First I thought I could make a crochet version, with perle cotton in the appropriate colors, but it was obvious early on that it wasn’t going to have the effect I wanted and I only half-finished it. For my second attempt I turned to needle-felting, buying 100% non-superwash wool yarn for the body color, and got along well until the end, when it was pointed out by my husband that the proportions were off enough that adding the red arms/ears/fins was not going to go well. For the third attempt I bought 100% wool flat felt and rolled up a strip of it to form the core, so I would have more control over the proportions, and that time it all went swimmingly!

(So it’s a little lopsy-faced. I’m okay with that.)

Note: This robot is not one of Mozilla’s trademarks, but the icon file is subject to the Mozilla Public License.

The post Third time’s the charm appeared first on ReveDreams.com.

It started with the silver notebook. I got it for free at work but it had a big ol’ vendor logo across the front. I wanted to cover it, and pulled out a magazine clipping from my stash – but my Mod Podge was nowhere to be found (it probably dried up). After procuring new Podge, I covered that, but then thought, “what other notebooks could I decorate?”

I wasn’t so keen on the tan plaid notebook to begin with; it came in a set. The chickens, from the back cover of a calendar, dress it up nicely, despite one likely being 90 degrees incorrectly positioned. The gopher-y creature was the front of a birthday card received from my parents years ago. I liked that notebook fine, but the whole back cover still has the zig-zag lines so there’s no real loss.

At that point I thought my supply had dried up – my remaining notebooks were too attractive to decoupage some random paper onto. Then I had a meeting and took the pinkish notebook – and realized I’d been using it for two years and was only maybe 1/4 through. Boring! Addition time. I do wish I’d trimmed out some of the white between the leaves near the bottom of the image, but it’s nice nonetheless.

Decoupage: highly recommended for instant gratification.

The post I’ve got a fever! appeared first on ReveDreams.com.

One of my coworkers just had a birthday, and I thought it would be fun to find him a magnet of one of those creatures. Striking out of suitable magnets, I thought maybe I could glue a magnet onto the back of a small toy. Striking out on suitable small toys, I decided to needle felt one: the narwhal. 90 minutes later…

The magnet is embedded in the back side, and there is a doubled length of light wire running from the tip of the horn to the tips of the tailfins.

I have some other projects pending photos, so there will probably be a flurry of posts here eventually. Meanwhile I added a big batch of new photos to the Fun with Vintage Patterns album on Facebook.

The post Narwhal! appeared first on ReveDreams.com.

The photo it represents actually came from this blog, from the post discussing the creation of the hat I’m wearing in it. Here it is for direct comparison.

We did not end up using this for the team page as originally intended; the idea sort of fizzled out. I wanted to show it off somewhere, though, and in case you’re curious, I have for you some material lists and process photos.

Visible components:

• Fabric
  • satin (sky, glasses)
  • fleece (white part of jacket)
  • home dec type (dark green trees, gray part of jacket)
  • netting (overlay for gravel)
  • cotton and/or cotton-poly (everything else)
• Sewing thread
• Bulky acrylic yarn (hat)
• Fabric paint (lips and teeth)
• Blanket binding (frame)

Invisible components:

• Flannel (to pad up my nose-cheek-chin region just a tad, though I think it ended up being irrelevant)
• Heavyweight nonwoven interfacing (face/head, line of trees on left, glasses, two full-size backings)
• Fusible web (glasses, mouth)
• Tacky glue (glasses)
• Fray-Check (glasses)

The first two photos are the back view of the piece that formed my head and neck, and a partially laid out background. I used the head piece to help align the background pieces.

Next, a shot I call The Invisible Bozo, and a taste of the oddness of cutting up three or four copies of your face to do a project.

The back, before and after I covered it with a second layer of interfacing and with calico.

Finally, a shot of the finished item lit from the right instead of the left. It really shows how much dimensionality the piece has.

This isn’t a project I would have done without someone telling me “hey, you should to do this,” but it was an interesting challenge. I don’t know what I’ll do with it now, but my rationale for backing and binding it was that if I was going to put as much time into something as I did into this (I didn’t keep track, but 10 hours give or take) then I was going to finish it properly.

The post A fibrous self-portrait appeared first on ReveDreams.com.

