A Thank-You Hat

This year I was teaching 9 periods out-of-faculty. Even though this was in TAS, my first area of qualification, I haven't taught it for years, and hadn't taught any of the projects I was asked to teach. Suddenly in the workshop with classes in front of me and lots to learn, I was pretty well lost.

Luckily I had a colleague come to the rescue. Show me what to do. Come to my rescue with questions I couldn't answer or resources I couldn't find. Come into my class and help my students. Encourage, support, and inspire me.

Where would we be without colleagues like that.

So I wanted to make her something for Christmas. Something to show my gratitude and give her something my time and skill created, to pay for all the time and skill she shared with me.

Sorry for the photo. It was late at night when I finished and I had to gift it the next day. She loves it though, which is all that matters.

Attempting to teach soft toy design

I mentioned earlier my choice to teach Soft Toy Design as a unit for Technology (Mandatory) this term. I try to ensure that I enjoy my job by making my job what I want it to be. Want to make puppets? Let's put on a Shapes Puppet Show. Want to design soft toys? Textiles time!

What an adventure. The kids had amazing ideas and were really enthusiastic (and that's always the best way to make sure they learn something). We researched, we discussed ethical design considerations, we sketched, we drew patterns, we learnt how to use the sewing machine.

Once we then started on the actual construction, some kids hit the reality wall of what they were trying to achieve. It doesn't seem to matter how many times you tell them to keep it simple. So some patterns underwent major editing, and some project were completely abandoned in favour of something more manageable. 

But this was good. In fact, this was a great experience.

The course is supposed to be centred around design. But it is hard to do that when students don't have a lot of skills, so most projects really focus on technologies and skills, with minimal design elements. I felt like this was real design. They faced the reality of design constraints, mainly time and skill restrictions. They evaluated and edited as they worked.

And in the end, like all good projects, I got sick, time ran out and we finished in a panic at the last possible moment!

The fellow on the right there is an adipose baby (Doctor Who), with hat and scarf (naturally).

I am extremely proud of what they managed to achieve and the lessons we all learned in the process. I had a fantastic time.

And we put some of our ethical design ideas into practice. This octopus is made from apron projects that previous classes either didn't finish or didn't want to take home. The straps and ties make excellent legs!

And to encourage them to finish all their theory work to a high standard, I gave the Zombie Bear to the best folio! And Violet Puffle and some Sock Snowmen to some runners up.

Spoonflower contest "Sweets"

This week's Spoonflower contest is Sweets (scatter print). Feeling Christmassy, I stuck to a standard theme of Gingerbread men.

But I wanted my men to be more than just your Joe Average gingerbread man. I wanted them to be classy.

So I present to you my entry, entitled "Gingerbread Gentlemen."

You can vote in this week's contest or look at the fabric in more detail here.

More Sock Snowmen

I loved making the first pair of sock snowmen so much that I went to Vinnies and got some more socks. Yay Vinnies! I got 3 pairs of socks AND an Agatha Christie for $3.50.

Actually I still had quite a bit left of the white socks so I used the rest of that up for the bodies, along with the new socks for the jumpers and hats.

I also fixed up the poor floppy fat snowman from before by emptying most of his rice and filling up the rest with stuffing in my patented* rice AND stuffing system.

Now he is skinny!

Filling with stuffing makes it easier to give a snowman-like appearance without tying the ribbon at the top and bottom of the jumper, so I didn't bother with these ones. I just shaped the stuffing into sections as it went in, and the elasticity of the socks does the rest. Or you can just separate the head and body into two sections, which is cute too.

Lots of buttons used up! And some other bits and pieces from my stash.

What a cute little line up!

*Not at all patented.

Hat Makeover - Christmas in July

Over the years I've made a lot of hats, and while some I continue to love just the way they are, others haven't been quite right. I don't like to get rid of them, so clearly, they need a makeover.

To begin, my Victorian Christmas-in-July hat. (Why? Because I had a Victorian Christmas-in-July party)

The event was awesome, but the hat is a bit silly. I was so in love with pheasant feathers that I only wanted them straight.

I contemplated taking the hat apart completely and reusing the bits, but I thought that there might be a simpler solution. So a little bending of wire and curling of feathers later, and the new improved hat is ready.

Gift Tags

This week's Spoonflower contest is Gift Tags. These slightly obnoxious presents are my entry. You can go and vote this week. There's lots of great entries, and you just vote for all the ones you like (which I think is a great system).

