goodknits gracious!

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

My loot

My mother and I visited the previously mentioned JoAnn, this morning. They had a phenomenal sale going on–95% off of everything! This is my loot:

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

neglect

I apologize for the neglect of this blog. It’s just hard to sit down and post when you have a chubby little guy pawing after you wanting milkies and lovies all day. I end up making things while I nurse him or when it’s late at night and all the boys have finally…finally!…gone to bed.

my sewing machine has taken a back seat to the fiber arts: knitting, crocheting, needlework. Those are all easy to do while you breastfeed. I have quite a few projects in my queue. MORE than I want to even talk about. I recently moved things around in my craft zone and piled all my “incompletes” on top of each other. really, a lot are “never starteds” and it makes me feel like I haven’t done ANYTHING in a long time. Ever since the beginning of my pregnancy, I’ve been less enthusiastic about crafting. On the other hand, I’ve been totally gung-ho about collecting craft supplies. Seriously! I don’t usually buy full-price, though. I gather coupons, I visit garage sales and thrift stores, and I scour closeouts. Just the other day, I visited a JoAnn that’s closing and bought 15 zippers! 15! I don’t even make things with zippers, BUT they were 90% off and I couldn’t resist. Who DOESN’T buy something that’s 90% off??? Crazy people, that’s for sure. I also bought a whole bunch of Gütermann thread at 80% off. The store closes (it’s actually moving to a new, BIGGER location) tomorrow and it’s making me anxious! I want to go right.this.very.minute. I think I may wipe them out of thread and zippers. They’re already out of useful yarn (wool) and only have yarn I’d pretty much never use (novelty). I would like to scour the remaining fabrics, but I usually have a baby attached to me and he gets fussy when I stop moving, so I tend to go in and come out really quick. Maybe I’ll check out the 90%-off remnants bin. There’s bound to be something in there I can use, right?

this is the chunk who keeps me from my sewing machine..


but I can make things like this while I nurse..


on the needles:

deliciously lemony socks

Tuesday, August 19th, 2008

starting a hex quilt

Thanks to all the awesome photos in the English Paper-Piecing Flickr group, I started a hexagon quilt on Sunday. I bought a set of coordinating fat quarters (there were a lot, in a cute little tin) and decided on a cute pattern to put them in. I’m using freezer paper to stick my hexagons to my fabric. I’ve attached seven together so far. I got antsy and just sewed up my 7 lonely hexagons. I’ll make more later this week and perhaps photograph my progress.

I still haven’t finished the dodecahedron I started weeks ago. Using worsted weight yarn with small needles really makes my hands ache, so I’m giving it a rest for a while. This hand-sewing is fun. I hope I can finish it and not get unmotivated after a few days. I need to make a lot of hexagons, so that I get to a point where there’s no lookin’ back.

Thursday, August 14th, 2008

Dyeing

dyed using low water immersion technique.


my baby is 12 weeks old, now! he’s getting SO big. he’s wearing a size 6-9 month onesie. :-O

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

Painted Fabric Silhouettes

I watched the demonstration by Anna Maria Horner on Martha Stewart about making painted fabric silhouettes and was inspired to make some as Mother’s Day gifts (and also one for myself!). However, I decided to tweak her process a little.

Materials (specifics I used):

fabric (some fat quarters I had)

canvases (one 12″x12″, two 10″x10″)

mod podge (gloss-lustre)

x-acto knife

freezer paper

iron

foam brushes

staple gun

First, I searched through the hundreds of photos of my son for a good profile shot. Since all my photos are digital, I used Photoshop to make the silhouette/outline. I used the vector tool and basically just traced his profile. I printed it out and set it aside.

I stapled my fabric to the canvases, as in the demo on Martha. Make sure you get the fabric nice and tight, to avoid any puckering from painting. there are a few air bubbles in mine, but I kind of like them.

Since I did these a little differently, I didn’t go straight to mod-podging the fabric. Instead, I grabbed my printouts and used my x-acto knife to cut out stencils with freezer paper (just tape the printout to freezer paper and cut out carefully).

I kept both parts of the stencil, the shape and the “outline.” I then layed the stencil, waxy side down, and ironed it to my fabric using a hot [DRY] iron. Once I was certain all parts were stuck down, I started painting until I was happy with the evenness of the color and whatnot. After it had a little time to dry, I gently unstuck the stencil and voila! I had my silhouette on the canvas. For the blue and brown silhouette, I ironed down the “outside” of the stencil, and for the other two, I ironed down just the actual face and painted around it. you can do whichever you like.

After the paint completely dried, I used Mod Podge to “seal” it and give it a nice sheen. that’s it! the longest part of it all was cutting out my stencils. Also, I had to put quite a few coats of the lime green paint onto the brown fabric. you can still see some un-evenness, but my husband says that makes it look “awesome.” How nice.