Familiars Brought to Life

I play DnD 5th edition with a friend of mine over Discord every so often. My character is a Kenku, a bird-like creature that cannot fly but can perfectly recreate sounds it hears, think Lyre bird. Her name is Rustle Crowe [sound of a piece of paper rustling, sound of a crow] and she’s got a familiar: Kevin. Kevin is an owl most of the time and he’s dumb as a rock. Still very helpful but I regularly forget he exists. So when the DM said: “why don’t you get yourself a reminder?”. That was reason enough to start making a new plush.

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I used Sew Desu Ne/Choly Knight’s free owl pattern to make this plush owl. When googling owl, I found a picture of an Eastern Screech Owl that I really loved, and he became the main inspiration. I looked through my stash and was limited in the colours and fabrics I had. So Kevin doesn’t look like an Eastern Screech Owl, but he’s still pretty cute. I made three deviations from the pattern. 1. His head tufts are supposed to have two spikes, but I made a continuous one. 2. His feet are a little smaller than the original because I couldn’t get them symmetrical so just resewed them entirely. 3. He’s got a tail feather that isn’t included in the original pattern and I drafted myself. As usual for the Choly Knight patterns, it came together easily and the instructions were marvelous. I have now also amassed quite a stash of this type of wellness fleece fabric, so I will need to make more plushies in the future!

Otter Friend

A friend of mine is a fan of otters and since it’s his birthday soon, I figured I’d get him his own otter. I used the free fluffmonger pattern for Squakers the Otter and hand sewed the small version in an evening while watching the darts. It only requires a little bit of fabric so that was quite handy. I only made two changes to the otter. The first was to make his ears a single layer, since they would be way to fiddly otherwise and the fabric doesn’t ravel anyway. The second was to omit the heart and just have him hold his own hands and an improvised fish.

You can also give him something else to hold, since the fish is not sewn to him. Perhaps an ikea pencil or an even smaller baby baby otter?

I think he’s really cute, and I’ve found that fluffmonger has more free cute animal patterns, so they may become useful in the future too!

Bottle Cover

A weekend at a larp and a new bottle require a new bottle cover. The new bottle was a lot larger than previous bottles and would not work for it’s intended purpose. I did base the design in part on my previous version Invisible Plastic.

After the hat I still had some more of the wool left over and figured it would work as a more or less waterproof cover. I cut out a circle, added some sides and a hanging loop. I needed to attach to pieces together to form a large enough rectangle for the sides. Then I needed to figure out how to close the thing. I the end, I opened up the front a little and keep the flaps to close over each other. Then I added another button to the front and a semi-decorative closure in a vague leaf shape.

I made it somewhat too big by accident and decided to sew an additional seam at the front to make sure it was not too loose. This also allowed me to open up part of the piecing on the front and create a miniature pocket. For proof I added a brownie spoon, it will probably hold a pencil while in action. (note from after the event, yep, it did)

Double Duty

An old friend of mine notified us that she was getting married earlier this year. I knew that this would call for a brand new outfit. At some point in time I received the cutest wedding invitation card (it had bunnies!) which had a dress code on it: Tenue de Ville. I’d just bought a nice piece of fabric that could sort of fill that dress code. So I started work making a dress with a waterfall top and a skirt that could make use of the border print. At some point I put it on, and it just felt wrong. So, very, wrong – frumpy, not me, just terrible. So I chucked it in the corner (it’s still there) and set out on a plan B.

Plan B involved getting new fabric, since nothing I own is light-coloured or pastel or suitable to fit in Tenue de Ville. Of to the market on the next Thursday, and miraculously I found something that was relatively close to the mark. Light coloured, with green leaves and blue/purple flowers. It was some weird sort of stuff, almost like thin scuba. It didn’t fray at all, which made it really easy to work with.

