Yes – because I have exciting news! John (Human John that is, not John Beastie my knitted life partner) built me a new tower to live in.
Here are my previous accommodations in Tierney’s studio (in a box John made during his earlier days of woodworking):
And here is my new home – a three story tower!
Before I show you a closer tour, here are a couple photos from the build of my new tower home:
Here are close ups of each floor and my roof garden 😉
Top floor – my dressing room and closet:
John built me a freestanding closet that can be moved; and Tierney found at gift shop this summer during her travels tiny hangers that she put away hoping someday I would be able to use them! (You might be curious about the container of Vaseline on the top shelf of my closet – Human Tierney and John also found that traveling this summer and thought it was very cute – a Beastie sized personal care product!)
Middle Floor – My Craft Room!
Beside sewing/quilting, Tierney found miniature versions of the other crafts for that she enjoys like drawing/coloring and knitting.
Lower Level – the Living Room
Now I have a room to hang out with John Beastie in and listen to music on my new turntable (see yesterday’s post), have tea and drink some Hop Monsters IPAs (my favorite craft beer).
Rooftop Garden
I might have been influenced by Tierney but for some reason I really love Sunflowers...
So I am very pleased with my new home, what do you think?
Postscript
Tierney thought I should store my colored pencils like she keeps hers – upright in containers for easy access, so she just now put mine for me in a little Colorado mug!
Hello! This is the tierneycreates Beastie guest blog posting (if you are new to this blog, my story is on this post – I’m A Monster!!! and you can see all my posts at this link: Beastie Adventures).
It’s been a while since I’ve done a guest blogger post and I know you all have missed me!
For Thanksgiving I decided to visit my partner John Beastie (see his story at this post Guest Blog Post: Mail Order Groom) who lives in the basement in John’s (Tierney’s husband) desk area (I would have invited him to my home in Tierney’s studio but it is currently being remodeled by Human John, more in a future post):
(Tierney found that strange sign “A fart is a wish your butt makes” at a little shop in Maryland while she was vacationing with her sister earlier this year.)
John Beastie served us a non traditional Thanksgiving meal of spaghetti and meatballs (his trademark dish) on the table John made me a couple years ago (see post Guest Blogger: A Desk for Me!) perched on the new table John made himself (see post John Builds Himself a Desk)
After dinner, John Beastie, who loves bourbon, brought out his bottle of Monsters Mark for an after dinner drink.
I’m not into bourbon like the human Tierney is so instead I asked him if I could show him my new record player – a Teeny-Tiny Turntable!
I then pulled out two bottles of Hop Monster IPA for us (I’m more of a craft beer Beastie than a bourbon Beastie) to enjoy while listening to some of my records.
My turntable came with a couple records that play a snippet of music of different musical genres and a book on 10 historical Chart Topping Record Albums.
John Beastie started reading the Teeny-Tiny Turntable book and I suggested that we play some music instead.
I wanted to listen to “Classic Rock” but John Beastie wanted to listen to “70’s Funk” and once I put the music on something strange started to happen:
I thought at first that John Beastie was having a seizure but then I discovered he was dancing! Well what he described as dancing…
(And yes the music you hear in the video is actually the music that comes out of the Teeny-Tiny Turntable when you put a record on!)
I made big progress and got the whole Sunflower themed Granny Square blanket all attached (horizontal and vertical) using a single crochet stitch to join the squares in both directions.
Here it is on the “Design Carpet”:
Here is another photo:
Now I am adding a single crochet border around the whole thing, likely several rows of single crochet, I’ll decide as I go along.
And then it will be time to weave in all the thread tails that are hiding in the back!
Oh I did try to make finishing the granny square blanket a portable project on like to I did with the individual granny squares, where I would work on them while riding in the car…
But it was a disaster and we had the “Great Hunt for the Lost Crochet Hook” in the car as well yarn tangling and blanket in my feet tangling disasters. So I had to finish it in my living room sitting in a chair to limit the drama – ha!
