Roses Are Blue...

You Say Tomato, I Say Tiny Pincushion...

A while ago (and by "while" I mean years) I read about a couple crafters making pincushion rings from the inside pull-ring of drink containers. Immediately I wanted one and started saving pull-rings left and right. But I never got around to it at the time. I don't know, maybe the new baby had something to do with it (Willa would have been about 8 months.) But in the meantime, pretty much every time I pulled one of the rings out of a container, I would think to myself "Really need to make that pincushion ring..." So, yeah, once or twice a week for three years I had this thought. I win at procrastination.

Recently I started making a dress and found myself in need of a better pincushion and thought, IT IS TIME. I started out by needle felting a tomato. Or, more accurately, a traditional tomato pincushion. Side note: do you know why traditional pincushions are shaped like a tomato? I didn't know so I looked it up. Apparently  it used to be a custom to display a ripe tomato on the mantle of a new house for good luck. Since ripe tomatoes were often hard to come by people would use red fabric balls filled with sand. And then after a while they'd get pins stuck in them and become pincushions. The end. 

I chose needle felting because I like the way felted wool holds pins. But you could also stuff some fabric with fill or wool and glue it to the ring-pull. (There's a good tutorial here for that technique.) Needle felting is pretty easy to pick up and the supplies are simple and affordable. If you're interested in learning more check out this comprehensive tutorial I found.

I used Glue Dots (I swear I don't work for them) to affix the pull-ring but you could hot glue or probably use tacky glue too. Glue Dots worked because I was planning on felting over the plastic.

Gilding the lily a little, but it makes the ring more comfortable. If you use fabric you could glue or sew a cover over the plastic disc.

Voilà! I've been using it for a couple days now and it works great. I love the way it turned out.

Pincushion Power! 

Handmade Holiday Stamps

Lowell, Willa, and I made some cool holiday stamps out of Model Magic clay the other day. It was totally fun and now we have lots of cards and gift tags with seriously cute stamp art on them (Lowell's gingerbread man KILLS ME.) If you're interested, I wrote up a tutorial over at Alpha Mom that has all the details for this easy but very satisfying craft.

Oh thank heaven...

Guess what we have for Christmas this year? Go on, guess! Give up? Ok, I'll tell you. We have not one but TWO little girls! And guess what else? (You don't have to guess, I'll just tell you.) They are each the perfect age! Mary Jane is still a teeny tiny baby which means A.) I get to eat her up and B.) she'll wear whatever I make for her! And my sweet Iron-Willa (Little Miss NO-I-DON'T-YIKE-IT!) is finally three (!!!) which means A.) she has HAIR! and B.) for those of you not in the know, three = teeny tiny toys!  Polly Pockets, Playmobil, tea sets AND barrettes and bows...I can barely contain myself. There are buttons, barrettes, fabric, tulle, and ribbons knee deep in the studio. I'm in heaven...

So the first project was for baby Mary Jane. The tutu ties on so it is a very simple project but I think it's going to look so cute with a pair of ballerina tights...*swoons* I cannot wait to smush her into this and eat her up!

If you'd like to make your own Tie-on Baby Tutu, I have put together a quick tutorial (I hope you all appreciate that I resisted the pun there):

First you want to cut a sash out of some nice wide ribbon. It needs to be long enough to go around the waist with enough left over to tie the tutu around the waist with a big bow. I cut mine 34" long for a 14" waist so my bow would have nice long tails. Then you want to cut a rectangular length of tulle. I cut mine about 12" x 42" but you can adjust this to any length and width depending on the size of your child and how long and/or poufy you want your tutu to be. You will be folding the tulle in half lengthwise so make sure you cut it twice as wide as you want your skirt length (waist to hem) to be (for example, my finished skirt is 6" long so the raw piece was 12" wide). The waist measurement is also variable. I made mine 42" (3x as long as the waist) so it would be super fluffy.

Once you have your tulle cut you need to add a stitch down the center lengthwise. Keep a nice long tail and tighten the tension on your machine as high as it will go and make the stitches as long as you can. You can also hold onto the thread at the spool to add extra tension (but don't hold it too tightly or it will snap which is kind of a pain). The high tension and long stitches will gently gather the tulle. You'll still have to make adjustments but this gives you a nice headstart. The center stitch can be done by hand as well. Just make a nice running stitch down the center with a long piece of thread.

Once you have your stitch in place just grab a thread tail and hold it as you slide the tulle towards the center, gathering it as evenly as possible until it reaches the pre-determined waist measurement (again, mine was 14").

Now take your ribbon and fold it in half to find the center (you can also measure but this method is way faster). Add a pin or a mark to the center and then center your gathered tulle on the mark. Pin if you'd like, making sure to adjust the gathers to your liking. I only pinned the ends so I would be able to adjust the gathers as I went along.

