North Woods Kitsch

I saw a really wonderful necklace last winter when I was visiting Cape Town at Mungo and Jemima on Long Street. The designer was a woman in the UK, and I would post her info here if I could remember what it was, but I can't.

The necklace was a deer's head woven out of seed beads. I really wanted to buy it, but when I did the calculation from Rand to US $ I realized it was $200! Seed beads? $200? I could make that for about $2, I thought. Well, I eventually did, but it took about a year, and the longer the project lingered on my desk, the more reasonable $200 started to seem.

However, if you are up for a time-consuming sort of craft project (i.e. if you think knitting is an OK pursuit) this is a way to make an expensive looking accessory for very little money. I wore it to a party yesterday and lots of people seemed to think it was awesome. (Disclaimer: my partner thinks this is the ugliest thing ever, but what the heck?)



you will need

tracing paper
colored pencils
photo or print out of image you want on the necklace
thread or nymo
seed beads (all the same size/shape - flat edged are best)
beading needles
wax (optional)
beading frame (or box - although I recommend making a frame)

how to do it

First, you need to make a design. All the necklaces I saw like this were essentially Y shapes -- deer with antlers, birds with wings up, things like that -- or round shapes like flowers. I loved the deer, so I did my own version of that.

Sizing the design was the biggest issue. I wasn't sure how many beads across and down equaled an inch square once the thread spaced out the beads. It turned out that 15 beads across = 1 inch, and 10 beads up and down = 1 inch.

1. Draw a grid onto a piece of tracing paper. The grid should be composed of rectangles, not squares, to account for the difference in number of beads side to side versus up and down.

2. Find a photograph somewhere (pictures of animals on Flickr abound).

3. Decide how big you want your necklace to be (say, 2 inches high), go to your tracing paper and (using the example of my gauge of 15 x 10) count out 30 rectangles up and down on your grid and measure that distance.

4. Re-size the photograph in a photo editing program so that the animal is the height you just measured.

5. Print out your photograph.

6. Decide on the number of colors of beads you intend to use. I only had a certain number of small flat edged seed beads, so I used those. Pick out the same number of colored pencils that roughly match the beads in value and color.

7. Tape your tracing-paper grid over the photograph, and color in each rectangle with the closest color of color pencil. Hue doesn't matter as much as value. For instance I used navy blue for black and pink for tan on my deer.

8. Take the tracing paper off the photo and gaze at what you have done. Does it look like the animal? If yes, proceed. If no, maybe you need a more iconic or more contrasty photograph.

9. Here comes the fun part. Time to make the loom. First, count how many columns of beads across you've got on your image. You'll need that many warp threads plus two.

10. Find something that can act as a frame. I used an old 4x5 film box, but I would not recommend following my example. It will work better if a) it doesn't bend at all and b) it doesn't have a bottom like a box, but instead is really just a frame. Hammering together 4 pieces of molding into a small frame would do nicely.

11. Wrap your thread tightly around the frame enough times to make the number of warp threads you counted in step 9.



12. Thread a beading needle with thread, tie that thread to one of the middle warp threads. You're going to start in the middle and work out to one side first, because that leaves the hanging tail of thread in a better spot.

13. I followed this tutorial to get started: http://www.beadiefriends.com/LoomworkInstructions.htm



14. Now you just bead like crazy until you're done, following your pattern. Here are some pitfalls I encountered:

• My warp thread was too thick, so when I got done I had to finish the edges with glue because I couldn't weave my ends back through the beads. Use the same narrow thread you use for the weft. You should be able to pass at least three strands of thread through the hole on one bead.
  
• I kept forgetting to start new threads in the middle of the row. Knots on the outside look ugly.
• My frame bent because it was made out of cardboard and the warp threads got loose. Use wood or a real bead frame.

15. Take it off the loom, weave in your ends or make beads of glue to keep the ends from slipping through the beads. Trim your threads to the finished piece.

16. Sew chain to the back and attach a clasp to the ends of the chain.

WOO! That took for freaking ever!

Recycled Mittens

So I haven't posted here in a while, but I'm getting back on the horse.

I have, for reasons not to be disclosed, a large number of cashmere turtlenecks. I do not like turtlenecks. They make me feel overweight with misplaced boobs. I've been trying to come up with what to do with them that I could actually wear.

Then I saw this post at Chie Duncan's blog Vivat Veritas. She used bias tape to bind the raw edge where the turtle neck was cut off, and then sewed it down with a straight line of stitches. I had been thinking I would need a serger (which I don't have) to get anything done, but this morning I tried Chie's method and it worked beautifully. Yay!

Then I noticed that I had the neck left over. What to do with that? I cut it in half, sewed each half together leaving a hole for the thumb, and voila! Cashmere fingerless mittens! And my hands are ALWAYS colder than my neck anyway.

Lovable Monsters

I saw these awesome monsters by Junker Jane on flickr and had to make some myself. I cut up some old clothes to make Sweater Bird . . .



. . . and Monoclepod

Birdies

I was browsing through craft groups on flickr and came across some wonderful embroidered birds by Anita. It set me thinking about where I could use such motifs myself. I decided I would try to cover up some egregious coffee stains on a shirt I bought at the Bharatiya Dress Shoppe and only managed to wear once before the coffee dumping incident. Here are the results:





Sweet Tea liked it, so now I've been commissioned to put a jellyfish over the stain on her pleated skirt.

I looked at the Bantom Step-By-Step book of Needle Craft by Judy Brittain (1979) to figure out stitches to use. Mostly I just did back stitch, but I also found some handy stars called 'star filling stitch.' I also did french knots, which are actually easy, but impossible to read about. If you want to learn how to do them, watch one of the many instructional videos on youtube.

