glittergoods

and the winner is! plus kindergarten felting!

My random number generator of an 8 year-old son has spoken, & abcgirl is the winner!  Thanks for all the comments, & thanks for the list of music to check out.  Lots of familiar names, but lots that are new to me, which promises some fun poking around on iTunes.

Around here?  My latest favorite album is Midnight Boom by The Kills, but I am also really liking Hideaway by The Weepies.  With the kids, Beauty & the Beat is in heavy rotation, also various Ramones songs, a B-52s greatest hits compilation, & Elizabeth Mitchell's You Are My Little Bird hasn't really faded away since we saw her last year.

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Today I had the task of mounting the flat felt pieces the kindergarteners made last week in the second of our two felting sessions.

I used the leftover adhesive photo mount squares from the auction project & stuck the felt to pieces of 8x8 cardstock.  Easier & quicker than glue, & the squares will hold the felt nicely behind glass & well enough for a piece that gets tossed in the bottom of someone's kindergarten art 08-09 box.  I used to use those squares quite a bit years ago when I was more into book & paper arts, but am finding them handy in all sorts of ways these days.  An excellent (& cheap!) rediscovery.

Anyway, it was fun to get the felt pieces home & really take a look at them.  This project was a little tricker for the kids than making beads & ropes (our first felting lesson, which I am just now realizing I completely didn't write about), but was perfectly manageable (we had around 25 kids, 4 adults, & 30 minutes to get things done.  This project requires enough dexterity that all 4 adults were kept very busy helping the whole time.).  We did plastic bag felting:  each kid laid out a wool background (two layers of wool strips, strips slightly overlapping on each layer, layers laid perpendicular to each other), added a design on top, then a grownup tucked the whole thing into a quart-sized freezer zipper bag, added some soapy water, & the kid proceeded to smash, squish, & scrunch the whole thing until felt magically appeared.

I essentially used the instructions from Kleas (complete with pictures!), but instead of pouring a bunch of water in & then squeezing it out into a towel, each of the adults had a big narrow-tipped squeeze bottle & we just squirted warm soaped-up water into each kid's ziploc for a count of 10.  We also bypassed the final step of shocking the felt with alternating hot/cold water, but for kindergarten purposes, it was totally fine to skip it.

My demo piece for the kids was a tree, which of course ended up showing up quite a bit in their own work.

 

This kid was very careful in all steps of the project, from wool layout (his pieces were nicely fluffy & loosely laid out, which makes it much easier for the wool to tangle together & felt up) to meticulous & patient smashing of his wool-filled baggie.  I think he probably got the smoothest, feltiest result.

 

However, I think I might love this kid's tree ON FIRE just a little bit more.

ok, then. also, 200th post giveaway!

Dear blog, I didn't think I'd be away for quite so long, but you know how it goes.

Auction:

Birthday:

Pizza night:

Birthday quilt for my mom:

Next design project for school:

...so I've been keeping busy enough.

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To celebrate this, my 200th post on this blog, I'm going to have a little giveaway (because, really, with all of my blog absenteeism, who knew I'd hit 200?  I'm so pleased!).

It's one of my modern patchwork pouches, complete with hand-printed loopy twill tape & a glitter zipper charm.  For a chance to win it, leave me a comment with your favorite current music -- album, artist, or song -- & I'll pick a winner on Monday.

Comments are now closed, thanks!

eightbyeight

I totally meant to be like Melissa & post every day this month, in the spirit of January & everything, but I have spent the past few days eyeing up some CSS manuals, which sucked all energy & will to blog from my being.  But!  I persevered (& found a much easier way to do things, which turns out to be have someone else do all the CSS work for you), & now I am excited to share that eightbyeight, the blog for my new collaborative art project with the inimitable Blair, is up & running.  I made a banner & everything.

The idea is that, for the next 12 months, we'll start each month by sending each other an 8"x8" box of supplies based on a theme (you can see our list on the eightbyeight about page), & by the end of the month, we'll each have made an 8"x8" project incorporating each of the materials from the box.

On the blog, we'll be sharing our materials, inspiration/process, & final results; we'll also be posting pictures on flickr along the way.