Today is also the start of Spoonflower's 12 days of Giveaways. Apparently if you enter by following this link thing from when I entered, I get extra entries. Remember people, it's the season of giving.

Christmas in Australia

Christmas is an interesting holiday for me because I've spent so much time studying it. I wrote my honours thesis on Christmas in Australia: specifically the retention of British traditions, the incorporation of native Australian elements, and commercialisation. In the course of that research, I read through years of December newspapers and magazines, looking at images, stories, advertisements and articles on Christmas celebrations, Christmas presents, Christmas food and Christmas sentiment. It felt a bit like an overdose, to be honest.

One of the threads of public discourse that I constantly encountered was the idea that Christmas in Australia would never really be a 'proper' Christmas. While only a few people would have agreed with outspoken Marcus Clarke who claimed that Christmas in Australia was 'a gigantic mistake' (he even admitted that his belief might be seen as 'rank heresy'), there were many who recognised that bringing a traditional European celebration into an Australian summer necessitated 'maimed rites'.

There was a constant tension between showing that Australians could celebrate Christmas in the traditional way and arguing that they shouldn't have to. Being able to reproduce the trappings of a 'real' Christmas was a sign that Australia was still a civilized place, despite its isolation and frontier status.  Even in the 1950s, which was the point my thesis stopped so my research stopped, every writer in a woman's magazine who gave an alternative to the Christmas pudding was still holding up the traditional, holly-bedecked, brandy-drizzled, ablaze pudding as the norm from which one deviated.

Of course, the "traditional" British Christmas that many writers held up as an ideal was of a relatively short history itself. The Christmas of the 19th century - focused on family gatherings, private & domestic celebrations - was a striking contrast to the more public, rowdy festivities of earlier centuries. But that is an entirely different strand of argument.

Calls to create a particularly Australian Christmas usually involved incorporating native Australian plants and animals into new duties as Christmas icons - wattle for mistletoe, ferns instead of firs. In 1941, arguing that the Americans had taken on poinsettias as their own new symbol of Christmas, one writer suggested that Australians should use Christmas bells and Christmas bush. Christmas bush was popular to decorate with, and indeed in 1881 an article in the Australian Town and Country Journal mentioned that its price was rising with its scarcity and that people who had it growing in their yards were reporting branches being stolen. But it never became one of the public symbols of Christmas, with newspaper illustrations, Christmas cards and advertisements continuing to prefer holly and mistletoe.

I'm fascinated by the duality of the Australian Christmas, and not just as a researcher (if anyone is interested, I have an article on the duality of an Australian Christmas using the Christmas pudding published  here in the journal Eras). As someone who has lived through Christmases here and overseas, I find that I need that tension and duality to be able to enjoy it. I love that I can view dried fruit AND cranberries AND cherries as Christmas fruits, for example. I don't think I'll ever be able to totally view a hot Christmas as normal - but neither is a snowy one.

This Christmas, for a variety of reasons, a lot of my usual traditions won't be happening. So I'm going to take the opportunity to experiment, particularly with food, to see where I can really tease out this dual image of Christmas.

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.

Rust Monster Pillowcase

Ok so this story begins in October, which is my brother-in-law's birthday, and this year was very shortly after my wedding. So his birthday passes and I haven't gotten him anything. I was going to go a gift voucher but time passes, haven't seen him since the wedding, and since the present is now so late, a gift voucher doesn't seem to cut it.

Since I'm making soft toys, I consider that idea. I ask my sister what kind of animals or creatures he likes. She asks him, and this is the sms response I get: "He likes rust monsters and dragons and trolls and panthers." Nothing too easy to make there. Anyway I wasn't sure if he'd even like a soft toy, so Rhiannon and I discuss that too. He'd probably like one, but maybe something more practical. Eventually we hit on pillowcase. They have a lot of pillows as cushions at their place.

So I made a fabric. I went with rust monsters. For those of you who aren't massive geeks who spent their youth reading and rereading "The Monstrous Manual", this is a monster from Dungeons and Dragons. (Oh crap, I outed myself again.) Thanks to a detailed wikipedia article I found a description of all the different animals that different illustrations of the rust monster were based on, and could go back to the source to make my own version. Consequently I think it is more insect-like than many others, but I'm happy enough with it.

I did quite a few sketches then tried to draw a "cute" version, which I liked and rolled with.

