Tag Archives: decoration

Stitching vistas

Through the Sew-Op, I had the chance to take a two-part course from one of my fellow teachers, Sally Munro, on landscape quilting. We used the method in the book Accidental Landscapes, by Karen Eckmeier. I chose a photo of sunset as seen from my grandparent’s backyard when I was growing up (appearing in speckly scan form below). See what you think of the interpretation:

I took a few progress photos to give you a sense of how it went together.

The sky and water were made from pieced fabric, through a technique called texturing where you cut a slightly wavy edge, press it down a quarter inch, and topstitch it to the layer above. After trimming the lower layer to a quarter inch below the stitching, you can add the next one. Cutting a wavy edge rather than a straight one gives a more organic feeling to the piece. The perfect colors miraculously came out of Sally’s fabric stash.

The tree was black fabric on Steam-A-Seam cut out by hand with a previous copy of the photo on top of the fabric. It is on top of the sky but extends below the top edge of the water, for extra security.

The binding is one continuous strip, joined into a loop after being sewn on three sides and a couple of inches into the fourth on each side. It is turned to the back and hand-sewn down. I used corner pockets for a hanging rod; the binding is what’s called a French twist and is supposed to create its own rod casing, but the fabric I used was too narrow to accommodate anything but the tiniest of dowels, with virtually no overhang at the ends.

Unfortunately I basted by machine, which was not Sally’s intent, and couldn’t get the needle marks out. It’s a good thing I had basted with the direction of the design! I will know better next time. It was a wonderful learning experience, though, and I am more than happy with the way it came out.

Repurposed denim

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The Sew-Op got involved with a local art gallery, AVA, as part of their 40th anniversary year. They are located in a former denim overall factory, and wanted denim to be part of their activities for the year. They were very interested in straddling that blurry line between art and craft, using denim for purely decorative endeavors, useful items that are attractive but not decorative per se, and everything in between. We discussed the limitations of the medium (we have no industrial sewing machines, so there is a bound on how many layers of denim can be sewn in the Sew-Op) and some possibilities. As part of this meeting a few Sew-Operators, myself included, volunteered to make some sample denim items for the kick-off repurposing session. That was this past Saturday. Let me show you what I did!

This simple bag was actually whipped up for the organizational meeting. It’s two pieces of leg trimmed to equal size and sewn flat against each other, left open at the top and a little way down each side, after a strap had been sewn to one of them and the part of each that would be left open had been stitched across. I made a straight stitch about a half inch in from the edge so it could fray, and the strap has two slightly offset lines of zigzag stitch down the center. It’s all done in the thread color I refer to as “jeans gold.” After washing it I trimmed the sides, combed the bottom and gave it a little haircut as well.

This wall hanging was primarily to demonstrate the hanging method, dowel with string wrapped around it and hot-glued in place. I stitched around with a narrow zigzag about 5/8″ in from the edge, cut the fabric with a utility knife, washed it, and colored the slits with Crayola fabric markers. After stitching the button on I cut dowels to size and sanded their ends, and ran hot glue along the dowel against the fabric. If I had a higher temperature glue gun I may have been able to run the glue on the fabric and stick the dowel on afterward, but with low-temp the beginning of the line had solidified by the time I got to the end.

This guy was whipped up quickly with acrylic paint and those cheap plastic-bristled kids’ paint brushes. I used brown, copper, black, pearl, and glow in the dark. I couldn’t get a good picture, but the eyes, teeth, and claws glow.

The most admired item, however, was this bag made from the top of a pair of jeans. I cut off the legs, undid the inseam, and sewed a seam across. Since the back of jeans is wider than the front, I added a pleat just inside each back pocket to accommodate that. I had originally placed the side seams to minimize the width difference (the outseam is the topstitched one, so you have to fold on one or the other side), but the jeans had additional pockets below the right back pocket so I changed that to try to minimize the number of layers I was stitching through. To line it, I cut a rectangle of fabric a bit wider than the base of the bag, folded it in half and sewed the seams adjacent to the fold. Then I folded down the top so the pocket was as deep as the base of the bag to the bottom of the waistband (as measured by eye from the outside), pressed it, and hand-stitched it to the bottom edge of the wastband inside. I also stitched the inside of the waistband shut, but you can actually access the space between the bag and lining through the fly. All the pockets still work, as well.

