Giant Food Pillow Giveaway!

Hey, my crafting hero is giving away giant pillows that look like slices of pizza and stacks of pancakes on her site.  Go on over and post a comment for a chance to win!  SO awesome.

Christmas In June

My fellow craftdactyl has been mad at me for not posting in a while, so I'm going to try to make up for it by posting twice today.

Here is another project I've been working on lately - I went to a workshop on making felted wool animals at Craftland a few months ago, and absolutely fell in love with the whole concept. I bought all of the supplies I needed to start crafting my own little cuties, and here is what I've come up with so far...

I ran into a slightly terrifying set-back before the photo shoot - this fuzzy little miscreant...

....decided my poor polar bear needed a make-over!

Phew - could've been a lot worse, just needed to be tamped down a bit :)

New Art

Whoo! It's been a while since I've been able to post anything new - I lost my reliable internet connection a couple of months ago, but, AT LAST, I am back in business! First things first, here are a couple of new pieces I recently added to my portfolio. I meant for them to be part of a series of three, but thus far only two pieces have manifested themselves - I got distracted and started another series before I finished this one! Haha, that happens a lot :) Anyway, I was listening to this beautiful song while I worked on "Ghost Of My Old Dog" (I named the painting after the song) and I was just feeling like my poor, aging brain had been causing me a lot of grief lately when I created "Dunce Cap."

(Fancy frames can be found here and here. Thank you FrodoBabbs!)

Pillow case

It has only been since this past Christmas that I finally figured out how to use my sewing machine.  At first I couldn't even thread the machine without consulting the manual, every...single...time.  So with that being said, I was looking for an easy sewing project to use for Christmas gifts, and came across this awesome tutorial.

It totally worked out and was a great beginner sewing project!!  I mean I definitely had my share of tribulations from cutting big pieces of fabric to sewing straight lines, but I made five pillow cases for gifts and they all turned out well.

Anyway, one of the cases I made in December was for my little nephew who is turning three in a couple of weeks.  I came across this incredible dino fabric perhaps months ago and bought two yards of it before I even knew what to do with it.  Sooooo, I made him another one :)

And I have to say, this go-around was a thousand times easier.  Why I never thought to fold the huge pieces of fabric in half for easier measuring and cutting, I'll never know.  But it took way less time, and everything came out evenly and most importantly---the cuff matched up on the seam which meant I could go to bed in peace.  Aaahh!!

Dino Alterations

A good friend of mine got me a couple of Threadless tees for Christmas, and as rad as they were, they were both Larges, and sadly I'm a Small, so they've been sitting in my drawer for five months.

So I spent the morning altering this one!

Turned out pretty good.  The shirt had no side seams (how in the world do they make a tube of cloth with no seams??) so I had to cut the sides and take it in about two inches total.

 

Hemmed the bottom another two and half inches, then shortened the sleeves and decreased the arm hole diameter.  I love using thread that stands out from whatever fabric I'm working with, but there's something to be said for matching thread...darker colors show everything, right or wrong.

I'm also sure there's some other type of stitching that's better than a straight stitch for stretchy t-shirt material, but I have no idea what it is.  I say, straight stitch all the time. 

It gets the job done for now!

Shorts

Gah!  Tried my hand at a pair of shorts recently, and uh.....wellll, shoot.  They were supposed to be custom fit, but that ended up meaning very fitted.  And, it made the front and back rise the exact same measurement, so the shorts barely cover my bum in the back, while covering my bellybutton many times over in the front. 

 

Still though, with a shirt covering the waist, they're pretty cute.  I'm gonna try again.

Tubes

So I finally cleaned up and pulled apart the old mountain bike tube I had draped over a chair on my front porch for weeeeeeks.  It was covered in pollen on the outside, and coated in baby powder on the INside.  A quick call to the man informed me that the powder prevents the tube from sticking to the tire when it heats up!  I had no idea.

This was my first attempt at sewing a zipper onto anything.  I had to wing it because the "easy" instructions found on the zipper package were ridiculous.  I took a bunch of pictures of this process, but had to can them all because I initially sewed the zipper on the wrong, stinking side. 

 

Oh, AND it took a full hour and a half of tinkering to find the correct tension to stitch length ratio for sewing through two layers of rubber...fruuuustratinnnnng!  But around 11pm two nights ago, a proper pouch finally emerged.

 

And as a side note, the outside of the tube (UNpowdered) is pretty sticky and will not run through the machine on its own because it sticks to the bottom of the presser foot.  I had to lay pieces of newspaper over it which not only obscured seam vision, but also gets sewed INTO the seam and has to be pulled out later.  With tweezers.  There has to be a better way?

The pouch was supposed to be a manly sewing kit for Jerm, but this one is way too long (stupid 9" zipper).  Alternatively, my boss said it would make a perfect pencil bag, and I think he's right.

Still though, I wanted to make right by the sewing kit idea, so I made another one last night, using a 7" zipper instead.  This time I knew to close the ends on the zipper which made it a lot more tidy.  

 

Voila!  The shorter one is way more what I had in mind, and at first I was disappointed that the lines of stitching along the zippers are pretty uneven...but then I decided I liked the idea because they run along the natural curve of the tube and that seems more hand crafty to me. 

 

That's it!