Making a Trapezium Puppet

You can check out my Teaching Blog for the "Why" of this project, and here I'll stick to the how and showing off the results.

Firstly, for some inspiration from the highest expert, watch Jim Henson talk about designing simple puppets. I also checked out the galleries at Project Puppet and the work of Australian puppet-maker PuppetOODle for ideas about the look, particularly the eyes. This HowStuffWorks article was also great although I haven't used much of that information in this project.

Here is my trapezium puppet in all his glory:

The good:

• Making the trapezium shape in 3D was very easy. I cut two of my trapezium shape and a long thin rectangle to go all around the outside between the two trapeziums. Thanks to looking up how exactly to clip corners he has a good crisp shape that I'm happy with.
• The eyes are slightly-squished table-tennis balls painted and with glued-on felt eyelids and I'm pretty happy with those, and the button I found for his nose.

The bad:

• I struggled from the start with the idea of adapting a sock-style puppet to something with a flat face. I think in future it might actually be better to give the shapes a more 3D, face-like face, if that makes any sense.
• I sort of sewed a sock-like structure for the hand onto the back of the mouth, and it left me with lips, which I wasn't planning on or keen on. It works ok but was a pain and is quite unfinished.
• I was getting more and more unhappy with him as I went so his face is hot-glue-gunned on and you can tell!

I'm pretty unhappy with him really but if I remind myself that he is a first go, a kind of test of the idea then I feel better. And the kids liked him, so I guess that's what matters.

Mr. Monk doesn't seem to mind him either, but Mr. Trapezium looks a little shocked at this strange creature sleeping next to him.

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?

Gertie's New Book for Better Sewing - a review

As a fan of vintage patterns, I love Gertie's New Blog for Better Sewing. She started it to sew through all the items in the Vogue New Book for Better Sewing, and now it has quite a following.
Such a cool idea generally, so I'd have read it even if it lacked a certain something, but I also like her writing style. I was a little dubious about getting the book though.
Firstly, I own many sewing books, and there is only so much information you need on how to sew darts or alter patterns.  But this one promised to have information on applying vintage, couture-style techniques as well, and dealing with vintage patterns, and while my Threads sewing book  has some of that, I was anticipating that her approach might be more interesting. Then, of course, there is the fact that I was worried that her voice might be muted or changed when official editors and publishers had become involved.
And thirdly, the last sewing book I bought was disappointing.  The Colette Sewing Handbook was less awesome than I'd hoped. I bought it mainly for one chapter that people online were talking about and saying how great it was - the chapter on 'A Thoughtful Plan'. Unfortunately this chapter was 9 pages of information that kept to very surface issues, in my opinion.

This one, however, looks like a keeper. The production values are high, the tone of the text is just like reading the blog, explanations are good, her discussion of vintage versus modern reissues for patterns is excellent, the patterns themselves are not only appealing but go up to a size that fits me, and she has some great advice about vintage sizing and fitting generally, such as using your high bust measurement to choose pattern sizing.  She has chosen to make the patterns she's included go bigger in the hips than conventional pattern sizings, which is annoying for me as that is not an area where I have an issue. I am not a pear. Despite this, I'm definitely going to use some of these in my next round of project dreaming. And I think I'll be turning to this often. 

Beneath a burgundy sky

Our blog name (and future shop name) was decided many years ago, inspired by a song of the same name by The Band.

The lyrics begin:
"Jupiter Hollow, Northern lights,
Cast a glow through the window late last night
I went to follow through the sycamores
When I found myself in a place I'd never been before.

There was a unicorn and dragon queen
Beneath a burgundy sky
I saw a soldier sing a love song
He had the distance in his eye"

I was trying to draw said unicorn and dragon queen to feature in our etsy shop banner and I wasn't at all happy with my results, so I decided to make them instead. Since I've been making hobby horse ornaments, I stuck with the theme. Here they are:

The eyes are jet beads (broken, in the case of the dragon queen) that belonged to my great-grandmother, for an extra-meaningful touch to the icons of our venture.

And in case you are interested, here is the song:

Spiralling Pumpkins

So the pumpkin pattern required a piece of fabric twice as long as it is wide, and I cut the tea towel to the right proportions. This left me with a discarded strip. So I cut that to the correct proportion. Which left me with another strip. Repeat. Then it was too small. Which is good, because it was starting to feel more like a lesson on the golden ratio or Fibonacci sequence than craft. Not that things can't be both.

Anyway, all this gives me a family of pumpkins! 3 little pumpkins, just like the ones we had as kids. Which makes me the littlest pumpkin :)

Dealing with UFOs

For those of you who don't hang out in crafty forums or read craft magazines, you may be unaware of the term UFOs to refer to UnFinished Objects. These are projects that, for one reason or another, you've set aside without finishing.  There are all kinds of reasons for this. Some are more 'abandoned' projects, the ones where you've made such a huge error you think 'I cannot salvage this', or you get half way through and realise that you in fact hate the colours or the pattern. Others are ones you still like, you still want to complete, but you've lost the momentum, probably stolen by other, newer, projects. (There may be crafters out there who start a new project, work on it diligently, and finish it, BEFORE they start a new project, but I am not one of them. I usually blame it on being a Gemini.) With the focus we are trying to bring to ethical crafting, it has become obvious that I'll need to bring this approach to my UFOs and not leave effort and resources sunk into unfinished stuff. 