The strap was the most time-consuming of the whole operation, because I braided it out of five lengths of ribbon (using these braiding instructions). I very much like it, though, and it seems to want to stay smooth and flat. After threading it through the belt loops I tied the like-color ribbon ends together in interleaved square knots (tie half of each, then the second half of each, so some of them are entangled), trimmed them, and glued them with Fray-Chek.

I also brought along my denim coaster from the craft countdown. I had one more idea for a bag but not enough time to complete it… perhaps in the future.

Knook review

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I received a Knook kit for Christmas this year. This is a way to knit with a crochet hook; the hook has a hole through it near the foot, you thread a cord through that hole, and the cord acts as your left needle. To start, you chain as usual for crochet, but then yarn wrapping and hook insertion change to methods standard for knitting rather than crochet.

I made an entire project with the Knook, the Circle of Love Mini-Cloth. The included Knook instructions only tell you how to cast on, knit, purl, and bind off, not how to slip stitches, increase, or decrease, so the patterns you can make are somewhat limited. Fortunately there is a large community of people designing simple squares for knitting, to use as washrags and so forth – two others I really liked showed a bat and a squirrel.

You can see blocking couldn’t cover up the tension change that happened as I proceeded.

Verdict? The Knook is good at what it does. The instructions are clear, the methods are pretty easy, the materials are good quality, and it really is knitting. However, I doubt I will ever use it again. I was faster at knitting when I was stumbling along with two needles and no real idea what I was doing. On the other hand, I believe that if I do try knitting again, I will be far better at it having used the Knook. I think it helped me understand how knitting works.

In sum, I would recommend the Knook as a gateway to actual knitting, a lesson allowing you to learn the motions of knitting and purling separate from the management of knitting needles. If you want to knit much of anything, however, I would say buck up and learn to do it the usual way.

Snowflakes for you

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In the spirit of my emergency pumpkins, I have a brief seasonal pattern for you today.

You like the fancy picture?

The pattern! Abbreviations and links to general instructions here.

Quick Easy Snowflake
Ch 4 and join with sl st into ring.
Ch 1. *sc into ring, ch 3* three times (3 sc, 3 ch sp made).
Join to first sc with sl st; ch 1. In each ch sp: sc, ch 2, sc, ch 2 (6 sc, 6 ch sp made).
Sl st in first sc to join. Sl st into next ch sp, ch 1.
*Sc in same ch sp; ch 8, sl st in 4th ch from hk. Ch 4, sl st in same ch as previous sl st. Ch 3, sl st in same ch as previous sl st. Ch 3, sc in next ch sp.* around (6 points made).
Last sc will envelop the sl st that preceded the first *…*; sl st into the ch 1 immediately after that sl st. FO.

[pardon my edit, here and below. that last ch 3 used to say ch 4; that was in error from a previous version of the pattern. the legs decidedly lean if you ch 4. apologies for the error!]

I like to pull that last yarn end to the back of the snowflake through the chain space that those first and last single crochets were made into. Weave in the ends, yank on opposite pairs of points to straighten them, tug the side nubs of each point apart. Sometimes the points want to lean a bit, which can be helped by holding down the beginning chain of each point while tugging the first side nub away from the center of the flake. If your snowflakes want to curl up, iron them (all snowflakes above were ironed). You can stiffen them like thread crochet snowflakes, if you want to hang them.

The yarns used above were Lion Brand Vanna’s Glamour (gold), Red Heart Holiday (off-white), Caron Simply Soft (light blue), and Lily Sugar ‘n’ Cream (variegated). All were made with an F/5 hook (3.75mm).

“But, Reve,” I hear you saying, “one of these things is not like the others!” I applaud your Sesame Street reference and reply with another pattern!

Quick Easy Snowflake – Variation
Ch 4 and join with sl st into ring.
*Ch 8, sl st in 4th ch from hk. Ch 4, sl st in same ch as previous sl st. Ch 3, sl st in same ch as previous sl st. Ch 3, sl st into ring* six times (6 points made).
FO. That’s all!

Pedicures

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For my wedding in August, I had borrowed and blue nail polish, loaned by a friend. I painted a blue heart on each big toenail. Afterward, I so enjoyed catching them out of the corner of my eye that before returning the nail polish I touched up the scuffed hearts, and then bought sparkly polish to paint over my whole nail. The picture below is on my wedding day (yes, I got married in jeans and flip-flops); I apparently failed to take any pictures of Hearts V.2.

