from tiny acorns...

About three (four? five? more?) years ago, I went gathering acorn cups when I was walking in the woods near my mum and dad's house in Elgin.

I was thinking about trying felting (even back then and yet I still haven't tried it!) and I thought felting little acorns to put in the cups might be a good project to start with.

Since needle felting (which I'm treating loosely as felting in general) is on my craftathon 2011 list, I thought I should rescue the acorns from the random-craft-supply box and get felting now.

Then I randomly saw some felted acorns on etsy (they popped right up on the front page) and suddenly I didn't want to felt any acorns. Even though I'd been meaning to do it for years, it still felt like copying.

But by that time I had got the acorns out of the box and remembered how cute they were and I really wanted to play with them and I had all that lovely new fabric I was telling you about...

..so I sewed some acorn brooches instead. Voila!

All these ones (and their little paper-leaf packaging) have gone to live in the Made In The Shade Maisonette. I made more to list in my etsy shop, but I haven't photographed them yet. It would have made more sense to photograph the ones I would be selling online, but I got so attached to each and every one of them that I couldn't part with these ones without taking a photo first. Hopefully Glasgow will not be so dark the next time I have a day off and I'll be able to get some photos of the rest and start listing them in my shop asap. I'll let you know when they're there. I've been wearing a red acorn with white polka dots on my jacket lapel all week and it still makes me, "Eep!" in my head every time I put my jacket on.

In other news... there is nothing like trying (and failing) to install a printer/scanner all day to ruin your good mood. Now it looks like the printer/scanner is working but it has somehow made everything else on my computer stop working, including Photoshop, my best friend (nay, lover) in the world of my computer. Aaargh! What good is a printer/scanner to me if I can't use Photoshop to make what I want to print/scan look better? I'm hoping a restart might solve the problem, but I'm sorely tempted to throw the new printer/scanner against the wall and then jump on it until it dies. As if a rogue printer wasn't bad enough, Marks & Spencer's ruined my cheesy treat (a rare thing in these diet-driven days) by selling us OUT OF DATE blue cheese, which wasn't spotted until my mouth was watering and I was just about to cut into it. Just show me who to throw against the wall and jump on and I'll do it. See, told you my good mood was ruined ;)

Later: the Photoshop solution! Just in case you have come across this bitter rant while googling to try to find a solution to the same problem (Photoshop quitting unexpectedly when you try to open it after installing a new printer/scanner) here is what I did to fix it. I should forewarn you that I don't understand why or how this works, but it has worked. Apparently some scanners have something in them that conflicts with the TWAIN something-or-other (driver? plug-in? I don't know) in Photoshop. The scanners shouldn't have this in them, but scanner manufacturers don't really care if your Photoshop doesn't work as long as the scanner does. (You can see I' still feeling a little bit bitter here.) Anyway, all you have to do is disable the TWAIN whatever in Photoshop by putting a ~ in front of it. If you go into your Adobe Photoshop folder, there should be a plug-ins folder with a folder in it called import/export. (That's Adobe Photoshop > Plug-ins > Import/Export) That's where you'll find the TWAIN thingy and you just add the ~ in front of its name like this.

After that, your Photoshop should open as normal. Mine did anyway. I'm a bit worried about disabling part of Photoshop when I don't actually know what it does, but word on the web is that it's fine and all you'd have to do to re-enable it would be to delete the ~ again anyway. I'm not sure if this problem/solution only applies to Macs. It certainly seemed to be Mac users who were experiencing the same thing. Hope this helps some other non-computer-savvy person in the future. (Hello, person from the future!) Does this count as a tutorial? It's certainly not a craft tutorial, but I'll add it to my tutorials category anyway so it's easy for anyone to find again should they need to.