What I've been up to

It seems like every time I open my inbox (not every day, but as often as I can) I've got another email from Pintrest saying "Gorgeous Momma (that fits just about all of my friends, don't you think?) is now following all of your boards on Pintrest!"

I smile and sigh at the same time.

I smile because it's like a little note saying "Your life is so crazy and I never hear from you but I love you!" from each dear friend. It makes me feel so loved.

I sigh because I haven't pinned anything in months... well pinned online, lol. I have pricked myself a few times lately. Every project needs a tiny blood sacrifice, right? Even if you never mean to, lol.

So, here is my hurried attempt to catch you up on my crafty, devious, little projects.

Halloween, my vampire and mermaid turned out lovely and I bought a costume for my son because it was cheaper to buy the cartoon character set than make one. (Gasp, I know! Frightening that I've been reduced to BUYING a costume! What has become of me?)





Sorry the pics aren't great but I was down with the flu that week.
Umm... okay then my life was stressful and busy and I was bemoaning to my dear friend and guardian angel Kelley that I had no snowy white owl for my daughter's eleventh birthday back in November and that it still killed me to have not gotten one for her like we planned. So what does my angel do? She went home and she knitted and felted wool for me so I would have fabric to make an owl for my baby girl. Yeah, Kelley is wonderful.

So she gave me the pattern she had downloaded from WeeFolkArt.com and the felted wool. I cut out the pieces... and of course added to it, because I am me after all. I put a second layer for accent on the wings and extended the back panel to make a tail, and did an accent on the tail, and added feet (feet! So cute!)

So, this is how it turned out:




And this is my baby, in her Burger king crown, and she made a crown for the owl out of her water cup lid. The owl is well traveled now, it goes with her all over the place.
Now I just need to learn how to clean wool... hmmm.

This past week was Chinese New Year, Year of the DRAGON! Yay! So at work we celebrated all week with the kidlettes. I made a dragon to dance under. No pics of the plastic tablecloths I put on the back to hide the line of kids, but this is the head.





So much less scary than Perry, lol.



This is the eye detail I added after I took the other pictures.

I also borrowed another idea (that Kelley found for me) and went a little crazy with it. The itty bitties and I made a big cityscape with strips from a Chinese Newspaper and finger paints. It was a little crazy doing it with preschoolers, but it was fun and so worth begging the nice man at Chinese Kitchen for his newspaper.


The dots are little lanterns, btw, sorry so small, but it was a big project!

Easter eggs

I love decorating eggs. I don't have a kystka and beeswax, so I can't really do Pysanka like I'd like to. Still, they aren't completely terrible... are they?

Asian inspired jewelry

My sister gave me a really wonderful bracelet for Christmas. I love it so much and was thrilled that she sent along the left over parts with it. So I thought, and thought, and then ordered some Song Dynasty copper coins off of eBay.





The coins arrived promptly, but I was wrapped up writing, so they sat for ages. I put it all together the other day.





Here's the necklace:




Here's an earring:






Here's the whole collection including the brilliant bracelet my sister made:



Thanks Sis!

Christmas Ornaments

(Apologies in advance for the bad quality of the pictures, I took them in my car as I waited in line to pick up the kids, after all the work I was out of time.)

This year, after a successful RS activity where I orchestrated re-making ornaments, I decided to make an ornament for each employee at work. There's only about 150 of us.

So I took several chunks of time and crunched out several options for them to choose from. Some were simple:

Some were very complex, like painting the continents on these globes:

And others were not so hard because I know a few tricks:

This last one was very popular, even though none of the people I spoke to who picked it guessed that it was supposed to be the North Pole. Ah well.

S&ST #9

I was wrapping my friend's gift and wanted to do something special for the card.
I remembered that my mom used to emboss stationary for my grandmother. So I grabbed the roll of funny paper I have that has paper on one side and foil on the other. I used a crochet hook and the groove in my paper cutter to put in the lines of a square. Then using the 60 degree angle marker I made the lines of a snowflake. Then I put the card on a Styrofoam plate and embellished it. I found the Styrofoam made a great surface for freehand embossing.


Then I remembered that we have an event at work that we need snowflakes for, so I got on the phone with a friend and did these, two at a time:

I used a printed out hexagon to get the placement right, but the rest I just free-handed on the Styrofoam plate.

Out of curiosity I did a set with foil from the kitchen.

It worked fine, but the metal on metal thing was a little uncomfortable in a mild nails-on-the-chalkboard kind of way. It was fine when the paper hexagon was on top though, so keep that in mind. I also thought, well if anyone reading this isn't the freehand type, if you print out pictures of snowflakes you can lay it over the foil and trace the whole thing for a foil replica.

You have to be a bit careful to not press too hard and tear the paper/foil, but it was a lot of fun and it sure looks pretty.

Spindly snowflakes

I have a bunch of snowflakes on my tree. Some of them my sister made, some of them I got from the thrift store. I wanted more, but as I looked at them and compared them to my recent research on snowflakes I decided I wanted a more spindly effect. I thought for a while and then realized that I wasn't thinking about it right. All I had to do was chain out for each arm and spindly lobe and then single stitch back.
So, I made several. When each was done I would pin it to a Styrofoam plate and use a dosing syringe to apply starch to it.

When they were done they looked great on the tree.

Crochet and Bead Snowflake earrings

It's my friend's birthday tomorrow. I've been making snowflakes for my tree, so once I had made enough to know what I wanted to do I made these:

For those that speak crochet:
I put the beads on the thread before starting. I took the last bead that I put on and re-threaded it, then tied the ends so that the bead was in the middle of a figure eight of thread with just a little room on either side so I could stitch into each loop. Then I put six singles, three on each loop making a circle around the bead. I built four stitch chains between each single then half stitch climbed up the first loop to the center. * I chained out six, then turned and single stitched into the second chain. One more single stitch and then I brought up a bead and went around it to tack it in with a half stitch. then I chained out three, turned and single stitched into the second chain again. I single stitched my way down the side of the lobe and arm then used half stitches to move to the top of the next loop. I repeated from * until I had completed all six arms of the snowflake and tied off. I pinned the complete work to a Styrofoam plate and used a dosing syringe to apply starch to it. In the morning it was dry and I added the ear hooks.