Craft Enabled, Domestically Disabled

More from enameling class.

Argh, it looks like I need to re-upload my finished tower pendant (which I am wearing today, thank you!), because I saved the wrong one here. But I can still show you the seascape pendant I am working on, because I got to the point of putting wire onto it.

The green in the back is supposed to represent seaweed, btw.

I'm amazed I got the fish to come out as well as I did, particularly that shark. Coolness. HOPEFULLY I can finish off the sucker in our last class.

My frit paintings!

The one on the right here is the first painting I did. It took two weeks to do because I fired it twice. The second time, I painted on top of my first painting to make some of the flowers come out more 3-D. I only wish I had had the time to do that with all of the paintings, because that would have been really cool. This one came out awesome.

The other one I did 3-D with didn't come out as well, perhaps because the flowers I was copying didn't differentiate as well. (That red-orange flower just looks weird, but oh well.) It's a good thing I finished this in the first week so I could 3-D it, because the picture makes a lot more sense that way.

I am rather disappointed that the greenish flower came out the way it did (I actually had to paint over it because it came out worse the first time!), but I think there just wasn't a pale enough yellow color that could work with that there, alas. I think it helped the yellow to stand out a bit more, though. Oh well.

After that multicolored one, I just did another pinkish-flower painting. It has an interesting effect if you hold it up to the light, because the green background looks more "foreground" than the flowers do. I'm not sure how that worked, exactly. Still kinda cool, though.

And finally, I did a bunny! (More specifically, it's Yuebing.) It's tricky to do gray bunnies in art (I had two as a kid, and drawing my own Netherland dwarf's shading was tricky). It would have been really cool to have been able to "flip and fire" this one and make it 3-D the way I did the first two, but again, we only got that chance once, and I did this in the second week. I'm not sure if the dandelions come across or not, but eh, it's still cute, and at least you can tell it's a bunny!

I definitely want to do frit painting again, but they only allow us to do it at the CC once a quarter, and you have to pay $100 for the class or so. That's frustrating, but between paying for all of the frit glass and having to fire frit paintings specially, it's probably not cost-effective to let anyone do it when not in a class *sigh*.

The cardigan didn't turn out so well.

The sleeves would NOT lie flat at all in the sewing, and they're all set in bulgy. And the sides are all pulled out of shape from adding the side trim on.

This makes me really sad.

I haven't tried to dry it flat yet (probably will wait until the cats move out), but... I don't think it's fixable, really.

Another screenprinting bombout.

I tried making a screen with a pimp hat. And alas, one side pretty much didn't come out in the printing.

I really don't know WHAT to try next for a picture that will come out. They're all coming out shitty. Wah.

At loose ends.

I don't really know WHAT to work on right now.

I'm trying to not go out and buy more yarn, for once. I am craving ModaDea Ticker Tape suede(!) yarn since I saw it at the beginning of the summer, but I didn't buy it then because I had no patterns for it. Course, the only pattern THEY provide for it, as it turns out, is one ugly-ass poncho, so I'd have to make something up anyway. I kind of want more of the yarn I used on the cardigan, but they're out of all of the good colors ('cause I bought 'em) at the yarn store. So any more yarn I get these days has to be ordered, and that's a pain.

So I'm trying to do something using up my old stash, for once. Kind of annoying when you have like 2-3 balls of yarn of every color left and all patterns need 4 at the max (unless you're making a scarf, which I refuse to do because I've got tons).

I first went to my old attempt at the Side to Side Vest, but I am thinking of dumping it altogether. Figuring out the instructions on the sucker is harder than I thought. Or maybe I should just start it over.

Then I next thought I'd try doing this shrug. Not that I have the proper yarn for it (not that I EVER have the proper yarn for any pattern, really), but I might just wing it or something. Or maybe I'll make one of these shrugs sometime (that's what I want to do with the ModaDea yarn, actually).

But then I was cleaning my room and found the old print out of this ribbon top. I already have the yarn for it, and supposedly for my size it only requires 3 balls of yarn. I have 3 balls of this yarn left. Perfect, eh? Well, not so much. The way they wind that ball, I thought I had more left than I do. Really, it was more like 2 1/4 balls, once I finished that previously-used one.

However, I have some samples of various ribbon yarns the yarn store had, and one of them is rainbow-ish sparkly. So I'm trying to knit stripes into the top and see how that goes and if it extends things a bit.

In other news, I need to post some more pics if I ever have time to get them off the camera. You'll sometime be able to see how badly the cardigan came out, and also how badly my second screenprinting attempt went (sigh). Though hopefully I'll be able to put up some great frit painting pieces too this week. And maybe (I hope, I hope), my finished enameling piece.

Good news and bad news.

Good news: the cardigan is done.

Bad news: it's very...lumpy. Nothing lies flat or even flattish. I am hoping getting it soaking wet and letting it sit for days will do something to fix this, but I suspect not.

And I definitely do not have enough yarn left to make a matching top to go with it. Waaaah.

Quick, Henry, the Frit!

(And nobody's gonna get that joke headline because it is older than old. Eh, whatever.)

Anyhoo, this weekend I took (and will continue to take next weekend, when hopefully I can get some pieces back for pics) a frit painting class. To be honest, frit painting is pretty much the same thing as enameling, you just do it on glass instead of on metal. Both are teh awesome.

Frit paintings look about like this. Making pictures of animals is something that's encouraged, and there were some dang cute llama and penguin paintings some folks had done. Fish are also extremely popular- I think I was one of the few in the room not doing a fish.

I did two flower pictures, since I could try to make them look more 3-D if I fused them once and redid them again next class. They seem to have come out well so far.

Nearly done.

The cardigan is almost done. All I have to do is the final trim and the buttons/holes.

It didn't really sew together smoothly on the sleeves, alas, and I couldn't figure out how to fix that. Which is frustrating.

Back to the cardigan

After having to take about a week and a half off to rest my hands, which were protesting all the knitting, I have finally finished all of the pieces of the sweater. Blocking, stitching, buttoning, and doing the finishing stripey bit to go.

I find it frustrating that the instructions for the sleeves just did not freaking match up at all. Telling me to increase twice every other row for ten times would NOT get the number of stitches I was supposed to have left. Repeat on every other increase/decrease mention, actually.

I have no idea how long the sleeves are gonna come out. Longer than the "just below the elbow" the picture seems to hint at. I wish they'd go all the way down, but I had enough problems with this pattern without making my own adjustments.

I am also quite nervous about adding the final trimline to the neck/open front of the cardigan. I don't think that's gonna go well.

Also frustrating: I suspect I might have just not enough left to make the matching tank I wanted to. I may try it anyway, but who knows. Grr.

A hit and a miss.

So, today I took a screenprinting class. Which was a VAST improvement from when I took screenprinting and nearly bombed textile design class due to issues with emulsion years ago. I brought in about three logos on transparencies to try out.

One of them worked, and I managed to get it onto a shirt. The other one, alas...Had Issues.

This one is a logo I've had in mind for awhile (and made a button out of). If you have seen or read Bridget Jones, you'll get it. If not...it will make no sense, so I won't bother trying to explain it.

It came out fainter than I expected, but oh well. No biggie.

On the left is the picture that I wanted to use in this logo. It won a vote on what hat to use by a vast majority. Alas...it didn't come out for squat in the screenprinting. The face disappeared, the eyes turned black, and the emulsion went berzerk on the fur on the light side. *sigh*

I think I'll have to try again with a different photo. With, alas, a less funny picture, or one not involving a person anyway.