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Collage kits for all ages

When it comes to art, sometimes it takes an artist to convince a nonartist to, well, give art a chance. My friend Laura Laramie, who graduated from Rhode Island School of Design, showed me a bit about the world of collage, and now she's found a great way to help you get started. Just in time for the holidays, Laura's offering wonderful collage kits on her eBay site. For $18, you get scissors, a glue stick, a frame, instructions, and a bag full of mix-and-match papers to cut up and create images, or extracts, or anything you'd like. These kits make wonderful gifts, or help you style wonderful gifts for your family and friends. No two kits are the same. The official name is Kitchen Table Collage Art Kit Journal Making Scrapbooking Junk Journal Ephemera; that should get you in the right frame of mind!

Welcome blankets

For the past, oh, five years at least, I've been crocheting small blankets shaped like giant granny squares, for donation to refugees and immigrants arriving in the United States. These Welcome Blankets are part of a large project created by Jayna Zweiman, an architecturally-trained multidisciplinary designer and social entrepreneur whose work is about civic intimacy, accessibility, and joy. Perhaps best known for her Pussyhat Project, an international network and movement of women’s rights supporters, Jayna has become a leading advocate of using design innovation to enact social change. The Pussyhat Project became a worldwide phenomenon at the 2017 Women’s Marches as one of the largest crowd-sourced art advocacy projects ever (I made 15 hats for the Washington DC march). Welcome Blanket, which began as a reconceptualization of the 2000-mile length of the proposed border wall as a 2000-mile length of yarn to make individual welcome blankets for new immigrants coming to the US, has been so successful that the project has expanded to reframe the 24,901 mile Earth’s circumference as a distance that connects us all. My choice of a crocheted granny square pattern honors my own grandmother, an immigrant from Poland in the early 20th century, who taught me to crochet this pattern when I was eight years old.

Ponyhenge update

We went, we saw, we laughed, we rode ponies in a field in Lincoln, Massachusetts. What fun! If you're in the greater Boston area, take yourself -- and your kids -- to Ponyhenge. 

Ponyhenge

My friend Stephanie reminded me a few weeks ago that I haven't yet visited Ponyhenge, a spontaneous collection of rocking horses, plastic ponies, and other horse toys in a field by the side of the road in Lincoln, Massachusetts (half an hour from Boston). Since 2010, the figures have been mysteriously appearing, and multiplying; they're occasionally rearranged into a circle, or a racing formation, or left to total chaos. Nobody knows how Ponyhenge started, though Atlas Obscura has posited some theories. I plan to check it out this summer.

Potholders for grownups

For as long as it took me to go online and order one of these loopy potholder frames, I was smitten with the idea of returning to my childhood and weaving giant potholders. By the time the package arrived, complete with frame, tools and a starter supply of loops, I'd lost interest. Fortunately, my husband Ted dove in and began making potholders to match our plates, and potholders in different color combinations and patterns, and potholders for gifts. There's even a Hudson's Bay blanket potholder in our kitchen drawer now! When he's done with this, the loom and loops will get passed along to one of our crafty granddaughters. If you try this and get into it, there are Facebook groups where people share photos and graphed patterns, lots of Youtube tutorials, and a couple of good books to get you started. When your fingers are twitchy, making potholders is fast and easy therapy.