Rhinestone Beagle: Temari fun day

This post has been in the making now for over a year and Anita and I didn't even know it. Let me start at the beginning and when I get to the end I'll stop, I promise. In February of 2012 I took a cooking/baking class with my mom at the John C Campbell Folk School, which is very near her house in NC. If you ever get a chance to take a class there you really should, this place is amazing, you can stay at the folk school in cute dorms and they have hundreds of classes. They even feed you. Anyhoo, their gift shop has a wonderful book section about all thing crafty and traditional. The bread making and woodworking sections are to be envied! While thumbing through said room of literary requirement I came upon this book....

Now I had seen these round works of art made back when I was in college in Montana but I had no idea what they were or how to even start looking for them on the Internets, let alone the fact that they were a craft all the way from Japan. So I peruse the book and decide that if I really want it I will come back and get it on my last day of class. Well, that didn't work out so well as we got so busy I forgot to go back. I spent the next nine months thinking about how I wish I had purchased that book and given the craft a try. Fast forward to November and a trip to Disney World and then back to my mom's for a week with her. I made sure that I went back to the Folk School to pick up that book. If I had been thinking about it that long I definitely wanted to give that craft a go. We go back to the gift shop and low and behold they have one copy left and it was even on sale, serendipity at its best I say.

Jump forward a few more weeks and we are in January 2013. I'm at work with Anita and she tells me she has this new craft she has been stalking on the Internets made out of these thread wrapped balls and it's called Temari. I kid you not almost a year later the two of us independently come around to the same craft out of nowhere. Well I tell her I just got a very nice book on the topic and we decide to make a date to try out this traditional craft. I picked one of the very beginner Temari balls to start off with, but not Anita. No, never Anita. She finds the one that strikes her like a bolt of lightning upon first glance and vows to do it come hell or high water. The one that jumped out at her was almost all the way at the back of the book in the "Ninja masters only" section. But while I say all this about my lovely blog-buddy she always comes through with a phenomenal project in the end, so even though there is much to do about fussing during the crafting, she has a project to be proud of.

Anita's in all its wonderful purple glory. She is a bit of a purple nerd, this is so up her alley it is silly.

This is my Temari ball, much less adventurous, though that gold floss is a pain in the butt to work with.

While the craft is a bit time consuming with all the thread wrapping, it is very relaxing, sans the gold floss that is, and I will keep this as a favorite craft to turn to when I need to keep myself busy and happy. Have you been trying a new craft, we would love to hear about it!

Keeping it thready,

Kelly, the origami ninja