I got my first box of goodies from Blair on Sunday, & while I have no real idea where I'll be going with it yet, I'm super excited about the start of this project.  I love working small, & I think we have a great list of themes that will send us in all sorts of new directions.  Stop by & say hi!

meme, meet blog

Found this at pixiegenne, & -- after having coffee with Blair yesterday & getting back some of that old blog feeling -- it felt like just the right thing to do today.

1. Do you promote your blog?

Not too much.  I link here from my flickr, & from my etsy shop, but I haven't linked my business site to my blog (though I have a link going the other way), for example.  I came to personal craft blogging after a couple of years of working hard to promote my business online, & it's been a tricky conceptual divide for me to bridge.  When I started my business, the sell-your-crafts scene was much more concerned with seeming like Real Business & much less...artist-centric, I guess, & so stepping out from behind the product line to reveal my obsession with vegan cupcakes or sewing a thousand skirts for my daughter etc still feels a little weird to me.

2. How often do you check hits?

Oh, it goes in cycles.  Of course I checked constantly when I first started blogging.  Now I'll go for months without bothering, until I get into one of those obsessively self-referential internet moods.

3. Do you stick to one topic?

Aren't all personal blogs about the overarching single topic of my life & opinions are so very interesting?  Less obnoxiously (but more pretentiously), this blog is probably about the moments when my aesthetic life meets my actual (messy, distracted, kid-filled) life. 

4. Who knows that you have a blog?

As in, do I keep it a secret?  I'm not all hi, nice to meet you, I have a BLOG, but I will mention it in conversation if it seems natural to do so.  Some of my family reads it (hi!), some beloved far-flung friends read it (hi!), there are people I know offline who have stumbled upon me through googling or other blogs, I think my husband directs people here sometimes in an attempt to explain what it is that I spend my time doing.

5. How many blogs do you read?

It depends on how much internet time & focus I've got at any given time.  I think I read about 50 through Bloglines, & then I love to poke around on that "related feeds" link & there are probably about 25 or so more that I follow that way with some regularity.  I sometimes think of adding more, but I like the look of a short list on my blog page.  I love the way some people do a tiny rotating list of recommended blogs, though I would never remember to actually rotate it.

6. Are you a fast reader?

Yes.  I have a love/hate relationship with Bloglines, since I really like how tidy & simple it is, but I find it's too easy to just skim through my whole list without bothering to click over & leave any comments.  But, really, if I left a thoughtful comment on every blog I read, I'd be here all day.  Just know that, if you write a blog I read, I probably have meaningful email conversations with you in my head all the time.

7. Do you customize your blog or do anything technical?

A little.  I made a list or two when I first set it up.  I kind of like the little book pictures that some people have on, so I'd like to learn about that.  Also, I didn't realize when I started that part of crafty blog upkeep was a seasonal change of masthead.  I'm overdue (by about 6 seasons).

8. Do you blog anonymously?

No, I blog under my real name.  Because I do talk some business here, I use real names for shows where I'll be (& I've met a couple of people that way, hi!) & stores where you can find my goods.  I haven't posted any pictures of myself, I don't think, though I'm not saying I never will.  But I don't use my family's names or post their faces (except that one of my sister at her wedding), since they're not the ones choosing to talk about themselves on the internet.

9. To what extent do you censor yourself?

Quite a bit, actually.  A huge part of it goes back to my continued negotiation of the business/personal divide, plus I am maybe just not that much of an exhibitionist?  On the other hand, some of my favorite blogs are ones that are much more open & confessional & emotional & welcome-to-my-interior-life than I can ever imagine being, & I would like to think that they're having a good, relaxing, influence on me.  I find that I'm a little more familiar in my blogging as time goes on.

 

10. The best thing about blogging?

 Hands down, the sense of community it gives me, the feeling that I am not alone being, as Meg mentioned, crazed over my kids' birthday parties, or obsessed with tiny food or willing to tackle a project over & over & over until I get it just right.  I discovered craft blogs at a moment in my life when I was feeling burned out with business networking & self-promotion & channeling all of my creative energy into the increasingly production-oriented work of glamscience, & so discovering this whole other world where it was ok to spend 10 hours on one tiny piece of hand-embroidered linen & another 10 hours staring dreamily at gorgeous Japanese craft books, it was just amazing.  I drift in & out of how deeply I'm involved with the whole scene at any given time, but just knowing it's there has been really wonderful.

