Craft Enabled, Domestically Disabled

I didn't make it into the state fair this year

I didn't get ANY of my projects into the state fair this year. I found this out right before leaving on vacation, but didn't really notice/process that uh...if you didn't get in, you had to pick up your items a LOT sooner than I was planning. Which is to say, on Saturday I got a phone call saying, why didn't you pick up your stuff? Uh....because I am hours away right now? Shit. I actually started dreaming that night that I'd forgotten my stuff, but at that point there wasn't shit I could do about it and couldn't even check the due date without say, downloading a giant PDF on my phone (which is not cool with that).  Anyway, the lady I talked to, Julie, was extremely nice and went above the call of duty about letting me pick up my stuff on Monday after work, even though I got caught in whopping traffic (despite my doing some kr8tive driving to get around freeway clogs in certain places, there's only so much you can do) and didn't make it exactly by 6 p.m. She said she'd liked my stuff and was surprised it didn't make it in. However, they have different judges every year, and apparently this year they only handed out one honorable mention per category rather than more than one. I don't know if that's a permanent change or not, but...ack.

Anyway, I got home and got my scoresheets in the mail. The fairy garden was "the scale isn't right." (Uh...for fairies?!) The handspun yarn one mentioned my "Bavarian twisted stitch" (I have never heard of this before and I don't know what it is) and said the yarn was too thick to wear--okay, there's some merit to that, though I've done it. The Desert Bluffs one nitpicked my weave-ins and said that the position of the sun in the logo was "problematic," which is to say uh...I didn't notice it was over the crotch. Anyway, I can't really argue with the critiques too much. I wasn't good enough. (Note: last year's note on my winning sweater on the sheet was "Needed better blocking," so whoever's judging this year was more nitpicky.)

And if they're only going to have four winners from now on--I asked Julie and she said she didn't know if that was just this year or what--then I'm clearly not going to be good enough to make it. Since I paid $10 per item to have them judged, if I'm clearly Not Good Enough to make it into the top four...well, maybe I should just save my money. Or become a lot more nitpicky with my knitting, but I am not super super picky about my crafting, so that might not happen. Either way, I don't think I'm likely to enter fair any more. Sigh, but there it is.

The finished fairy garden

Now it has a fuzzy, vine-and-leaf decorated fence around it, and a few other additions.

Making a fairy garden

So there is a state fair competition to make a fairy garden. Seriously, that exists. I happen to know someone who totally does that sort of thing, so we're working on one together. Here are the results so far:

Here's the base, which has to be 12x12. Meg provided me the yarn and I knit/crocheted a cover for it to make a shaggy forest floor. The base brown/green yarn I designed and Meg spun and then I crocheted around the edge.

Meg did this amazing mushroom hill/fairy house, and I did the underglaze on it and then she did the top layer of glaze. It came out really well.

This is the base piece--I used flower stamps all over it, then used a foam donut to make it more of a holder-type thing. I painted on red, purple, orange and yellow underglaze and then Meg used celadon glaze on top of that. It came out amazingly coppery and a perfect holder for the mushroom hill.

I can't really explain this one so much other than it was another slab draped over a foam donut. The weird blobs are things Meg made with drippings, which I hand painted underglaze on to attempt to make them flower-ish.

A baby labyrinth that I cut out of the tile stamp..

And here's where we glued the pieces on, and added little fairies out of yarn, and glued some nature-y bits and twigs and stuff onto t.

I may add some kind of fence so I can wrap vines and leave around it (and also to hopefully hold the pieces in just in case). But it's pretty wild and wooly so far.

Experimenting with yarn and ceramics, part three

Here's the last of my crocheted samples.Yeah, that octopus has a ton of arms, what of it?

For Round Two of this level of experimentation, Meg and I dipped the pieces in slip without pre-soaking them first, and then put them in already made little cups.Meg also threw a bowl for my second version of the mandala to drape in there. I painted more slip on top of that.


So how did they come out?

So at this point they haven't crumbled in the kiln! Huzzah! However, I will admit that a few of them came out...crumblier when they were manhandled a bit later.

This one has pretty much lost its shit altogether after the photo was taken, really. And after breaking an edge off of another piece unexpectedly, I am being VERY careful about touching them. I glazed everything but the big nice bowl (I'm afraid to mess with it) to see how that comes out.

 Oh, and this is a totally random thing I made after using some of Meg's experimental drippy swirly bits.

 

Gavle Goat 2005--Don't Blaze Me Bro

The ugly holiday sweater I've been thinking about for almost a year is finally done!

What is the Gavle Goat? Read and laugh here.

Front and back.

Approximate steps to making it:

