Craft Enabled, Domestically Disabled

And this is just a very shiny plate

There's no way that photography can cover how beautiful and changing it is in the light, but oh well.

Mosaic glass fusing

So I've been taking a class in mosaic glass fusing this quarter. My projects in it have been kind of varied. Mostly we are doing tack/slump-style melting (rather than full fuse, in which things really melt together in a kind of soupy fashion) in this class, so things stay more in the original shape and stay 3-D.

This is the first one I did, which is just a wee little useless thing:

This isn't really all that mosaic-y, but I did get to use the teacher's supply of gold frit on it:

I used a ridged glass, brushed Klyr-Fire glue and gold mica in on the ridges, then put them face down on the glass, and later slumped it a little to come out with a sushi plate.

This is taking a piece of clear glass and layering the clear-with-squiggles sorts of glass over it. I cut out various triangular shapes, some of which have more background color than others, and layered them. I then took some clear squiggle stringer bits and layered them on top of the piece.

Then there's the beach scene I tried, which is ah... pretty much the same sort of technique as I've used on the usual grouted mosaics. I took a bunch of fragmented pieces and put them together (I traced a traditional stained glass pattern) to make an approximated picture, with spacing between the pieces. Before fusing, it looked like this:

Looks pretty much like a beach with mountains and a palm tree, right? I don't know if it did so much after fusing it-- there seemed to be a bit of size shrinkage.

It makes more sense from farther away than it does in person, I think. So when the teacher let us go use some of the frit (tiny bits of glass), I decided to fill in with that. Rather like grout. This is what it looked like unfused.

But... when I got it back, apparently somehow the glass on the back had shattered. It LOOKED okay as long as you didn't touch it, but... it was unfixable by fusing. Dammit!

But in the grand tradition of me, I asked the instructor if there was a way to preserve it anyway, and she said, "Glue it to some wood with silicone glue that won't shrink..." And I thought, hey, like a regular mosaic!

So I added it to a piece of wood--separating where it broke because I like how that looked-- and added a broken ceramic plumeria I made ages ago to the wood. I don't know how well they go together on the wood/in an eventual mosaic (and obviously I ran out of room for one of the petals), but hey, it's an experiment and it saves projects!

We'll see what I come up with for the rest of it if/when I get to do a regular mosaic again.

Quilt side B

Here's the other side. Which is ALMOST going well. Almost.

The one problem is: one corner seems to have stretched itself out so far that I have extra fabric that just won't lie down... AND ripped to boot. I don't know what the hell I am going to do to fix it, other than fudge it very badly and remind myself that this isn't going to the county fair or to a teacher for grading.

Grr. Quilting stinks.

The fastest skirt I ever made in my life

Introducing Lanesplitter, yet another pattern that I thought was well suited to using up extra yarn around the house, if you like that sort of thing. I think it's pretty cool. Also, it took me eight days to make. FASTEST REGULAR GARMENT EVER.

T-shirt blanket quilt uh, thing.

Updated from here: this is sooooo hard for me. I really hate making things bigger than me.

What happened was that I went to the thrift store a few weeks ago and saw a pink fleece blanket (stained on both sides) and thought, "Hey, I could just buy this and sew T-shirts to it, instead of going out and buying fifty tons of interfacing and batting and more fabric to make a real quilt!" I loathe interfacing and real quilting is not my joy in life, so I was pleased with myself for this idea. Also, it cost $4 compared to racking up like $100 on Proper Quilting Supplies.

Problem #1: the quilt is an interesting size... rectangular. I think it came out to 72 inches x 80 inches. Ergo, by Doing Math I eventually figured out that I could use a lot of 12x12 squares, but then I'd also need some 6x12, and then a few 8x12's if I wanted to have some 20x12s to make a quillow...

Problem #2: I eventually figured out that making a 20 inch wide pillow pocket was just not gonna work or happen with T-shirts. Even if I subbed in some regular fabric. Just too complicated.

Problem #3: trying to fit shirt logos/sizes that were over 12x12.

What I ended up with was 6 rows on each side, with 4 12x12s and 1 6x12 in each row. I thought I'd be short on shirts, then I ended up cutting up more shirts than I could use. God, I hate math.

EXCEPT:

Problem #4: remember how I really hate interfacing? How I don't feel like it makes fabric all that stiff really?

Well, T-shirt fabric is really super wiggly when you cut it apart. So the boundaries of all of that fabric wiggled and shifted like hell when trying to pin it together. I ended up taking a day off from work and spending the entire day (7.5 hours) just trying to lay out the squares and pin them together into rows. I had to do a lot of adjustments. Sewing them together didn't nearly take so long as that.

I spent last weekend pinning the rows to each other for one side of the blanket, still adjusting for more wiggles. Happily, that only took me about 3 hours, including the sewing.

One more side to go. Then I have to figure out how the hell I'm going to sew the two tops to the blanket. I'm sure the machine can't handle that level of thickness and then something bad will probably occur, like me doing handsewing with a thimble.

Anyway, this is side 1 so far:

And here's some closeups of the shirt logos, if you care:

Dutch Touch

So, this is a skirt that's normally supposed to be done in Noro or something, but I looked at the stripiness, and how the panels were done together, and thought, "Hey, that would be great for a striped skirt that uses up my handspun." The pattern said I'd do about 62 stripes altogether to finish it off, so I decided to do it in sets of 10 (red, red/orange, light orange/yellow, yellow, green, light blue or blue/green, blue/purple, purple, pink, rainbow yarn), rotating in regular worsted yarn when I ran out of the shade for each color. What with the variegation of the yarn I used (the red and purple are probably more DK weight, the rest of my handspun is on the bulky side), I actually got it to go around my waist at 50 stripes. Oh well.

For the record, one can do a stripe with a ball of bulky-ish yarn that is about 2.5-3 inches across, and 2.25-2.5 inches across in a smaller weight. Should you attempt to do this at home.

Yes, I took these pics before I had tucked in all of the ends, but I wanted to get a shot of the skirt using a dummy rather than the usual crap-shot-at-home-in-the-bathroom, and the place was about to close. I also made a slip to sew inside of it.

Easter Birthday

So years ago my shrink came up with the idea of me doing a craft on my birthday every year, preferably something I can finish within the day. This year, I wanted to commemorate the fact that this year, for the first and only time, my birthday was on Easter. I LOVE this since that's my favorite holiday.

I figured something wearable would be redundant pretty fast, given the situation, so I decided to (a) try making a few small items, such as a baby bunny and a baby cake, and (b) then I decided to combine a few flat pieces together into one Easter Birthday uh... sort of large patch thing. No, I don't know what I am going to do with it.

In retrospect, I think I would have ah, varied up the pallette a bit better so that you can tell there's a birthday cake behind the bunny/basket, but oh well. It's Easter Birthday-ish and that's what I wanted.