Photographer, Blogger and Crafty Type
After I made a little blender breakfast, I headed right into my craft room to get some sewing done. I didn’t dare turn on the TV or computer for fear that I would lose precious sewing time. I also had plans to watch the SuperBowl in the afternoon, even though I don’t really like or understand the rules of football. I watch it just about every year and mostly just to see guys getting tackled. I like contact sports, I guess.
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I think I just need to confess right now – I’ve been preoccupied with my school work for the last week or so. I’ve been working on a group project and it seems as though we’re done. All that’s left is the presentation tomorrow. I’ve got to present for 5 minutes tomorrow about social media and email marketing. It’s not a big deal, I’m getting better with the whole public speaking thing, but man, it weighs on me. I think about it all the time. Tomorrow night cannot come soon enough. Then it’s one more class and I’m finished. Done. Finito.
Then I’ll have Tuesday nights back for the fun stuff.
Anyway, on with the fun stuff! My buddy and art teacher pal, Kelaine, suggested I try using acrylic medium inside some plain glass balls to create these ornaments made with some kind of fancy pigments and some glitter. I had some glass balls at home already, so all I had to do was pick out my favourite acrylic at Opus on Hastings Street. I picked out blue and silver. Shiny! Too bad I don’t really have a colour theme picked out. I’d like to do that sometime – all coordinated colours.
This was a quick, fun project. I’m going to do another layer once this first layer has dried to fill in the spots where covered, but it looks like gravity pulled the paint off the side. Then I’ll use some nice ribbon to hang them up. Hang them up on what? I’m not sure yet.
I’m pretty sure Donner will be climbing up any tree we bring in – he’s goofy that way – so we have our thinking caps on as how to have a tree or tree-like decoration that Donner won’t climb up and tip over.
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Since I have homework to do, create this year’s Christmas card, and make some presents for Christmas, I decided the best way to tackle my workload was to make a bunch of tiny Christmas wreathes shown above. I know. It makes sense to me, too.
I found a lovely site yesterday called, Natural Suburbia – by a crafty blogger in South Africa. She knits all kinds of cute little items – flowers, a tiny knitted Christmas shirt and some bats. She also knitted up these mini-wreaths.
Since I am the slowest knitter in all the land, I opted to crochet my tiny wreaths instead. Instead of knitting an i-chord, all I did was chain stitch a 10 inch row and then slip stitched back up the chain – just like in this video. I decided to use 3 – 10 inch slip stitched pieces instead of the 2 like she used. Her knitted i-chords are much fuller, so she only needed 2 to get a nice full wreath.
I used 3 different shades of green yarn for my wreath. Next, I connected the 3 pieces at the top and loosely braided them together – I couldn’t get my twists to look quite right without braiding the three pieces together. Next I just sewed the ends together to make a circle.
For the bow, I crocheted another slip stitch piece – about 8 inches long – with some red sock yarn and tied it to the bottom of the wreath in a bow. Too lazy to sew it on the wreath, I opted to tie it on (shoe-lace style) instead.
Linda (the blogger who posted the tutorials for this project) suggested using them for decoration on door knobs. I thought that was an excellent idea! However, the wreath stayed on the door knob for less than 30 seconds – Oscar and Donner were quick to pull it right off – while I was taking a photo of it. Sheesh. Kitties. They soon went back to trying to lift up the kitty robot feeder after I put the wreath away. This is their new thing now – I caught them with their paws UNDER the feeder – and Donner had it lifted up a bit, too. I guess they want to tip it over so the food comes spilling out? I’m not sure. Either that or they are just vandals.
That’s okay! I’ll decorate something else with them. I’ll be making others – in different colours. They are very sweet.
Thank you, Natural Suburbia, for sharing this great project. I’ll be following along to see how your Christmas unfolds this year.
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The tea party was a big success. It’s not often you get good company, great treats and a fun project all at once. Our project today? Fancy photo frames. We painted, modge podged, glittered and adhered decorative pieces on those plain old boring wooden picture frames you get from Ikea. There were babies and pets and toddlers, too. All and all, a good time. While I was there, I got some sewing advice for those little birds I was trying to make last week. Cynthia and Bea (the sewing geniuses) showed me how to do it. They also showed me how to read a pattern – as in, fabric 2 means, the second piece of fabric, not cut two pieces of this fabric. The reason why I couldn’t figure out the pattern was because I had cut out 3 pieces instead of 2 pieces. Yes. I was stymied on a pattern with 2 pieces. Good one.
A big thank you to Cynthia for the party and to Cynthia and Bea (from Texas) for the sewing hints. Here’s one – when you sew in a curve, it’s best to clip the fabric on the seam allowance side so it gives when you sew it.
But, as you can see, I followed their directions and got the bird together. It’s not quite perfect (there’s kind of a lump on the top of the head I don’t like) but other than that, I think I can whip together a bunch of them. Oscar and/or Donner seemed to have enjoyed the bird, too. Mysteriously, I found the bird on the opposite side of the room a couple of hours after I finished making him.
PSST…I think it was Donner.
After my crafty, busy day, we settled down to watch the Canucks (thankfully) beat the Kings, which means they will move on to round two of the Stanley Cup. Hallelujah. The third period was terrific and then Luongo‘s interview immediately after the game was pretty sweet – especially this quote:
“That’s how I play. I only play when it matters.”
Oh Luongo. I really like you when you win. I really do.
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