Bunch of Crafts

I totally forgot to post about what I made for Craft Challenge May. I didn’t take a photo of all the “ingredients” but they consisted of styrofoam beads, small round mirrors, wreath and floral wire. I didn’t win and rightly so. I literally made my challenge item the night before. But I actually like what I made anyway. Every time the packet comes and I see what we get, I always say to myself “Oh, boy! What am I going to make with this?” So I am always so happy that I actually think of something! Here is what I made:
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And here are some things I made for swaps! I joined a faux stained glass swap because I already had the fake leading and little containers of stained glass paint that I got from a kit someone bought me for my birthday ages ago. I was excited to play around with them again and it was so much fun to do! My partner loves coffee and voodoo dolls so I made her two. The photos suck and do not really show how cool it looks in the light. I ended up also using Alcohol Inks to make colors I didn’t have in the paint. FUN!
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(the hearts are for me)
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The butterfly and Eiffel Tower didn’t actually make it into a swap as I was just doing more playing around with the UV lamp and UV resin.
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This Raccoon bookmark (resin) was part of the Woodland Lucky Parcel
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Hand carved stamp swap
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These last 2 were for the Handmade Specialty swap.

Fiber, fiber!

We fly home from vacation tomorrow so I hope to be able to post some vacation shots soon!

Some more swaps, fiber related. I decided to use this Coffeeshop burn action for these set of photos (coffeeshop is a GREAT blog for photoshop tutorials and free stuff!). I must have snapped over a dozen shots of the chicken stuffie I made and was not really happy with the results for some reason. I used this vignetting action and it makes it look better so I decided to use it on the rest of the photos.

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Chicken for the Spring on the Farm swap, made with the Chickummyjig Pattern

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Yep! Made another drawstring, french seamed bag! I’m telling ya, so easy!! For the Woodland Lucky Parcel swap

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Eiffel tower stuffie for the Embroidered Stuffie swap. I used a pattern from the Rainbow of Stitches book and widened it. The grey fabric is cut from a linen shirt the Yves didn’t want anymore. Really loved how it came out!

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This is actually a Wild Olive embroidery pattern (I believe it is the March embroidery pattern download in the sidebar) that I made a felt pin from instead. For a mystery pouch swap.

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2nd time making this owl bookmark but instead of embroidering flowers, I used dimensional fabric paint to paint in my partner’s initials. Part of the Woodland lucky parcel swap.

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Used a Sizzix die to make this heart brooch and embroidered my partner’s wedding date on it. Part of the Wacky, Unusual Holiday-June swap. This one was for National Pink Day!

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This is actually the Mushroom from Mario Bros. but I made the stem longer so it wouldn’t look like it. The pattern is here. This was part of the mystery pouch tag.
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Lion Brand doughnut pattern for National Doughnut Day! I used dimensional fabric paint for the sprinkles.

Classes, labs and a win

In order to give a fast update since I have so many blog updates to do, I’m combining a couple of posts into one. Did I tell you I won the April ChristyNelson.net crafty challenge? Here is my post with my entry and all the entries here. I won a $25 gift card to amazon.com and some extras from Christy herself. I hemmed and hawed about what to get, honestly, there are so many choices! I finally opted to get a UV lamp to use with some UV resin I’ve been wanting to try (and whenever I wanted to try it, it would be a cloudy day.) So finally, with a UV lamp, I could play with the resin whenever I wanted! All I had to do was pay $5 for shipping.
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And here are the extras I got from Christy!
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I was really excited to get the birds and birdcages since that theme is so popular nowadays but it turns out that the mandala type stamp in the middle is getting a lot of uses!

