hearts and crafts

i've been invited to participate in this craft fair! so, if you happen to be in or around greenpoint on may 6th, please do plan on stopping by to visit me and my table full of wares. i will have lots of the items pictured in previous posts up for sale. i've been making lots of little bags (zippered pouches) and carry-alls (like totes) lately, and i will be selling those there in addition to hair-pins, cards, onesies, map-books, skull crayons, and whatever else i whip up between now and then. oh, and cafe grumpy, where the fair is being held, has really good coffee.

teeth - hounds' and zippers'

that box of zippers that i scored in PA has me inspired to put them to use. i didn't get too much done this weekend, as i was kinda sick and miserable, but i did bust this out at about midnight last night. it's a really simple little pouch-bag -- nothing too fancy or complicated. halfway through the project i got nervous -- thinking my cold must have made me delirious to think that i could reacquaint myself with the zipper-foot function on my sewing machine using a patterned fabric. but then i finished it, and all of the lines matched up, and i was happy.

pull my daisy

i saw the white flower-shaped buttons while on a country retreat/flea marketing adventure last weekend with janna and greg. i snatched them up with the intention on turning them into hairpins, which i did!

felting - the kimberly kitchenaid method

so i had these little swatches that i had knit a year or so ago -- teaching myself how to knit patterns (hearts) directly into a piece. i didnt really know what i wanted to do with the pieces.

first, i stitched them together into a scarf (which i never took a picture of), and it looked okay, but it was too scratchy for my liking - seeing as the yarn it was knit from was pure wool. i ended up selling the scarf at bazaar bizarre. but i still had swatches (with little mistakes) left over with no real purpose. well, i decided to experiment with them by stitching them together, felting them, and turning them into little pouches. felting is a bummer if you dont have your own washing machine and you dont want to work at it by hand. too impatient to wait to get to the laundrymat the next day, i came up with a brilliant plan -- how about using my kitchenaid? it made perfect sense to me -- fill the bowl with hot water, a little dishsoap, throw in the pieces (they were tiny!) and put it on low speed. agitation+hotwater+suds=felting, right? so that is what i did and bingo - only about ten minutes of agitation and it worked!


(it looked so pretty! like strawberry whipped cream!)
brilliant! of course i googled it to see if anyone else had thought of this brilliant idea, and it doesnt seem that anyone has written about it (at least, not that i can find)! so here i am, writing about it. i did it. i felted using my kitchenaid mixer. and it worked. i would NOT recommend doing this with anything other than tiny little knitting pieces -- nothing that could get tangled in the mixer-paddle. that would be terrible - to kill a kitchenaid.
so then, after the success of the felting project, i needed to finish the pouches. how to create closures? snaps? nah, they really needed zippers. well, i had only put a zipper in something once, long ago, and i didnt have any zippers. but i was determined. i ended up getting a whole huge bag of zippers while out on a thrifting/antique-ing country drive in PA. and that very night i put the zippers in -- a challenge since they really should be put in before sewing the other seams. but it all worked out and i am actually quite happy with the finished projects. i added some little tabs to make the zippers easier to pull.. not so bad for an experiment project!!

crawling up the walls

new art for the apartment -- these were endpages that i had (carefully) ripped out of an old book. i had been saving them until i figured out what to do with them. well, for now, i think i have it figured out.