Zee Zee Anniversary and Darning Update

The first of May marked Zee Zee’s fourth anniversary with us. We celebrated the week letting her decide on what routes to go on our morning walks (though that seems to be a regular thing these days) and a trip to a local pet store to pick out a few treats. We even made the trek downtown to the Sunday’s farmers market that week… She was a total champ and walked most of the way despite it being a seriously long walk from home. She can be a gremlin sometimes but she’s our little gremlin and we are so grateful to have her in our lives.

Darned dish cloths

I had promised in my last post to update on my various darning projects in March… but seeing that it’s May now I kind of dropped the ball on that. I think at the time I was feeling a bit blah about the darning I managed to finish. I felt at the time I was a bit out of practice so I wasn’t feeling impressed with the finished product so I threw them back in the darning pile to maybe redo them sometime in the future. Pulling them out a few nights ago I realize now that I actually like these repairs. I discovered a while ago that I need to walk away from my projects from time to time to maybe appreciate the work I did with a fresh set of eyes a day or so later. I think this project was certainly one of them.

Why save dish towels? I genuinely love these towels. As weird as it may sound I picked these towels up in past travels. Two are from couple of trips to Philly while the third is from San Francisco. For sentimental reasons… and because I really like using these towels they have not reached rag status just yet. I’m hoping this will add several more years to their life.

I may put up a simple tutorial on how to use the darning eggs and mushrooms. We have simple instructions for the looms and nostepinnes but not for the darning tools. I think they can be a bit intimidating to some.

New darning eggs

Speaking of darning, last month I got a new batch of darning eggs from Mark Supik co. Since these are made from scrap woods from previous jobs at the shop, Mark picked out some really unusual pieces. I really love the selection. The woods are so lovely in person. Even the ash, which is a wood I’ve worked with many of times in the past, is unusual. It’s a grainy wood and the color tends to be pretty uniform, but the ones from this batch are a bit variegated in color. They are really lovely. The woods from batch to batch will vary so the less common the wood the chance of them showing up again is pretty slim. They and a few more common woods are currently available in the shop: darning eggs