Where Did April Go?

“Make Something Cool Every Day in April” – what a motivator, I definitely worked toward a project every single day.  I just wish I had completed more!

I learned a lot from making these birds.  At first I sewed ten of these with the plans to do 2 at a time, 5 for B&M shop, 5 for Etsy shop.  Well, that didn’t work out well.  A pink fabric I’ve been working with stretched in odd ways and a linen one frayed at the seams.  I had to learn engineering and balance to get the legs to hold up these little guys, too.  I’m pleased with the results and will make more for sure with all my new-found knowledge.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

I follow Dave of Rings & Things on Twitter and really, really love his posts- they’re always informative, inspirational & he takes time for people.  When he pointed out some bead caps, I had an idea for them, and he blogged about it – I just LOVE getting creative ideas and multi-purposing.  Go check out the post and his blog and see what I’m talking about.

2 comments creativity, dolls, plush animals, sewing

Use What You Have

A pile of buttons, but none the color blue that I need.   So, I got to work making lemonade out of lemons and:

• threw them into a glass bowl,
• covered them with blue food coloring and a splash of water,
• cleaned up the blue that landed all over my counter,
• covered it tightly with plastic wrap*
• put it in the microwave for 2 minutes.
• Rinsed and wala!  Blue buttons. 

I think the saturation and scratches that show up are probably due to age, I have no idea how long these buttons have been in the bag or what they’re made of (picked them up from a grandma at a yard sale).  But the variegation adds some interest to these and I think they’ll come in handy in future projects.  Turns out they’re not the color I’m looking to work with the birds I’m making, so will set them aside for now.

*which I would never do with food, but plastic buttons are “okay”.

6 comments tutorial

Catching up

My poor neglected blog.  I’d gotten used to posting often and this week have been so busy…

What have I been doing?
Some of this: 

Crocheting flowers to use in some upcoming jewelry projects.

And some of this:

So glad those pepper seeds finally sprouted!!!

Been Tweeting about these things:

The Bread Art Project – $1 goes to Feeding America for every [virtual] piece of bread art you create.

The Tip Junkie has my blog post about Drying Herbs featured on Teach Me Thursday!  I’m honored.

Excited to read about Etsy in Wired magazine.

Do you tweet? 

Doing anything special for Earth Day?  I thought I was the only one excited about planting seeds, but I’ve been giving away the packets I made for the Earth Share project (that I blogged about a few days ago) and people have been giving me great feedback when receiving them!  I hope there will be beautiful flowers sprouting up in many gardens this summer.

3 comments creativity, crochet, gardening, life

Earth Day - Green Share

 

“Green Share is an effort, an idea conceived by the members of the EcoEtsy Team. It is hope - it is our promise to spread the green within our own communities all over the world.”

“At its most basic, Green Share is this:  The passing on and sharing of a gift of seeds and a starter planter that is given freely to classrooms, local businesses, neighbors, friends and family. ….  Many EcoEtsy members are participating in Green Share, but anyone can participate really!”

I’ve been an EcoEtsy member for a while because I feel it’s important to be aware of our environment.  99% of my Etsy sales get shipped out in recycled packaging and whenever possible I try to reuse and recreate from raw materials.  (See my latest bird project in the last post? All recycled fabrics!)

 I’ve put together my packets – cut out seed packet envelopes from recycled garden catalogs, added peat pellets to start them growing and a spoonful of cosmos seeds.  Topped them all off with a sticker on the front and another one on the back with directions.  This week I will be delivering them to folks around town – sharing some spring-time hope to people at town hall, the library, maybe a teacher or two.  Next year I hope to continue this with seeds that I harvest from my own garden!  If you find this page from getting one of these packets, please be sure to leave a comment below.  I hope everyone enjoys their flowers this summer.

5 comments gardening, life, recycling, use what you have

Little Birds

Birds in progress. Well, actually this one’s done – I just have a design question if anyone’s ever made anything like this. The legs are one piece of wire inserted through the bottom piece of denim – so basically there is a bar holding up the bird from the inside. Like a swing. Hence the 3rd picture with it lying on it’s side. If anyone has suggestions how to stabilize the bird better, but still keep the design simple, I would appreciate it. I thought of inserting each leg as it’s own wire, or maybe pushing more wire into the body and bending it flat against the inside stomach (like in an “S” or “N” shape). Well, maybe just typing this out – I’ve solved the problem & now I just have to make another one and see what happens next!

I have bunches of coordinating fabrics picked up to make more of these little guys, just would like to tweak the pattern a bit more so the legs will hold up without swinging.

