30+ Days Late

Halloween.  When was that?  Oh, yeah, October.  I made a costume for my kid.  It was actually a long hard road with the costume and probably would've made mediocre blog content, but, again:  pregnant and lazy.  So, blah.

I wanted to make the Goodnight Moon bunny and ordered some of that minky fabric off of ebay.  It was totally the wrong color.  Still blue, but not turquoise.  I have not taken a photo.  You'll just have to take my word for it.  I didn't return it, but I should have.  Lies!  

Then I went with just bunny.  I found some purple faux fur at the fabric store and picked up a lot of that.  I went with Butterick 3238.

All of my calculations led me to believe that this would fit her.  It had a gazillion pattern pieces and faux purple fur went all over the craft room.  I accidentally cut out the wrong size hood.  I whipped up the body part while the kid was at the park and when she got back I put it on her only to discover that it was way too big.  You see, I had calculated her entire height instead of doing the base of neck.  It was like six inches too long. 

No picture of her in it, but this is what I made up.

It's an Easter hue, I know, but it would have worked just fine as a silly little Halloween costume.  

So then it was back to the cutting board.  I had made the smallest size on the last pattern, so there was no where else for me to go with that one.  I went back to my stash and picked out another kid costume.  There was another bunny on it, but I didn't have any more faux fur, so I had to improvise.

I went with the kitty.  So I scrounged through my fabric stash and found a faux leather cat fabric, some faux fur left over from this costume, a little bit of black fabric, and a variety of brown bias tape.  It worked.

She moves pretty fast, so these are the pictures I was able to snag.

For the tail, which you can sort of see in the above photo, I just cut out a tail shape in the faux fur and tacked it onto the back of the costume.  I did not see the point in sewing a tube of fabric, because turning that frustrates me to no end.  Also note that I was too lazy (or rushed, now that I think about it, because this was made the night before Halloween) to switch out my thread at the cuff.

So there you have it.  If I make up the hood on that purple costume (still in a heap on my craft room floor, so I better get to that before the cats shit on it), then she'll have a costume in the future.

Ugh

Where did half of October and all of November go???  I was not doing much crafting due to a medical condition called pregnancy.  I was just too pooped to do anything.  I'm in the second trimester now, so I'm feeling better.  Plus I had to muster recently, because my niece and nephew both turn three this week.  I made some crayon rollups, which I have previously made here.

I made three rollups...one each for the two birthday kiddos and one for another nephew.  So here they are:

I opted for the button closure this time around, because the kids are only three and four.  

Marbling: Favorite Pieces

I'm really milking this marbling thing, huh?  Four posts this week about it, but whatever, man, this shit is cool!

Okay, so here are my favorite (final) pieces to show.

This was originally a blue piece of paper and I dragged my skewer through this a few times for this swirly pattern:

 This was a piece of brown paper, I think:

 This next one was originally a sort of cream with gray flecks.  You can see the flecks throughout the page:

This next one was a pink page, I think, and gorgeous!  I love how it turned out:

 And then this was done on purple and is my absolute favorite piece of marbled paper:

 I can't remember the original color of this page:

 And this one is a corrugated type of paper in a dark brown:

So there you have it.  A day's worth of marbling distributed over the course of a week.  Fun stuff.  I would love to set up a marbling station in my house.  That would be fantastic, but there are lots of tools involved and an actual science to this art.  Seriously...the water needs to be the right temperature and there needs to be some humidity in the air.  It's very intense, but I really had the best time doing this.

And now what am I supposed to do with all this paper?  I suppose I could figure out how to make some cards.  I don't know.  

Marbling: Fabric

And here are the four pieces of fabric that I did.

This was originally just some gold lame and the first piece of fabric that I marbled.  Love!  I really don't know what to do with it.  It's not very big, maybe 9"x11", and so my first thought was a Barbie dress, but then my most recent thought was the front of a pillow.

 I marbled some Vikings colors for my husband on this sheer fabric.  I don't know if I like it.

 This is another synthetic fabric that got marbled.  Pretty.  Maybe this one will be the Barbie dress.

 This next piece is the only cotton that I did in a free-form style:

Marbling: Sheet Music

I loved the marbled pieces of sheet music that we did in our class:

This one is titled "The Lady in Red," so I went with a red theme.  It's pretty nifty.

 And here's a piece of music by Cole Porter:

So, what do I do with these?  The last two would work as framed pieces of art.  My mother suggested some sort of Christmas ornament.  I can't decide.

Marbling

Yesterday I took a class on marbling paper and fabric at the Textile Center of Minnesota, which I had previously mentioned here.  I bought a hand-marbled fat quarter last time and remarked about how it came all the way from Holland.  I need to set the record straight on that...turns out, the fabric was made by a local artist who happens to have the last name of Holland and, well, she's the one who also taught yesterday's class!  

I have about 21 different pieces of paper and fabric to share, so I'm going to break it up over the week.  

This was my first piece of paper with a pattern called "stones."

 I did some more stones on paper, but then used a special technique to place the paper in the bath, which created this ribbon-like, fabric-like effect:

 Same:

I used the special raking tool for the next paper pieces.  Those lines are called hesitation lines, I think, and are caused when I did not place the paper into the bath in a smooth/fast enough fashion.  And that swirly in the bottom left was unintentional -- I dropped the paper in the water.

 More paper with that ribbon-like/fabric-like technique:

 Chevron-ish:

 And the last one:

It's Only October...

...but the Land of Nod sent me their new catalog and it was filled with Christmas things.  What really got me was this $99.00 tree skirt:

That's insane.  I really think that this can be made with felt and some ric-rac packages and it would seriously cost less than half of that price...way less than half that price.  Insane.

I was also struck by these advent calendars.  I'm not sure if anyone in my family would do these for their little kids (I'm not even sure that we will ever do these), but I thought about how easy it would be to make your own little pocket advent calendar out of fabric and then fill it with fun trinkets.  

sorry about the glare...photo was taken with phone camera.

Anyway, these are not projects for this year...I've already got too many projects lined up, but I'm keeping them here for future reference.