An Easter decoration

Hello, everyone.  It's only about a week and a half until Latin Easter. I understand that Orthodox Easter is a week off from that this year.

I have gotten it together to hang an Easter wreath. 

Components: Dollar Tree wreath form and plastic eggs, Hobby Lobby fabric peonies and lambs quarters, JoAnn fabric hydrangeas, and an entire 3 yard roll of ribbon.

(I looked at the Hobby Lobby hydrangeas but I didn't like them. I checked out the ones at JoAnn while picking up the ruler holder.) 

It does put some cheer on the door, doesn't it.

Working towards Halloween

 Hello, everyone.

Halloween may be a bit different this year, but the children still enjoy dressing in costumes.

DGD expressed an interest in being Sailor Moon, an anime character in a cartoon series. The character is a schoolgirl in Japan, so her outfit is based around the typical Japanese girl's school clothes. That means a sailor (middy) blouse and a pleated skirt. 

Years ago I made a costume for DD2 of this type, but it's long gone to another relative and even if it were findable, DGD isn't the same size. So I'm doing it again.

This time I started with a purchased school girl outfit. Added a pair of red knee-high athletic socks for the "boots," and sewed a gem onto each one. (She is intended to wear the knee socks with her tennis shoes.) The sock gems can be removed later for normal wear.

That was the easy part. Next began the work on the gem for the bow, the tiara (no pictures of that yet), the ribbon choker, and so on.

The bow gem in progress. As there are a number of variations of the bow gem in various drawing of Sailor Moon, I used artistic license in designing something that has multiple colors around the central red element. A ring of the round gold beads was added after the photo. 

The back side of the bow gem, showing the pin back. The beads are sewn with Fireline 6 pound test crystal colored line. Yes, I have a fishing line cutter to cut it with, the braided nylon line will ruin your regular sewing scissors.

The ribbon choker. The ends have extender chain and a spring ring and are somewhat adjustable for size.

Many of the components are from stash: Mylar type gift wrap, round gold beads, stiff interfacing and felt, faux leather and pin back, etc. The small round gems were even in stash, though I had forgotten about them.

The larger, acrylic gems were from JoAnn's. 

The tiara is still under construction, with more of the stiff interfacing and Mylar and also some gold colored tulle, and more of the acrylic gems. Like the bow gem, there will probably be a line of gold beads around the top and bottom edges of the tiara. The plan is to have a strand of elastic to hold it in place when she wears it. 

A quick little sewing post

Hello, everyone.

The monthly sewing club meeting is coming up and we're doing a fairly complicated project this time.

The prep work before the meeting involved both cutting and quilting.

This will be my first time working with Annie's Soft and Stable stabilizer. (From Amazon.com)

The plan is for the leaves to be the face fabric, the brown to be the straps, and the wood-grain blue to be the lining. (Fabrics from fabric.com, fusible fleece from the local JoAnn store.)

The pattern book has several very girly fabric choices for bags but the busy little prints just didn't appeal to me. Instead I am using a busy medium print in calmer colors.

Another dopp box

Hello, everyone.

As mentioned, the first dopp box made me want one of my own:

As before, ripstop for the face and flag fabric for the underlining/interfacing. Hanging loop is a piece of self-filled tubing that was lying around in the scrap bag. Zipper was sitting in the box of unused zippers--I used a 22" zipper and just tucked in the extra inch or so at the bottom end.

With this, the razor and the shampoo and etc. will all be together when I go to the shower cubicle. Possibly the toothbrush will live in here, too, with the tiny toothpaste tube.



 

Sewing with pet screen

Hello, everyone.

As many of you will recall immediately, last summer while on the Camino del Norte, we had a bad day, and DH was injured. We concluded, after reflection, that both of us need to be using hiking poles.

Poles have tips--little rubber ends that screw on so that if you're using them to keep from falling on slick pavement, they don't go "click, click, click" and also don't make holes or catch in pavement that is, like some asphalt, a little bit rough. The tips are not large, and I became worried that they would fall to the bottom of the pack and be unfindable--totally a word, guys!--when needed along the trail.

Thus the pole tip bag was conceived.

Tip bag, closed.

Tip bag with tip sticking out of opening.

The little bags are about 3"x3" in finished size. The chief difference between these and your standard boxed-corner utility bag (like a dopp kit) is that these have an overlap on the top for the Velcro closure. They were made of pet screening, a sturdier version of window screening that can be found in one or two colors at the hardware store (it's used to screen windows that pets scratch on as it's resistant to the damage caused) or many colors online at sewing/crafting shops. I have seen a bolt of black pet screen on the Utility Fabrics shelf at my local JoAnn store as well.

The blue fabric is ripstop nylon that was on hand, and the Velcro tape was also on hand. Stash usage! (Well, the pet screen was stash as well--we have pets.)

