We saw these at a museum gift shop and I said, oh just pipe cleaners and styrofoam balls and glue. I can make those. Of course, it was harder than it looked. The difficulties are: 1. keeping the lines straight and 2. not getting glue all over everything. If you needed a license to operate a glue gun, I wouldn’t own one.
Drapes for Todd
These were actually finished back in January but it took him a while to get them hung and then even longer for me to get over there to take a photo. He went out and bought some nice bronze tie-backs for them and they look great. The fabric he chose was really too heavy to be drapes but he wanted something that would help keep the heat in during the winter and I think they’ll do that.
Clay ornaments
I didn’t make any ornaments this year. Usually come Christmas-time I’ve got a box full of that year’s output but this year I had to sit down and make some. I decided to make clay ornaments from cookie cutters. Here are an angel and a stocking, decorated after baking with glitter.
Then I made a raft of candy canes. At first I was trying to get a real candy cane stripe going using that cane method (not named for candy canes but hey, it works) that I’ve read about but that wasn’t working out at all. I ended up with some crazy results and they started to grow on me, so I made crazy tie-died candy canes. Each one is unique, front and back. You just keep putting red and white clay into the pasta roller, folding and twisting, until you see something you like. Then cut. Fun.
Christmas Tree Skirt
Finally! I bought this kit about four years ago. I didn’t have anyone to make it for (my mother made my own tree skirt) but it was so beautiful I couldn’t resist it. Then my friend Sheila’s tree skirt got ruined in a cat/tree accident and I started it for her. This was all year in the making but it was worth it.
Here’s an overview (click for full size photo)
And here’s a close-up of the detail:
Furry blanket
You see how productive I’ve been lately. It’s not that I haven’t been posting. I really haven’t finished any projects in all that time. I’ve got a few longer term projects going that will take a while longer still to finish but mainly I just haven’t been crafting much. It was a fun summer, spent largely outdoors.
And after all that silence, I have a finished piece that took me about 15 minutes to make. But I love it and it was just what I wanted. Made from the new fun fur fleece, blue on one side and white on the other. It’s nothing more than two pieces of fabric sewn together but the resulting shapeless floppiness fits the fabric exactly. This is the best snuggling blanket ever made and I’ve got the best snuggler to share it with me (which has got a lot to do with how little I’ve been getting done).
Last batch of bowls
My machine has died. I guess it wasn’t meant to do so much satin stitching through so many layers of fabric. Here are the last three bowls it managed to turn out before biting the dust.
Sparkle bobble baby blanket
It’s hard to get a good picture of this yarn. The variegated yarn is somewhat lighter and more pastelly than it appears in the photo and it has a sparkle thread running through it. This is the second blanket I’ve made from Our Best Baby Afghans. It’s for my cousin Peter’s first baby.
Holiday bowls
Can you say obsessed? I started working with my stash of holiday fabric. This is the basic square pattern but I made it smaller. The size called for in the book makes a pretty big bowl. I ran out of the gold thread I was using so this one has a different color thread along the top.
Another example of running out of thread partway through but it really works with this design. It takes a fair amount of thread to do one of these bowls. This is the alternate hexagon shape, also made smaller.
Another variation of the hexagon shape where you use a circle on the outside but a hexagon on the inside and cut the darts as for a hexagon. As you can see, these really do reverse although most of them look better one way than the other.
This one was a nightmare. First of all, it was made with canvas instead of the craft interfacing. That’s how to get the floppy corners. The book calls for two layers of canvas which I tried to fuse together but the fusing didn’t hold very well on the canvas so, as I was working, my textile sandwich (as she calls it) was coming apart in the middle. Also, the canvas shreds along the edges, so when I was doing the satin stitching around the top, I had to contend with strings of canvas everywhere and so the edge didn’t end up very smooth. On top of that, I was using this fancy gold thread as you can see. It didn’t like being wound on a bobbin very much and until I learned to lighten up the tension it kept breaking as I was sewing. Came out OK in the end though and I learned some things. The material doesn’t photograph very well because it’s shiny but it’s a beautifully elegant bowl.
My masterpiece. Isn’t it cute? This is the other circular pattern which is made with canvas. Having learned from the last one, I basted the two layers of canvas together instead of trying to fuse them. Then, once I’d trimmed my textile sandwich down to the final size, I did a line of zig zag around the top to keep the shedding to a minimum. Although you do cut through the stitches as you make the darts, the book recommends to cut and then sew each dart, one at a time, so there’s not much time for the stitches to unravel before they’re oversewn.
The other thing I learned about working with canvas is that it’s harder to pull the edges together when joining up the darts. The book has you start by joining the darts with zig zags and then going back over with satin stitch but it recommends that you start right off with the satin stitch once you’ve got the hang of it. That’s OK with the stiff interfacing but with canvas I recommend doing the zig zag pass first. It allows you to concentrate on the practicality of joining the edges on the first pass and worry about making it look pretty on the second.
I’m trying to restrain myself from making more bowls but they’re calling to me. It’s so much fun picking out two fabrics and a thread color and a shape and size and then seeing how it all comes out because they all seem to come out so nicely.
Fabric Bowls
When I first read through Fast, Fun & Easy Fabric Bowls I was a little intimidated by the unusual materials and the need to do satin stitching which I’d never done on my machine. So I put the book away for a while. What a mistake! It turns out that the fabric bowls really are fast and easy to make, and as for fun, well I think I’m addicted to them. Here are the first three I made:
This is the first one I made. It’s the square pattern. I love the colors. It really goes with my dining room.
This is the hexagon pattern in a classic delft look.
This is one of the circle patterns, the one with darts. I didn’t read the instructions all the way through first. For the other shapes, the darts are made by measuring but with this circle shape, the book includes a pattern for the darts. That means that you either need to make the initial circle the size the book told you to or plan ahead and have the pattern reduced appropriately. So I had to fudge the darts a little to make them fit the smaller sized circle I’d started with. It still came out OK.
For the most part, you can make the bowls any size you like, but careful with that circular one. Each bowl is reversible and you don’t have to use a contrasting color for the base if you prefer a solid look. As I worked on each bowl, there would be a point where I’d attached the contrasting base and I’d look at the flat bowl with the blotch of contrasting color and the satin stitches running around it and I’d think how ugly it looked and a little warped too.
But in the end every bowl I made has come out fantastically. It’s almost as though you can’t go wrong. More to come.
Other fairlytale puppets
Here are the rest of the fairytale puppets – a king, a queen, a jester, and a knight. These were fun to make: choosing little scraps of interesting materials and trim.
I especially had a good time with the jester who’s made out of a few fat quarters.
Here’s the whole gang. That’s the dragon lying limp at their feet. I guess the knight slew him.