I tried painting the sketch and also colouring it using GIMP. It is much easier to stay in the lines on a computer. I stuck to 3 colours then used this "burn" tool I just discovered to create darker areas, then smudged it all smooth.

Then I copied and pasted and rotated a whole bunch of them. The fabric is available for sale at my Spoonflower shop if you have someone in your life that loves rust monsters. I agree it's a niche market, but you never know :)

Then I made it into a pillowcase. Every single set of instructions on the internet seem to be for making a pillowcase with 3 different fabrics including a contrast band or something so instead I just looked at my trusty Sesame Street pillowcase and copied that. I figure, it's lasted this long, it must have something going for it.

Wrapped and ready to go! Happy super-belated birthday!

One Year of Ethical Fashion

I don't know exactly when I read "To Die For" but I first mention it online on December 3rd last year. I was so ready for this book, already feeling these things subconsciously and ready to take action. It hasn't been too difficult so far, and I think I've been mostly successful.

My concern was that the main action I would have to take would be NOT buying. I did a lot of research finding ethical clothing and coveted a lot of things, but didn't need them, so I couldn't buy them.

But new habits formed more quickly than I thought. I am so disinterested in fashion shops now. Westfields and other centres are pretty boring actually (except for Lush). I'm sure this must be doing my savings a lot of good too!

Here is what I have purchased in the year since I read the book.

I'll start my confessing my sins. Things I have bought new, without any ethical credentials:

• A year 12 jersey that says "Mrs Kovari". The jersey timing coincided pretty closely with our wedding, and since I am now their year-advisor-in-law, I thought it would be cute.
• My wedding shoes. I did try finding second hand but didn't have much luck. I will try to find another life for them now.
• Wedding underwear.
• My engagement party dress.

New items with ethical credentials:

• Underwear from Urbanearthwear (read my review here)
• Gideon shoes (review here)
• Icebreaker socks and thermal top, in preparation for Canada and also just a search to find ethical socks.
• My wedding dress. No ethical cred for the fabric, but it was made by a dressmaker and designer team who were certainly not underpaid.

Second hand:

• 2 vintage dresses and some vintage ski pants from an auction
• Knit vest
• Polo shirt
• Jeans
• Work shirt
• Singlet top
• Shorts
• Long-sleeved black top, all of these from op-shops.

It's actually a lot more than I thought it was, and I may have missed some. It makes me wonder how much I bought in the average year before!

I've been mending things a lot more than I used to, and I think I may do some alterations too. I'm determined to do the most I can with what I have already.

But I am itching for a shop. And I have lost about 8kg and some things are a little "bra-showy" at the moment. It may be time for another op-shop crawl.

Little crafts with magnets and cinnamon

A couple of weeks ago I had some friends over for a Christmas crafts afternoon. We focused mainly on cards (which I won't show because I'll be posting them soon), but I also tried out a few other ideas that had stuck in my brain recently.

Of course I can't remember where they came from anymore, but they were about recycling old Christmas cards. The first was to cut a pretty shape from an old card, glue it onto a small bunch of cinnamon sticks and hang it with ribbon. Easy Peasy.

Actually the reindeer was from a card-making kit and was already cut out. Even easier.

Then I tried the same idea with some buttons.

At the moment they are just decorating my fridge.

Along with idea number two. Which was to cut up bits of old cards and attach a magnet to the back. Now I don't have a lot of magnets lying around, and I didn't want to be wasteful. But then a light bulb appeared.

One seriously chopped up magnetic real estate agent calendar later...

The main red and white bits are these vinyl cutouts that Rhiannon brought along for cards, the penguin is from an old Christmas card, the porcupine is a button, and the shapes on the stocking are stickers. I wasn't sure the thin magnet would hold much stuff, but it's proving sufficient.

Sarah brought some scrapbooking stickers and they made great magnets too! Attach sticker to magnet, cut around, put on fridge. Genius.

Kitchen themed and all.

Then I was looking at my card-making stuff and found these old plastic butterflies I bought at some point for some reason.

This has the tinest bit of magnet attached to the middle and it still stays up.

And really, I have more than half of the calendar left. And that was just 2011! I'm never throwing magnetic junk mail away again!

Christmas Dice Fabric

Hooray for free shipping day at Spoonflower! It motivated me to finish two new designs, and I treated myself with some other fabrics too.

Christmas polyhedral dice!

Green dice on red.

The green hasn't come out as well in my photos as it actually is. I blame the blinding hot sun of today.

And red dice on green.

The dice and the spacings are larger on the second one.

