My Grandmother was a tea drinker. She liked old teapots, fancy teapots and vintage teapots but then she would put them on the stove to warm up her tea and, in the end, each pot would end up cracked from the heat. So, she ended up with a lot of broken teapots. She could have used a teapot cozy. I know she had at least one. My Mother would knit them for her.

I don't drink a lot of tea but I love the look of the teapots and teapot cosies (or cozies, however you spell it). They have a romantic image. Some of them are so pretty and girlish that you almost want to become an avid tea drinker.

What are your tea drinking traditions?

I don't love tea. It's not so much a part of the traditions and history of Canada as it is in Britain and Japan. But, we do have tea parties, simple and down-sized though they are by comparison. I like Earl Grey tea and I love the smell of Lipton's caramel tea (which they don't seem to sell any longer). My Mother likes to get jasmine tea when we go to a Chinese/ Oriental themed restaurant. I like the ginger tea, the odd time they offer it.

Tea has some part of everyone's family history it seems to me. Even if we don't make and drink tea on a daily basis, it's there. A gift from your Grandmother, an impulse purchase you made yourself, or just something you keep around for company who don't want coffee or hot chocolate.

Kind of nice, when you make tea for someone, to be able to pull out a nice teapot and have the finishing touch of a pretty tea cosy to top it.

I found so many wonderful tea cosies when I began looking for them, I couldn't decide which I would like most. I'm not a knitter so patterns for knitted tea cosies are a bit out for me. Unless I get someone to make it. But, it's never really, truly your very own tea cosy if you paid for it. There's something special about the tea cosy (like any craft project you make yourself). For one thing, you're the only one who knows about that glaring error which you somehow managed to conceal with a bit of extra thread or yarn...

One of my favourite tea cosies was knitted (plain knitting luckily) underneath and the top was decorated with exotic looking crochet flowers. You can find the instructions for it in the links below.

JustJen's Flower Garden Tea Cosy

There is something about buttons. People create all kinds of interesting things with buttons. I knew there would be a lot of button flower ideas. What a great way to make yourself a colourful, simple and cheap bouquet!

Look for buttons at thrift stores. Otherwise your button buying can get expensive. At craft stores and craft aisle in department stores, you can sometimes buy a bag full of buttons. (You can't pick through them for the ones you want, but you get a lot of buttons that way).

I found a lot of colourful flowers and flower bouquets made with buttons.

Most of them seem to glue the buttons together in daisy sort of pattern. Or, they use them as the centre for a fabric flower.

From my Experience

I've been there, as the person writing and the person getting the condolences. From my experience it was best to be kind, keep it short and be honest rather than trying to be nice, polite or neutral.

From my experience, after my Dad died I found many people did not know how to express sympathy or condolences. It's actually not as complicated as they were making it. The best condolences were honest and simple words. One person, in particular, said just the right thing and gave me a new perspective on my own feelings. But, that's not going to happen in most cases.

The friend who had the right words was a good, longtime friend who knew a lot about myself, my life and we had been long time confidants through my divorce too. That kind of friend has a far better chance of knowing the right words.

Here are some ideas, help, and tips to get you through picking the right words to offer your support, sympathy, and encouragement.

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart,
and you shall see that in truth you are weeping
for that which has been your delight.
-Kahil Gibran

Tips for Writing a Sympathy/ Condolence Card

• Mention the loss in some way. Don't send a note that could sound generic. Mention a name if you know it.
• Avoid clichés. They make you seem a little uncaring and less than sincere.
• Keep it short. Unless you are a very close personal friend, stick to just a few words or a couple of sentences.
• Keep it light, think easy reading. Big, dictionary words will just make you sound smug and superior.
• Avoid negativity. Don't complain, claim anything owed or air grievances of your own.
• Be sincere. Don't write anything you don't mean.
• Offer sympathy or condolences but don't say you're sorry. Unless you are somehow responsible for the death.
• Keep religion out of it, unless you know they are religious and which traditions they follow.
• Don't say nothing at all. Even just a simple "thinking of you" is good if you really feel too intimidated, upset or angry.Button Lovers and Collectors

• British Button Society
• The Victorian Button Collectors Club
• National Button Society
• Button Floozies

Ideas and Photos of Button Flowers

• Button Flowers - Pinterest Boards

• Flickr: Button: Wreaths, Trees, Balls and Flowers

My Grandmother's Buttons

My Grandmother kept a canister full of buttons. When clothes became worn out and ready to cut down for rags, she removed the buttons and added them to her button canister. There were all sorts of colours, sizes, shapes and patterns of buttons. Some were very old. My Mother kept the buttons and the canister when my Grandmother died. Now and then we use some of my Grandmother's buttons. But, not for just anything.

