More Keychains

Cute Overload

For some time now I've been contemplating and pondering the idea of making key chains. I even started one--an octopus. But it wasn't really turning out all that great and I put it aside to come back to later.

Last week I mentioned to someone that it might be fun to try to make some crocheted key chains. She was so excited about the idea that it made me want to give it another shot.

Let me warn you...cute overload ahead.


The little guy with the green head is a baby sea turtle, though it's hard to see in this picture. He kind of reminds me of Squirt from Finding Nemo!

Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of the second one I made--a wee little bunny. Never fear, though, I will make another one...probably today.

Tea Set

A while back I made this tea pot, along with some tea cups.

My friend bought the set and gave it to her friend. Then she asked me to make another set for her to keep. It took FOREVER, but I finally finished the second set. It looks so much better than the first set, all color-coordinated and whatnot.

Snowflakes

Last year, around Christmas, I discovered snowflakes. There are TONS of patterns out there for snowflakes and when I gave it a try I got a little hooked. I made a couple dozen snowflakes and gave all of them away. I have noticed that when I make that many of one type of thing I burn myself out for a while. So after Christmas I stopped, even though I had hoped to make some for this Christmas to give away again and hopefully to sell. This weekend I found my "snowflake wind" again and made three more. I don't have pictures of them yet, as I want to make some more and photograph them all together in sets. But here are some from last year:

Finally

I finally finished an outfit for my doll, so now I can post a picture.

I also made another bigger doll outfit...

Even More Doll-related Stuff

I set out this evening to start at least one regular doll outfit that I had promised for the woman on the bus. I used the dress from this doll pattern as my "first attempt." It was a pretty simple pattern, though I did have to use a larger hook than I'd started with because the dress was turning out too small, even for the small doll I have. Here's hoping it fits on one of the little girl's dolls!

More Doll-making

I finished my second crocheted doll and she's WAY better than the first. I don't have pictures of her yet because I'd like to get at least one complete outfit on her before I take pictures. The first doll I made is already being sold to a lady at school for her daughter. When I was working on some of the doll clothes on the bus last week I got a request from a woman to make some doll clothes for her daughter, so I'm going to try that out as well. Pictures will be coming!

Her First Outfit

I really like how this turned out...

A Doll

For a few months now I've wanted to make this doll. It was frustrating to work on the legs, being as narrow as they are, so I put it away for a while.

It's been a difficult week for me and I got the urge to go back to the doll and finish it. So I did! She turned out alright, for my first doll, and now I'm working on clothes for her. I'm almost finished with her first outfit.

A New Little Girl

A Little Bump

I started on the second half of my paper mosaic and I hit a bump. As I applied the paper around the tree branches I saw that the tree branches simply blended into the background. Not good. I tried a few different things to solve my problem. First, I tried outlining the tree parts in a bronze-gold color. That didn't look so good, so I thought I'd do a wash of the bronze-gold over each piece. But the outline was too dark and the whole thing looked terrible. My last-ditch effort to save the work was to just paint in the parts of the tree in brown-black. That didn't work either. At this point I was frustrated and about to give up.

So I took a break, I took a walk, I got an ice cream sandwich and I regrouped.
When I came home I had a new idea. I cut the board in half, saving the half that turned out well. Then I took a board I had started working on before and cut off the half that I'd messed up on that one and started my "gloomy" half-tree over. Now I have a two-panel art piece:

Halfway Done

My paper mosaic tree is halfway done!

Frustrations

I've never really been a quilter. In fact, I've never successfully completed a quilt on my own. But I REALLY wanted to do this quilt. And did it work? Well...not yet. I got frustrated and put it down while I contemplated solutions to my quilting problems. In the mean time, I got a new idea. Paper mosaic of the same image.

As a side note, I noticed that when I started my new medication my creativity seemed to diminish. I'm glad it's coming back.

Soooo...I started the paper mosaic. It was tricky, just as the quilt was, but a little easier in general. After all, I have done a lot of work with creating images out of scrapbook paper. It's taking a long time, but here's the beginnings:


P.S. Unlike my amazingly talented friend at Aroha Photography, photography is not a strength I possess.

Workin on the Quilt

I had the tree done and it was actually pretty easy to get that much done. Actually, scratch that. It really was pretty hard to draw the tree out using just computer paper for a tree that was a bit larger than computer paper. I had to come up with a design for the tree, draw it out, paste it all together to be big enough...it was difficult, but I did it and it turned out well.

Not so for the next part--stitching together the background. Admittedly, I thought about just plastering the tree to the background and building it up from there. But that's not REALLY what I wanted to do. I wanted it to basically be one big piece all stitched together. Luckily I had extra "sky" fabric, because I royally messed up the first half of the fabric. I was getting frustrated and thinking about scrapping the whole idea. But I tried again and got a piece stitched in between two branches. That was HARD. I didn't think about the fact that stitching together two oppositely curved pieces is rather tricky. I got it done, though. And it turned out okay, I suppose. After stitching that piece in, I got a better idea for the sky around the leaves: patchier. So this is how it goes.


It's going to be a lot of stitching...and yes, I am stitching by hand. It's been a very relaxing project, at least now that I got the basic idea down. I'll try to keep up with my progress.

