Ornamentea featured on Visit South!

We were recently mentioned in an article on Visit South, a lovely little blog with great, Southern-focused, travel writing. We're at the bottom, below Holly Aiken's Stitch and Quercus, a nice shop here in downtown Raleigh that is getting a bit of buzz lately.

Check out the article here. 

Try the Inspired By Nature Retreat this year!

Join author and designer Heather Powers for a weekend retreat inspired by nature.  This year's theme is "Wings & Feathers".  You'll explore the delicate and precious things of nature; leaves,  butterfly wings and bird feathers. Symbols of hope and renewal with earthy fall hues; coppers and verdigis green, browns and plums.

The Retreat is October 17th - 19th in lovely Michigan. A fall trip to the upper Midwest is bound to be inspiring!

The retreat includes three days of classes and supplies, a gift bag with nature-themed treats, lodging, breakfast and snacks. Click right here to find out more. 

5 Family Crafts That Travel Well - My Favorite All-Ages Crafts for Traveling

My family is headed off on a big vacation this week. It's a mountain trip, this time, to a bare-bones cabin. We have to bring just about everything we want for the week, and we tend to travel like Victorians anyway. This means we have to take sheets and towels, but our trusty minivan will also be loaded with rugs, hanging lanterns, speakers for the ipod and that big skillet I use to make paella.

Oh, and the craft stuff. We can't go anywhere without taking some making activities. What makes a good travel craft? For me, it needs to be portable and packable, easy to clean up and, most important-sharable. We're taking this trip with a big group of friends and any craft that gets started on the picnic table can attract a crowd, fast.

Wait, I have one last criteria for a good travel craft; it can't be trashy. It needs to be lovely. I want to make something (or help my friends make something) that I want to keep. I'm not a fan of time-killer crafts; the junky things made from foam stickers and paper plates and google eyes that keep your hands busy but really need to be popped in the recycling bin immediately when you get home. I try to find crafts that are engaging, interesting and look beautiful when they are finished.

This is my list of Great Travel Crafts:

1.Needle felting
Needle felting is a fabulous travel craft. You can embellish items that you are wearing or plan to wear, you can make toys, you can make felted book marks. Needle felting is appropriate for anyone old enough to hold the needle. Yes, I just wrote that. My children both needle felted at age 3 and no one lost a finger. They made dearly-loved balls of wool with eyes and ears and tails. I think they were supposed to be hamsters. Or kittens. Imagine a very young child's drawing, but three-dimensional. Children can also make snakes (long, ropey things) with ease. The wool is inexpensive, the tools are reusable and the clean-up is absolutely minimal. If you want to read an amazing needle felting blog, check out Puffy Little Things from New Zealand. Her work and tutorials are super incredible.
What you need:

1. Wool Roving (get an assortment like this)
2. Felting Needles (I like this tool to hold the needles, it is safer)
3. Extras-yarn scraps, needles for stitching the yarn, buttons for eyes (you can also felt the eyes!)

2.Kumihimo or macrame knotting projects
Friendship bracelets and stacking bracelets are such a trend now that just about everyone in your group will want to make something colorful and knotty to wear. You can use a kumihimo braiding board or print out and make your own. You can also embrace your inner love-child and create some macrame bracelets. I love the bracelet tutorials on this site for macrame and knotting.

What you'll need:

1. yarn or cording of some kind (I like this hemp assortment)
2. kumihimo braiding boards  (I like this assortment of shapes)
3. scissors! I like these cute ones!
4. a ruler or yardstick is also helpful

3.Altered books
Creating an altered book while on a trip is a nice way to make the scrapbook in the moment. Especially if you are travelling with school-age children, this can be a good way to insert some quiet time into your day. We've do this on beach trips. We borrowed a small photo printer from a friend and each day the children could cut, paste, paint and stitch their pages describing the activities that happened the day before. I'm one of those people who has boxes of photos and ticket stubs and maps that I want to add to a scrapbook 'someday' - doing the book ON the trip means nothing else has to go into that box! To create an altered book scrapbook on your trip, take along some scissors, glue sticks, rubber stamps, ink pads, markers, an old book and a photo printer. The rest of the embellishments can come from your trip. For inspiration, you can check out this book.