I thought at first that I would chain stitch ribbon around wire, bend it into shape, and connect the ends; nesting two or three of different sizes would fill out the star. That might have worked if my wire had been a bit heavier, but as it was it was too flimsy, and it was also difficult to smooth and flatten the wire without crimping and creasing the ribbon.

Then I went looking for patterns and found one by Kimura Kraft that I liked the look of. Unfortunately it didn’t work in ribbon; the inner part was somehow too large for the outside.

Fortunately I had purchased three “kegs” of ribbon, so after two strikes I could still try for a hit, modifying that pattern. For the star shown I used a J hook (6mm), a 40ft roll of 3/16 inch wide ribbon (12.2m|~5mm), and a generous 2ft (60cm) of 28-gauge jewelry wire. I had a decent bit of ribbon left, but only about half the difference to the next available size down, 32ft (9.75m).

Here are my changes to Markus’s pattern. Unfamiliar abbreviations below (and the rest of them too) are explained on the Crochet Reference page.
Round 1: Replace the starting ring and chains with “ch-4, work into ch next to sl kn.” Make sure to put your sl kn onto the hk loosely – ribbon is inelastic.
Round 2: Ch 3 to start instead of 2; work only 1 dc where it says to work 2 (so don’t make that first dc, in particular).
Round 3: This one’s different enough that it’s simpler to give the instructions in full. Note that “in picot” means to treat the “sl st in 3rd ch from hk” parts of rnd 2 as chain rings, working into the center:
No ch this rnd. Work the following stitches around the wire as well as the rnd-2 sts, leaving a wire tail of several inches: *sc 2 around next ch-2; [sc 2, ch 1, dc, ch 1, sc 2] in picot; sc 2 around next ch-2; sk dc* around. Sl st into 1st sc of rnd to join (40 sc, 10 ch, 5 dc). FO ribbon.
Twist ends of wire together and use to attach star to tree or other hanging/display place. Shape by hand.

The post Shining (ribbon) stars appeared first on ReveDreams.com.

It didn’t go so well. I started with green floral wire, probably about 28 gauge, maybe 26, which was stiff with its coating. Second round was 30 gauge gold wire. Both were with a size 1 steel hook (2.75mm). My tension was all over the place – with the gold wire especially, it was impossible to get a grip on it without bending it and risking kinks. Not that I didn’t get kinks regardless. After the fact it occurred to me that finger cots on two or three fingers of my left hand might be a help, but by then I was getting ready for bed.

I did feel like I was starting to get the hang of it, as uneven as that second round is, but by then I was kind of over the whole granny square idea and decided to make a chained chain. I used the same hook, and red wire that was unlabeled, but probably 28-30 gauge. That went better, especially because the unevenness of my loops is not as apparent as the uneven height of the double crochet stitches.

Speaking of kinks, as we were a while ago, I tried to reel the wire straight off the spool instead of letting it come off the end, coiled, because I read a hint somewhere that I’d get fewer kinks that way. I didn’t have much luck getting the gold wire to unreel like that, but the red wire was better behaved. I think it did result in fewer kinks, but not their complete elimination.

I thought about trying beaded wire crochet, but it was getting late and I didn’t have any ideas that appealed to me much. Instead, in honor of how birds-nest-y my wire crochet is (especially the granny), I made a wrapped wire bird’s nest.

Frigid rain all day yesterday. I do like winter, but not that aspect.

The post Wire crochet experiments appeared first on ReveDreams.com.

My piece was an intense red. Since they didn’t specify anything about colors or materials, I used a black Crayola fabric marker to write an adaptation of a piece of advice I read online somewhere.

That little bubble showed up when I heat-set the marker (despite using no steam). I hope it goes away again in later work.

This mini project made me wonder whether I’d even written about Crayola fabric markers here. A little search says I haven’t, although you can see them in action on white elastic and denim. I picked up a box of 10 at a party supply store, on impulse. I figured they would be all right, since I’ve never been really disappointed by a Crayola product. They exceeded my expectations. These things lay down a lot of color and the shades are rich. Here’s a rainbow on denim (contemporary with the other denim link) to demonstrate, at least somewhat.

The post Wedding quilts and Crayola markers appeared first on ReveDreams.com.

