I aways thought of the timeout dolls as mummified grand kids. They creep me out. My mom made my grandmother life size dolls of my brother’s children with faces made or an inket printout of a photo of their face. The dolls with faces are even creepier.
The only items I like made out of plastic canvase are various small christmas tree ornaments, a brick cover, and a vase.
My aunt has on the back of her toilet an eight sided vase made out of plastic canvas. Each piece is cut so the shape when it is put together is quite elegant. I rather like it because of the pleasant shape.
The brick cover is covering a brick from the walk to my great-great-grandfather’s farm. Since the brick is large, a bit crumbly about the edges, and abrasive it does need a sturdy cover. I may make a cloth cover to cover the plastic canvas one. The plastic canvas seems to do a good job of protecting the floor and the brick.
Fortuneatly most of my craftsy friends don’t like the current craft themes so they use their talents for good, not evil. One make cross stitch items that are beautiful and elegant not tacky and trite.
I don’t get anything latchhook.
I did make a draft excluder for my door. It is a plain tube filled with sand made of celadon green cotton with silver snowflakes. Celadon one of my living room colors. I did not make it into a snake, duck, or dachshund.
Jeep’s Phoenix, what the hell is up with that bed? I was looking for an explanation of why anyone would want a sleeping bag crocethed out of shopping bags, but the site owners seem to think they’re self-evidently desirable.
Speaking of “jarred”— does anyone else remember those horrible jars of “pickled people” that used to be found at bazaars years ago? As I recall, they were small soft sculpture bodies made from pantyhose and stuffed with batting, that were crammed tightly into a Ball canning jars. They were a joke item, but they creeped me out when I was a kid. <shudder>
I tried to find a link to show y’all what I mean… but, fortunately, I could not. :eek:
And there are message boards just like this one, where people spend hours every day talking about nothing but scrapbooking! (Well, no, I shouldn’t say “nothing but,” as things do get off-topic fairly frequently.)
My husband is getting a PhD in folklore, and he’s doing his dissertation on scrapbooking as auto-ethnography. Really. It works out well, combining his schoolwork with my hobby. I get to introduce him to people and help with interviews and stuff.
Wow helena your husband’s dissertation sounds fascinating… I wrote an ethnography for a grant in College… it was a lot of fun and I learned so much doing it. If I could have presented my “artifacts” in a scrapbook that would have had a lot more impact!
I just had a flashback to something my Mom made once: a Christmas wreath made of computer punch cards. It’s rather hard to describe, but it was made by first stapling the corners of one end of a bunch of punch cards together (without folding them, so it made sort of an open-ended cone), then stapling the other ends in a circle around a paper plate. you then added two or three more layers of cards to the inner circle, spray-painted the whole thing green and glued a few pine cones and (I think) a large red bow to the paper plate.
LurkMeister, I remember those wreaths! And you reminded me of another holiday favorite - a “tree” made from a TV Guide or Reader’s Digest. Fold each page so the top is tucked securely between two pages, then crease. When all pages are folded, including the covers, staple the covers together so that the pages fan out in a tree shape. Spray paint green or gold or silver or whatever, and decorate. Toss into Yule Fire.
[sub](OK, I made up that last step…)[/sub]
I also remember as a kid making BIG flowers from tissue paper (the wrapping kind, not the nose-blowing kind) I seem to recall pleating several sheets together, fastening them to a “stem” (stick) then separating the sheets carefully so the flower “bloomed” - we made bunches of these, but I can’t remember why.
Hahaha, ok. Now you’re getting into crappy crafts from my childhood. My mom still has piles of craft magazines from the 70s (Crafts ‘n’ Things, anyone?) and some of the stuff is soooo horrible! There seemed to be a big emphasis on “ethnic” crafts as well as nature and eco-sensitive ones. There was a lot of painting bleach bottles and covering them with felt to look like a piggy bank, and just painting stupid crap on rocks.
I have a banana hook. It does not look like a goose. It is plain wood with a metal hook, and it helps the bananas last longer than they normally do.
The time-out kids look like the kind of dolls that come alive in the middle of the night, stop in the kitchen to get your butcher knives, and make their way to your bedside. No good can come out of a time-out kid in the house.
The seventies were also big on sticking glittery crap into styrofoam balls.
Speaking of fun with styrofoam. My hubby’s grandparents made us a disco ball of styrofoam, white tulle and clear plastic cups with holes in the bottom where colored christmas lights poke through.
We dutifully put it up every christmas but I sincerely hope my kid wrecks it soon!
Oooh I made a bazillion god’s eyes with yarn and popsicle sticks!! I wasn’t a girl scout though… there was never any room in the troop for me sniff although I tried to sign up every year.
Oh and I’d gladly send it away to ya if only it wouldn’t sponsor 30000000 questions from eagle eyed great grandma with the memory that never quits. I regularly get quizzed on these matters… where stuff is, if I still like it, do I want more?
On of my nieghbors on the next block has gobs of these things hanging from her porch every Christmas, and they all blinkblinkblinkblink. It’s enough to cause a seizure.
Voguevixen, when you mentioned the eco-friendly seventies crafts, I had a horrible flashback to my childhood, when my big sister made me a pop top vest, not unlike the one on the kid halfway down the page of this link. I’m glad that craft fad went away.:eek:
Yes! My neighbors have one of those shadow cutouts, but it is a Jesus with his arms raised and at Christmas they put it in their big picture window on the front of their house. So every time I go past there in December it scares the crap out of me because it looks like someone is standing between the curtain and the window.
(No, I’m not sure why they have a shadow of adult Jesus in their window at Christmas - but with his arms up like that it looks like he is supposed to be blessing the neighborhood or something. Instead he strikes fear in my heart.)
also made thousands of those in girl scouts. Along with the tissue paper flower decorations.
This year, I’m teaching Sunday school, and some of the crafts we send these kids home with are, well, interesting… but it keeps them entertained for 1/2 hour or more, and they seem to like it. Luckily, they’re not taking them overseriously. That’s the danger.