As a tribute to the bride, I wanted a circle skirt, as she always wore them back when I met her. The fabric had some lettering, but the print wasn’t super directional, which allowed for that circle skirt. Then I needed to determine what to use for the top. I figured on the garden party top, as I know it fits without much hassle. But it needed something special, so I pinterested (is that a verb?) and found this pin. I liked the idea of the keyhole and the pointed waistband. In contrast to the inspiration I also incorporated binding and modified tulip sleeves.

This make felt so much better right out of the gates. It was super comfortable, it twirled so nicely and pockets. It was easy to dance in (queen of horrible dancing on the dance floor) and not too hot or cold. I was a fan.

It did have a test drive before the wedding. Two days before was convocation, a work event. I had this one finished in time (!), and I didn’t have the time or inclination to also make a dress for convocation so I wore this one instead. Therefore, this dress served double duty and will be put into regular rotation in my closet. It has been a super success!

Christmas 2016

This year will end with one big change; I’m moving house today. This means that next to putting all my stuff into boxes, I needed to plan some things. So somewhere a long time ago I started working on my end-of-year-cards. This year they were going to have to do double duty. They’d have to be festive, for Christmas & New Year, and allow me to distribute my new address to all people on the list.

So the design process started with scouring through pinterest to find nice ideas for cards. In the end I found two pins that would be nice to combine this one and this one, all my card pins can be found here. Then I looked through a website filled with fonts. I have fairly crappy handwriting and decided that I’d wanted to have the address and text legible. Eventually I found it! Then I tried to print it and it made something hideous, so back to the fonts I went and I found my second it!

I have since managed to murder my laptop and have thus lost both the font, the Christmas list, the actual card and about 6 months worth of other data and pictures. That should teach me to backup more regularly.. [Cue 5 minutes of clicking through handwritten fonds on the internet] I’ve now rescoured the font website just for your pleasure and I can tell you that the font I used was Talking to the Moon.

Then I got paper and more paper and made all kinds of nice pastel cards with the green end sticking out of the right side. After I’d finished about 30, I figured out that it would be grammatically incorrect (the comma at the end of the sentence) and I got new paper, now more Chrismassy red and started all over again. I also added the ‘pull’ which wasn’t on the original. On the inside I printed my new address so I didn’t have to write it out 40 times. Now, the ‘fancy bit’ of this card is the activity you have to do to read it all. See my fantastic gif below!

I’m now hoping that people ‘get’ them, and if not, well, it’s the idea that counts!

So, to all of you: Jolly Holidays and a Nifty New Year!!

Bats!

What do you do when you have to housesit the building you work in and literally only have to get up every two hours? Do you also race home to collect your fimo stuff and create little bat earrings with your friend? Well I did, in the first weekend of this month.

We found the inspiration here, and decided to make our own versions. Mine are a little cross eyed, which was exactly was I meant them to look like.

I smoothed over the back such that they are one whole. I like them. But I haven’t got my ears pierced, so I think that I will hand them over to a friend. I think I’ll make some more fimo stuff in the future. I forgot how much I liked it, I also found some more inspiration which I’m gathering here. If you’re ever interested.

 

Cluck Cluck

What do you get when you put three exited girls in a quilt shop? MAYHEM!!

I went to this quilt shop a while ago with two friends. One of them and myself found a large wicker basket (a meter high) filled with small pieces of quilt fabric with a note attached that turning it over was allowed. So after we went around the shop and saw a myriad of nice designs on the walls, we turned over the basket. We touched, looked at and judged all of them and all of us took a few of the scraps home with us.

One of the designs I saw was a log cabin chicken. Log cabin is a type of arrangement of strips of fabric that forms a square eventually. The chicken is two of these log cabin ‘blocks’ sewn together to form a chicken. I knew I wanted to make one, but I also knew that I didn’t really want to put it out in my house somewhere. Then after a miserable Tuesday where it felt like everything went wrong, I knew what to make the chicken for. That Tuesday was the day I forgot my key in the house and the people who have a spare were both gone. Clearly I needed someone else to have my key and I figured I had to make a key chain. I used some of the scraps from a ‘foot of the bed quilt’ I’m currently making for the chicken.