I was so enamored of it and so tempted to buy a rainbow of polish that I decided it would become my trademark. My toenails are not well-suited to being painted, given that two on each foot rub on the ground at their tips and one is tiny and nearly vertical, so this just-the-big-toe idea was a bit of a revelation.

I managed to hold off with buying only two colors then, green and purple, and put nail polish on my Christmas wishlist. When I tired of the hearts I tried painting pictures related to my crochet designs. Unfortunately my Stumpy just looked like a puffy green gingerbread man, so I cleaned that nail and had my artistic husband paint a seahorse. I do like how my squid came out, though. Somewhat to my regret I later painted glitter over that as well.

At that point it was basically sock weather, and my ability to be comfortably barefoot out of the shower or bed was limited. However, I still couldn’t resist a set of Halloween-themed mini-bottles in the beginning of October. They are definitely not as high quality as the green and purple I bought before – in the picture below there are three coats of orange and four coats of purple to get that level of opacity. The set included the four colors below plus silver glitter and a dusty rose color.

There are two pictures because we amended the jack o’lantern to make his lone tooth more distinct. Actually it was amended twice, because my attempt was blobby and awful; the two shown above were painted by my husband with the use of a toothpick. My Frankenstein scar on the right was intended to be a lightning bolt, but it came out mushy and I thought, okay, that’s fine too. I may get more adventurous and try toothpick painting myself another time.

A little bonus to this post: a shot of my handsome husband wearing a scarf I made him for our second monthiversary (though it was belated). It is angel hair yarn granny squares slip stitched together with an eyelash yarn granny square sewn on each end.

Inching along

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Inchies are artist trading cards’ tiny little cousins, one inch by one inch square canvases for any artistic medium you desire. With some time to kill recently, but not too much of it, I decided to make some fabric inchies. The most recent set I saw online was photographed in fours, so I made four, in a fall theme. They are constructed entirely from fabric and fusible web (Wonder Under for the main square and appliques, and snips of Stitch Witchery to hold down the flaps).

Those took almost no time. On the next night, I discovered I had made a dreadful measurement error in a set of commissioned window treatments, and couldn’t proceed until I had spoken to my client (that turned out fine, by the way, but this job has only confirmed my distaste for sewing window treatments). Looking to turn lemons into lemonade, I made another set of inchies. This time I ironed a square of Wonder Under onto four box-themed fabrics, embroidered the front of each, layered another square of Wonder Under to seal the stitches, and used that and Stitch Witchery to fuse down the flaps.

The backs of these are not as interesting (you can see I didn’t even bother getting a picture of them in the good light), but I think the added interest of the front makes up for it.

My first set of inchies seemed really tiny: for work entirely in fabric, one square inch is not much. My second set of inchies, however, seemed much more reasonably sized. I was even able to make tiny pictures in two of them (can you see the face – with a big ’80s earring – and the set of display boxes hanging on a wall?).

Wishstones

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The hubs was taken over by the urge to make things with clay, so I sat with him with the idea of making a little soap dish. We recently bought some solid shampoo, and I thought it would be nice to have something with narrow drainage slots, so when it gets smaller it doesn’t want to slip through and fall. I finished the dish – really more of a tray – earlier than he finished his doodads, though, and since I had chosen Fimo Effects in “granite” for the dish, I rolled my leftover worked clay into a rock shape. And then remembered something!

Years ago I pulled a craft idea from a magazine. I assume it was Better Homes and Gardens, but the page doesn’t say and the article doesn’t seem to be online anywhere. The craft was called “Say it with Dream Stones” and was about using translucent polymer clay and spices to make stones, imprinting them with rubber stampers before baking, painting the impressions but wiping off the excess so only the stamp would be dark, and then varnishing them. I just so happen to have a set of typewriter letter stamps, which I retrieved post haste.

The second picture is another set of wishstones, after baking but before any painting or varnishing. Those were made with Sculpey III instead of Fimo.

I have close-ups of the second round of stones, linked from their names. “live” is beige clay (really a sort of pink) with mace, preground black pepper, and celery seed mixed in. “dream” is pearl clay with black pepper and poppy seed, marbled with elephant gray clay with salt and poppy seed. The gray really didn’t show the spices through, it just became more textured. I thought the salt would perhaps show and add some sparkle, since the pearl clay has some shimmer, but it did not.

