Fobbed! A Fabric Fable-T is for Tuesday

Here you see some (operative word, some) of my scissors in their native habitat.This mug was made by a dear friend of mine, Dave, who called himself, Lost Guide Pottery. I cried when the handle broke, and smile seeing it sitting on my desk, tea-less and scissorful.

At the last Fiber Arts Alliance Meeting (FAA- find us on FB), we had  a series of mini demos by members, all invoving scissors in some way, and I was the ONLY demo-er who's scissors were

(GASP)

 fob-less!

I do a lot of art on the go , and could be carrying up to 20 scissors at a time, and I always identified them with just a piece of masking tape!

(shame and embarrassment)

As luck would have it, Suzanne of Quietfire Design,

asked me if she had sent me the paracord from the Prima Publishing event at last winters CHA.

I looked in the goody box she sent me and there it was!

Scissor fobs in the making!

This is what I had left after making the two fobs.

There was about 8ft of cord, and an instruction book, by Leisure Arts

subtitle

Everybody wants one.

I experimented from the book, ripped them all out and delved into the lanyard making canyons of my mind( and youtube) and came up with a design using what we use to call the box stitch,

added some elephants ,because I could, and some beads to hide where you stabilize the cord by melting it with a lighter.

My second attempt, I started with a knot stitch at the bottom- the book was helpful for this- and finished off with box stitch, beads and a worry doll.

(tell tail tape still in evidence!)

I can proudly enter July's FAA  show and tell with my newly fobbed scissors.

Did y'all make gimp lanyards as kids?

I had to laugh at this brilliant PR job using the pararcord.

It does go faster.

Just for fun, below is one of my favorite Billy Collins poems.

The Lanyard

The other day I was ricocheting slowly

off the blue walls of this room,

moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,

from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,

when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary

where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist

could send one into the past more suddenly—

a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp

by a deep Adirondack lake

learning how to braid long thin plastic strips

into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard

or wear one, if that's what you did with them,

but that did not keep me from crossing

strand over strand again and again

until I had made a boxy

red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,

and I gave her a lanyard.

She nursed me in many a sick room,

lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,

laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,

and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,

and I , in turn, presented her with a lanyard.

Here are thousands of meals, she said,

and here is clothing and a good education.

And here is your lanyard, I replied,

which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,

strong legs, bones and teeth,

and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,

and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.

And here, I wish to say to her now,

is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,

but the rueful admission that when she took

the two-tone lanyard from my hand,

I was as sure as a boy could be

that this useless, worthless thing I wove

out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

(no idea why this is all caps and too tired to mess with HTML!)
Comments and questions welcomed!