This project did earn me some bizarre and unhappy looks on the subway. At first I couldn't figure out why, since knitting doesn't phase anyone at all. One of my coworkers thinks it's the presence of the very sharp needle. I had no idea it was so easy to indimidate people. Watch out folks, I've also got a bottle opener on my key chain. Boo!

Sweater Finished After 20 Years!

Actually, I've just had this yarn for 20 years. My mom bought it for me in middle school to make a sweater. Unsurprisingly, I flaked out on the project. Years later I made a scarf with some of the yarn, and 5 years after that the scarf got stolen out of the US postal system. Finally in December I started this sweater for myself and I actually finished it. Amazing.

The pattern is free. If you aren't one of the 536 people on Ravelry who have already made this sweater, here's the pattern. It's pretty bare bones in terms of number of stitches, size and placement of neckline, but it's also very easy.

The most fun part was choosing the buttons. I used a bunch of buttons I took from my mom's stash last time I was home.

Of course you can always use a classic cat fastening:



In terms of satisfying and fast knitting, the Buttony pattern is definitely recommended.

hot enough to melt

I got an enameling kiln! Enameling is probably the most fun craft I've tried to date. Despite the 4 days of glass inhalation before I got a respirator, setting a minor fire, and accidentally melting something I thought was brass (whoops) I'm still obsessed.

Here are some things I've made so far.

First, I just tried regular enamel on copper.


Then I got wacky and tried embedding watch gears into the enamel. This works! However, it's kind of a crap shoot, because it's not always easy to tell what the parts are made out of, so sometimes they melt out of shape.

There's a great tutorial out there by Copperheart that got me started.

A longer post on this coming soon!

a little bit wearable art, a little bit rock and roll

A few years ago I wanted a vintage-looking silk-screened t-shirt with a high-contrast face on it. I do know how to silk screen (courtesy of my print-maker mom), but I don't have silk frames in my tiny tiny apartment, nor do I have all the various chemicals, the funky-smelling greasy ink, the squeegees, the ninety miles of cat-free horizontal space to lay out the drying prints, etc. So, I came up with a way to make something that looks like it was silk-screened, but only involves a tiny tub of fabric paint, one shirt, and a paint brush.

You will need:

Tracing paper
Pencil
A photograph of something you want on the T-shirt, at the size you want it
An x-acto knife
A smallish paint brush
Opaque fabric paint (I like Setacolor or Tulip brand)
Tape
Cardboard

How to do it:

First, I need to explain a few things about the materials, because several variables are quite important. You must use real tracing paper, not a substitute. I tried this once with vellum, and it was a disaster. You should also look for the most viscous paint available. The thicker and goopier it is, the better it will maintain the shape of your stencil and the more opaque it will look. Think about the color of the paint vs the color of the shirt. Darker paints on lighter fabrics are easier to deal with. If you have really really opaque paint, you can do light paint on dark fabric, but this is more likely to come out uneven and blobby. Finally, think about image size, shirt stretchiness, and where the image will end up on your chest. If the shirt is very stretchy and tight, and the image is right over your boobs, the whole thing is going to get stretched way out of shape.



1. Ok, find an appropriate image you want to transfer to your shirt. Several qualities are important that you might not think of right off the bat. The image should be contrasty - i.e. lots of very light areas and very dark areas, but not much in the middle range. This will make it much easier to make a comprehensible stencil out of it. The image should be fairly iconic, meaning a recognizable object. For example, a human face is very recognizable as a human face, even if sketchily drawn. An old rotary telephone is recognizable. An example of something that is NOT recognizable is a high-contrast photo of a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig. Yes, I tried this once, and the image on the shirt looks nothing like a pig and a great deal like Lenin.




WRONG!!

2. If you found your picture on the internet, blow it up or shrink it down to the size of what you want on the shirt and print it out. If you are using books or magazines, look for something that is already the right size.

3. Put your tracing paper over the image and tack it down with a little tape to keep it from moving.

4. Now, trace your image. Don't use lines. Instead, color in only the dark areas with solid black and leave everything else alone. This process can be aided by using a thick, dark marker (like a bold sharpie). You are going to be cutting out the dark areas later, so don't make them too tiny or intricate.



5. Next, check to make sure your dark blobs make a recognizable image. Take the tracing paper off the image and put a white piece of paper behind it. Ask yourself, "if I hadn't just been staring at this for half an hour, would I know what it was?" If the answer is yes, proceed. If not, start over, probably with a different image.

6. Now cut out all of your little blobs with your x-acto knife. This takes a while. Make sure you have a couple of new blades around. A dull knife will rip your paper.

7. Tape the tracing paper stencil to the shirt. You want everything very flat at this point. I usually put a big piece of cardboard inside the shirt to give myself a flat surface. Just make sure that the shirt doesn't have to stretch to go around the cardboard.

8. Prep your painting tools. The fabric paint I recommend cleans up with water, so get two small containers of water, one for cleaning your brush, one for cleaning up potential mistakes on the shirt. Also get a clean rag and a few clean pieces of paper towel.

9. Paint over your stencil. Make sure that you are careful not to stick the brush under the edges of the tracing paper - it should stay flat down on the shirt. This is why you must use tracing paper and not something like vellum or plain paper, the tracing paper tends not to absorb the water, so it doesn't wrinkle or curl up. Be sure to apply the paint evenly.



10. When you are finished, carefully remove the tape and peel back the stencil. The stencil can be saved for future use on other shirts. Put the shirt somewhere to dry where your pets won't use it as a racetrack. When it's dry (this usually takes at least 8 hours), turn it inside out and iron it with a hot iron to set the ink.

Hey presto, it's a shirt with a thing on it!