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.

Crazy quilting is another way of creating patchwork quilts. Crazy quilts don't use a pattern (traditionally). They are the ultimate in scrap quilting. Crazy quilts are often heavily embellished too. Some use ribbon embroidery.

Crazy Quilting is More than Just Embellished Patchwork

The first crazy quilt I saw was embroidered with delicate stitches, beads and other little things. There were images of birds, spiders and other creatures and things the quilter must have liked or been thinking about. She (I'm assuming it was a woman quilter) had used fabric scraps, fabric and textiles from used clothes, her own wedding gown and her Mother's wedding gown, cigar bands and assorted other textiles which I no longer remember. That quilt was full of local history and her own personal history. All together it was an elaborate masterpiece to keep you warm, snuggled up in your bed each night.

Early crazy quilts were from the 1800's, were made with silk and velvet then heavily embroidered. Often beads, buttons and accessories were added for an extra glamorous touch. Though the idea was to recycle, they were meant to be showy creations. It's a shame to see some modern crazy quilts which have become far more on the practical side versus being gorgeous and decadent looking. But, the concept is still the same.

Vintage Vogue - Crazy Quilt Blocks - https://thatgrrl.com/blog/includes/download.php?file=vintage-vogue-crazy-quilt-blocks.pdf

I taught myself to crochet granny squares. I made lots of them. I used a lot of coloured yarn but then I stopped. I never did start doing anything with them all. I've still got some of them around. So this is my quest to get back to crocheting and to make something with the granny squares I already have.

What I'd really like to find for sewing up all those granny squares is a backpack. The kind I can use as a purse. So it has to be medium sized with enough extra pockets, zipper pockets and fold over pockets, for my keys, the book I'm reading, my digital camera, paper and pens I keep for making notes, my bus pass, my wallet, my mobile pharmacy, and all the other essential stuff I carry around day to day.

So far I can't find anything to suit me. But I have found some very interesting, unique and creative patterns and ideas.

Granny Square History

Crochet itself seems to have been around since the 1350s and likely before. People didn't always make a point to write about the work of women. So there are many things we won't ever know about. Those we have now were likely passed down a long time, though many generations of women.

Granny squares date back to at least Victorian times. They were known as patchwork squares. Most often they were a good way to use up scraps of yarn from other projects. So the patchwork squares were a simple pattern which could be used for everyday stuff rather than the fancy work like crochet lace and doilies.

Granny squares found new popularity in the 1970's when people wanted simple and colourful crafts to make and wear.

Ribbon embroidery looks complicated when you see some of the wonderfully feminine and romantic looking work done by others. But, if you learn some basic embroidery stitches like the straight stitch, stem stitch and the French knot you can already begin to embroider with ribbons. The trick between regular embroidery and ribbon embroidery is to leave a bit of extra slack in your thread so they are not pulled too tight. You want the ribbon to look placed rather than pulled.

My favourite ribbon embroider work are whole gardens of flowers, especially those I have seen on old, Victorian crazy quilts.

Ribbon Embroidery Resources

• Debbie Cripps - PDF file with a Ribbon Embroidery Stitch Guide

• Beginners' Silk-Ribbon Embroidery: Five Easy Stitches - Threads

• Ribbon Embroidery | Pinterest

• Pinterest Boards - Ribbon Embroidery

• Flickr: silk ribbon embroidery

Embroidery with Ribbons

I fell in love with ribbon embroidery at least 20 years ago when crazy quilting became popular for awhile. Ribbon embroidery was an extra, an embellishment used on some of the old Victorian crazy quilts.

Ribbon embroidery is mostly about flowers. Now all of it though. It's usually very feminine looking but I've seen some ribbon embroidery used in creative, unusual ways too.

I like hand sewing. Most of the sewing I do is either making Christmas ornaments or mending. I hand sew buttons, hem and mend holes. I don't know how I end up sewing everything by hand. I do have a sewing machine, a very good one which my Mother bought me as a wedding present. It's tucked away in a cabinet. Maybe the idea of taking the time to thread it and set it up keeps me from using it. Meanwhile, you can thread a needle and start sewing by hand right away.

Ribbon embroidery is so romantic and feminine looking. I can't see a machine ever being used for embroidery with ribbons. For one thing, just try running the ribbons through the machine instead of the much thinner thread they are meant to use.