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!

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

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!

Recycled Shirt

This winter a lot of Sweet Tea's tights went kaput. She had several pairs of sweater tights that all went at once. It was a bloodbath: holes in feet, holes in the crotch, total elastic failure. In the aftermath we figured out that you can make pretty cute legwarmers from a pair of sweater tights. But there are only so many pairs of gray legwarmers a person needs. So today I took 3 more pairs of dead tights and made them into the raglan shirt you see here. Doing this is fairly easy, and the stretchiness of the material makes for a forgiving fit. You just have to be OK with a little unevenness and use a trim-and-adjust-as-you-go philosophy.

You will need

three pairs of tights
thread

How to do it

1. First you need to make some flat pieces of material out of two of the pairs of tights. Cut the legs off and apart from one another. Cut the feet off the legs. Cut each leg lengthwise and flatten it out.

2. For each pair, sew each flattened leg to the other legnthwise. If you don't have a serger on your machine (which I don't) lap the edge of one piece of fabric over the edge of the other with the right sides of both pieces facing up. Sew down the middle of the overlap with a loose zig zig stitch. Then go back to the top of the seam and sew the raw edge of the top piece of fabric down with a tighter zig zag stitch.

3. Now you have two rectangles that will form the front and back of your shirt. Cut them out roughly according to this pattern:



4. Cut out the small triangles shown in the pattern from scraps (the feet or whatever you have left). Sew these triangles to the sides of the front at the top of each side, abutting the curve for the sleeve insertion.

5. Sew the front to the back.

6. Cut the legs off the remaining pair of tights, but don't cut them open. Cut off the feet. Shape the top of each leg according to the pattern above.

7. Sew each leg to the curved arm opening formed by the front and back.

8. Have someone else put the shirt on and neaten up the curve of the neck.

Is it a snail?

The Christmas push is finally over, so I can start putting up pictures of what I made for everyone in my family (whether they wanted it our not). This spiral hat was a fun and quick knit. The pattern is from Elizabeth Zimmerman's The Opinionated Knitter and can be done in a night, or a day or two if you are a beginner. This hat can turn out looking really different depending on what you do, so if you want it to look like the pictures here, here's what to do:

• Use fat yarn. EZ calls for something that is no longer manufactured, so I tried holding two strands of Manos del Uruguay together, which worked just fine.
• Do the backwards loop increase, like she says. I tried a different increase for the first hat I made and it looked cool, but not at all like the picture.
• Sew the edges of the garter-stitch portion together. The pattern is a little vague on this point, but it'll look odd if you don't.

I actually found this pattern first on google books, because the portion of the book they were displaying for free included it. This doesn't seem to work anymore, but The Opinionated Knitter is terrific - definitely worth buying.



And here's my grandma looking pleased with her version (or possibly being held up):

Baby's first owl

A one-year-old I know was having a birthday party today. I had been toying with various present ideas for weeks, but suddenly it was an hour to the party and I hadn't started anything. Sweet Tea and I whipped up this serious little guy in about 50 minutes. If you want to make something similar, here are the steps:

1. Draw the body shape on a piece of fabric. Make it a little fatter than you want the final toy, to give room for seam allowance.
2. Cut two body shapes out.
3. Cut the eyes, nose, brow, etc. out of different fabrics.
4. Sew the smaller parts to the larger parts. I went in this order: pupils to eyes, brow to face, nose to face, eyes over nose and brows. Use a close zig-zag stitch to hide the raw edges.
5. Make little triangular pillows for feet, loosely stuffed with poly-fiber-fill. You don't have to close the ends of the pillows because they'll be sewn into the body.
   
6. Sew zig-zag stitches over the foot pillows to make 'toes'
7. Put the feet over the front of the toy, upside down. You want the pointy, unfinished end of the pillow sticking out past the bottom edge of the toy.
8. Put the back of the body over the front. The part of the feet you want to have showing at the end will be inside, in between the front and back of the body.
   
9. Sew almost all the way around the outside of the toy, sewing over the feet. Leave yourself about 3 inches unsewn so you can turn the whole thing right side out.
10. Turn him right side out and fill with stuffing.
11. Sew the hole in his side closed.

Voila! Cute owl.