House Holiday Decorating
After I got the blanket assembled I felt very industrious and with the help of John got the Christmas tree up and the fireplace mantle decorated for the holidays!
It was fun to pull out our ornaments and various decorations and see them again! I missed these three holiday bears that I’ve had for over 25 years – they’ve held up pretty well:
I also put up this copy of The Night Before Christmas that John has had since he was a child.
The pages are on the verge of falling apart but I like reread it every year.
I’ve been looking for ways to comfort myself during strange times. I shared in the post Flowers on the Table, my keeping fresh flowers on my kitchen table to brighten my world.
Another things I’ve been doing is playing with a set of Magnetic Poetry words I found a couple months ago thrifting; and writing (albeit bad) poetry on a magnetic bulletin board.
The challenging and yet cool thing is that my poetry is limited to the magnetic words provided in the set, however Creative Limitation/Creative Constraint is known to be a good thing (*see the Postscript section below for an AI summary of the research on this topic).
Most of it has been forgettable but I really like this piece and thought I would share:
THE FEROCIOUS ETERNITY by tierneycreates
but perhaps
above a vast sacred sky
seeps only the fresh clean
liquid of time
yet with delicious rhythm
we wake
we listen
and we embrace
the ferocious eternity
of a universe
I haven’t written any additional poems since this one as I do not want to take it down right now. I find it strangely comforting and empowering.
Speaking of ways to comfort/empower yourself during “strange” times, if you don’t already follow her, my blogging friend Laura of Laura Bruno Lily has a powerful creative piece she did as part of the Fall of Freedom program where creatives express Activism through art. Here is a link to the post which contains a video of her piece:Fall of Freedom 11/21 – 22, 2025.
If you are struggling with our strange times, please share if you like, what you are doing to to comfort and/or empower yourself, in the comment section below.
While traveling in September, I ran across a framed print of the 1961 Norman Rockwell painting, The Golden Rule, and it definitely gave me a pause for thought:
*Postscript
As a creative person you’ve likely already heard about the concept of “Creative Limitations” or “Creative Restraints”. If not, here is an awesome summary by Google AI of research and thoughts on this concept.
Limitations foster creativity by preventing overwhelm, forcing a more focused approach, and encouraging innovation within boundaries. Instead of being paralyzed by limitless options, creators can use constraints to find novel solutions, distill ideas into their most impactful form, and become more resourceful. This happens because limitations act as a “creative anchor,” stimulating the brain to make new connections and discover solutions outside of standard methods.
Limitations spark creativity by:
Prevent decision paralysis: An abundance of choices can be overwhelming, leading to “analysis paralysis.” Limitations simplify the creative process by narrowing the field of vision, allowing for deeper focus on the task at hand.
Encourage innovation: When faced with a restriction, creators must find a new path to achieve their goal. This can lead to more unique, original, and efficient solutions than they might have come up with if they had unlimited options.
Force efficiency and focus: Limitations, such as a time limit or a limited budget, can force creators to prioritize what is truly important, leading to a more streamlined and impactful result.
Stimulate the brain: The brain grows by forming new connections. Constraints can act as a catalyst for this growth, pushing the brain to create new branches and associations that lead to creative breakthroughs.
I know this is why I love working with a set group of fabrics or fabric scraps when making a textiles project. One of my favorite scrappy projects was Seattle Scrappy where I was given/challenged with creating a piece from a bag of my friend’s scraps.
I only used those scraps for the quilt top. I used a recycled thrifted cotton bed sheet for the back and hand quilted it with thrifted Perle Cotton thread I already had in my stash.
Do you need any help getting in the mood for the upcoming Christmas holidays? Do you want to see where Christmas has “exploded” and holiday cheer is spewed everywhere? Well I have a post for you 😉
John and I were recently in Las Vegas for his poker tournament and we stopped one day at the Bellagio Hotel’s Conservatory and Gardens where they had outdone themselves on Christmas decorations.
