I'm so honored to announce that I was selected as one of the winners of Craft Magazine 's 2009 Valentine's Day Project Contest ! My winning creation was a soft sculpture, made entirely of hot pink merino wool, called "Love is a BattleField."

The "Love is a Battlefield" Hand Grenade is 1:1 scale replica of a real pineapple grenade. It is a needlefelted sculpture made of solid hot pink merino wool throughout and of course, the heart-shaped pull pin is indeed removable. 

 

It is part of my continuing fine art series of needle-felted weapons made from merino wool. The first of the series, was introduced last winter during my 2008 holiday craft season. In fact, it was at the Bazaar Bizarre Holiday Show, that I sold my first piece to San Francisco's own Mythbusters co-host, Adam Savage.

What a perfect item for an eclectic and interesting gentleman scientist! Adam was so kind to post pictures of the hand grenade when he got home to his Twitpic and Flickr accounts, as well as posted a picture of the half dozen sweet and adorable NifNaks Eggy Eggs that his charming sweetie, Julia, fell in love with. What a heart-bursting moment. :)

I'm totally loving this new series of weapons and am so pleased that others seem to be enjoying it as well. Stay tuned to see pictures of the next in the series that I am working on, a needle-felted Glock hand

I couldn’t imagine a better way of starting off the new year, than communing with friends over brunch on a Sunday morning, so
this past Sunday I invited friends out for some sharing food & conversation at the Thai Buddhist temple in Berkeley, Wat Mongkolratanaram .

It's such a fun experience, exchanging your bills for handfuls of Thai tokens, and then you stand in one of the many food lines and exchange them in for Thai deliciousness. The place is packed with people waiting with patience for a favorite dish – mine being their yummy mango with sticky rice. (The mango with sticky rich is reason alone to go! They serve it with both white AND forbidden rice, AND a wee bit of coconut custard on top, AND the portion is huuuuge.)

After brunch, I invited friends to take our motorcycles up into the Berkeley hills for the lovely scenic views of the entire Bay Area. We had total of 10 bikes, with 12 riders. What fun!

 The day ended with hanging out with a good friend, who communes with The Cute & The Good. Cookies were made, and I had lots of fun documenting all the cuteness abound:

I need more Sundays like this in 2009. How about

Three adorable flip wigs arrived from China today for use in NifNaks photo shoots!