Quiltart

So, a while back I found this website (can't remember how...) and it's called Uncovering the Darkness: A Quiltart Challenge. I found this art fascinating, seeing as how I had been working on my own "quiltart" with Eliza. Soooo...as I was re-visiting this website, I decided I wanted to make a quiltart of my own. I suppose I've wanted to for a long time, I just didn't have a good idea. But now I do! I'm actually sort of "stealing" an idea from a friend's painting. The basic design will be a two-sided tree. One half of the tree is dark and dying. The other half is completely alive, colorful, with leaves in the tree and flowers on the ground. If you'll notice, in the quiltart challenge, it says to include an element of hope. Seeing as how I've been feeling much much better lately, it's much much easier to include that element of hope in this art. Another interesting thing is how collage-like this will be for me. I started turning this idea into a collage first, but I lost interest very quickly. For some reason collage just hasn't appealed to me since Eliza left.

Now...here is the beginnings of my tree (it's laying on my cutting mat):

Finished Curtains

What I'm Working on Now

I have two odd-shaped windows in my apartment and it has been impossible to find curtains to fit. My living room window, for instance, is 75 inches wide and only 50 inches long. The closest fit I've found is 63 inches long--simply too long for my short window.

Anyway, here's the fabric I chose (it's a little paler and brighter in person).


I'm modeling these curtains after the very wonderful curtains I made up myself that are in my bedroom.
Those, however, are double-sided and these new ones will only have a plain white backing. Because I'm modeling these curtains after the curtains I made for my bedroom, I am taking my time and doing things slow. I have made many sets of curtains ranging from stapling fabric in front of the window to sewing a fast and shoddy pocket for the curtain rod and hastily adding some trim to the bottom. The fabrics were nice, but in the end the curtains looked just as hastily and shoddily made as they were. The set of curtains that are in my bedroom now are the very best I have ever made. The only thing I would do differently is to make all the tabs out of the same fabric.

Unfortunately, until Wednesday I don't have my sewing machine. So for now, I'm sewing the hems on the tabs by hand. The good thing is it gives me something to do in the waiting room when I get to my appointment an hour early tomorrow.

Surprise!

My apple has a surprise...


...a little wormy!

A New Book

I've been wanting to buy a book of patterns to make more stuffed animals, but it's been difficult not only to find one at a bookstore around here, but to find *the one* I want. There are a few books that I've "kind of" wanted, but there was one book in particular that I saw online that I really wanted to look through. I haven't been able to find that book, so I purchased it on Amazon and am now anticipating the delivery of my sought-after book. In the meantime, it's a long weekend and I wanted to have something new to do this weekend. There's really only so much you can find online as far as patterns go. There's a lot, I'll admit that, but I've gone through all of the free stuffed animal patterns I can find and I've saved and tried all the ones that interest me. Let this be known: there are a TON of ugly patterns out there.

The point of my story is, after searching different stores for a book that interests me, I finally decided on this book (picture from Amazon):
I opted for this book because a friend of mine wanted me to make her a tea set and I had been having a difficult time re-making the tea pot I made for my first tea set. This book has a pattern for a tea pot. So that was the first thing I worked on and the tea pot turned out alright. I altered the pattern a little to fit my tastes, so it looks a little different than the one in the book. The other item I made was this:
Cute little bunny in his PJ's. Mine didn't turn out quite how I would have wanted, but I was running out of blue yarn. I plan to make a teddy bear in PJ's...at least I think I might. And hopefully that will turn out better than this one. At least I finally have a good pattern for a bunny.

Update on the Chickie Mobile

Here's what I decided:


Nest-ish, don't you think?

A couple new things

I made this penguin for my good friend:


And then there's this cute little chickie mobile (not sure if I should add something more to it and if so, what I should add):

Bookmarks

One day I was browsing around Crochet Pattern Central and I saw the bookmarks category. I took a look through the free patterns available and I decided to try some out. This is what I came up with:


I wanted to find more and more unique bookmark patterns, but I wasn't finding any. I did a little web crawling and found that flower bookmarks seemed rather popular. So I opted to stick with a flower theme. Some of the flowers I made up myself and some came from free flower patterns. I'll post my own flower patterns later.

An Assortment of Mobiles

Among my newest endeavors are my crochet mobiles. I have a blast coming up with new ideas and themes to turn into mobiles. My mobiles are made of a combination of patterns off the top of my head and free patterns I find online.

This butterfly mobile is my smallest mobile. It's made of a 4-inch embroidery hoop, which gives an idea of the overall size. It's done entirely in crochet thread. I made up the patterns for the butterflies and the flowers and the design around the hoop. The leaf chains, which are a little difficult to see, came from this pattern.

This little sunshine/raindrops mobile was inspired by a picture I saw online. I made all the patterns up myself for this mobile.

My very first mobile, this birdie mobile was inspired by a mobile I saw in the book "Amigurumi Two!" I didn't make the actual mobile in the book and I don't actually have the book, but when I saw the idea for a mobile, I wanted to try one of my own. The birds come from this pattern. I think I got the pattern for the flowers from a book, but I can't remember.

This is probably my most ornate mobile, complete with sea life and bubbles. I used a boucle yarn for the top of the mobile and the hanging strands. It looked so ocean-y, it was perfect! The starfish, the bubbles and the puffer fish were my own patterns. The yellow and blue fish come from this pattern and the jellyfish comes from this pattern.

A Little About Me

I am an artist, a crafter and a writer. I crochet, I sculpt miniatures, I do batik, I do abstract drawing and painting and I write poetry. This blog is dedicated to my visual arts. I want to share my creations and my knowledge with the world.