Planet Nice Crafts

Hello Everyone! And Happy Thanksgiving! I hope everyone had at least a little bit of a special day. I had some good homemade food delivered to me which I am always very thankful for because this week was the annual Fruitcake Frenzy. Yes, I bake fruitcakes for Christmas presents to a select group. Fruitcake has a horrible reputation, but I have to say myself that the ones I make defy that generalization. They are not for everyone because the cakes are heavy or dense – and if you don’t really like it, there is a slim chance that you will receive another. They also have a lot of alcohol and nuts, which may not be very appealing. I bake them Thanksgiving week because, the traditional 4-week aging is followed. I use sherry not brandy, perhaps another reason why they defy the fruitcake stereotype. My favorite way to eat a slice is toasted or I have heard that under a broiler is very good. The namesake fruit in the fruitcakes I make as well – when I first started this endeavor many years ag...

Hello Everyone! The popular refrain to stay safe and sane continues. June has been an incredible, momentous, and exhausting month. Planet Nice Crafts has felt the emotion of these times. It has spent time reflecting, but also continuing to stay the course. As of today, 257 masks have been delivered to the MasksNowIllinois group and others in our orbit. The MasksNowIllinois group in totality has completed over 15,000 masks with almost 29,000 requested – so the group is more than half way there. It has been asked where these masks are going. According to the updates, before the beginning of June, healthcare facilities and disabled/senior centers were the main recipients. Now the focus has changed to non-profits and under-resourced places such as orphanages, safe havens, homeless shelters, food pantries, and child care services. This affects Planet Nice Crafts because now only the 2-layer masks are sewn instead of a mask that has a pocket for a filter. The sewing of masks is one of ...

Hello Earthlings! Due to the nasty cough taking a very long time to resolve, no crafting activity on Planet Nice projects has occurred since January. To my surprise, the cough was not due to sinuses being out of balance but instead a virus – not the flu, just something else I picked up and furthered its path to other hosts, probably. This has been a challenge in multiple ways, especially not taking advantage of the Southern light exposure streaming into my work area, but I carry on. Sewing has been ongoing as the College of Lake County prepares for its opening night next weekend of “As You Like It” by William Shakespeare. Because I have no project progress to share, I am going to share knowledge on a design style called Retrofuturism which was I don’t want to say popular, but came to the buffet table of design in the 1960s and 1970s. It combined an optimism for the future, a fascination with space and technology, and streamlined shapes. Think the Jetsons. What brought my atte...

Hello Everyone, It is January 18th but recovery from the holidays is still ongoing. The recovery will need to wrap up very soon as next Tuesday a new semester begins. I wanted to get a post in before I am completely caught up with other tasks. Some crafting activity has been ongoing due to holiday gifting. A little bit of everything has been the order the last month or so with sketching, framing/matting, vinyl cutting, and sewing. The first project I would like to share with you is the creation of a few polar bear stickers. As with the best of projects, it started with putting pencil to paper with sketches: The ideas that spawned the sketches are not completely original, as I looked at others from searches, but with the reworking, I feel they are original now. The sketches were then sketched in Adobe Illustrator into files that were friendly to the Silhouette Portrait 2 vinyl cutter at The Workshop of the Cook Memorial Library. Here is the final produc...