Mary Poppins's Handbag

I made this handbag about a year ago, and since then people have been asking me about it all the time. It’s pretty easy to make, although a little time consuming, and is that magical combination of hip and comfy. It has a lot more room in it than it looks like it should (for example I can fit a bottle of wine in the bottom). I’ve always been planning to make myself another one in a different fabric, so I finally did that for the purposes of this blog.

The pattern I’ve posted here is pretty impressionistic, I.e. Not to scale and not very detailed. That’s because it doesn’t really matter if you get the size or proportions exactly right. Just use my pattern as a guide and make your own pattern pieces for whatever size bag you think you want. I’ve actually made the same bag in beach bag size, and it worked wonderfully like that too. Just remember that the body of the bag is going to end up seeming a lot smaller when the bag is done, so don’t skimp on the size of that.



The idea is that you have different patterns of fabric on the inside, the outside and the pockets. For both of my purse size versions of this bag, the linings for the yoke and the body are different patterns, which I think looks cool. Plus, this is a great way to make something out of bits of fabric that are really too small for anything else.

Also - let me stress the importance of having a helper for this project:





You will need:

2 heavy weight fabrics (canvas or upholstery material)
2 to 4 medium to light weight fabrics
1 button
About 50 inches of 1/2 inch webbing
4 O rings (these can be from curtain hangers)

How to do it:

1. First cut out the pieces. You want the yoke outside and the bag outside to be of heavier fabric. Ideally, the yoke outside should be the heaviest of all. If it isn’t you can use a little interfacing to make it stiffer. For the first bag I made, I used upholstery fabric for the yoke, canvas for the body, and quilting cotton for the pocket and lining pieces.

2. Next sew together the outside yoke pieces at the side edges, right sides together. This is the first mistake I made on the purse I made for this blog post. Instead of doing that, I lined each half of the yoke separately and then had to figure out how to put the two sides together later. Either way will work, but sewing the outsides together first is less of a pain.

3. Sew together the yoke lining pieces together at the side edges, right sides together. Now sew the yoke outside to the yoke lining, right sides together, along the top edge (the edge that has the curves and shapes for the handles). Clip curves and trim corners.







4. Turn the yoke right side out. Press under the raw edges of the lining and outside along the bottom edge. Topstitch along the top edge of the yolk.

5. Now deal with the pocket. The pocket goes into the lining. So, first put one pocket rectangle, centered horizontally, near the top of one of the lining pieces. Pin it down and sew a long narrow rectangle. (This step is similar to step three of the Boulevardier bag) Cut a two ended Y into the rectangle and then turn the pocket fabric through the hole you just made. Press.



6. Now make your button hole, horizontally centered near the top of the pocket. (Button tutorial here http://www.purlbee.com/buttonhole-tutorial/).



7. Now, pin the other side of the pocket to the pocket piece you pushed through the hole, right sides together, and sew all the way around.



8. Now sew your button onto the back fabric of the pocket.

9. Next sew your two bag body outsides together along the curving edge, right sides together. Do the same with the bag body linings. Clip a few places along the curve. Turn the outside right side out and then slip the lining into the outside.

10. Sew very long basting stitches all the way around the top edge on each side. Use these stitches to gather the fabric. Gather it so that it becomes the same circumference as the bottom of the yoke.



11. Insert the top edge of the bag body into the space between the lining and the outside of the yoke and pin.





12. Sew all the way around, as close to the edge of the yoke as possible. The body is done!

13. Now you need to attach the rings that the handles will go through. I actually used curtain hanging rings for these, because I had them around the house. You can also go to a notions store and get various sizes and finishes of ring. To attach them, just run the top of each sticky-uppy part of the yoke through a ring and sew it to itself.





14. Ok, all that’s left to do is make the straps. You want to use fairly heavy fabric for these, because they will get the most wear and tear. Essentially, you want to make a tube of fabric, run the webbing through the tube, and then top stitch both long edges. This is annoying no matter which technique you use. The first time I did it, I made a tube, turned it right side out, and then fed a strip of webbing through it using a large safety pin in the webbing to pull it along. Another way you could try it would be to wrap the webbing in the fabric and then sew it down.

I haven’t made the straps to the new bag yet, because none of the fabric I have looks right with it, so photos of the finished new bag will be coming soon!

dressmaker's pin earrings

I've always loved fancy sewing pins. They look so satisfying in the pin cushion, just like candy sprinkles. This morning I realized they could make cute earrings. This project takes about 2 minutes and costs almost nothing.

