An Elephant

I've mentioned Abby Glassenburg a lot, because she has a fabulous blog full of many great things, particularly advice on learning to design your own soft toys. She also sells her soft toy patterns and I've had my eye particularly on the Lovey Doveys for a while.

I told myself rather firmly that I couldn't buy this pattern unless I had a target in mind, and I just don't know anyone with a new baby at the moment!! Then one evening my lovely husband says "My cousin has had her baby." I practically burst with joy. "CAN I MAKE A PRESENT???"

So anyway, I have. The elephant lovey dovey is from Abby's 2nd Edition pattern which includes an elephant, pig, owl and penguin. You can get it from Etsy or Craftsy. (I went with the latter, because you get the pattern immediately rather than waiting for it to be emailed to you. Not that I was in a rush really I just thought that was cool.)

Here it is with some other babies - my little veggie garden. Hmm... something has been eating that lettuce.

It was very hard to get the little tike to sit up for a photo, not having a proper body and all. This was, I feel, an elegant solution.

Plane Shapes Soft Cube

Who doesn't want their kids to play with toys that teach them stuff about maths? Crazy people, maybe. So anyway I can't even remember how this idea started but I've been playing around with Spoonflower, as I mentioned before with my Pencil Pals design, and I've been working on these shapes for a while.

I designed them with the idea in mind of making a soft cube toy, and maybe later a dodecahedron (I have 12 shapes ready but only the first 6 in swatch form yet).

Excited about ordering organic cotton, I ordered them in the organic cotton knit, and then realised what a fool I was when they came! I don't know, but I'm pretty sure a real stretchy fabric won't make a nice crisp cube. So I used some iron-on interfacing that I had. Actually that has turned out pretty well because the panels have a nice soft knit feel but a solidness behind that.

On the downside though in the process of interfacing, some of the fabric stretched. The square is not so square anymore and the circle is not so circular. So next time, not knit.

Still I'm really proud of it. Time to order some more swatches and make another one. Or try the dodecahedron challenge.

Luckily since this guy is finished, I'm allowed to buy more swatches. I've set up a new self-control system - I must finish 2 craft items before I can buy resources for another. There was a period of ebay-related incidents.

Ok it isn't finished finished, but it's blog finished (fabulous expression, courtesy of Ric-Rac). The reason is that I'm thinking about getting a rattle to put inside. Although I'll have to finish two more things to buy the rattle. Darnit.

Halloween Finger Puppet Greeting Cards

I've been making some cards - something I haven't done for a while. I've been playing with the idea of cards with finger puppets, and since I was exploring Halloween ideas, I started with some Halloweeny ones.

I started with some owls. One of the big issues I had was coming up with how to attach the puppet to the card. Eventually I found these sticky puffy tab things in a card-making kit (you know the things that make the bits on the card stick out? Those. Turns out I had some) but I experimented with many other ideas, including paddle-pop sticks, as with this fat owl and his fence:

He is so fat.

Happy with the owls, I tried a pumpkin-headed man and a kid dressed as a devil.

I think in future I would do him either as just a jack-o-lantern without a body, or as a proper pumpkin-headed man with some arms. He looks a bit funny this way.

Poor devil kid's face. I didn't want to go to the effort of sewing on eyes and a mouth (especially the mouth) so I tested fabric pens. Unfortunately I tested them on one felt then used them on another, and it spread more on the face fabric. Oh well. He doesn't seem to mind.

I don't think the pictures I used are copyright free (they were from a Dover sampler but not from a clip-art book so probably not ok) so I can't try to sell them (plus apart from owl number one they all have issues, plus who buys Halloween greeting cards, plus who in Australia buys Halloween greeting cards...). I'll be giving these away to any of my friends who has someone to give them to. Then we can see if the puppet-card idea is a good one.

Also, this week's fabric of the week contest at Spoonflower is Zombie Plush Toys. Worth a look and a vote.

Pinterest Progress - Button Pictures

All quiet from me on the blog lately - I've been getting married! More on that soon, but here's something from before that I hadn't published yet.

I have a large tin of buttons, as I may have mentioned previously. I want to use them up, but a lot of craft projects seem to require specific colours, often bright colours, and I don't have many of them. I have a lot of black, white and brown buttons. So one thing I found on Pinterest was button artworks.

So I had a look at the tutorial for the Button Elephant by bustedbutton and decided I would have a go at it.

I decided to make a badger, because I love badgers, and because it exactly suited the colours I have. I painted the background with acrylic paint and in rather more than the recommended "wash" that she does, but that's what I happened to have out at the time to paint some table-tennis-ball eyeballs (more on that in a future post).

Then I hot-glue-gunned away! It was pretty hard to do, especially because I had small areas of colour and not as many small buttons as I'd like, and because my glue gun left lots of trails of glue strands everywhere that had to be picked off. And I had to redo the eyes 3 times because they kept being in the wrong position or angle or something.

Overall I am pretty happy with how it turned out and it was a very quick project.

The thing that baffles me is that I can use SO MANY buttons and the tin seems just as full. I will need to make a lot more button animal pictures. Anyone want one?

A Small Scale Beginning

Getting back into regular crafting there is a huge list of things I want to try. One of them is hobby horses, and I have begun playing around with patterns and ideas but it's a pretty big project and hasn't gotten very far yet.

So for the moment, I have made a tiny hobby horse Christmas tree ornament, to at least give me some feelings of hobby-horse-related joy.

Chapter One: In Which Tanith Introduces Herself

Yay new blog!

You'll see two people posting here, myself and my sister Rhiannon. We've decided to start a craft blog together and soon(ish) start selling our crafts together.

I am currently a full time maths teacher and I'm teaching TAS (technology and applied studies) classes this year too. I have a teaching blog which is mostly pictures of the silly things I decorate my classroom with.

My craft interests include millinery, costumes, soft toys, toys in general, everything to do with Christmas and Halloween. I aim to learn a lot more about designing soft toys and about woodworking in the next year or so. I also love to draw and paint. And I love maths, but that's arguably not a craft.

I've recently developed a strong interest in ethical fashion, which I will also blog about, and I'm starting to explore other ethical lifestyle choices and gardening.

Here are some of my favourite things that I have made, to give you an idea of what might be yet to come: