Stuffie challenge

Things are busy busy busy round here, so of course I had to accidentally create more work for myself. I can't even begin to tell you how much I'm looking forward to Christmas, for everything will [have to] be done by then!

So, I seem to be getting into free-hand monster making these days. It started with this one:


I doodled, then I made a monster out of it. The results of this particular one I already posted in my last post.

Next up was this one:



And the latest one got finished just now:



I'm really enjoying these. I tried to recreate the first one, but it didn't really turn out right, and it's kinda fun making one-offs anyways. And to top it all off, I actually managed to sell the first little guy at the market on Sunday, wheee!

The two latest fellers shall be included in the Craft Reactor Showcase Exhibition, which opens on Thursday, 16 December. Come see!

Hello World!

What a crazy year this is still only just being! We just moved house, and I spent a month without the internet and then another month trying to unearth enough stuff to make things with... Everything's still a giant mess, but oh well. We're getting there. Christmas may have to be skipped, though.

Anyways, here's what I made:

Because the world NEEDS TO KNOW

Today, I got distracted by running across the What I wore today Flickr Group. Since I had a pen in my hand already, I doodled.

I've previously been contemplating doing some sort of regular drawing exercise, but so far have always failed. Not sure this is the one I'll stick with, partly because I'm not so sure *I'm* interested in what I wear every day, nevermind other people. So ye. Basically, what I'm saying is, there's not much to say. So I'll shut up now.

Dress hack

Looks like the next adventure on our long list is moving house. We just recently managed to buy one, apparently, though at the moment we seem to be in a dead zone where nobody speaks to us while behind the scenes solicitors and finance people do their thang.

Nevertheless, awareness of the incredible amount of stuff we have in our current flat drove me to a very feeble attempt at cleaning out one of our many cupboards. In the process, I came across this utterly amazing fabric, which had temporarily been buried under a pile of other fabrics (all of which I had totally forgotten about). My friend Liz gave it to me a few months ago in what I'm convinced can only have been a moment of temporary insanity. Ha! Well, it's MINE now! I decided right away that this needed to be used before it disappeared again in the mounds of things we own...



Before I got my greasy paws on it, this was a skirtlike thing. I say skirtlike because it was open, like a wrap skirt, but not really long enough to wrap... In addition, it also seemed designed for tall skinny people. Did I take a 'before' picture? Of course not. Which is why I spent the last three hours sifting through Liz's flickr pics to find a picture of her in it.

Anyways, it seems to be hand-printed, and of course I wanted to destroy and lose as little of the amazing artwork (monster fish, people!) as possible, so I cut it hardly at all. I removed the waistband and stitched up the open sides - this became the back seam of the dress. Then I cut two slits in the now-sides, which I shaped into shoulders and arm holes. The rest is done with darts. Finally I halved the waistband lengthways and backed it with some lace (this purely because I couldn't be arsed cutting a long straight strip of fabric, and I had lace of the right width) and stitched it to two of the side folds to tie at the back.

The material is just amazingly lovely. It's really soft, yet sturdy. I think this dress and I are going to go a long long way together. I just hope the printing actually stands up to washing...

Bookplates

Ooooh... I like me a nice bookplate. I don't know why it's never so far occurred to me to come up with my own (I've always stuck to stickers or just handwriting my name in the book), but when I saw a link to this nice little tutorial on how to paste a bookplate into a book on the Craft: Blog, I dropped everything and got my pens out.

So here's the result. And of course I'm happy to share the love, so feel free to download them singly or ready to print as a sheet of nine (about 18x25cm, so should go on either letter or A4 size paper).

In which she goes off on one about her dad

Right. My dad. He's the classic grumpy old man. You ask him to do something and he immediately starts whingeing and wailing and clawing at his eyes, but if you turn your back for 20 seconds he sneaks off and does it and pretends it wasn't a problem.

The whingeing and wailing can get a bit much sometimes, so on occasion, my mum and I take a turn at sneaking off and doing things ourselves, which is probably the point of the exercise, even though he doesn't really like not being asked either. You see the problem.

So, whilst we were on holiday in Germany, we had to get the house ready for some overnight guests. This meant that a mattress needed to be got from the loft. I went up. Got the mattress. Then stumbled across a box of old toys and spent the next 30 minutes digging through it. This feller caught my eye.



He's photographed here on the bathroom floor just before his adventure in the washing machine. My mum says I never played with him, but I remember him being around. Anyways, when I saw him this time, I noticed what a nice huggable size he was, and it occurred to me that most of my stuffed monsters are smaller. Nice, but not quite as cuddly as this one. So I decided to nick the pattern and turn it into something monstery.



It feels like a real achievement, actually. It took me a lot of trying and undoing and redoing and then several tries to get the face right. But now, I'm really quite pleased. I think if I want to make these for sale, I'll have to streamline the pattern a bit, but that should be easy enough.

Just so you know...

The Craft Reactor Launch evening will be going down on Tuesday 31 August 2010 at the Glasite Meeting House, 33 Barony Street, Edinburgh. If you're a crafter and want to know what it's all about, come along. There'll be gimmicky biccies and everything!