the enough aspect comes in. It is hard to know when the Scrumble is done because there is no pattern. You just make stuff up as you go along and unless you run out of wool, like I did on this Scrumble, it is hard to know when it is finished.
Marry the one who gives you the same feeling you have when you enter the yarn store.
– hooked –
I should learn to crochet something I’ll actually use… like a martini!
– Maxine.com –
This is my third Scrumble. I call it “Denizens of the Coral Reef”. I knew it was done when I found a new ball of yarn that I liked a lot and it didn’t fit with the colours of this Scrumble. A quick finish to this Scrumble and I moved on to the next.
Yes I’m Bilingual – I speak fluent Crochet! Ch6, DTRC in base of ch 6, SC in next cluster. Repeat from * around, join with sl st to first st.
– Author Unknown –
Crocheter’s Hourly Rate:
$20/hr minimum
$30/hr if it requires black yarn
$40/hr if you require it by tomorrow
$80/hr if there is no pattern
$90/hr if your example photo was knitted.
– Author Unknown –
What Say You – Have you asked, and answered, your questions of “What does enough look like”?
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow –
May the Christmas season
fill your home with joy,
your heart with love,
and your life with laughter.
My very first Christmas Post: The Annual Christmas Letter. (This year I will mention that The Car Guy and I are observing our 50th Wedding Anniversary!)