I ordered a fat quarter of both on Organic cotton sateen. Prepare for nerdy present bags this Christmas, nerdy family members!!

Both fabrics are for sale in my Spoonflower shop, which now has a banner!

Craft Challenge: Desk supplies tree topper

We discussed the idea of running some craft challenges. Then I put up the little Christmas tree at work, and it needed something for the top. Therefore, challenge 1: "make a tree-topper with things you have at your desk."

Here's mine, suitably themed for the maths staffroom:

I emailed it off to Rhiannon, and she responded with this index-card present:
 

Then I emailed our mother, and our stepfather came back with this penknife angel:

Join us! Make a tree topper with the stuff at your desk! We'd love to see what you come up with.

Sock Snowmen

Rhiannon and I feel very differently about Pinterest. This is why I love it - cute easy project ideas. And finding cool blogs or websites you otherwise wouldn't find. This sock snowman comes from the blog "Then She Made" and includes lots of nice pictures with the instructions.

It can be no-sew, and it can be very ethical/eco. If you have socks you don't want any more, buttons, ribbon or string, rubber bands and rice, you're there. In my case, I got rid of some knee socks that I've been keeping despite the fact they cut off circulation to my legs.

I have a few reservations about the rice. As you can see, all the rice creeps to the butt and stays there. Like all foods.

Also when you move him, his head lolls around in a disturbing way that makes me feel like someone will call the soft toy docs on me.

This second one I did with stuffing after a bit of rice at the bottom. The rice helps him sit up properly, but the stuffing stays where you tell it to.

My noses are made from bits of this orange twine that our cat net came wrapped in.

Bennie said he likes the mismatched but colour-coordinated buttons. "They look like homeless snowmen."

Soft Toy Spheres, Baseball-style

I've mentioned before, as I explored designing a pattern for a polar bear, I have a class doing Soft Toy Design as a unit for year 7 technology. Teaching is such a great way to learn! They've come up with all these ideas and I'm trying my best to find achievable ways to make them happen. One girl wants to do the head and body of her leprechaun as spheres.

I remembered reading Abby Glassenburg talk about baseball heads, so I said I'd try that out and we'd see if it was easy. I wanted more of a complete baseball though, minus the neck. So with help from this wikihow article, I drafted my baseball pattern.

Gosh I really enjoy drafting stuff like this. It takes me back to the good old tech drawing days of year 9 and 10.

I brainstormed some ideas for what I could make my sample sphere into. Pea? Tomato? Blueberry? Snowman? Caterpillar? Eyeball?

Ultimately it would be up to my fabric stash to decide. Blueberry/Ribena-berry it is. (Ok I could also have done snowman but it was already 8:30 by then and I like to get to bed early.)

Why do people who write tutorials never say "This is going to be fiddly and annoying to get it to line up" or "You will probably end up with more left on one side than the other"? I'm going to say it - these things might happen to you too. Be warned.

I decided to give mine safety eyes for the best of all reasons: because I happened to have some safety eyes. Also a little stitched smile.

"If your ball looks rather "squarish" ... you drew your two original circles too far apart." I did think they looked too far apart, but I went with my carefully calculated two thirds, like they told me to. Next time, round down lots. *sigh*

Still, he can be a slightly squashed blueberry.

Also, this was my first project using eco-friendly corn fiber stuffing from innergreen (and the fabric scraps, of course). The weird thing is that it smells like a foodstuff. Innergreen only sell in large quantities, so I bought mine through Tomni Design, from whom I also bought a rattle for my shapes cube.

My students are my most generous critics, they love everything I do! The blueberry was very popular, and was named "Violet Puffle". They are also very impressionable. I've brought in various examples to show them, and they suddenly say "I'm changing what I'm making!" There's a polar bear and a zombie and then the polar-bear kid today wanted to make a blob like this instead.

Pencil Pals Wall Decal

First secret! You didn't have to wait long. Once Spoonflower announced wallpaper and decals, I was pretty excited! I thought that my pencils could be really cute on a classroom wall. So I ordered one. Picked it up yesterday with the others, cleaned a section of wall first thing this morning and here it is!

As you can see, it's hard to find wall space in my classroom. My lovely year 7s commented right away and recognised it as being from Donald in Mathmagic Land. They also said that the pencil was kind of in the shape of a 7! Cute. This lovely pencil decal is also for sale in my Spoonflower shop.