Took a Scratch n Sniff card class with the Bay Ridge stampers meetup.
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And a couple of Etsy labs! This one is from the embroidered jewelry lab. So much fun!
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And Ed Roth held a lab to promote his new stencil stationery kit! I forgot my camera so don’t have photos from the lab so here they are at home.
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Wear Me

The craft of the moment is earrings and pendants. It’s been awhile since I made loops with jewelry tools. I need more practice. It was so much fun to make! These are for ME to wear!
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I had a lot of fun stamping on resin beads during the February thing a day and learned that if I don’t coat it, it will fade. I used Diamond Glaze to coat these. It’s looking a little dull after a few wears although I could probably buff it but will try other options next time. And my loops look really bad but they are just for me so I don’t mind.
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I just made these over the weekend and wore them for the first time yesterday. I lost one of the silver chains and tree at the end of the day (or maybe I lost it in the beginning of the day!). I was so bummed! I think I may have to dab a little glue on all the jump rings next time.
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This was for a mystery pouch tag on swap-bot. I crochet the orange flowers.
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Finally getting around to experimenting with UV resins, this one is Lisa Pavelka’s Magic Glos. Still need to play around with it some more.
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Phoenix turned 4 on the 15th and I made her this necklace using the acrylic fragments from Tim Holtz and collage sheets I bought on Etsy.

Stitchin’ it for swaps

Some more swaps I’ve done, stitching related.
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Postcard cozy for March is craft month
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I made these bird pins from an embroidery pattern. I made the top one first (for a Spring lucky parcel) and liked how it turned out so much that I made another one for a bird lover (technically not a swap but there was a call out to cheer up a fellow swapper that found out she has cancer.)
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an owl bookmark, also for the spring lucky parcel. Pattern here.
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a drawstring bag for the spring lucky parcel (I discovered how to do french seams and it’s now my go to for making bags as you don’t need a lining)
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Zombie Embroidery for a rainbow lucky parcel
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Cupcake pin for the rainbow lucky parcel
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There’s that french seam drawstring bag again! For the rainbow lucky parcel. Flat and filled.
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Matryoshka dolls for the swap of the same name. Pattern here.
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Blue bunny for the Woodland stuffie swap. Pattern for this here.

Carvings

Here are some recent carvings I’ve done in swaps. I’m attempting to group all like type crafts together regardless of the swaps but I don’t know how long I can keep that up. All my photos are kept chronologically and I take too many to tag them all although it might benefit me to start doing that right after I download them into the computer…Anyway, I digress!

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Part of March is Craft month swap.
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Hedgehog carving for the Secret Sisters Spring parcel.
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Fleur de Lys carving, part of a pinata swap (make a pinata and fill with goodies)
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The ‘orange’ for the Rainbow Lucky Parcel’s swap. SC is my partner’s initials.
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These 2 were for a mystery pouch swap. The recipient’s nickname is Roro and gummybear.

ColorArtz Rd2

I just wanted to show how my second go around went using the ColorArtz. My first go around can be found here. Before I start, I want to follow up on the ones I made. I haven’t worn them yet but decided to throw 2 of the 3 shirts into the wash. Please note that I purposely washed them right side out. If you know anything about doing laundry, you know that if you want to keep the coloring or a decal on a front of the shirt intact, it’s to turn it inside out. Anyway, they did quite a bit of fading! I don’t think I have to tell you which one was the pre-washed shirt!
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So for this turn, I found this blog post of a woman that made her daughter a Peep’s appliqued shirt/dress for Easter. She included the template for it and I promptly downloaded it. For the life of me, I can’t find that blog post!! Big apology for the woman that made this available! If you happen to be reading this, please let me know who you are!

So I decided to do the airbrushing instead of applique. I set up the template and printed it out on freezer paper and cut them out. In my supplies, I found this giant clipboard that I’m not sure where I got it and for what reason but I thought it was perfect for this project. This way I can be looking straight at the shirt instead of down on the shirt.
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I was really good this time at masking the surrounding area!
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As you can see, I had some trouble printing on the freezer paper because it was too curly but then used the scrap anyway. After taking this shot, I decided to tape a little bit more in between the peeps on the top. You can see exactly where in the final shot!
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I did several coats because I wasn’t sure how well the yellow would show up on the pink. I also attempted to do some shading on the bottom. I think it came out cute! I used dimensional fabric paint for the eyes. I was debating writing “My Peeps” on the front but ended up not doing it. You can really see the areas that were open from not being taped down or from the tape not being secure. You really have to tape around the whole area to get it perfect!
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So when I washed this shirt, I did turn it inside out and I did not notice any fading. This could also be because I sprayed several coats. That’s good to know! Sienna wore this on Good Friday for the Easter Egg Hunt. Here is another outtake, she has started to give me the sad face whenever I take a photo of her (she’d be all smiley seconds before!)
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A Craft Challenge