You will need:
Small pliers
Wire cutters
2 dressmaker's pins

How to do it:
Snip the sharp ends off the pins. Leave as much length on the shaft as possible. Bend the shaft around to form the earring wire.

And you're done!

Cheap and Easy Produce Bags That Won't Destroy The Planet

We just joined this hippie food coop, and I’ve been feeling guiltier than ever about the absurd number of plastic bags I use. Even though I’m pretty good about bringing reusable shopping bags, I still end up with more plastic bags than I can fill with cat box leavings. Already, I was having nightmares about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Now that I shop at a place that sells nutritional yeast in bulk, posts notices on why they don’t carry Coca-Cola products, and offers workshops in past-life regression and community acupuncture, I feel like Judas every time I reach for one of those clear plastic bags in the produce aisle.

I’m too broke for therapy, so I found a couple yards of plain muslin leftover from another project and set about making washable, reusable, drawstring produce bags. There’s no need to use muslin. I’d like to try using nylon, ideally in a crazy pattern. If you’re getting rid of an old dress with a lining, you could use that. Any fabric will do, so long as it’s light enough not to add to your bill when your organically-grown, fairly-traded, Waldorf-school-educated bok choy gets weighed.


What you’ll need:

Light-weight material, approximately double the size of your finished bag.
Ribbon or string — a shoestring, even — about twice as long as the top of your bag
A sewing machine or some patience (this is totally do-able by hand)
Thread (matching, if you want to be dull)
Pins — mostly straight, one safety


How To Do It:

1. Cut a long, rectangular piece of muslin or other light-weight fabric. About 14"x34" works well. The bag in these pictures was made from a more square piece — about 14”x24” — because that was the size of fabric I had left. Depending on the proportion of your piece of cloth, you may end up folding it differently in step 2.


To get a straighter edge on muslin or calico, make a small cut to begin, and then tear the fabric, rather than cutting the whole distance. Pull evenly on both sides. Feel like a yardage store badass.


2. Fold your fabric in half. You want to end up with a bag that is deeper than it is wide. Pin the sides or side and bottom -- whichever way will leave a short side open to be the top of the bag. The pictured bag has side and bottom seams, but the others I’ve made have had two side seams. It’s not a federal case.




3. When you start sewing the side seam, leave an 1.5-2” unsewn at the top. The drawstring will come out of its tube here, eventually. If you’re doing two side seams, you only need to do this on one side.


Here is an example of me only leaving an inch, and having to fudge later. Leave an inch and a half.

Sew the sides or side and bottom, leaving 5/8” seam allowance.



If you’re sewing a side and a bottom, you’ll have to go around a corner. Make sure the needle is piercing the fabric, lift the foot, reposition the fabric, and lower the foot.




4. TOTALLY OPTIONAL. If you want to show off — or, if like me, you want to try to learn a new sewing technique on a project that doesn’t have to look good — you can fancy it up by flat-felling the side seams. These are rutabaga bags, not your wedding dress, so I figure why not practice on ‘em? But you can just motor ahead to step 5 if you prefer.

Snip most of the seam allowance off of ONE of the pieces of fabric you just sewed together.


(The seam is a bit messy because I was having trouble with the tension on my machine. Repeat after me: This is not my wedding dress.)

Pin the long (5/8”) seam allowance over the snipped side, folding its edge under so you dont’ have a rough edge showing.



Stitch along the folded edge.




5. Finish the open top of the side seam — the one you started 2” down. (If you’re me, realize you forgot to leave it open, swear, and tear out the top 2” of one of those side seams.)

Fold the edge double, pin it, and sew so that the opening of the drawstring tube will not have annoying rough edges.




6. Fold over the top of the bag to make the drawstring tube. (Double fold at the bottom, so there won't be a rough edge.) Sew along the bottom fold, being careful not to sew the two sides of the bag together.




7. String that sucker up.

Cut ribbon or string twice as wide as your bag’s top, plus about six inches.



Turn the bag right side out. Attach a safety pin to one end of the ribbon, and send it into the drawstring tube.



Work the ribbon through the tube by pushing the safety pin and scrunching the fabric over it.


When you’ve got the ribbon through, tie the ends together so you don’t have to restring the bag every dang week.




8. TA-DA!