1. make a basic sweater using the Perfect Sweater pattern from Mason Dixon Knitting.
2. Get feltable blue and white yarn and knit a square panel that fits across most of the front of the sweater, knitting the blue in stockinette and the white in garter.
3. Find some gnome and gingerbread patterns on Ravelry and make some adjustments to them, do some crocheting. Make up bows and (feltable) arrows. Add a little moon because I'm moon-obsessed.
4. Make up a Gavle Goat pattern, kinda based on the aforementioned stuffed goat except flat. Copy the fence that I've seen in goat pictures online.
5. Pin and sew the pieces on to the blue and white piece.
6. Break out my felting needle and felting stash and hand felt up a little flame. Felt-attach it to the bow/back piece with the hand needle.
7. Get a small battery pack of white lights at Rite-Aid. Poke the lights through the front piece to simulate (a) stars, and (b) how they light up the horns. Carefully put some extra sewing in between each light to hold it in place. No, I am never going to wash this sweater.
8. Sew the entire front piece to the front of the sweater. I left a hole in the white section by Santa for messing with the battery pack.
9. Make up some crocheted lettering and sew it to the piece.
10. Write up an explanation of what the Gavle goat is to put on the back (see below), because clearly one is needed for the general public.
Go out and buy iron-on T-shirt transfer paper (for dark shirts) at Office Max. Grab a medium green T-shirt and very tediously follow the very specific instructions to iron it on. It's not perfect, came out a bit blurry in spots, but it was hard enough to do that I'm not gonna worry about it. I sewed it to the sweater with a sewing machine and zigzag stitch, and then realized the edge looked a bit rough.I crocheted an improvised goat pattern around the border (inspired by a hen edge pattern I found on Ravelry) and sewed it on both with a sewing machine and with yarn by hand.Sewed the parts of the sweater together.

Here's shots on the mannequin:

And on me:


Here's the text on the back of the sweater.

In 1966, someone in the town of Gävle (pronounced "yeah-vleh"), Sweden, got the idea to make a giant traditional Swedish Yule Goat every December and erect it in the town square. On New Year's Eve, someone set it on fire. This has led to an over 40 years long tradition of burning or otherwise destroying the goat approximately every other year or so (even years seem to be likely). Sometimes it's burned right after it’s built, sometimes it gets burned before they finish it, and sometimes they just get stolen. For the record, the town of Gävle does not want to actually burn the goat. They would like to not have to remake the goat every year, or sometimes twice a year--they would like to save it for later. At this point, two different organizations are erecting goats, because they need backup. It costs around $30,000 American dollars to erect one goat.
Every year the Swedes insist on putting up the goat, though they do attempt to make them less flammable. This isn’t going so well, as techniques such as freezing the goat with water don’t actually work. The Swedes especially don't like the fireproof solution that turns the goat brown, because that makes it less pretty.
People are paid to guard the goat--firemen, police, hired guard, volunteers, taxis, the Home Guard, an infantry regiment at one point.... but that doesn't always prevent burning. Heck, people will run out in the middle of a heavy blizzard to burn the goat. Once money to pay the guards runs out, the goat usually ends up burning.
There is a fence around the goat, but it's not exactly the world's most badass fence. Because the Swedes like things to be pretty, the fence is rather small and easily jumped over. Putting webcams on it doesn't prevent burning, but does lead to several helpful flaming goat videos on the Internet. As for catching the burners, it very rarely happens. In 40+ years, only four burners have been caught at it, and so far none of them have paid for the damages.
Of COURSE people take bets on the goat's survival.
Goats have been run over by a car, kicked to pieces, and thrown in the river. The webcams have been hacked. One year some guys tried to bribe a guard to look the other way while they attempted to grab the goat with a helicopter and haul it to Stockholm. Four men burned the goat in 2012, got tattoos commemorating the event, and posted pictures of them along with an anonymous confession on the Internet…and they still weren’t caught.
This sweater is to commemorate the burning of 2005, in which a guy dressed up as Santa and another guy dressed up as a gingerbread man showed up with crossbows and shot a flaming arrow into the goat, burning it down. Not only were these guys not caught, they were featured on Sweden's version of the "Most Wanted" TV program.

I'm thinking of doing a series of ugly holiday sweaters. Next up: Hawaiian....

 

Craft Scouts

I just wanted to call attention to this over here as well.

Trial run of the costume, #2

Almost done with the...

 

Sorry the hat pic is blurry--will try to get better later.

So this one features the frock coat, corset, some of the jewelry, skirt, bloomers, and spats. I am not going to bother with the scarf since I came up with the jewelry (plus um, not sure where I put it), and I'm not sure about the frock coat since it doesn't look so good with the rest of it. I have a funky frilly knitted-looking purple jacket that might work better for this outfit instead. I'll see how the rest of it looks tomorrow. And the rainbow socks will probably be replaced by darker leggings or knitted ones later--I had them on for something else to be seen later.

I will hopefully get a picture taken of the whole ensemble for real sometime tomorrow, but it won't be up until after Halloween, most likely.

Another year, another Halloween costume trophy

I was pleased to hear that last year's winner wants to keep her trophy, so here I am making another one. I wanted to make it fairly well different from the last go-round (and it was requested that it be ah, slightly smaller).

I wanted it to be different...was originally shooting for a haunted house theme, but it wasn't executing well. Maybe next year. I decided to go for a spiderweb theme, with hanging wacky things in the web. Then I decided it needed a white backdrop...and I needed to make something out of yarn..

In the end, it came out 2-sided. The winner can display it either way!

I pretty much made up the ghost pattern from scratch to fit the frame--kinda on the spot, didn't write it down. Oh well.

 

 

Final week of silicone mold making class

This is a mold.

This is cutting the mold in half-ish to get the clay model out.

This is what happens after you pour mold into the wax to see how well the pieces turn out.

Two of mine were total losses, and half of the double mold didn't come out great, but three of them should work well enough to actually try to make a metal piece with them. Someday. Apparently there's not going to be a metal casting day until...who knows when, so I'm pretty annoyed about that. Maybe winter.

Week 3 of silicone mold making

Here's a sampling of what happens when you pour in the silicone.

That's pretty much all we did for week 3, but there was also a terrible attempt at wax sculpture (NOT MY SKILL IN LIFE) that I am not even showing you people. Suffice it to say that I took this class to avoid sculpting in wax again...