Craft Enabled, Domestically Disabled

Why all hemp necklaces are chokers.

Because somehow no matter HOW long you cut the threads originally, somehow once all the knots are tied, they all come out to (barely) 15 inches long.

Why is that?!

I wish I had patterns for the following dresses.

Does anyone know of anything similar? This woman makes up her own patterns out of thin air, so I can't ask her, but I like the styles. I'd really like some more patterns with lace-up designs in particular (though I did find one in DomiKNITtrix).

• Cute wrap sweater.
• Wacky flower-trimmed tank. 
• Ren-Faire-ish red top.
• Red Ren Faire dress #1
• Red Ren Faire dress #2
• Awesome black laced-up cardigan.
• Funky blue-striped dress.
• Cute blue tunic.
• Corsety green-blue jacket.
• Green-blue dress.

Hemp-a-licious.

So, Jess has taken up hemp, and promised to show me how to do it the next time I saw her. I stocked up on PRETTY COLORED hemp for this purpose.
Here's my first finished piece, with boring ol' scratchy practice hemp. I gave this to Jess's son Julian, who later complained that it was itchy. Yeah, that's why I normally didn't like hemp in the first place. Usually it is not comfy to touch or wear!

So here's my first finished colorful piece. This is the only photo in existence of it, because (a) Julian immediately made off with it instead, and then (b) he lost it at school the next day. Very sad.

Here's my second piece. There's a uh, limited amount of beads I could find that would fit two or more strands of hemp. Hence why we have uh, Disco Ball Hemp here. Probably nobody else but me would ever like it, but I'll probably put it up for sale in a few months.

I'm keeping this one with the flower pendant for myself, mainly because the pendant was so expensive that nobody else is going to be able to afford it if I put it up for sale :P

Then I made some bracelets with the leftover hemp twine. The skinny one with the bead in the middle was kind of an experiment, but it came out looking all right.

A blast from the past.

Remember this? Now I've seen it on her. Heh.

Successful runes!

And my final set of runes came out BEAUTIFULLY!

And after all this time...

I finally finished a FEFI that I can wear myself!

Bad runes, good runes.

Made some more runes last week. Here's the ones that DIDN'T come out well. The air bubbles came out really huge and insane, for the most part, or the glass covered something funny, or the tacked-on pieces shrunk or came off. Argh. And I like that orange one, but you can't even see the rune unless it's held up to the light.

These, however, all came out very nicely. (Note air bubbles on the top middle one- how nice did that come out by accident?) So, slightly more than half came out okay! Yay!

Still redoing the others.

Experiments in bungling

So, I've been taking an advanced glass fusing class. The teacher suggested a method where we were to sculpt something or other out of wet clay, make a plaster mold of the clay object, open up a hole in the bottom and scoop out the clay, and then later pour crushed-up glass into the mold before baking it in the clay. As you can see from this side shot of my original mold, I attempted to make a duck.
Note the word "attempted."

Problem #1: the teacher said, the smaller you crush up your glass, the better. Once you were done filling up the entire mold, cover up the top with bigger pieces on the bottom. Now, while I had mine filled to the top with teeny glass crumbs, when I got my mold out before breaking it up, I came out with...this. Mold wasn't totally filled, and the big bottom glass was kinda hanging in odd places... I knew this wasn't going to come out good.

Problem #2: when it comes to the sculpture, FLATTER IS BETTER.

Problem #3: teeny glass crumbs of different colors comes out looking...nasty dirty gray.

Note that the only part of this that looks even remotely good are the bigger pieces I had covering the bottom.

I am attempting another one, making a FLAT crappy heart paperweight with no details AND BIGGER GLASS. Hopefully that will be an improvement.

In the meantime, I guess this is what I can do with my duck: flip it over and have... a vagina?

It's an idea...

So, I was reading this.

"I’ve been reading a lot of sewing blogs recently, and a lot of them talk about something called SWAP - it’s a contest wherein you have to make 11 mix and match garments within four months: 4 bottoms, 6 tops, and 1 jacket or 4 dresses, 2 jackets, 2 bottoms, and 3 tops.  There’s all these other rules and I doubt very much that I would officially join the contest [it’s sponsored by a fabric store and one of the rules is that one thing has to be made from fabric purchased at the store, which I think is just sly way of selling more fabric], though I’m tempted to play along."

Now, while I think the whole "you must buy fabric from this store, which is in Canada, which kinda limits the amount of people who can have the fun" thing is kind of sad (albeit fundraise-y for them, obviously), it sounds like an interesting project.

Then I thought, "what if there was a knitting version?" Of course, you'd probably need like 4 months PER GARMENT, or at least a year to compete at it. But I went to a fashion show last year- my old college department has a show where people are to come up with 3-6-ish garments apiece- and one girl knitted 3 outfits for her collection.

So, since this one requires 4 bottoms (skirts/pants) and 6 tops and 1 jacket...what would one do of this in knitting? Okay, so finding knitted pants (much less, knitted pants that aren't hideous) would be difficult, and some people are anti-knitted skirt, but...?

I hate swatching.

Not in the usual way that people hate swatching, mind you.

I have been trying to do swatches to figure out the yarn/gauge/needles for the possible new sweaters, and they are all going horribly. Why? Because the widths of the swatches will all come out fine and correct as listed- but the lengths are all too big.

What the hell do I do THEN? If I use smaller needles, then the width comes out wrong as well.

Also, this sweater's swatching so far does NOT correspond with the worsted weight it's supposed to be. My DK yarn seems to be working better with it. Huh? Oh well, at least that way I'd have something to use that yarn on instead of having to buy new.