More Coverings of Macrame

This was inspired by work that Andre showed on his site. The ones he shows are mostly (all?) needle hitched, but we were in the chatroom one afternoon and I mentioned that I might like to try these cork key rings with macrame. He said he'd not seen it done, so of course, I had to try it! I decided to whip the cork (just common whipping) before tying the macrame, so that the winery's name on the cork wouldn't show. I showed it to Bud, when we were at his house, and he said it would probably be easier to just sand the name off the cork. Why didn't I think of that? ROFL!

Anyway, I had fun working on this and hope to make a few more, including some needle-hitched ones. They've become yet another addiction, and I'll probably be teaching them in my class at IOLI Convention in 2009. : - )

Thanx for looking...more macrame to come, as well as other knots ... still catching up after the long vacation. I'll get there eventually...

My First Fully Covered Macrame Bottle!

Well, I'm back from a LOOOONG vacation, so now I can get back to blogging. I've missed it and have quite a bit of catching up to do. Here's a UFO (UnFinished Object) that I finally finished. I began this over a year ago, while in England for the IGKT Silver Anniversary AGM. It's a small bottle -- just a plain old 125-ml 'mixer' bottle from the pub near where the meeting was held. I didn't want to start with a HUGE project, for fear it would take too long to finish. It wasn't all that difficult, really, with pointers from Ken Elliott, and quite a few online Q&A sessions with Gordon Perry -- Thanx, Ken and Gordon!

The problem I had was at the end -- the decreasing part. I wasn't positive about how to go about it, so I sort of had to wing it, and that gave me a terrible case of the '3 P's' (Perfectionism, Procrastination and Paralysis). But I finally decided that I would try it, and just figure it out, without cutting any of the cords until I was certain it was correct. And it worked. I'm very pleased with it and have even begun covering my second bottle -- it's well underway, as a matter of fact. I also have plans for two more projects! Okay, just a little obsessed ... but it's all Ken's fault for getting me started ... that's my story and I'm sticking to it! LOL

Here are the pictures I took -- the first one is the only 'in progress' picture that I can find, but the rest are all of the completed bottle. Those of you who were at Fareham 2007 will probably recognize the cord I used. That's right -- it's from that tangled mass of cord that was so lovingly untangled by devoted members who needed the 'therapy' as Europa referred to it. LOL! Thanx again, everyone, who worked at untangling all that cord. The bottle is even more special to me, because I can still hear the ROAR of cheering that went up when Europa and Mikio met at the middle of that last length (there was so much of it that we had to keep cutting off sections and winding it onto spools)! I may even still have a bit of this cord leftover -- I gave a LOT of the spools of it away at the meeting, so there's not much left, after this project. : - )