As part of a challenge in another part of my life (on the amazing Nerd Fitness), I'm devoting three hours a week at the moment to working on UFOs. It has really made me sort through all these half-finished projects lying around and work out what I'm going to do with them. My UFOs tend to fall into 3 categories:

• 'Actually WIPs' - i.e. a work in progress.  These are the 'lost momentum' projects that I mentioned above. Once I pull it out of the craft chest and put it somewhere my gaze will fall on it when I'm deciding which project to work on while watching an episode of Grand Designs, I'll keep going. And eventually finish!  The current example of this is the daffodil cross stitch pictured to the right. This has now entered my rotation of current projects and I've even decided who will get this as a gift when I've finished it. 
• 'Something went wrong!' - a project where something messed up or wasn't right, and I shoved it into the 'too hard basket', as my year 12 maths teacher used to say.  This includes yarn fails.
• 'Do I still want this?' - a project that I started but now look at wondering 'what was I thinking?'.  This can have some overlap with 'something went wrong!', as that is often the reason for a significant enough delay that my tastes changed so much.

Some examples of 'something went wrong!' UFOs, to give you an idea of how I've been working through these, and some of the negotiations going on inside my head.

The doves. These were a free kit from the front of a magazine. The idea is you stitch a small design on Aida, then sandwich it between two provided felt dove shapes. Unfortunately, after I'd stitched the four designs I liked, I realised that the pre-cut holes were too small. Muttering about 'stupid magazine' and not wanting to go to any trouble, I left them for 'later'. In this rethink, I realised I still liked them, so I cut the holes bigger. Really, it took about ten minutes all up to alter them enough so that they would work, so I must have been in a very lazy state of mind when I abandoned them the first time round.
The magazine's suggestion was to sew them flat onto a long ribbon to use as a garland. I stuffed them and gave them some shape, and I think I'll add some ribbon later and use them as elaborate tags for hard to wrap presents such as wine bottles.

 

The toddler jacket. This was a project from a book, and is yet another yarn fail. At least this one I have a chance of salvaging it, as I'm thinking of doing the collar again, this time in the colours I have left, using the grey from the unravelled collar to sew it up, and then edging it in the yellow. It might look a bit garish, but it will be finished. Obviously I also need to weave in lots of ends. I just couldn't see myself not completing this if it was at all possible - there is so much work in this already. The toddler for whom it was originally intended is now a bit older than this, but my friends keep having children, so when I finally finish someone will be the right age. Actually, given that it might look a bit strange, I might have to keep it for my not-yet-existent child.

The Victorian Christmas stocking. I started stitching this when I was about 13, for a doll I loved. Then I messed up the stalk. It is disturbing to think that this means this UFO has been shipped from England to Australia, moved with me when I left home, etc. 

I went back to this intending to unpick the mistakes and keep stitching (you can see the fluffy bits where I've started to unpick) but then I realised that as I no longer felt any pressing need for that doll to have a Christmas stocking, finishing it might not be worth the amount of time and material in the part I'd already done. I could use it as a tree decoration, but... the fabric is a 32ct I think, and I was working with 2 strands over 1 thread to give a full, tapestry effect. It isn't responding well to the attempts to unpick - there is one thread that has pulled a little already.

I think this will, unhappily, remain a UFO.

Oh no not another potential hobby!!

My most amazing bridesmaids, or "Matrons of Awesome" as I also like to call them, threw me a superfantabulous Hens party yesterday. We had a cupcake-decorating class at my friend's house, followed by dinner, and it was an inspiring way to spend a day. I love learning new things, and as always I got very excited by it and have lots of probably-doomed plans to do a lot more of this.

We each made a monkey, a lion, a zebra and a cookie-monster face. In my house, we have already eaten cookie monster!

This is my monkey and lion. My monkey's head was too small and his neck was too long, so I gave him a scarf. Scarves proved popular with several monkeys suffering the same condition. This is almost the perfect camera angle to hide the bad bits of my lion.

My zebra:

All four of mine, including a crumb-covered cookie monster:

Here are Rhiannon's:

Here are the rest that I got photos of:

 

Best Hens night ever!

Compost Creature

Through a combination of being really excited about getting a compost bin and having my mind filled with ideas while reading Abby Glasenburg's series Elements of Soft Toy Design (beginning with this post), I decided to make a compost monster.

Originally I planned him to be pom-pom style - just a bunch of fabric sewn together, but in the end he has a solid body and some legs, which I think has turned out nicely.

Drawing a pattern for an apple core was quite weird and unusual, but I like that bit the best.

I had to include some celery. I always hated how much of the celery I would end up throwing out, but now it is a joy knowing it is all going to become soil for my future veggie garden.

As you can see we had quite a little photo shoot. Here he/she is - Master of the compost bin.

I'm gonna go buy more celery.