Now stitch along the edge of the ribbon making sure to get all the tulle as you go. Move slowly, tulle is squirrely! Once you have it all stitched into place you can go back and cut all of the long thread tails.

And that's it for the skirt! Super easy, right? I had originally planned to fold the ribbon in half to hide the rough edge of the tulle but i liked the look of the wide waistband so I kept it open. You could do either. It's really a very flexible project.

For the onesie, find some matching skinny ribbon, tie a bow, stitch it on and add some Fray Block to the ends of the ribbon. Even easier!

And so cute, holy cow. I'm dying to see it on her!

Ok, moving onto hair accessories now...stay tuned.

Leafy!

Hi! It's Alana here, finally posting again! Kara and I are gearing up to do more posting and we have a couple projects to share. The first one is this wreath I put together from leaves I collected over the past few weeks.

The inspiration for this piece came from a beautiful leaf gradient I saw as part of the 10/10/10 group on Flickr. I had it in the back of my mind that a gradient would make a great wreath. When the leaves really started to change around here I picked up as many colors of maple leaves as I could find. I put them in books to press them (finally - a good use for my out-of-date Chicago Manual of Style) and then yesterday I glued them all on a form I cut out of some cardboard. It was really easy and took maybe an hour from start to finish. 

First I figured out how big I wanted the wreath to be and cut out a circle wreath form from a cardboard scrap. Once I had the form I started to plan out the gradient, layering the leaves starting with green through yellow and orange.

 

I went along trying different sizes and colors until I got the gradient I wanted.

 

Then I moved the leaves one by one off the form, snipped off the stem, and laid them out around the form in the order I wanted them.

 

I wasn't sure what kind of glue I was going to use. Hot glue would have been overkill since the leaves were pretty thin and brittle. I thought I'd probably use plain craft glue but, being the impatient type, didn't really want to wait around while it dried. So I pulled out my trusty glue dots and gave them a try. They worked perfectly.

 

If you've never used these definitely give them a try. They are magic. They're especially good for kids crafts when you don't want to deal with glue mess.

I put two or three glue dots directly on the leaf, depending on the size, and then pressed the leaf down on the cardboard, layering as I went from red through the spectrum to green.

 

Once the form was filled I was done. I took it straight to my front door and hung it up. It was light enough for me to just use some sticky tack.

We have a storm door in front, so I wasn't worried about wind, but you could easily hot glue a loop of ribbon or wire to hang it more substantially.

I'll be curious to see how it weathers. I don't expect it to last more than a season or store well. You could preserve the leaves with a couple different techniques besides just pressing for a longer-lasting wreath. I'll probably just make a new one next year. It was totally gratifying for not much work. My favorite kind of craft.

The shop is re-stocked!

Ok, so for those of you who have emailed wondering when there will be new Joey and/or Kitty Bags in the shop, here ya go! This isn't all of them but it's a start. I will try to post again when they are all in there. I'm also planning on making some new bags with some of the awesome vintage fabrics I've been hoardin-err, saving so I'll let you know when I get those listed as well.

And not to get you too excited but rumor has it there might be a guest posting coming soon...stay tuned kids...

Thank you, Austin! Goodnight!

Is that line getting old? You'd tell me, right? Like if I had a poppy seed in my teeth or toilet paper on my shoe? I hope so. Anyway, phew, Renegade Austin was FUN. I could go on for hours so I'll try to spare you and just stick to the highlights. And obviously the biggest highlight was the stuff! The crafts were so stinkin' cool. These are some of the goodies I bought (minus the super awesome prints that are still en route in their safe, flat packaging):

Another highlight was Austin's Minor Mishap Marching Band marching up and down the aisles. I love marching bands and this one was awesome. They even had a little hula hooper! But the aisles were too narrow so she was just marching and bouncing her hoop. Sadly the photos all came out blurry so you'll have to use your imagination. Here's a picture of a screaming guitar kid instead:

Speaking of guitar kids, my favorite customer was an adorable little 2 yr-old boy named Shane. His super cool parents let him pick out one of my kid's guitar straps for his guitar which they said he actually plays. I can only imagine how cute that must be... He picked the green guitar. My favorite.

The last-but-not-least highlight was meeting Jenny Hart of Sublime Stitching (she's the embroidery guru for those of you who don't know). AND having her ask to photograph my embroidered sign! I tried to be cool and not get all fan girl on her but I doubt it worked. It did help that I didn't recognize her when she actually asked about the sign and didn't find out it was her until I stopped by her booth to introduce myself and she assured me that we had, in fact, met the day before...way to go, huh? Back to my rookie moves again.