School Fabrics

Spoonflower is so awesome. I have a new addiction. It is so immensely weird and cool and satisfying to see something you imagined as a genuine real life fabric.

I picked up my samples from the post office today. I'd ordered the Pencil Pals before, my Donald-in-Mathmagic-Land-inspired entry into the "School Supplies" contest, but it failed to arrive. The envelope arrived, slit open at the end with no swatch inside. I told the lovely Spoonflower people and they gave me credit for it, which was super nice. I was happy to finally see it!

One thing I'm finding it hard to get the hang of is size. I don't know how big I want my design to print. This one I did in two sizes to find out. This one might be a more useful size.

Plus my plane shapes fabric swatch came too. There's actually another column of shapes that don't fit onto the swatch - the trapezium, parallelogram and ellipse. Sometimes you just can't stop the maths stuff from being in your brain.

Also two things which I won't show you yet. One will have to wait until I get it installed and one until after the present is given. Yay! Secrets!

These 3 designs are now FOR SALE at Spoonflower. I have a "Shop" now, apparently. You should check it out, it is to be found here. I'd better get it a banner because right now it has my name hovering in a big white box!

Christmas Craft Plans - and the question of who deserves craft

There's just something about the calendar switching over to November that brings on Christmas plans. Not that I haven't had plans all year, but November crystallizes and accelerates them. The truth is, big craft projects for Christmas need a lot more lead time than November.  But there are lots of little things - cards, tags, packaging, tree ornaments, etc - that can be made very quickly. Presents for family and close friends I've had planned for a while, so I've done a lot of preparation for them, and November is the month that I need to evaluate whether they will actually get finished! Tanith kicked things off with a Christmas craft party over last weekend, and I've been spending lots of spare minutes stitching.

I'm involved in several exchanges over at RPG Geek this year: a Christmas card exchange and two present exchanges. One of the present exchanges is just games off people's wishlists, but the other, a less formal, smaller exchange in the 'Tavern' (the off-topic forum area) is a mixed bag of stuff related to their gaming and non-gaming interests. And we don't get told who our targets are until mid-November. I'm crafting three of my five cards (the other two I'm buying, as I want to send 'Australian Christmas' cards to some overseas people and I'm not in the mood to stitch koalas).  And I'm also making a card and a tree ornament for my Tavern exchange target.  This means very quick crafting - trying to figure out what I can make that relates to their interests and won't be too time consuming.

I love making crafted items, so I don't mind putting the work into these items (and current state of unemployment does at least give me plenty of time to work on them). But I do sometimes wonder if I'm being silly to do these for people I don't know.

Even when I look at my own close circles of family and friends, there are people for whom I rarely make gifts. Sometimes it is because it is difficult to find things they'd like that I can make - my husband falls into this category, one of the reasons I'm so excited about the Rogue Trader cape I'm making for him. I know he'll actually use this. My brother is another - he has a very tight list of interests, and is streamlining his life. As I can't craft weightlifting equipment, I'm stumped on what I could make for him. But both of these guys have hung around crafters for long enough that I think they would at least appreciate the work that went into a present.  There are others, however, who shall remain unnamed, for whom I am reluctant to make presents because I don't think they realise how much work is involved and don't appreciate them. The targets of my various geek exchanges are people I've only met online, and talking about roleplaying. I have no idea what category they will fall into. Will they see them as special craft items or just another card?

Or is that a relevant question? If I've enjoyed the process - if I've enjoyed researching their interests through their profiles, and finding a suitable pattern or card design, enjoyed the crafting - then does anything that happens after they leave my hands matter? If I've had a good time and am proud of my work, does it matter whether the recipient appreciates the work involved? Does my effort 'require' suitable acknowledgement to make it worthwhile?
Questions I'm pondering. Meanwhile, back to stitching...

My First Gingerbread House

Last Saturday I went to a Gingerbread-House-Decorating evening with a colleague. We were supplied with everything pre-made and ready to go, which made the whole process very easy. I feel that my cooking skills would let me down more than my decorating skills.

I took a photo once the major construction was finished, just in case it later collapsed.

While that set, last year's MasterChef winner, Kate, talked to us about food and Jesus and stuff.

Then we got to decorate. I had to steal some of the supper items to complete my vision, and it was very hard  not to constantly eat the decorating supplies, but I succeeded on both counts. Mostly.

I feel inspired. Next time I think I'd like to take on something more ambitious (of course I would). But with less Jesus. We're going to have our own gingerbread house making. With Blackjack. And hookers.