Here we are, overwhelmed with holiday cheer 😉
I don’t mean to make fun of it, the display was actually very lovely and the Bellagio’s team did a spectacular job with the design and decorations.
I got a kick out of the miniature train set circling one of the Christmas trees on display. It reminded of the electric train set we got from my grandfather that always chugged around our Christmas tree when I was a kid.
After touring the gardens we popped into the over the top Christmas Shop at the Bellagio where many items cost a mortgage payment.
But they were beautiful to look at and we had fun browsing the very crowded shop.
It’s been a while since I posted about one of my husband John’s woodworking projects.
I set up a website/blog for him for his Mighty Moe Creations – but I never got the posts from my tierneycreates blog on his woodworking transferred over so it is not really a functioning blog yet.
So for now I will continue to share his crafts on my blog 🙂
John was tired of his desk which he bought used like 15 years ago from a neighbor:
He wanted a smaller profile “Mission” style desk and found images like this one on line to inspire him:
With no formal project plans or any instructions, John figured out how to build himself a desk. First he had to learn a new skill – using little dowels for joining the railing on the side pieces of his desk:
He was pretty proud of himself for making it through that which was the most challenging part of the build.
From there he went on to build the rest of the desk:
Then stain and polyurethane it:
And finally to add era/style specific handles to the drawers that he had to special order:
Here is John very happy at his new desk!
Now he plans to build a coordinating station for his printer with an attached 2-drawer file cabinet.
(In case you are wondering what the sign behind John in his bar “Pog Mo Thoin” means, it is Gaelic for “Kiss My Arse” – we picked it up in 2022 while in Ireland. John’s nickname is “Moe” and so he got a kick out of the sign!)
Things have been mighty strange, sad and stressful here in “America-land” and this summer I decided to combat the ugliness I would see in the news (when I could bear to check it) with BEAUTY.
I decided to try to always have a bouquet of flowers on our kitchen table. I’ve continued the habit into the Autumn and plan to take this practice through the Winter and beyond.
I started with pulling flowers this summer from my garden and putting them on the upstairs patio table:
By the way here are our last roses of the season in our rose garden in the front of the house (I had some of them in a bouquet but didn’t photograph it):
Then I moved to purchased flowers each week (or every other week if the bouquet was especially hardy) and here are some of those bouquets:
The bouquets really make my kitchen table happy and add some happiness to our lives!
I got John’s T-Shirt Quilt assembled and I am shipping it off to the long-arm quilter. Not sure if I’ll have it back for Christmas as she is of course backlogged this time of year!
Just a reminder from my previous post on this quilt – I will have red binding to it to frame it and pull in the scrap red flannel I used in the center to make the center T-Shirt fit with the others.
Oh and here is a photo of the basketball themed flannel (John loves basketball and was even playing in an intramural league where he was the oldest guy and the referee nicknamed him “Old School” – ha!) that will be on the back:
I got all 11 rows of 12 sunflower granny squares each, connected vertically. I also began connecting them horizontally.
It seems like I am so close, but so far away from finishing. I have many horizontal rows to single crochet together and then I need to do a border around the whole thing to “square” it/neaten it up.
Then I have all the ends I did not already weave/crochet in to weave in 😦
But I try to focus on far how I have come and how much closer I am to being able to snuggle under my sunflower blanket!
Weather is weird in my part of Colorado and it is at time trying to be Spring, then Summer and then switches back to Fall. To encourage Fall to come to us in full force (bring on 40 degree days!) I made a batch of yummy Pumpkin Cream Cheese Muffins:
I think I’ve posted about these muffins before but here is the link to the recipe by Sally’s Baking Addiction:
The recipe looks tedious because you have to make 1) the streusel topping, 2) the cream cheese filling, and 3) the pumpkin muffin BUT it is totally worth it. I put on some good music and before I knew it I had to components assembled and they were baking the oven.
John was naughty and have two once they cooled down but they were VERY tasty with our coffee/tea!