Thanks to Rachel, I received the April edition of Christy Nelson’s monthly craft challenge. Every month, Christy assembles a packet of crafting goodies and your challenge, if you choose to accept it (ha! sorry, couldn’t help that!), is to make something out of the supplies. You have to use everything included in the packet, how much to use of it is your choosing. She sells the packets in her Etsy shop and posts photos on her site at the end of the month for voting. The recipients have no clue what will be sent in the packets. Just send her a photo of your finished piece, blog about it and wait for the votes to come in! There are different prizes each month. I’ve heard about Christy’s challenge before and honestly, was too chicken to participate. Today is the last day to send in your submission and of course, that is when I sent mine in. I can be a bit of a procrastinator, as I mentioned several times before!

Anyway, this month’s challenge was indeed a challenge! Here’s what we got:
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Some black felt, burlap, ribbon roses, large sequins and safety pins. Yikes! What was I going to do with this?? When I first got it (several weeks ago!), I had in mind to make some sort of jewelry display to hang my earrings on. I had an old frame that I thought I could wrap the burlap around and thought I’d decorate it with the sequins and ribbon roses and back it with the felt. I wanted to mull that over for a bit before diving into that as I also wasn’t sure what to do with the safety pins. Periodically, I’d pull out the supplies out of the envelope and look at them. Then put it back in. I realized that my initial idea would not work. Well, maybe it would work technically but I noticed the burlap kind of unraveling and leaving a lot of residue on the black felt. I didn’t think earrings would hold up on it and then they might get caught on the burlap (these sort of jewelry displays are usually made using metal screens.) Hmmm, well that goes that idea!

The deadline was closing in! Last week was sort of a crazy week, as I wrote about in my previous post.  And I even thought about forgoing the challenge altogether. Well, I would have felt too guilty to do that plus that would have been the easy way out. Finally an idea started to form in my head yesterday. I was looking at the burlap unraveling and thought I could use the strings to roll it to sort of make little roses to compliment the ribbon rose. First, I wanted to color it and used my Tulip Fabric spray (which quite honestly, have not had much luck with using on actual fabric!). I chose pink and purple and added in some sequins to see if the spray would stick (it did not, you could easily scrape it off with a finger nail).
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The burlap you see is the pieces I ended up not using. I only remembered to take a photo after I started rolling. I used the sequins as the base of the ‘rose’ and used Diamond Glaze to hold it down while adding a bit of gloss and bling with rhinestones.
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The diamond glaze is still drying in this photo. Now that I think about it, I wish I tried using the painted sequins. I wonder if the glaze would have sealed in the paint. Oh well! File that away for future reference.

Ok, so at this point is when I stopped. Yves might have come home, Sienna might have called for me, dinner needed to be started (or thought about), I don’t remember. Normally, I would have continued this the next day but last night, after everyone was asleep, I wanted to finish this baby up! And here is what she looks like!
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front
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back

I cut out 2 circles from the black felt and blanket stitched around it with pink embroidery floss. I used my own green felt for the leaves and embroidered some accents. I dabbed some pink acrylic paint and glitter glue on the ribbon rose (looks so much better in real life). I punched tiny holes in the sequin roses and added some jump rings. I added the safety pin on the back and for fun, embroidered my initials. I think it came out cute! The sequin roses didn’t actually come out how I pictured they should have in my mind but I am actually quite happy with it. I’m really excited to see what others came up with using the same materials.  I’ll just wait to see if I win, ahem, before I purchase next month’s (I believe the winner also gets the next month’s challenge for free?!) This was a lot of fun and glad I took the challenge!

