Patches II

I've been beading away on the "Mother and Child" necklace for the past few weeks but completely forgot to take any photos, so...no posts. I'll make up for that soon!

In the meantime, I ran across this post on Darling Petunia's blog a while back and just fell in love with Patches. I bookmarked it with the intention of trying to recreate the pattern when I had a free day to sew and no projects planned. Well, the Big Guy is out of town and I took a few days off work to enjoy the peace and quiet of an empty house while the Little Guy is at school, and (of course!) to enjoy a little crafting with no interruptions. When I was going through my inspiration file looking for something to work on, I ran across the post and decided to give Patches a try. I printed out the photo of Patches for reference, pulled out my quilt scraps, did a few calculations, and started cutting.

Here's the end result:



I'm very happy with how he turned out. My cutting/accurate seam allowance/piecing skills need some honing and this was great practice. He has a few wonky seams where the legs and tail meet the body, but overall this is easily the best pieced project I've completed so far.

I love him, and so does the Little Guy. Patches II goes back and forth between hanging out in my sewing room as my crafting mascot by day and sleeping with the Little Guy at night.

Learning something new every day

Started playing around with offloom weaving this weekend based on instructions from the bead books I found at the library. I started with a little sample of flat peyote stitch. It came out a little uneven on the sides, partly because I used cheap beads that aren't a uniform size, but it turned out pretty well for my first attempt. It makes really drape-y bead fabric with a little stretch to it. I also tried odd-count peyote around a tube. That got frustrating REALLY fast because it kept slipping out of place. So then I tried it around an empty spool thinking the wider surface plus the rim at the top and bottom would make it easier to handle. That was better, but it still took several tries to get it started. I couldn't get the first row to stagger when I added the second row of beads. I finally ran another thread through every other bead in the first row and tied it around the spool, then pushed the alternating beads above the thread to hold them in the staggered pattern. That seemed to work pretty well. The instructions for the flat peyote mentioned you can do the same thing with a pin or fine wire, but I didn't have as much trouble with the flat stitch and didn't need to do it. I took a couple hours today to bead around the entire spool but it came out pretty nice. I'd need to do a lot more practicing to get the hang of patterns with different colors, but I at least have a feel for it now.

Bead book lust

We're having a midwinter thaw so I took advantage of the mild weather and walked to the library on my lunch hour to look for craft books. I found a couple things that looked interesting, and then I found the beadwork section...SCORE! There were so many I wanted to check out! I made myself stick to a limit of two, and both of them are books I'd love to buy at some point. The first one is Embeadery by Margaret Ball. It has over 100 pages just of bead embroidery stitches plus about a dozen projects. It would take months just to try all the stitches once. The other one is The New Beadweaving by Ann Benson. It has several bead embroidery projects and a lot of woven pieces, both loomed and off-loom. The loomed pieces are amazing. My loom isn't big enough to handle most of them and I'm itching to find a wider one so I can try out some of the projects. There are at least 6 projects I want to try out of this one. Time to start hitting the used book sites to see if I can find a copy!

Waiting for the Tooth Fairy

The Little Guy has his first loose tooth. Two loose teeth, in fact, so we're getting prepared for his first visit from the Tooth Fairy. In honor of the occasion, I made him a Tooth Fairy pillow. I looked at several ideas online and then made up my own pattern with "My Tooth Pillow" machine embroidered and a white felt tooth hand appliqued on the front and a little pocket on the back for his tooth and tooth fairy loot. And, of course, it had to be in his favorite color - red! Now I just need to remember to go to the bank for some gold dollar coins before the first tooth pops out.