Sewing completely relaxes me, especially as I bring to 'life' something I've made up in my head. It's also a great feeling of confirmation lately to have been reading all sorts of news articles online about the 'health benefits of knitting/sewing/crafting'. (I knew it was good for me all along.)

7 comments creativity, dolls, plush animals, sewing

Crochet & Crocus

I think I have some work to do on my crocheting.  When I saw this pattern at the mutts shop, I had to get it.  This is my first “mutt”, definitely the first of many.  Also part of the “Make Something Cool Every Day in April” Challenge, hosted by Dabbled. 

I don’t really work sequentially, so “every day” doesn’t work well for me.  One day I’ll make parts, then start a new project or two, another day… maybe a week later… go back to the original project and finish it up.  Then it might be days before I photograph it and upload.  Anyone else work like this?

My yard is making something cool, flowers!  New England winters last soooo long…Still snow on the ground, but this was a welcome surprise while I was out raking the other afternoon:

Welcome Spring!

I’m glad these came up, I planted them after the ground had frozen and spent quite a bit of time hacking at the hard soil to make some room for these bulbs. 

3 comments crochet, gardening, plush animals

Springtime Bunnies, part II

7 comments dolls, plush animals

Springtime Bunnies, part I

I’ve been chosen, at the Zakka Life blog, to be the Facebook Fan this week!  I am honored.  Zakka Life has some of the cutest and most clever projects and it’s one of my regular reads.

Latest project:

Inspiration: Springtime! & Mrs. Schneider. (Story accompanying bunny here.)

Creation:

5” tall.

I wanted to take this picture last night, so created a light box for indoor pictures, using this template.   I only had one lamp with a daylight bulb, will get a couple of others for future use.  I’m pretty pleased with the way things came out.  Finding the white balance button on my camera made a big difference on how things looked, too – much less editing afterwards to get the colors corrected.

Here you can see how I created this bunny. On the left-hand side I started with a wool crochet bunny.  Next I threw it in a hot wash to agitate and shrink, then out to dry.  The third picture is the naked bunny.  I ended up doing lots of needle-felting, too because I found holes here and there – I started out thinking it was going to be an easy project to complete and it didn’t exactly turn out that way.

3 comments dolls, plush animals

Contradictions

My original title for this post was “Vexed” but I’m trying not to have a negative overview of things, it’s just not good for me. 

The bunnies I’ve been crocheting with wool were cute pre-felting… not so cute after… (pictures coming soon).

Fleshing out ideas directly on [short supply of] nice fabric…not such a great idea. I hate the thought of making things over again though … but I keep holding onto the illusion that as I make a new project it will come out perfect the first time. Yeah, I’ll have pictures of these soon,too.

I’m happy to have read this, but& embarrassed that I’m a month late:

I received a “Spreader of Love” award from the Rings & Things blog. Dave, on Twitter was one of the first to show me how people really listen out there! When I announced a new blog post at twitter, he posted a lovely comment & I truly appreciate it. And… on twitter he connects to the most interesting links and information that are truly unique. Link to the Design Gallery for the pen project is here (not affiliated,just think it’s really great).

My five awards go to folks who’ve commented on my blog or at twitter, or both!:

♥ Jacqueline of So Cute it Hurts
♥ Rustic Diva Designs and RP Gardens
♥ FatDaddySweets
♥ firebirdhouse
♥ Odd Dotty Dollmaker blog
A link back to “rules” are no longer available at takung.blogspot.com.

And… just one more contradiction. I’ve enjoyed the “Letter of the Week” theme, especially reading what’s going on at the Craftside blog. But – I just can’t keep up with it. I need to focus on what I truly want to do (not coming up with weekly project just to participate. When the stars aligned like on “I”, it was great, but mostly I’ve been fishing for matches & that’s not real productive.)

Want to use this robot? Pasting this text into your blog post should work for a big size:<a href="http://tamdoll.blogspot.com/2009/04/contradictions.html" target="_blank"><img border="0" alt="Tamdolls Spreader of Love Award" src="http://lh6.ggpht.com/_wc3-XBkXdU4/SdPDICT-DVI/AAAAAAAACYA/bZQnEV6Knzk/image32%5B1%5D.png" /></a>

For a sidebar - Pasting this text into your blog post should work for a small size:<a href="http://tamdoll.blogspot.com/2009/04/contradictions.html" target="_blank"><img border="0" alt="Tamdolls Spreader of Love Award" src="http://lh6.ggpht.com/_wc3-XBkXdU4/SdPDICT-DVI/AAAAAAAACYA/bZQnEV6Knzk/s144/image32%5B1%5D.png" />

If you want it to link to a different location, swap out the www.locationyouwant.co

8 comments life, living creatively