Hi, I've done quite a bit of felting - but generally I knit up an item, then felt it. When I do use sweaters or other knitted items to "make felt" I just treat them like fabric afterwards... so whatever I can do with a similar fabric, I can do with the "felted" sweater. The 2X cape thing is great! It would have so much surface area! I look in the men's section when I am looking to felt and look for the big men's sizes. I haven't sold any felted items, but I've given them as gifts and they have been well received. There was a picture online of a big rug that looked like one of those potholders we used to make in Girl Scouts, with the loops... it used strips of felt from sweaters and blankets. I have a cedar chest full of these strips waiting for me to get in the mood for a big project :) If you are a knitter or crocheter - it is also worthwhile to buy sweaters made of a great yarn and "unknit" them... I have skeins of cashmere I have unwound from thrift shop sweaters - the price would be prohibitive to buy as yarn... but is a good deal when you unwind them yourself. Not all sweaters lend themselves to being unwound, though... some are cut at the edges rather than being made with a single strand of yarn per piece. If you are going to felt a lot - consider felting within a zippered pillowcase. Those errant fibers that end up in the washwater can turn to felt within the water pump... bye bye washing machine! Diane

Our job took 3 slabs so 2 of them were a bookmatched pair and the third one was the next one in sequence (the one that had its rough face against the rough face against one of the pair. Since its polished face was 4 cm away in the block of granite from the polished faces of the other two, its pattern was very similar to theirs but there was some drift. Our L counter has a sink leg that was longer than the long dimension of the slabs and longer than twice the short dimension. The other leg was longer than the short dimension of the slabs. That means there was no way to lay it out on the slabs so that all seams were bookmatched. (If both legs are no longer than the long dimension of a slab, they can lay it out with a diagonal bookmatched seam in the corner. Our kitchen fabricator doesn't like to do the diagonal seam, but in our case it didn't matter because of the long leg.) The only way to do our counter with only one seam was for the seam to be at the sink or dishwasher. Fabricators seem to be divided on whether a seam at the sink is good or bad, but over the dishwasher is more of an issue because there is no cabinet front for support. We wanted the seam at the sink because it let us have just one seam and our fabricator preferred that as well. Our granite is 2 cm with a plywood underlay so it is well supported at the sink by the plywood and cabinet. Our granite is very active, but the grain doesn't have a strong direction - in some areas, it slants across the slab and in others it was pretty swirly. We spent a couple of hours with the fabricator laying out the templates on the slabs. We were doing granite backsplashes and wanted a good match between the counter and backsplash and also had to fit long pieces for our window sill and counter outside the kitchen window. We chose a placement where the two sides of the seam were in a swirly part of the granite. I can see the seam when I look for it, but I don't notice it otherwise even though the color match at the back of the sink isn't perfect. Recently we had a surround made for a new fireplace from the remnants from our kitchen. The top and one side came from one piece and the other side came from another piece because those were the only remnants long and wide enough. I think the fabricator did a good job of positioning the pieces on the remnants so that the seams aren't jarring even though the long direction of the top piece was parallel to the long direction of one of the side pieces on the same remnant. BTW, the left and right side pieces came from the same part of the slab on the two slabs that were back to back - you can see that they are close to mirror images of each other around the white smile-shaped mark but the darker area a foot or two below the "smile" shows more differences.

This is what I did. It is actually in my breakfast room. The center is 24 inch fridge drawers with 15 inch drawers beside them. The uppers are the same width and 15 inches deep, done to go over the 27 inch depth below to fill the space we had. That extra depth really helped with storing one more row of glasses in the narrow cabinets. Can't say we planned it that way, but it sure worked out well.

Barbara Pym is a great favorite of mine - try Excellent Women. Her books are wonderful, and the characters are beautifully drawn and live very realistic lives without being raped and murdered. A fun YA novel that I discovered here at RP (thank you, whoever it was!) is Sorcery and Cecilia, or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer. There are three books in the series, if you like the first one. I can't remember the quote exactly, nor who said it (an artist, I believe) but to paraphrase - why is it only valid or artistic to evoke negative emotions or feelings? Why isn't happiness just as important? Why, as an artist, does one have to defend oneself for making people smile? I have thought of this nearly every day since I heard it. Go ahead and read happy books, draw pretty bright colored flowers, and don't be afraid of being thought shallow if you want to, at least occasionally, leave the darkness behind.