Red and gold metallic floss! It gleams! I have a love/hate relationship with metallic floss (in contrast to my just-hate relationship with satin floss). It’s so attractive, and such a pain to work with (crochet or embroidery… as long as you’re not comparing it to satin floss). The floss is made of a fiber core with a metal strip coiled around it; as you work with it the edges of that strip poke out and turn into snag factories. That’s trickier with embroidery than crochet, fortunately for us here, but it can cause difficulties. I have some advice for crocheting with this material, with the ornament instructions below.

This tree is my Tabletop Tree made in Red Heart Tweed “Camo” yarn, through and through. It is denser and smoother than the other tree.

Garland: This tree also has a chain garland, made using the better part of a skein of each color, but not a magic one this time. I found the strands of the two colors were too intermingled – at least at first – to make a magic chain. I used an E/4 hook (3.5mm) and chained with both colors together, instead. A double thickness was too much for even the roughness of metallic floss, and the slip knot and knot at the end did not want to stay put. I augmented them with overhand knots. If I had knotted each color separately, I would have solved both the problem of the slippery slip knot and the strands intermingling.

Decorating: To put the garland on the tree I wound it around in a spiral, trying to tuck the chain into the branches from time to time to mimic how garlands are placed on real trees. I used a yarn needle to hide the floss ends inside the tree. The ornaments were hung by stitching through the tree, as before, and placed at the tucks of the garland to help hold it in place. I stitched straight through and then down and out the foot of the tree.

General floss crochet instructions: The two decorations below were made with embroidery floss and a size 4 steel hook (2mm). For these my abbreviations and conventions are relevant, though the only one you haven’t seen before is likely “2sc” for single crochet increase. “Dec” means sc decrease. I highly recommend the double magic ring to begin, since it does not require any additional floss-end securing. I also recommend the trick of inserting your hook into the first stitch of the round before tightening the ring so it does not get tightened down along with the ring (shown in the video at the link), under both loops even if you won’t be using both loops. After the second round of stitching, make sure the piece is fully right-side-out, rolling the rim up with your thumbs and index fingers if needed. Metallic floss needs encouragement to change position, which is also an advantage.

Ornament balls (red): One skein of floss will comfortably make 7 of these.
1. Form magic ring, ch 1, and sc 5.
2. 2sc, sc, 2sc, sc, sc (7). Make sure the work so far is fully right side out. I like to loosen the current loop so I can take the hook out and roll the rim up with both thumbs and index fingers.
3. Sc, dec, sc, dec, sc (5).
This should not need stuffing beyond perhaps wadding the initial floss tail (and maybe not even all of that) into the ball. Cut floss leaving a long tail. Stitch a drawstring through the opening: up under the front loop of the first stitch, down through the first loop of the second, alternating to end with up through the front loop of the last stitch. Put the floss through the ball and out the middle of the magic ring. Pull the drawstring tight and roll the ball between your fingers as needed to round out the shape.

Pine cones (gold): One skein will easily make 8.
1. Form magic ring, ch 1, and sc 6.
2-3. Sc around in BL only (6 sc; 2 rnds).
As above, the initial floss tail should suffice for stuffing. Cut floss leaving a long tail and stitch a drawstring through the back loops only of the last round; I like to go from inside the round to outside under each stitch’s back loop. Pull it closed but don’t tighten too much. Put the floss through the pinecone from the center of the last round through the center of the magic ring. Roll the pinecone between your fingers if necessary to make the rounds taller and narrower (increase the distance between magic ring and drawstring).

Additional tips: A stuffing tool will be very helpful, a small fork of sorts to push the floss into the item. I use a plastic yarn needle with the back of the eye snipped off and the two resulting prongs sanded smooth. I have seen a stuffing tool of two pointy toothpicks taped together, but a wider end on the tines would be more helpful – perhaps two flat toothpicks, with half of a third one in between for spacing if needed, using the wider ends for stuffing. I also had a much easier time stuffing after I tried twisting the end of the floss until it was all coiled around itself – it gave me more to push against and I didn’t have the problems with individual plies looping up, impossible to hold onto with the stuffing tool. I had no problems with the drawstring staying closed, even though I didn’t secure the tail (well, except for stitching it through the tightly-stuffed item and out the tight magic ring).