Stuff It!

I’ve joined some stuffie swaps back in March!
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2 Easter Egg Ornaments I crochet. The pattern on the left is here and the pattern on the right is here.

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I made 2 Lucky Ducks for 2 different swaps! A Spring Critter swap and Plushie Love. These were so cute and I think I will enlarge the pattern if I make this again. Which I might because Sienna thought they were really cute too. Here is how long the legs are (I might have went a bit crazy on that!)
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This is for itty bitty critter and it’s hiding place. I crocheted a white rabbit and made a hole for him to go down a la Alice in Wonderland. My partner is also a fan of photobooth shots so this little rabbit went to the photobooth first (forgot to take a shot of that!)

These following ones were for the Softies Galore swap. You have five partners to make little stuffies for! I got a little overwhelmed with them since I wanted them to be profile based plus I procrastinated just a bit!
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Birdie from the Puchi Collective
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Lucky cat from nuno-runo
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Hippo from The Cute book I got from the library!
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2 partners liked witches/Halloween so I made 2 different versions. From one of my Japanese felt books.

This one is for a Kawaii monster swap. You had to create your own monster. I got inspiration from the Invasion of the Plush Monster book (also from the library!)
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In other crafty news, I’m doing pretty well with the April Stash Bust challenge as far as not buying new craft supplies. I’ll be writing a separate post about that as well as the craft it forward I’m involved in.

Chelsea Market and Stitchfest

Last Thursday I attended Martha Stewart’s Stitchfest, an event to celebrate her latest craft book, Encyclopedia of Sewing and Fabric Crafts. I also have her first craft book, which honestly, I don’t look at much but I feel my craft library wouldn’t be complete without it. I met my friend, Rachel for a bite to eat at Chelsea Market. We went to the Green Table, a local, organic and sustainable food restaurant, but not before stopping in some cute dessert places! A lot has been added to the market since I’ve been there last (which was quite awhile ago.) We were quite drawn to the cute displays at Eleni’s (but not their prices!) and I got a (chocolate mint) brownie at Fat Witch, how could I resist? I foolishly only got something small to eat at dinner (meze platter and roasted butternut squash) thinking I would leave room for the hors d’oeurves at the event. Rachel got chicken pot pie, a smarter choice!

And on to the event. I’m not sure what I was expecting but I was a tad disappointed in it. Of course it was laid out beautifully, all the stations were organized well and it was very helpful to see some of the projects in the book up close (especially after having looked through the book last night). There were people showing some crafts at the stations, a make and take for the tomato pin cushion project from the book and lots of demonstrations of sewing machines. We got there shortly after 6 and the make and take line was already super long! We ended up not getting on it in time but did wait to get a free monogrammed tea towel (I got S for Sienna). The people coming out with the hors d’oeurves were hard to find and they came out with such tiny platters that the food was gone pretty quickly (I resisted the urge to lunge at them when I saw them! LOL) We did get this tasty green milkshake that I think was black pepper and I want to say….avocado? I forgot. Anyway, I think I was expecting to at least learn some little crafty tidbits. I don’t know why! As true about everything with Martha is that it all looks perfect, too perfect! We did enter a bunch of free drawings to win different types of sewing machines. I don’t think I won because I haven’t heard anything. The price of admission did get us a cool goody bag. It includes the book, a bunch of MSLO magazines (anyone want my extra Everyday Food issue?), a bunch of thread and needles, coupons and Martha’s brand of precision cut scissors. In the end I am still glad I went. You can see a goofy photo of me and Rachel ‘posing’ with Martha over at Rachel’s blog.
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Hibiscus Lemonade
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Stamping on fabric demo
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I love this applique on the bedspread but I know me, this project is too daunting for me! But maybe the pillowcases!
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Getting the S tea towel made
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Using shells is a cute idea!
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Goodie bag swag

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