It feels like I floated far away from a regular quiltmaking practice and I’d like to return to it.
I’d like to always have some quilt, whether traditional or art, in progress on my design wall.
So I am easing back in by making a simple T-shirt quilt for John for Christmas (it’s not a surprise as I wanted him of course to have a say in what T-shirts he gave up for the project!);
I took 17 of his old T-shirts and backed them with interfacing and trimmed them to 12.5 inches by 12.5 inches.
The one in the middle, “Beards Turn Laziness Into Awesomeness” is not actually one of his old T-shirts but a joke T-shirt my friend S found for John while she and I were thrifting.
I am setting the interfaced T-shirt squares with a tartan looking flannel I found a couple years ago at a thrift shop.
I will bind the quilt once it is quilted with red flannel binding to “frame” it/coordinated with the scrappy red flannel I put around the center T-shirt to make it large enough to fit into the design.
Happy to have a quilt in progress up on the design wall!
It should come together quickly so I hope to soon have an update on this quilt!
I love New York City (NYC) and I’ve been there many many many times. This is a continuation of the post Time in Times Squareabout the couple days that my sister, John and my nephew L spent in NYC in October 2025. This post is a little bit about our wander from Soho to Chelsea one day, with most of the time spent in the West Village.
I grew up in Long Island, NY and Albany, NY. I remember when I was 14 years old in the late 1970s taking the train from Long Island to NYC with a high school friend. We were two teens wandering around NYC unsupervised. Perhaps not the safest idea nowadays but it seemed okay (maybe back then).
Because I’ve been to NYC so many times, when I visit, which is usually with my sister who loves NYC also, we like to focus on a specific neighborhood(s) and just enjoy our times like locals. We are very “un-touristy”.
Some Background on NYC and How I’ve Visited Over the Years
If you are not familiar with New York City, it is comprised of five (5) boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and Staten Island. The boroughs are then divided into neighborhoods.
For examples some of the well known neighborhoods in Manhattan are Greenwich Village, Soho, Tribeca, Chinatown, Upper East Side, Central Park, Hell’s Kitchen, Harlem, Meatpacking District, etc.
Image credit: Wikipedia
The challenge with visiting NYC is there is SO MUCH TO DO and SO MUCH TO SEE that you have to narrow your visit to just a specific section to really enjoy it (at least in my opinion). Here are some examples:
Back in 2017 when I attended Quilter’s Take Manhattan (see posts from my blogging category Quilters Take Manhattan), I pretty much only spent time in the Garment District and Central Park area (I spent the most amazing day on my own at the Metropolitan Museum of Art one of the most magical places in the world in my opinion).
When my sister and I attended New York Fashion Week in Manhattan in 2021 we primarily hung out in Soho and accidentally discovered the “Little Paris” micro-neighborhood that we didn’t even know existed (a cultural heritage project and micro neighborhood occupying the stretch of Centre Street between Grand Street and Broome Street – Wikipedia).
So what I am trying to explain in a very long-winded manner is when I visit NYC I focus on a small part of NYC each time I visit.
And that’s what we did in October. We stuck primarily to the Manhattan neighborhoods of West Village, Soho, and Chelsea.
The Tiniest Yarn Shop
While in West Village we discovered what I call the “tiniest yarn shop I’ve ever seen” – West Village Knit & Needle. There maybe smaller ones but was impressively small!
We took the narrow stairs down to the shop in a brownstone’s basement:
There was barely enough room for John, my sister, my nephew and I to maneuver around (they were great sports stopping at bookstores and craft stores whenever I came upon one) but here is a little tour:
The staff was very friendly and one of them was working on an amazing cabled cardigan:
That is some serious cable knitting. I tried to learn to knit cables when we were visiting Ireland in October 2022 in a class taught by Helen of Knit with Helen but I have yet to finish the cabled knitted headband project she gave me to take home!