Grandmother's buttons are used when we make something special. I used a few for making Christmas decorations and ornaments for the tree. I used one set of her buttons when a favourite sweater lost a button and I wanted all the buttons to match again. There were just enough, all the same type, among the buttons in the canister.

We still have a lot of buttons in the canister. There aren't a lot of things in the regular mending sort of sewing which are special enough for Grandma's buttons. These button flowers would be very nice. I think I would use a lot of the white shirt buttons as the outer petals and then pick a colourful or patterned button for the centre.

Pressing Plants, Flowers or Leaves the Easy Way

Get a big, thick, heavy book, a dictionary is kind of traditional, but not essential. There are other hefty books you can use to squish your flowers.

You also need wax paper or tissue paper to protect the pages of your book and to keep the flowers from breaking apart and sticking to the pages as they become pressed, dried and flattened in between the pages of your book.

Some people don't put the flowers in the pages of the book, they just put the book on top of the flowers. This is fine of course, but it loses some of the history of the project I think. My Grandmother would press flowers in the pages of her diary. She would have to put something heavy on her diary (it wasn't heavy enough on it's own) but I've always liked the custom and the history to pressing flowers in this traditional, sort of romantic way.

My Grandmother pressed the flowers she was given in the pages of her diary. I've always been fond of vintage romantic notions like this. So, I have to be careful when picking up my own old diaries/ journals lest the old pressed blooms slip out from the hand-written pages.

Why press flowers?

Pressed flowers can't keep all their fresh, original colour. I always feel this is the downside of having pressed flowers versus just taking a photograph. But, if you take the time to arrange all those flowers, leaves and so on for a photograph - why not take the extra step of pressing and preserving the originals.

Of course, this means you have to find room to keep them. You can create them as a framed picture and hang it up on a wall. A smaller project could be a in a frame which you could add a photograph to and give as a gift. You might even add other souvenirs from the day or event and turn the pressed flower project into a scrapbooking sort of arts and craft.

So, why press or dry flowers and keep them?

They are a sort of living art. If you use some plants which smell nice you can also keep that scent around in the display. A nice added bonus.

Most of all, I think flowers and plants in general have a short life, it's nice to preserve a few of them - give them added years rather than becoming compost at the end of each garden season.

My Mother likes it because she spends so much of her time in the garden, working. Then at the end of the season she really just has photos and her own memories left. When we take the time to preserve some of her best blooms she can keep them much longer, the very flower she grew in her own garden.

Some gardeners enter flowers in contests. I wonder if they press them and display them in a frame or just add the winning blossoms to the compost pile, mere worm food.

Drying Plants, Flowers or Leaves the Easy Way

The simplest way to dry flowers is to gather them in a bunch, tie the stem ends together tightly and hang them upside down somewhere for at least a few days. They should be dry right through before you store them.

You can tie the bundle to a wire hanger and easier hang the whole bunch over a door knob or something else do-able. Keep them away from steam and water - hanging them in the bathroom is not the best idea. I put newspaper down under them in case petals or leaves fall off as they dry.

Store dried flowers in a sealed container until you're ready to use them. Some dried flowers can be used to make teas as well as just looking pretty.

Kaomoji Emoticons

Kaomoji are probably what you think of when you think of Japanese emoticons. These are text based emoticons made out of a wide variety of different 2-byte characters. Kaomoji means “Facemark” in Japanese.

Emoji Emoticons

Emoji are small image emoticons that were invented in Japan for use with cellphones. The word Emoji means “Picture Letter” in Japanese. Emoji are built into a bunch of different cell phones and are standardized across devices.

Source: About JapaneseEmoticons.net

I like having a real phrase for the text versus graphic image emoticons. I still think of emoticons as the basic keyboard text, ASCII style. I guess they could be known as ASCII emoticons.