Craft Enabled, Domestically Disabled

A cool fashion exhibit I saw.

Just wanted to repost this over here for people to look at. Not my crafts, but still fun.

Felted ornaments

Just did some needlefelting at a friend's house. Star, dragonfly, orange cat (hard to tell), yellow duck (also hard to tell), then hearts. 

THIS IS MAH HAUL

Here's the pictures of what I got at Stitches 2023.

Yes, that's something like....17 skeins, technically? (A bunch of minis on the end). I have been collecting (a) rainbow skeins, (b) pastel mix skeins, (c) purple/blue skeins, and (d) neon skeins, for possible future projects. I shopped like there may be no Stitches in the future, basically. I took a class in alterations, so hopefully I can someday come up with the dress pattern I want for these things.

Other things: shawl pin, knitting board, landscape pendant embroidery kit, Knitters Oracle. And a bunch of stickers.

And the socks on the right.

This is the sample NEWS sweater I made in class.

Oh, and I made the embroidered pendant. (I note that the kit seems to have slightly different color instructions than the picture, so one part of the mountain is light gray.)

Stitches West 2023, day one

Enormous amount of pictures below the spoiler cut.

Stitches West 2022

Because this will go on forever, the pics will be below the spoiler cut.

Baby Yoda Cross Stitch

I didn't design this one, I was googling for Baby Yoda stuff AGAIN and found the pattern for free online. I love it so. I didn't do the same colors (used what I had around the house, of course).

I felt like it needed more around it to be a sampler. I wanted something sorta-virus related, and yet not virus related because who wants to ruin Baby Yoda with that, so the idea of "Personal Bubble" (he is in a nice floating crib, and who doesn't want one of those) is my compromise idea for that.

I confess it was a bit difficult to (a) design vaguely SW-logo letters, and (b) put them in a circle in an inherently square medium. I just sewed a line around the edge of where the hoop was to make it officially bubbly. And added some little silver balls because Baby Yoda likes those :) 

Wake Me Up When The Virus Ends

It's been a while since I did any cross stitch around here other than the Hamiltie, but I've got tons of supplies around the house for it and I wanted to do some kind of coronavirus-themed sampler, but not "Wash Your Damn Hands" or "Stay The Fuck Home." I don't want to give advice (not that anyone's seeing it anyway), I just wanted to make something that established how I feel about the situation.

And frankly, sleeping and forgetting about it is the best part of the day. So hence, this:

Here's the free pattern for it. Make it in whatever colors you wish. It's a little small because otherwise I couldn't get a screenshot of it all on the screen without shrinking it to 50%, but it's pretty simple to figure out. 

The Hamiltie

In another edition of "Jen Makes Strange Gifts For Friends, Hope They Like It!", here is the Hamiltie. The friend went to Hamilton for his last birthday. 

For whatever weird reason, I always wanted to try making a tie. I don't know why since my dad's dead and before this year I haven't had any dudes in my life for a long-ass time, much less any that were into ties. I saw this Hamilton ornament on Ravelry and wanted to do something along those lines, but noticed that the logo was just out of felt, eh....

I quickly found a suitable fancy tie pattern (Collar and Tie on Knitty) that was double sided (and is supposed to be knit in the round on DPN's), but you're supposed to knit that on the bias, which to me ruled out trying something Fair Isle to do the logo. Then I remembered that years ago I bought some cross stitch waste canvas because I liked the idea of being able to cross stitch on other items. IDEA! I can finally use that stuff...Also, this reminded me of my phase where I was cross stitching a bunch of Hamilton slogans and called it the "Ham Sampler Platter." 

Knitting the tie was tricky. I bought this fancy yarn, Cascade Yarns Sorata, which is out of freaking baby llama(!!!) and silk. I couldn't get the gauge quite right. The pattern gets gauge with size 1(!) needles, and I could get the stitch gauge with size 6's but was about four rows bigger than the row gauge. Normally when making things I prioritize making sure stitch gauge matches because when you're usually making stuff like scarves or sweaters or skirts you just knit for a certain length. However, I had some issues making the tie come out the right size and shape, so I had to take it out and redo it, starting the bias large middle section when I had 26 stitches on rather than 35.. I also had to knit each side separately rather than in the round as intended so I could cross stitch on one of the sides.