4.Apothecary bottle necklaces
These tiny glass-bottle necklaces are a great travel craft. You can fill them with beach sand, sharks teeth, a feather, a leaf or a tiny rock from the mountains. This craft is EASY PEASY and perfect for the 'I am not crafty' set.
You'll need:
tiny glass bottles (find them here)


5.Decopatch
Decopatch requires a bit more of a work space, and some drying time, but it's a great rainy-day-on-vacation craft. You can cover a paper-mache animal, or a box, or you can even Decopatch a pair of shoes! This craft is also good for the 'I'm not crafty' crowd as it involves little more than paint brush strokes and really, you can't mess it up!

5.Metal-etching
Don't laugh at this last one. I am trying it this week in the mountains with a group of friends. We'll take some copper discs and decorate them with words or images using Sharpie markers. We'll etch them and then use a punch to turn them into pendants or key-chains. Handmade souvenirs, voila! This meets my criteria for a not trashy craft, and I don't think it will be super hard to clean up.

Do you have a favorite travel craft you think I should try? Leave it below in the comments.

Whew! a hard weekend...

Okay, I'm about to do that whiney thing that I HATE when people do. Consider that your warning.

I had a hard weekend here in bead land.

It was my own fault. I took my girls to The Ancestral Homeland (Ohio!) to visit grandparents, Great-Grammie, Aunties and Unkies, cousins and more. I planned on driving them up there on Sunday and then returning back to NC on Thursday afternoon, in plenty of time to greet our visiting artist (Diana of Suburban Girl Studio) and get all set up for her trunk show AND Carol Owen's class this weekend. Of course, the trip would be a bit squeezed in but if I don't go when I can squeeze it in, I'll never go.

So I went. We went.

The trip up was kinda, sorta uneventful. We stopped at our favorite mid-way place, Tamarack, and bought some hand-made goodies. We ate too much Easter basket candy. We listened to podcasts and talked and watched the weather. We cheered as we crossed bridges and went through tunnels, looked for deer by the road side and laughed at the dogs in the cars driving next to us. Even my speeding ticket in Meigs County, Ohio, didn't dampen the fun.

The visit was fabulous. We had a week of really, really awesome visit fun that included tons of cousin-play time, fancy hair-do's with Auntie, our first-ever Varsity Men's Volleyball game (go Rocks!) and a tour of an inspiring Mark Rothko show at the Columbus Museum of Art. We hugged and chatted and laughed and talked. Then we got up really early to come home so I could begin the weekend.

Uh-oh. Snow, traffic, snow, more traffic, accidents on the side of the road, keep the gas tank full, more snow, is it April?, completely stopped traffic, glad we stocked up on snacks, let's turn the van off for a while to conserve gas, MORE SNOW?!?, traffic moves, exits are closed, more snow, traffic moving again but heck, it's so late, time to get a hotel room.

We finally pulled off in Bluefield, West Virginia only to find out that everyone else on Interstate 77 had thought to pull off for the night, as well. There were no hotel rooms, even at the hotel next to the biker bar and 'adult entertainment' venue. We finally pulled in to a booked hotel just to eat our take-out dinner in the lobby and use the bathroom. When I asked them where I could buy 3 sleeping bags at 11:00 pm on a Thursday in Bluefield, Nick the Night Manager took one look at my worn-out face and my two tired girls and convinced two unrelated guests to share a room so we didn't have to sleep in our van. Thank you, Nick of the Quality Inn in Bluefield. You are awesome. King-sized bed + snuggly Mom in the middle of two tired girls = perfect night.

The next morning we awoke a bit late and strapped ourselves back in to our seats to come home. I hit the ground running and tried my best not to look too road-worn as I helped Diana set up and found her hubby, Colin, the perfect BBQ in our very own parking lot. On Saturday, Diana had a fabulous day of bead-selling at Ornamentea  (including a door-busting, early morning visit from her posse who traveled many miles to see her!) I probably wasn't at my best all day; I was still worn out and even disoriented, but the day was really fun.

And that Crunchie bar? A gift from Diana. I ate it Sunday morning, with a cup of coffee. Yes, it was really delish. Somehow, the Brits really do get candy just right...