It’s all hand sewn and the beak and head thing are felt. I think it’s cute.

 

I saw some examples on the internet that had a tail attached, which I thought was really cute so I added one too. I had to look up how to sew the chicken together because I couldn’t remember it from the top of my head. Luckily patterns for things like this are abundant.

Prompted Crafting

I have been busy over the past weeks. I’ve been busy knitting (a sweater, I now only need to do the one sleeve and shorten the other sleeve), quilting (making the top for a bed-foot quilt) and embroidering (what you will see in a little bit). What I will show you today was made over the course of 1 evening after having tidied up all my sewing stuff.

This was because I found my embroidery floss and a loop. Then I remembered that a friend had complained that the toilet seat came down on him when he was trying to pee. This is of course a very dangerous situation, pee might go everywhere! (This is dangerous because cleaning is not my most prized hobby, so I’d rather avoid it where not necessary). However, it isn’t always immediate obvious that the seat will come down again. I blame it on the house that is as crooked as a witches nose.

Click on the video to see what I mean. Do not that there is a toilet in  this video, so if you.. hate toilets, it’s not safe to watch.

Now, I decided that I had to protect myself and the male population from this annoying fact, so I made a nice little embroidered piece of wisdom to hang above the toilet. My bathroom has about 25 things where I can something, so there was bound to be space somewhere.

It says: “Boys, please sit or be surprised by the lid!”. Lid rhymed, even though it should be “seat”. Cheer for some inaccuracy (I prefer the rhymyness over the accurary)! I quite like these one-night-quick-fix-projects. However, let me try and finish the sweater before real winter sets in..

Deadline Work (2) – Cowls

The first deadline went by, then came the second. The important visit, said visit was the Queen of the Netherlands, the real one. I came so close I could have touched her if I wanted to, which I didn’t because I value my life. Anyways, the brief was to wear something formal but festive. I knew I wanted to wear something I’d made myself. I’d already decided that I was going to be too busy to make something new, so I’d settled on wearing the grey pants.

But, lo and behold, I managed to have a Tuesday off which I’d sort of forgotten about. I thought that that would be enough time to make myself a cowl top. I traced a shirt I already owned with a cowl and frankensteined it with a shirt pattern I’d traced long before, that has formed the basis of several shirts (here and here and here) I still wear. I found some grey stretch stuff with blue that I liked in my stash and sewed up a storm. I finished this thing, from pattern making, to cutting, to sewing, to finishing that same day. That almost never happens. All in all I was very happy with the end result, see before you the front and back.

I personally like the cowl a lot, a close up is on the left here. I was also doubting how long I should cut it. In the end it turned out I could wear it as a dress, see right, if I felt inclined to show more leg above the knee than below. I don’t, but I couldn’t resist seeing what it looked like in picture form. I will not wear this out of the house like this, it is so far out of my comfort zone that the Oort cloud is closer by.

 

I do like this shirt, is comfortable and I see quite some wear for the future. Next segment is the wedding present.

Scuba-dress

When one visits the market and finds a bit of fabric that feels like a wetsuit but has giant blue flowers one it, one naturally has to buy it. Right, right? That’s what I thought anyways. I wanted an easy dress with a drawstring waist so that’s what I (sort of) made. I used the t-shirt pattern from 3 hours past/cake because of the cut on sleeves. In hindsight I probably should have chosen a shirt pattern that I had actually made before, since I don’t really like the shape of this one. I haven’t worn my dress out yet, and summer is almost over. It should suffice as a beach cover up though, so maybe it will come in use still, you never know.

Front and the insides, with pockets!

Simple neckline and cut on sleeves and the drawstring at the waist. It’s a bit baggy at the waist so I don’t think it’s muchos flattering, but maybe I’m wrong. You never know.

This was part of a series of projects I finished on a Saturday a while ago but I’ve been busy (and lazy) and didn’t feel like posting much. So soon you’ll see the last entry of that Saturday’s creative outburst and I’ll be almost free off backlogged pictures!