Anyway, there was so much more...amazing tattoos, adorable babies, adorable dogs, bands, dj's, crafting booths, raffles...it was a fun, fun weekend. Thank you to everyone who came by the booth to say hi and to all of my new customers! And a super-huge extra-special thank you to my awesome friend, Heather, who made the trip with me and was indispensable. And quite the two-stepper although she likes to be coy about it.

Yippee ay oh ki yay! Renegade Austin!

 

Ok, that's the news kids! I will be a vendor at the first ever Renegade Austin and I am beyond excited about it. First, I'm excited because it's Renegade and I get to participate again. And second, it's in Austin! I love Austin! I want to move to Austin! Even though I've never been there...but I really think I will love it.

Since this fair is going to involve air travel I had to come up with new ways to display my wares that are lightweight, collapsible, portable, etc. I like to use what I have so I looked all around my studio to see what materials I already had on hand and I happened to have a lot of second hand paper, gently-used posterboard and foam core board. I started playing around with it all and what I ended up with were foldable, slipcovered foam core shelves and Cone People...

This is the felt slipcover for one of the shelves before I stitched it up.

These are the cone people bodies getting a coat of spray paint.

And here are some of the faces and hands...

All together they look like this:

Cute! So this little lady is a medium sized Cone Person but the larger ones are big enough to model the Joey Bags. Unfortunately they are already packed up in their box ready to head to Austin so again, you'll have to take my word for it. But don't worry, I promise to take photos of the entire display once I get it all up. I'm trying to keep the rookie moves to a minimum this time...

It's terrarium time!

I have been wanting to make a terrarium for ages now and I finally remembered to write down a list of supplies and bring the list with me on my errand run. An important detail. Turns out to make a terrarium is incredibly simple (key word make. Time will tell if it lives). Now that I have done it I'm not sure what took me so long. And I am fighting the urge to turn every covered glass container in the house into a little mossy diorama. I already have plans for the little Matchbox VW microbus I have although I went with an Easter theme for this one.

So I followed the beginner instructions on the Terrarium Man website but there is an easy tutorial here too. The only difference is Craftzine adds a layer of activated charcoal while Terrarium Man adds a layer Spanish moss. And they had Spanish moss at the dollar store so I went with Terrarium Man. I also just used sheet moss on top but you can add all kinds of plants and ground cover. I am going out in search of a larger container so I can try one of those.  I need to plant something tall for my hippies to hang their clothes up to dry on...

How I spend my free time...

What? Are you going to try to tell me you don't make roach dioramas when you are bored? Because I'm not buying it...

So it was just Alana's 40th birthday. You might remember Alana, my sister...we, ahem, share this blog. She last posted back in 2008. That sweet little baby is 2 now... Anyway, although you wouldn't know it here, Alana is pretty big into the blogging world  (Letter B and Momku) so for her birthday Matthew, her husband, started a secret birthday blog where her family and friends could all post videos, photos, letters, haikus and what not. So, because Alana hates roaches and I am her little sister, my idea was to make a video of a roach birthday party with a roach jumping out of a cake. Actually, my original ideas was to use Peeps Bunnies but then I found my pack of rubber roaches in my sock drawer (what?) and had this minor stroke of genius...I have since made a full recovery, thanks for asking. See the cute little puppy? I'm not all bad.

Love is in the air...

I'm going to take a quick break from the Christmas gifts to bring you some valentines! Wait, what? But it's still January...right? Yes, it is. It is still January. And I have valentines. You are probably sitting there scratching your head thinking that this is not normal (and you are right!) But I was sitting at my computer on Wednesday desperately trying to come up with an alternative to paying holiday bills and I spied the rubber stamp carving kit I bought several months ago. Perfect. I had already drawn a picture of Perry on one of the blocks (back when I was all excited to try carving my own stamps) so I pulled out the carving tool and got to work. 

Now, if you have ever carved lino blocks then you have the basic idea of how one carves rubber stamps. But the rubber is much, much, much easier to carve (much easier). It's like carving butter. The only drawback to the lovely buttery softness is that you sacrifice detail. Well, maybe you won't, but I did. It is very easy to accidentally chunk out a piece (or pieces) of your drawing and very hard to get thin lines and small bits. Still, it's a fun project with semi-instant gratification (and way better than paying bills...no matter how many eyes you accidentally chunk out).

Anyway, after I had Perry all carved out I thought he would make the perfect motif for some um, unique valentines. I mean, think about it. What says love better than a waving cockroach?  Honestly, can you think of anything?  It's like love defined...  So, if you happen to be the kind of person that can get away with valentines like these, they'll be in the Etsy shop.