“REACH” is translucent clay with cinnamon, and “joy” is translucent clay with turmeric and mace marbled with translucent clay with coriander and chili powder. The translucent clay darkened quite a bit when baked – my husband described it as being “like teeth” when it was baked, which is slightly translucent and slightly yellowish, and when it is unbaked it is plain white. I think the spices may have shown through more when it was baked as well. This was better in the case of “joy”, which was an unnatural yellow in the turmeric-colored portions before baking.

I painted the words on “magic” and “dream” with a mix of metallic black and silver acrylic paint. “REACH” is gold acrylic, and “live” and “joy” are both a mix of gold and copper.

The unmarked stones were experiments. The marbled one is leftovers from “dream” mixed with turbinado sugar. The unappealing gray one is elephant gray clay with turmeric (the mistake), salt, poppyseed, paprika, and chili powder (the efforts to rescue it), with a surface rub of paprika and black pepper. I painted both with clear nail polish. In the case of the marbled stone, this was so the sugar wouldn’t dissolve in a water-based finish, and in the case of the gray stone, it was an effort to salvage its attractiveness.

This would be an easy craft to do with children or in a group setting, provided you had the capability to bake the clay and the time to wait. It could be great in a daycamp type setting, where the kids could make the stones one day, someone in charge could bake them that night, and then they could paint the letters at the start of the next day and have them dry in time to take them home. The varnish is really optional.

Fancy pie charts

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I was out with two girlfriends some time ago at a coffee shop that hosts little art exhibits on the wall. There were all these pie charts of pretty paper, and the legends were the sources of the paper. We thought, “we could do that,” and furthermore combined the idea with charts a la GraphJam.

Here’s my favorite of the four I made that night, with all the magazines, scrapbook paper, and postcards we could summon up. It was a gift for my sister.

We used an unwanted CD for a stencil. This time around, I folded the cut-out circle into segments and cut them apart.

After selecting magazine images and cutting out wedges and some extra paper for the legend (using a different pattern than the one in the photo above), I marked a cross 4.25 inches down from the top of the page and centered across (4.25″ in from each side edge) to center the circle. Then I just started gluing down my pieces. I had some old glue sticks that were slightly dried out but they seemed to work okay. I glued the magazine pieces and my husband glued the paper; these approaches both have their pros and cons.

I’ll caution you now to cut your pieces wider than you think they need to be, because I thought mine were wider than the pattern pieces and they still didn’t quite meet up – I had to replace the perfume bottle with a substantially wider wedge. If you are more careful than I am you may not need the extra, but if that is the case it can always be hidden underneath the neighboring pieces.

Finally, I cut half-inch squares of the leftovers to make the legend. I arranged them neatly and wrote my captions and title. My husband’s lovely chart is below as well.

Abandoned Alice

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I recently spent three straight days cleaning and organizing my sewing and craft room. Part of that was deciding “keep or dump” for my stalled and unstarted projects. One such project dates back to last summer, when Iron Craft posted about QR-3D, an effort to represent the two-dimensional barcodes called QR codes in fibrous form. Since I have a dumbphone, QR codes are really irrelevant to my universe, but I love a good geeky challenge.

The pieces of a QR code are explained here; there are large square blocks that give orientation and a smaller one for skew correction, a white border to distinguish it from its surroundings, and two bands of dots that tell what sort of code it is (there are different kinds with different error-correction capacity). The rest encodes a URL or plain text, among many other possibilities. There are a number of different free QR code generators out there; my favorite of those I found was Kerem Erkan’s, because it allows you to set the error-correction capacity and produce an image in various sizes. This allowed me to check the highest error-correction I could have and still get a reasonable code for stitching: the highest level of correction uses more boxes than the lower three, but there was no difference between medium-low and medium-high error correction in terms of design.

Initially I produced a QR code for this site, but one of the three criteria for judging the works was the interest of the site linked to (the other two were workmanship and whether the QR code is actually readable), and while I love my site it’s not going to make anyone say “ooh, nice one,” when used in this way. I needed a theme. I also originally thought of doing chicken scratch on black and white gingham, but kept thinking, waiting for the ah-ha moment (as opposed to the a-ha moment). Gingham led me to aprons, and then I made a leap to this:

Alice in Wonderland, with a QR code in cutwork on her apron.

I was in over my head, though. I still love the idea: the cutaway boxes would have a shadowed version of her blue dress showing through. I had seen enough colored QR codes in my research to believe it would work. I even found thread to match the skirt, to use to anchor “floating” white squares without confusing the image. However, I think there is still a week of stitching left in that, and the contest is long over, so I decided to share.