The idea with these little bags is that we will tuck them into the top zipper pocket of our packs, or if the tips inside are wet maybe we will hang them from a loop on the side, and when taking the pole tips off to walk on dirt trails, we will put them into their very own place so they don't get lost.

(Links go to examples of the thing described. The fabric may have been purchased at Fabric.com or the local JoAnn store instead, but these links were handy to illustrate with.)

Small Tree (Egg Ornaments)

Hello, everyone.

As Thanksgiving is over, and the refrigerator is slowly approaching normal (from total overload!) levels, we've begun getting Christmas things down and the decorating is slowly getting going.

The small tree is up. Next to the polyclay ribbon candy ornament is a little ceramic ornament left over from when I would give gifts to my CCD students every year. It has a painting of the Holy Family on the front. On the other side of the ribbon candy ornament is one of the ones made during the mad tassel phase: embroidery floss makes lovely tassels that are just the right size for hanging from egg shells.

One practical note: with the fake trees, the top is too floppy to hold up a tree topper of any normal kind. I had to add a stiffener to it in order to get the star to stay upright. The stiffener is wired onto the tree with green pipe cleaners and is pretty much a permanent item. Then when decorating the tree, I put the last of the white mini-bulbs up at the very tip so the star would be lit from within.

Another practical note: the small tree looks much bigger because it's on top of the coffee table. I put a table cloth over the table to protect the surface from scratching by the tree stand. This also hides at least some of the extension cord clutter.

Almost all of the eggs made it onto this one.

Some years past, when MIL would come down for several weeks at Christmas time, we would have a large tree in the living room, a 3-foot tree on top of the buffet in the dining room, and this tree in the upstairs hall. That was when there were helpers still living at home with us, of course. Now we're cutting back on the over-the-top decorations. This year I decided to put the upstairs tree in the room with the piano. (The buffet was retired to the Salvation Army with the over-large table and chairs that matched it. They weren't heirlooms or anything like that. We just felt like we were crowded out of our place a bit.) The 3-foot tree was outside in the Man Cave shelving over summer a couple of years ago and a mouse moved into it and chewed up the whole thing, so that one is gone. That left only two places to put all the egg ornaments that have been made over the years--and this tree is in better proportion for the smaller items.

The trick with eggs is to use your handy corsage pin to break up the yolk before you blow it out the holes that you carefully drilled with your Dremel. (Or chipped patiently open with the said pin and a starting hole made with the point of a sharp knife--less mess on the tools, but more eggshell breakage!) On the side, there was so much eggshell cutting going on at one point that DH got tired of finding egg white on his things and got me one of my own!

One nifty thing to do with an egg shell is to cut a slice in the shell while the egg is still inside, allowing the cleaned shell to be used to display a tiny angel or other scenic element. My grandmother's friend Mrs. Beckley was an expert at this and even made an egg shell with a tiny skating scene once. She sent us each an ornament, back when I was a child, and I still have mine.

The Beckley egg

She used graduated pearl beads and velvet cording around the opening of the egg, along with the golden fringe. There is even a bit of frou-frou on the back of the egg! She was an amazing egg artist.

(This photo taken before we stopped buying a fresh tree every year--now, sadly, we have fake. The expense of the extremely large fresh floral item over two or three years was the same as the cost of a nice fake tree which lasts for five years or more. And let's not talk about the problem of keeping smelly mold from growing in a water-filled tree stand for several weeks!)

When making Christmas eggs, I find that painting the washed and dried egg shell with gesso covers over the slight texture of the natural shell and makes it stronger. Then the shell can be perched on a bamboo skewer--one that you don't intend to re-use for food--and spray painted. That will give a smooth, shiny surface for further decorating. (Link goes to a really huge container of the stuff. My gesso is in about a 2 ounce bottle! And if you're only painting egg shells it goes a long way.)

The children and I would have "Christmas in July" over the summer holidays and make egg ornaments. They would paint words or even little scenes on the shells. They never broke an egg shell, either--they were all old enough for elementary school by then. (For younger children, I'd stick with popsicle stick crafts. There is only so much manual dexterity available before about age 8!)

Model paint works really well for painting words and tiny scenes, but requires mineral spirits for clean up. The tiny brushes sold in the model department are wonderful for the work.

Acrylic paint works well also, and is very easy to clean up, but after the paint is all dry the shell must be sprayed with sealer before any lacquer coat is added. Otherwise the carefully painted flowers or whatever will run. The tiny brushes can still be used, or one can go with a more elaborate floral kind of decoration.

Acrylic paint is also more generally available (in scads of colors) even if there is no hobby store in the area. Wal-Mart has it, Hobby Lobby and Michaels and JoAnn all have it, and if one gets into elaborate shading and such there are even blenders and extenders to give more working time. The gesso is also sold in little plastic bottles in the acrylic craft paints section of stores.