Costume Party

A couple Sundays ago, I received a cryptic text from a friend. It read, "I need your help this week." And I got a follow up, "We need to... make a quilt... sorta..."

When we met up and talked, I got the whole story. He had been invited to an Adventure Time-themed costume party. In order to get into the party, you have to be dressed up, and there were no duplicate costumes allowed, so you had to sign up for a character on the Facebook event.

He decided to be Old Finn. He showed me this picture:

Photo found here

He also brought about three yards of denim and a blue tablecloth. He thought we might cut pieces of tablecloth out and hot glue them to the denim to look like a quilt.

I scoffed. If we were going to make a quilt, we were going to do it right. So, two evenings of crafting and many little pieces of fabric later, we ended up with this:

I built two small quilts out of denim and backed it in the tablecloth. We hot glued the decorations on to maintain a cartoonish look. Then, I stitched the shoulders together to create a quilt poncho of sorts and he dug up some rope for the belt. We used a grey shirt for the claw arm. 

This was also when I realized that I'm going to LOVE having kids and making them Halloween costumes!

New Year - Old Goals

Happy New Year everyone!

I'm not one for New Years resolutions - I've come to the conclusion that if I'm going to change something about myself or my habits, it's best to start trying RIGHT NOW instead of waiting for a kickoff date. But I know that they really work for some people, and I won't lie - I use January 1st as an opportunity to evaluate my current goals and adjust tactics.

So, in the spirit of reflection, let's take a look at one of my lagging projects that I finally finished recently - pillowcases!

For Christmas of 2012, I decided I would embroider pillowcases for some close friends and family. I successfully completed a couple and shipped them off to the recipients before I had a chance to take pictures, but here is one that I completed in time for Christmas and didn't deliver until November 2013:

Here are a couple that I completed late and delivered later:

And here's one that I didn't complete until just recently and was able to just hand to the recipient immediately:

The moral of this story? My goal last year was to get this blog up and running. This year, I'm going to be consistent about it. Fingers crossed, I'll get 52 posts up over the course of the year. The vast majority of them will be finished crafts. Dare I say that I will complete 52 projects this year??

Stay tuned - we'll see :)

Record Bowls

I had a realization about Christmas this year.

To be more exact, I had a realization about Christmas BREAK. This is my first year without a real Christmas break, so when it was suddenly December 23rd, I found myself without gifts to distribute. Until this year, I'd always had the week or so following Christmas to finish up the gifts for my friends and I would deliver them when I returned to school after the new year. Not so much this year.

Ah well, you live and learn, right?

So this year, I made a bunch of the same gift to distribute to people. I had some 45s sitting around that I never listened to, so I made them into bowls!

I followed this tutorial.

Start with some records. I used 45s, but this works for full-sized LPs as well.

Place them on an oven-safe bowl on a cookie sheet. Preheat your oven to 200 degrees. Pop it in. The tutorial says to set your timer for 8-10 minutes, but since 45s are smaller, I left them in for 5-8.

When the timer goes, pull it out. I used a different one of the same bowl to help with shaping. Watch out, they'll be hot, but they also cool SUPER fast, so some scorched fingertips were par for the course for me.

Voila! I learned that if you leave them in for longer, the vinyl starts to shrink, so you can make taller or shorter by adjusting the time in the oven.

I'm planning on covering the bottom with a neutral-colored paper. I'll add pictures when I've done that, but until then, enjoy!

Pillow Sweaters

'Tis the season to be crafty!

I'm in a place in my life where I want my home to be a grown-up level of festive, but I don't really have the budget or the stockpile of decorations to do it. So I'm starting that stockpile. Little by little.

This year, one of the things I'm adding to the stockpile is some new pillowcases. In case you were wondering, I consider sewing the fourth side of a pillow to be one of the worst things that a person could be forced to do. Right up there with talking with a close talker.

So, I took a look at my sofa...

...and realized that it wasn't exactly the most festive thing out there. I love those pillows and all, but they don't exactly scream CHRISTMAS.

Living in Seattle, I know that our thrift stores can get picked over pretty quickly. I also know that, with ugly sweater party season upon us, the selection of festive sweaters - ugly or not - would be pretty slim.
I had the bright idea to buy some thrift store Christmas sweaters to cover them up.

Then, I had the brighter idea to use CARDIGANS!

I snagged these three at Value Village and whipped up some cozy little sweaters for my pillows. Bonus: buttons. Because all of them have button closures, I just had to sew the four corners and button them straight over the existing pillowcase!

Behold:

Cozy little pillows.

I'm already formulating a new project to use this technique, so stay tuned for an in-depth tutorial!

Headwarmer - Free Pattern!

I mentioned in this post that I went to London for a weekend to audition for Star Wars. What resulted was standing outside in line for six hours in order to hand my headshot to a woman. Luckily, this was exactly what I expected.

Regardless of the fact that I knew nobody would notice me, I wanted to look my best when I got to the front of the line. Being November, I knew it would be cold. I didn't want to wear a hat because, um, hi, hat hair. So, at the last minute, I grabbed a ball of yarn from my stash to whip up a headwarmer on the plane.

This only took me about an hour, including trial and error on size and length. It still ended up a little wide and a tiny bit long (it slips down somewhat), but it did its job and I didn't have absurd hat hair!

Here's the pattern.

Using bulky weight yarn and a size H hook (adjust for gauge).

ch 11
skip first chain, sc in each across (10)
sc in first two, ch 1 and skip next stitch, sc in next 4, ch 1 and skip next, sc in last 2
sc in each across
dc in each across to length
sc last three rows

Sew buttons on the final three rows to line up with buttonholes created by the chains in the second row. BAM, headwarmer! Happy crafting!

Bowtie!

November was a month of travel, and you know what long hours of sitting down leads to? Crocheting. Lots and lots of crocheting.

A few years ago, I went on a rampage, asking all of my friends what they would want from me if I were to make anything for them. I'm still chipping away at that list, and last month, I polished off a couple of them! Here's one of them:

I used this pattern and this yarn in Candy Apple Red. It's pretty straightforward (and a lot faster than this tie that I finished back in July).

I'll add pics if/when the recipient sends them to me!

I'm Baaaaack!

Hey team!

So... it's been over a month since I've blogged. Oops.

It all started when my dear friend Jillian visited. She's doing a residency at a pottery studio a couple of hours outside Seattle, so she came a few days early to visit.

Gum wall!

While she was here, Halloween happened.

Black and white movie star

Then, I was busy with a bunch of social obligations. No excuse for not blogging, really, but it's what happened.

After that, I visited Philadelphia for a weekend. I saw a bunch of old friends and also went to see First Date on Broadway!

Philly's City Hall

In early November, I found out that Star Wars was hosting open auditions for the lead roles in their upcoming trilogy, so my brother and I decided that we HAD to go. Star Wars is a very important part of our close friendship, our childhood, and how we perceive ourselves (an absurd amount of weight for a fictional universe to carry in our lives, I know), so there wasn't a thing you could do to keep us from there.

So we flew to London. For a weekend. For Star Wars auditions.

Westminster Abbey

Buckingham Palace

Big Ben

Then it was Thanksgiving, which I spent with extended family in Portland. And now I'm finally back at home, gathering my wits from the most insane November I think I've ever had, and trying to find my footing with my personal projects going forward.

On the bright side, all this travel means that I had a lot of plane time for crocheting! Stay tuned for updates on what I've made!