Oh, and what was the destination I thought people would say “nice one” upon reaching? After shortening it became http://bit.ly/j4L0dA, but I still can’t bring myself to spoil the surprise by giving you the original URL here.

Some notes on construction:
I sized the code to be as large as could be attractive and also flat; it took an hour to transfer the image to the fabric before stitching.

Doing the research for this I discovered Wikipedia has a page on Alice’s dress. I didn’t use that picture, though; I tried to mimic the dress from Disney’s animated movie. I printed several images of Alice dresses (animated and otherwise, seen at different angles), and essentially freehanded a dress and apron pattern, using the pictures to judge proportions. The petticoat underneath is three long strips of fabric, each sewn into a circle and gathered along one long edge, then sewn together so the shortest strip is gathered at the waistline and the longest is a bottom tier. I did not try to make it pretty.

Hat tip to my parents for the hanger: Mom found it in their basement and Dad cut off the ends so it would fit inside the dress.

Small projects

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In the ongoing war against tragically lingering (not at all) current projects, I cleared out some dress pants that were slated for alterations (so long ago that the alterations were no longer to my measurements!) and dumped some holey jeans I’m not positive of my motivation for keeping.

I also had a game that I got at Christmas of 2010, Scrabble Scramble To Go, which had a sort of flimsy vinyl board that looked like it might sustain permanent damage simply from being stored – folded in quarters and put in a canister. The first picture below was enhanced with iPhoto’s automatic process, hence the garishness (I was going to undo it, but it grew on me).

I decided to glue felt to the back of it. I was uncertain what kind of adhesive to use but settled on rubber cement. I did each side individually, after cutting the felt with my guillotine-style paper trimmer, and then stuck them together. Then I stacked books on top to keep it flat and smooth. I checked on it after a little while and some kind of oily gunk had seeped through the board, making it cling to the dust jacket of the first book, so I put a tissue in between. The first time I took the books off, the board wrinkled up after a little while, so I put it back under for a few more days. Hopefully it will stay nicer now.

My other “project” so to speak has nothing to do with downsizing, but with some tulips my darling boyfriend gave me. They had very long stems and when they came to full bloom they got tired. In the before picture here don’t mind the busyness of the backdrop.

I filled a pretty glass bowl with water and cut the blooms off for a little more time to enjoy them. Two of them were already overblown but the other three fit perfectly.

Catstitch

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I was raised by cats. To commemorate that, long ago I decided to rework a four-cat cross-stitch pillow design to represent the four most longstanding feline figures in my history. I traced the original designs, sometimes altering the features a bit (to give Snowball her very round eyes, for instance), and changed out the colors almost completely. That latter involved a lot of staring at photos and my DMC thread card.

Of course, although I begin all four of them, I ran into troubles with accurate colors for one cat (Tabitha was basically done in watercolor; hard to match the subtle variegation with thread) and ran out of steam on two others. The one I completed is my sister’s dearly departed O.D., originally our eldest brother‘s until he married a woman who is allergic to cats, then living in the family home, and finally sent to my sister in college in the Cat Diaspora when our father became allergic.

Framing stitched pieces is kind of a trick. A double mat might keep the glass from flattening the stitches, but I went with a shadowbox frame – a half-inch spacer between the glass and the image. I think this is actually the first time I’ve ever framed a piece of stitching in a proper frame.

Crochet with ribbon

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I finished my work early one night recently and, taken by surprise by that event, looked around for something to fill a little time before bed. I decided to try crocheting with ribbon, pulled from my stash. I used PlanetJune’s Love Hearts pattern.

The white and gold heart was made with 1/8″ wire-edged ribbon and an E hook. The dark blue heart was made with a J hook and non-wired ribbon that had loops along the edge; without the loops it was a bit over 3/16″ wide, and with the loops it was 3/8″. They both turned out fairly sturdy and I think crocheted ribbon baskets and catch-alls would work quite well. The one difficulty with ribbon, that slows down the stitching, is that it wants to coil up into a nice corkscrew as you go along. I could probably have alleviated that by detaching it from the spool, but even once I did with the blue ribbon it still coiled until the free end was short enough to no longer drag on the floor. Instead I had to smooth it every stitch or three. It still didn’t take too long to make these hearts.