 

craft geek goes to studio craft

Ok, finally a chance to sit down & write about Studio Craft, which was just about the sweetest little show I've ever seen.  If you read any of the blogs involved, you already know that each participant is already wonderful at the little details, so just imagine what happens when you get them all together.  For instance:

See what I mean?

Also, everyone was just flat out charming, even more so in hindsight when I realized that I was just one of many who came to the show to meet the crafters as much as to see the crafts, & so the very pleasant chats I had with Blair, Sally, Alicia, Abby, Melissa, & Stephanie (plus hearing a great story that proves that amazing vintage finds are cosmically attracted to Lisa) probably had less to do with me having fresh & witty things to say & more to do with them being excellent + tireless hostesses.

I loved seeing all the goodies in person (it was like celebrity sightings for the terminally craft-geeky, Look, there's one of Stephanie's squirrels! Ooh, & Sally's pin boards!) & picked up quite a few little things here & there, but I have to say that my score of the day was this notebook cover from Melissa:

I love so many things about it:  the brown, the white stitching, the polka-dots, the pocket.  I am a big believer in notebook pocket systems.

I also get a kick out of the Denyse Schmidt fabric on the inside; one of the things that was great about the show was seeing a bunch of familiar fabrics used in ways I wouldn't have thought of (craft-geeky, remember?).

After all the chatting & shopping, I rounded out my trip to Portland with my first visit to Bolt, which is a perfect little jewel box of a fabric boutique.  Portland really seems to have a knack for the perfect little boutique; I'd say that maybe it's all the time spent indoors that lends itself to creating that kind of thing, but we have rain up here too & there are far fewer amazing little shops than I'd like (though we do pretty well when it comes to the needs of knitters).  Anyway, I found & immediately snapped up all they had left of this fabric

which is something I've been looking for for months & had given up hope of ever seeing again in this colorway (it's one of those Alexander Henry short run prints).  For this, if nothing else, Bolt has my undying love.

Then a wistful glance at all of the other enticing but unvisited (by me) shops on Alberta, a sandwich from the Wild Oats deli, & a drive back north through horrible, horrible rain.  I didn't stop to fortify myself like Blair did, but only because I didn't think of it (though I did have a handy bar of Green & Black's in my purse).

Great show, great day.

no, really, this time I mean it

Ok, September 1.  Man, remember back in the early summer, when I was writing regularly & I -- along with lots of other people -- was struggling with the whole family/work/craft balance?  Talking about how hard it is?  Oh, & then, remember a month ago, when I thought I was ready to get back into the blog swing?  Yeah, well, my balancing act hasn't been so hot lately, obviously.  My kid, though, the one who's about to start kindergarten in less than a week, has been having a pretty good end-of-summer, so I guess sometimes "balance" is less important than "happy little boy."

At any rate.  Speaking of trying to get back on the balanced-life train, last weekend was my first show in a while, Swank -- oh!  first, I have to say that a significant part of the inspiration to pick up the blogging, um, keyboard, again is that a blog reader stopped by & let me know that she made a trip to the show specifically to see me.  So flattering & cool, & I totally failed to get your name, but, thanks!  I loved that you stopped by!

So, Swank is a great show, by which I mean that it's in a really nice space (a big room in the lower building of the Phinney Ridge Neighborhood Center, locals may know what I'm talking about), & the mix of vendors is a really high-quality & interesting one (if I say so myself, ha).  This was my second time at the show, & the foot traffic wasn't quite what it should have been either time, but the show is also new to the space, & I think that there's a lot of potential there, once people figure out where it is.  There might be an Eastside show coming up in November (if the organizers can find a good location), & then the next Phinney show will be on December 16.  I won't be there (I'll be down in LA at Bazaar Bizarre again), but I hear that the Swank holiday show is fantastic & if you're in the area, you should think about checking it out.

I am trying to remember to take pictures of my booth/table whenever I do a show, though I only manage it about half the time.  When you've got as many products as I do, cramming everything into a 6-foot display is fairly tricky, & every time I'm trying to do it, I end up thinking that I really need to pare down the amount of stuff that I actually haul to shows with me (or, ultimately, the amount of stuff I actually make).  But, you know, it's hard:  do I leave out the shirts?  The cards?  The bracelets?  The sparkly little bobby pins?  Oh, decisions, decisions.