Helen is the one who knitted the tiny cabled sweater worn by the tierneycreates Beastie:
tierneycreates Beastie with Mattie Beastie (both wearing tiny cable knit sweaters by Helen) and John Beastie in Dublin, October 2022
(By the way we are returning to Dublin in 2026 on our way to visit London for the first time. Aer Lingus flies out of Denver now and we can fly directly, for a reasonable price, to Dublin and then hop on an hour and a half flight to Heathrow. We had such a wonderful time in Ireland 3 years ago we want to stop there again for a couple days before heading to the UK)
I am all over the place in this post, what was I originally blogging about? Oh yes – wandering around the West Village in Manhattan.
We Snuck in Some Thrifting
While wandering around West Village we came upon a charity thrift shop – Housing Works Thrift Shops and just had to peek in.
My sister and I love thrifting (we usually find a thrift shop or two on our sister vacations) and I seem to have corrupted John, who at first appeared to be tortured whenever asked to accompany me into a thrift shop. He now seems to enjoy them and was excited to pop into this thrift shop for a wander.
Yes that’s John in the photo above buying something at the thrift shop.
And a Couple Other Places
We didn’t just torture John to thrift stores and yarn shops, my sister surprised him with a visit to the famous Garber Hardware a family owned and operated hardware store in business since 1884.
John was happy wandering this cool hardware store!
We also visited a couple independent bookstores and this one was my favorite – Three Lives & Co.
I had a wonderful chat with the bookstore staff who told me that surprising a lot of people from Colorado has visited there store recently (what?!?! are a bunch of fellow Coloradans all sneaking over to NYC?!?!). John bought a book as did my nephew but I just bought some postcards and bookmarks, as I need another book in queue to read like I need a hole in the head!
We also ate our way through the neighborhoods we visited picking up little treats, snacks and tastes here and there. There is SO MUCH GOOD FOOD in NYC its difficult to even put into words.
For example while wandering we stopped at a wonderful little tiny sushi counter and got a little sushi roll snack to fortify us for our continuing adventures.
Okay you might be asleep now but that’s the end of this post 🙂
Postscript
I misled you, there is a little bit more to this post.
In this post I mentioned the tierneycreates Beastie (Beastie Adventures). I realized she has not “guest blogger post” for a long time on my blog. She used to be quite active. I used to also have Mike the Miniature Schnauzer (who passed in July 2024) “guest blogger post” quite a bit. I think when he passed I just stopped with the “guest blogger” postings.
But in the future I will be bringing back the tierneycreates Beastie as a guest blogger. She has been primarily hanging out in her “apartment” in my studio and I realize it’s time to take her on some adventures again (I have to give her stuff to blog about!) 🙂
Update on the post 48 Granny Squares Now Connected – I now have 84 sunflower granny squares joined together vertically! I am plugging along 🙂
So 7 out of the 11 rows of 12 granny square each, are done and just 4 more rows (48 granny squares) to go.
Then I am of course going to single crochet them together horizontally and add a single crochet border all the way around to anchor everything. After that I will decide if I want to make a fancy border, etc.
Revisiting a Hat I Started Last Winter
I made 137 sunflower granny squares while riding in cars, planes, trains and sitting at events beginning May 2024. Now that the making of the individual sunflower granny squares is done (and the blanket is finally being assembled) I needed another portable project.
I used a variegated ball of yarn I found thrifting with little idea of what the different colors would be since it was already rolled into a ball and I could only see a little of the color changes!
It was my leap of faith hat!
So on Friday John’s son Z was visiting and we took him to the Denver Film Festival and saw the premiere of the film Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, starring Danile Craig, I brought my hat and worked on it in the car on the way to the event and at the event before the film showing began (we arrived early to get good seats and had a bit of a wait before the movie started).
Here’s some additional images from the festival including the lovely Chihuly chandelier that hangs in the Ellie Caulkins Opera House where the film was premiering.
The film was really fun and I recommend it when it premieres on Netflix in December.
tierneycreates 