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little post blitz! Here’s a final close-up glamour shot courtesy my husband:

I’ve made the decorations above and in the previous post, as well as my tips for working with embroidery floss, available as a name-your-price PDF for easy printing.

The post Red and gold tree appeared first on ReveDreams.com.

I did not like the blue and silver options in metallic floss (though I fortunately picked up a white skein with my gold and red), so I got rayon/satin instead. As mentioned in the initial post, I now think that was a mistake. Many words not in keeping with the spirit of the season were said, and I may have even thrown the floss on the floor at one point in a fit of pique. I can neither confirm nor deny. The starting slip knot in particular does not want to hold well. I made different fixes for the two types of decorations, described below.

This tree is my Tabletop Tree made with a cone of Red Heart Super Saver “Hunter Green” yarn and branches of Herrschners Holiday “Dark Green.” The Herrschners yarn is finer and twistier than the Red Heart, which led to a shaggy, textured tree.

Magic chain garland: Chenille yarn in an appropriate color, metallic eyelash yarn for tinsel, or a simple chain make great garlands, but for a two-color garland I turned to my magic chain. To make one, hold two strands of yarn together, tie a slipknot, and place it on your hook. Now chain as usual, but grab only one strand for each chain and alternate which one it is. I did these with embroidery floss instead of yarn, though, and used a C/2 hook (2.75mm). To deal with the slippery knot, I held onto it with my fingers until I’d chained a few times, and then trusted to fate for it not to fall out (well, fate and the long tail I left) while I finished the chain. It didn’t, and after finishing I went back and tied the two colors in a square knot, with an overhand knot over top of it so the tails would be pointing the same direction. I pulled the end of one color through the last loop of the other at the end, tightened it a bit, and then tied overhand-square-overhand to secure. The garland used about 2/3 of a skein of each color, but more of blue and less of silver – I think this was due to shifting my grip upwards after the same color link most of the time, so the slippery floss that wanted to pull anyway was inclined to do so more on silver than blue.

This magic chain does not look much like a yarn magic chain, but it’s cheerful. The satin floss likes to keep its own shape and doesn’t have the benefit of friction to make it stay put. To put it on the tree, I used a yarn needle to hide the floss at one end inside the tree, wrapped the garland around in a spiral, and then hid the opposite end into the tree as well. And then I re-wrapped the garland, because it had slipped completely out of place during the end-hiding operation.

To add the ornaments, I stitched the beginning and ending yarn ends through the tree to hold the star in place – leave an extra long tail on both ends for ease of doing so.

Stars: I made the stars with embroidery floss and a size 4 steel hook (2mm), or with worsted weight yarn or two lengths of floss and an E/4 hook (3.5mm). You can make them with 4, 5, or 6 points easily, although 5 looks the most like a star – 6 looks a bit like a flower, and 4 like a cross or plus sign.
Here’s the pattern. Note that when I slip stitch into a chain other than to make a ring, I insert my hook in the back bump of the chain.
Ch 4, sl st into ring.
*Ch 3, sl st in 2nd ch from hk, ch 1, sl st into ring* as many times as desired; each iteration of *…* makes a point.
FO, putting the end of the yarn through the center of the ring, front to back.
To make one longer point, replace the *…* with:
Ch 5, sl st in 2nd ch from hk; ch 1, sk 1 ch of ch-5, sl st in next ch of ch-5; ch 1, sl st into ring.

The satin floss did not work well at all. Here’s a sample:

Slip knot tips: I did learn some things, and made enough stars to say that a skein should make 3 each of 3 kinds: 6-pointed, 5-pointed, and 4-pointed with one longer point. In both metallic and satin floss, two lengths held together don’t make for a sturdy slip knot. With metallic floss by itself, the slip knot holds well. With satin floss, it doesn’t, but if you add another wrap to the knot before tightening it holds perfectly. That is: a slip knot is essentially an overhand knot with the working end of the yarn looped up through it. You want to convert the overhand knot to a double overhand knot. In the lower drawing of my slip knot instructions, the tail going off to the left gets wrapped around the last strand it passes under.