Luckily, I brought my latest embroidery project along to distract me from such weighty issues.  It's my second Stitchette -- I'm doing a series of three to hang on my daughter's wall -- & wow did that pattern get a lot of compliments over the course of the day.  It was especially fun to see how many of the other vendors already knew about Wee Wonderfuls (since I meet a surprising number of crafters offline who don't know about the amazing online craft world).

I suppose I shouldn't be talking about my second Stitchette without showing my first one, which I finished a few weeks ago.  I had a great time personalizing the pattern, though I think it will be a while before I decide to do a whole head of hair in French knots again.  I just love how portable embroidery is, compared to most other work I do, &, given how little time I'm finding to devote to craft lately, I especially love how small these girls are, particularly compared to this gigantic vintage embroidery kit (seriously, I had to buy a set of 18" x 34" stretcher strips for it) that I really want to stitch up except it kind of scares me, since it's going to be almost as big as the smaller of my children, & it's taken three years to get her to this size .

blog? what blog?

Let me tell you, when I left on my little weekend trip to LA, I did not expect things to snowball into a whole month off from blogging (both writing & reading), but it's been a nice break.  I have been working on the yard, staining deck furniture, waiting patiently for our never-ending backyard fence project to be finished already, taking my kids to the pool, rediscovering pleasure reading, & basically doing as little as I could get away with.  It was not such a bad way to spend a month.

I'm ready to get back into the swing of things (though the official tally at bloglines is that I'm 364 posts behind, so it will take me a while to catch up, ha), I think.

And, in honor of my attempt to reclaim some sort of structure, here's the first craft project I've done in a while (a month, in fact, though I did pick up (& then fail to start) a few fun projects in the interim), my answer to the Flower Pincushion Challenge:

This was a hard theme for me for some reason, but things fell pretty well into place once I decided to go in an entirely different direction than last time (except for the pins, which are just too fun not to do & which give me an excuse to collect lots of colors of polymer clay).

So then, I finished the first one & decided that I'd probably better make another one with the leftover circle of pink felt that was sitting there already cut out.  And maybe some more pins.  (There are two rows of snaps on the wristband, for size adjustment.)

The cushions also unsnap from the bracelet part, for those less flamboyant sewing moments, although I have to say that sewing is usually such a dramatic event around here (jubilation!  disaster!  frustration!  success!) that a big pink pincushion wrist corsage is just the thing.

o, technology

I haven't been able to upload pictures to typepad for the past couple of days (this is a test using flickr), which is frustrating enough in its own right, but especially frustrating because I am seeing other people posting lovely posts full of lovely uploaded pictures, & double plus frustrating because I finished the quilt, & I have pictures to post!

(That's my quilt binding helper, pictured above.  Very, very helpful.)

well, hello.

Not too long ago, I was googling around for info on sewing oilcloth (for a tablecloth project), & I ended up at Dioramarama's post about what a pain it is to work with (!).  A while later, I'd received the Denyse Schmidt book as a gift & was doing some more (lovestruck) googling, & lo, Dioramarama again.

Of course all of this led to link-clicking & flickr-looking & a whole lot of excellent blog discovery, which in turn led to a piece falling into place for me:  I have been thinking for some time now about whether I wanted to add a blog to glamscience, my business site, but I just couldn't get a good head of creative steam up about an ongoing business blog.  Finding the current crop  of arts/crafts bloggers, though, people who were doing the kinds of things that I was or wanted to be doing or doing things that I only wish I could be doing,  doing it with kids in tow or after hours or in odd stolen moments, just because they can't help but make stuff, got me thinking about a blog that's a little more casual, a little sloppier around the edges, than the strictly-business one I'd first imagined.  And now, I'm going to give it a try.

(Oh, & the tablecloth?  More of a table-sized placemat really, & it worked out fine -- probably because I didn't do any hemming, ha -- despite being dinged by my fatal sewing flaw, the mostly complete inability to grasp spatial relations of any significance.  This is probably why my drawings are almost always tiny, & definitely why I almost always have to take apart a sewing project at least once & put it back together the right way again.)