After I eventually got that working and done, I had to figure out the waste canvas issue and re-design a logo that fit the size of the tie, which of course came out smaller than I expected. I found a logo somewhere in cross stitch but it was too big for me to use, so I had to figure out how to size it down. 

There's not a whole lot of information out there on what I was trying to do, i.e. cross stitch on knitting. That's about why I'm writing this post in case anyone else tries it. It looks super easy if you're just doing it on regular fabric, but the few websites that mentioned anything about doing it on knitting said you had to have interfacing in there to make it less wiggly. I hate interfacing, but since I had issues the last time I did any major project and tried to not use interfacing...okay, fine, I got the stuff. The online instructions said to sew it in, but there was no non-fusible interfacing to be had in Joann's, somehow.

Thankfully, I did a sample knit after finishing the tie and tried it out, because man, I had some problems. Ironing in the fusible interfacing worked great on the sample (much less so on the actual tie, which kind of barely stuck by comparison...oh well, it was in enough for my purposes), but the waste canvas did not work so great.

(Note: since I used an embroidery hoop to do the cross stitch, I really did not have any wiggle issues with the project. Some parts of the sample actually went over where I had the interfacing, but I didn't have problems cross stitching there. I don't necessarily feel like I really, really have to have the interfacing if/when I try this again.) 

I had read some stuff online saying that when pulling out waste canvas strings, you had to get the project wet first, make sure your floss didn't bleed when wet, blah de blah... So after cross stitching a bunch on the sample, I did the bottom third of it by just yanking out the strings dry and barehanded. It was pretty easy to pull out, but snagged on the yarn on the sides on the way out. I tried wetting down (slightly) the rest of it and it slightly snagged less... but it still snagged. This was something nobody mentioned running into online anywhere (again, why I post this if it comes up for you). 

Also, as per whatever website I read this on and can't recall, you really should use thicker strands when cross stitching on something else. Two strands was kind of flimsy looking, so I did further cross stitching with all full six strands in. 

After noodling around trying to think of something else to try that wouldn't make the baby llama yarn snag (I debated ordering water-soluble waste canvas online for a while, but felt like waiting on delivery time might slow me up on finishing it, and given how things had been going I wasn't sure if I'd have to scrap the whole thing or start over or what...), I was Googling around not finding much and then I saw some stray mention of tissue paper somewhere on Craftster...

That's the idea that worked, folks. Put down a layer of tissue paper (in this case, I got some yellow) and layer it in. Tie on the bottom, then tissue paper, then put the waste canvas on top of that and then load all the layers into the embroidery hoop. And that worked! You don't see much of the tissue paper and it was easy to pull out of the sides after I pulled out the waste canvas strands, which snagged not at all this time :)

So, whew, it's done and I didn't have to start the whole thing over again. Huzzah. And now you know the special trick to try (plus what recommended tricks did and didn't work) if you ever want to try doing cross stitch on a knitting project. 

 

This is mostly done...Garden of Chaos!

Ugh, I haven't updated this in over a year? Good god. Uploading pictures is such a pain in the ass that I take them and never upload them.

Anyway, here's what I've been up to lately: my third gallery show is up. 

 
Remember the Summer of Flowers last year that was taking forever to upload? I did finish that and sewed them altogether into a shawl.

My mermaid costume from a few years ago. And I finally did a self-portrait in mosaic. 

Mosaics from the last few years. Big thanks to my friend Melinda who actually does woodworking for figuring out how to put backs on them.

And here's the last four years' worth of "ugly" holiday sweaters.

The last batch of ceramics I made that weren't stolen off my patio this year: 

Since this year's theme is "Garden of Chaos," one area's dedicated to flowers and the other's dedicated to undersea gardens:



This is called "Octopus's Garden" because there's sixteen octopuses in it. My friends Meg and Jamie contributed to it, and I am ah, still adding pieces onto it because I spent so much time making the first display piece (and then I found boogie boards at a thrift store in Santa Cruz) that I just don't feel quite done yet. Will keep adding more things later.  

 

 

 

Drafts of foul cross stitch

So awhile back I got the idea to make a friend a certain sampler with a certain foul Internet saying on it. I went as far as buying the supplies and setting up the canvas and then forgot about it until a week before her birthday. Alas, I didn't super rough out the text ahead of time (plus ran out of some colors), so the idea of it came out like this.

I have since started on version 2, which so far is looking like this:

Next time: smaller canvas square count, all one color for text, less confusing to have text not on giant field of brown.