January
28th 2008
Posted under Weaving
Scarf. Only took me about 3 or 4 hours to weave, I think. Made from some yarn I dyed, 90% wool, 10% nylon. 7 1/2″ x 70″ without fringe.
Archive for January, 2008
January
28th 2008
Posted under Toy
Just 3 more Pointy Kitties. Nothing too exciting about them, except that the white one is made out of some weird slippery non-cotton fabric and was kind of a pain to work with. I’ve got 2 more after these that I need to finish up the hand-sewing too and then I’l be done (unless I decide to do some decoration to them).
January
25th 2008
Posted under Handspun
Yep, it’s yarn. 162 yards, 4 3/4 ounces. It’s navaho-plied, which I haven’t had a lot of practice with, so there are some rough spots. Not too crazy about this one – it’s one where after I started to ply it, I thought it would have been better off left as a single. Oh well.
January
22nd 2008
Posted under Photography
So, I actually did get some of my photos enlarged this month. Yay! Travis and I take a ton of pictures, but we really don’t do anything with them, so one of my resolutions was to start getting actual photos printed and put up on display in the house.
Since photo enlargements are cheap (at least they are at Costco) and frames are expensive, I was inspired by two things I saw this weekend while looking at the Craftzine archives. Someone had wrapped foamcore in fabric using double sided tape and hung it on the wall with fun tack as a fun way to display some of their fabric collection. Another link was to the idea of mounting photos directly on wooden blocks and then mounting the blocks to the wall. I just went ahead and combined the ideas. I wrapped foamcore in muslin using double sided tape, and then glued the enlarged photos to the fabric using photo-archival glue. Piece o’ cake. I just got a few things enlarged because I wasn’t sure how the results would be, but I’ll probably be doing a lot more in the future.
January
21st 2008
January
21st 2008
It’s Emo Day (I’ll post more about this over on Yarnzombie in a little bit, so I whipped up this little Emo plushie to celebrate! It uses two different pieces of felt that I made and some other pieces of wool for the face and hair (and lonely little emo-tear). I was thinking it could be a pincushion, too, but it gets sad if you stick him with needles.
January
21st 2008
Posted under Sewing
I can finally post the kitty bed as an FO! Yay! This counts as my first major sewn project for the house this year (I want to do at least one a month). I’m really happy with this, not only because I made my own fabric, managed to figure out how to make it without a pattern, and used up some foam that I had hanging around the house for the past 4 years, but because Ellie loves it. She’s sleeping in it right now, and is in it at least 3 or 4 hours a day. It’s so nice to make something that actually gets used.
To recap, I made two big pieces of woven fabric to use as the top, bottom, and sides. I sewed them into a big cylinder (a long rectangle for the sides, a circle for the top, and two part-circles for the bottom) and flipped them inside out, and then smashed the top onto the bottom. I used a big strip of foam to stuff the sides, and cut out a circle of foam for the bottom. I also sewed together a little pillow out of some white fabric I had to stuff some polyfil into to make the bottom extra soft (this is what took me so long to post – I was out of polyfil). I also put a pocket on the pillow that contains catnip. After stuffing the pillow and filling up the catnip pocket, I puched the pillow on top of the foam circle inside the bed to make an extra squishy nest for Ellie. And then to top it all off, I put a kitty head and a bird appliqué on the sides.
You can see more pictures of the whole process here, in case you want to make your own. I’m thinking I may wind up making some bigger versions of this because, well…
January
18th 2008
Posted under Felting
Here’s a small felted cup I sewed today as an experiment. The fabric wasn’t happy going through the sewing machine, so I sewed it up by hand – the machine may not like it, but it hand stitches like buttah!
Also made some more sheets of felted fabric. Here are the highlights:
It’s hard to get a sense of these through photos. In reality, they’re a lot cooler. They remind me very much of handmade paper. The texture is so rich, and the different layers of fiber lend a translucent quality to them. I’m just mad about making these now, so expect to see more of them. At some point, I’m going to try to move beyond small cup and make something cool out of them, too!
January
18th 2008
Posted under Sewing
I really didn’t intend on making this bag. I was trying to make a storage cube, but the canvas I used wasn’t anywhere as near as sturdy as I had hoped. So I tried making it into a bag instead, things progressively went more wrong, and I figured the only way to salvage it at this point was to make it into something that would hang on a wall with one of the straps. I tied the other strap into a kind of rose thingy. It looks okay, I guess. I’m not real thrilled about it, but it is a functioning object, so I guess it’s better than that scary-ass cat I made earlier this month.
January
17th 2008
Posted under Felting
Not too sure how to categorize this one, as it’s the first thing like this I’ve done. I made some felted wool fabric today, and sewed up a quickie little heart ornament from it. And, there you go.