In the stars made from two lengths of embroidery floss I knotted each separately and then worked with them together. Metallic plus satin worked fairly well (blue and white); satin by itself was just mushy and hard to finish off. The silver floss in the photo is some I had at home, which of course was on an unlabeled bobbin.

I’ve made the decorations above and in the next post, as well as my tips for working with embroidery floss, available as a name-your-price PDF for easy printing.

The post Blue, white, and silver tree appeared first on ReveDreams.com.

A stylized pine tree is basically a cone, with something passing for branches around the outside. I wrote about cones earlier this week and more information can be found there, but the important recap is: To make a cone in single crochet, start with a 4 or 5 stitches in a magic ring (you can even go as low as 3, but be careful to work right-side-out as early as possible, because a tight turn with back-loop-only fabric can create big gaps in the stitching), and single crochet in a spiral. Work in back loops only and add the same number of stitches to each round (on average, at least). Try to shift them around so the increases aren’t all on top of each other.

The narrower tree below was made by starting with 4 stitches and increasing by 1 stitch per round usually, but by 2 stitches every fourth round or so, for a total of 14 rounds. The wider tree started with 5 stitches in a magic ring, and then 2 or 3 stitches were added each round, alternately. It has only 13 full rounds. Both trees, however, also have a partial round for straightness. Spiral crochet loses ground with each round, so by the time you get to 14 rounds you’re well behind where you began, and adding some stitches can be necessary to get the tree to stand up straight. Do that by eye; start with about a third of the stitches around, but be prepared to add or subtract stitches a few times. It doesn’t need to be perfect, though, partially because not all trees are totally straight and partially because back-loop-only fabric can be molded to shape enough to accommodate small imperfections.

Cone bases (also discussed earlier this week): Start with 7 sc in a magic ring and add 7 to each round: 2sc around, then *2sc, sc* around, then *2sc, sc 2* around, continuing or stopping short as needed to make a disk of the right diameter to fill the space in the bottom of the cone. If correct diameter and matching number of stitches are in conflict, favor correct diameter.

Stuffing: You don’t want to overstuff, because back-loop-only fabric can stretch out and expose the stuffing through holes. However, stuff enough to make sure the tree has body. This is more important the taller your tree is relative to its diameter. The tall, thin blue tree in the previous post was originally understuffed, and after I put the branches on, the tip of it didn’t want to stay upright. I had to wedge more stuffing in through the fabric, which was kind of laborious.

Attaching the base: Essentially, sc around, making each stitch through the back loop of a cone stitch and both loops of a base stitch. I have found that often the base has fewer stitches around than the cone opening, though, and so some cone stitches will either have to be skipped or crocheted to the same base stitch as the previous cone stitch was. I have found that skipping stitches can tuck the bottom of the cone inward a bit, whereas crocheting two cone stitches to the same base stitch preserves the slant of the sides.

Branches: Starting with a new length of yarn, place slip knot on hook. Insert hook into unused loop of cone stitch closest to magic ring (point of cone), so your hook points down the tree (insert from point toward base). [If you crochet left-handed, point your hook the same direction, but begin at the base of the tree/opening of the cone instead of the tip.] Slip stitch to join yarn. Chain 4 and sc in same st as sl st. *Ch 4, sc in next lp* all the way around and around your tree. I like to replace the last sc with a sl st for smoothness. Nicely, if you accidentally skip a loop or double up, or are one chain short or long, it will just add to the natural look of the tree.

Designing your own: If you want to make a less straight-sided tree, keep in mind that whatever shaping you give the cone will be muted by the branches, so exaggerate it. The trees in the top photo are from my Tabletop Tree pattern; you would not guess they’d have the natural shape they do from the “unbranched” form. Those trees also illustrate something about design: the tree with the sparkly branches is made on a base of yarn that is thicker than the sparkly yarn, and the non-sparkly tree is the same yarn all the way through. The sparkly yarn was also very twisty, which I think contributed, but you can see how much smoother and more solid the non-sparkly tree is, whereas the sparkly one is rougher and shaggier.

If you’d like a different tree, here’s a hollow one made bottom-up with loop stitch, and here’s a stylized one made from three triangles stitched flat.

Overview post Making the tree
Blue, silver, and white decorations Red and gold decorations

The post Crocheting a pine tree appeared first on ReveDreams.com.