Rants, Raves, and My Knitting Obsession

Rainbow Bracelet

2012-01-22T16:31:00.000-08:00

This is as far as I've gotten on the Rainbow Bracelet so far. Since I've been on such a beading kick lately I hope to get it finished soon. It's been sitting in my beading box for ages!

Cabled Brambles Hat

2012-01-22T16:27:00.000-08:00

I made this in November. For being such an avid knitter, I have a surprisingly small amount of hats.

Progress on the Epic Pillow Project

2011-04-23T16:28:00.000-07:00

The Epic Pillow Project (E.P.P.) is going well. It's really starting to develop some depth. I'm slowly filling in the light purple border with stitching. I'm anxious to practice my long and short stitch (and shading) so I'll have to see where I can fit that in.

The design doesn't look it, but it's still relatively small. I'm planning to complete the entire front, bit by bit.

Rainbow Bracelet

2011-04-22T00:24:00.000-07:00

This is my current beading WIP. I'm using the great spring colored seed beads I got for my birthday.

The pattern came from one of my beading magazines.

The Epic Pillow Project

2011-04-22T00:09:00.000-07:00

Here's the embroidery project I've been working on lately. The carousel horse towel still isn't finished, but I got started on the Epic Pillow Project anyway.

It's a white on white pillowcase with an awesome paisley pattern. The paisley pattern is so subtle that it's barely discernable, so I decided to embellish the pattern with embroidery. I'm ecstatic with how it's turning out, and I hope that by trying lots of different stitches and patterns I will be able to maintain my momentum and embellish the entire front of the pillow.

Flashing My Embroidery Floss Stash

2011-04-18T17:37:00.001-07:00

The new project photos are coming soon, I promise. In the meantime, I thought I would flash my stash. I'll add in my ribbons and hanks of floss in a bit. So here's all my DMC.

As a refresher, this is what it looked like before I found all that thread at Goodwill.

Here's what it looks like now. It has a lot more depth now instead of staying in my favorite color ranges (*cough*jewel tones*cough*).

The empty spots are from the colors I'm currently using in projects. I have a lot of projects going right now: the new project, the carousel horse, and finishing up another new project.

Sneak Peak

2011-04-17T01:55:00.000-07:00

Here's a sneak peak of what I've been working on lately.

More to come soon.

How to Organize and Store Your Bead Collection - Part Two: Beads, Findings, and Tools

2011-04-05T18:39:00.000-07:00

Last time I talked about how I stored my seed beads, so now it's time for other beads, findings and tools! My system is pretty basic, but it's the best I've found and works well for me.

I have one of these, and bought it it several years before they started selling them in craft stores. I bought mine at Fred Meyer. They are a lot cheaper at non-craft stores, Fred Meyer, Target, and I think Wal-Mart sells them. It's technically a tackle box, so they're in the Sports and Fishing section.

This thing is fabulous. The clips are strong and easy to snap and unsnap, and the tackle box is very portable. It keeps all my non-seed beads, findings and tools in one place. The bottom holds four individually sealed trays with customizable slots. It's great because when I bead I don't usually work at a table. I'm usually on my bed or sitting in a chair, and individual trays allows me to only remove the tray I need. Best of all, the tackle boxes come in a variety of sizes. While it was a tight fit when I had all my seed bead tubes in the lower tray, without the seed beads I have plenty of room to expand my bead collection. When I do fill it up I can easily buy a size up.

I keep my tools in the top portion. The top compartment is pretty deep. It easily holds 3 rolls of wire, 3 pairs of pliers, 1 cutter, a wire jig, beeswax, plastic bags and a variety of other items.

Each removable tray has customizable compartments. You can only change the size widthwise however, which while slightly annoying does make sense from a construction/durability point of view.

The first tray has my Nymo and beading thread, needles, precious stones and clasps.

The next contains all my silver beads and findings.

The third is my main beading tray, with lots of fun colors. You can definitely tell how easy it is for me to get locked into the blue-green-purple color scheme. I'm working on expanding that range.

And the fourth is the overflow, as well as some jump rings and beads without tubes.

How do you store your beads?

My Fabulous Quilling Present

2011-04-01T20:44:00.000-07:00

My sister made this for my birthday. It now has a place of honor on my wall, next to my embroidered butterfly.

Isn't it beautiful? I absolutely love it. I've never tried quilling, I don't think I'd have the patience for it. But she makes such gorgeous designs out of paper!

I never knew you could make so many different pattern just from rolling paper! It's very intricate, beautiful, and in all the right colors.

The Birthday Addition to My Beading Stash

2011-03-31T20:46:00.000-07:00

My birthday was this week, and look at the pretties I got!

My mother took me bead shopping for my birthday, which was greatly appreciated! I picked out some fantastic spring colors.

I'm trying to build up my stash of 11/0's, so they're all 11/0s.

This is what my seed bead stash looks like now. I'm trying to add some bright and lighter colors to my mostly dark blue and green seed bead stash.

How to Organize and Store Your Bead Collection - Part One: Seed Beads

2011-03-31T18:46:00.000-07:00

As I posted about how I organized and stored my fabric collection and supplies, I decided to do the same for my beading collection. I love reading about everyone's methods of storage and organization for various crafts, whether it's fiber, beads, or paper. Some stashes are absolutely drool worthy and some methods of organization make me squee in glee.

Why Organize?

I enjoy organizing, and I am an incredibly detail-oriented person. Add in gorgeous colors and craft supplies and I'm in heaven. I love to see not only someone's method of craft supply organization, but also the reasoning behind it. I fully believe that good organization encourages and promotes more frequent crafting as well as streamlines the crafting process. I have a hard time being creative when I live and work in a messy and chaotic space. In my apartment my room is my haven, and as soon as I walk into the room I feel relaxed and serene. While I might not be big of feng shui, I am a big supporter of good organization.

This becomes especially important when you have a lot of craft supplies and several different crafts you like. I like to say that I don't believe in craft monogamy, and I partake in a multitude of crafts. I knit. I embroider. I sew. I bead. I like paper crafts. I love drawing and draw with multiple mediums, mostly watercolor pencils, pen and ink, and charcoal. Every craft has it's own supplies, and without some method of organization I would quickly become lost in my various stashes.

How large is your collection?

It's very important to consider the size of your craft collection. Use something that is large enough to leave room for you to add to your collection, but at the same time doesn't take up half the room. Think about your crafting process. Do you like to amass a large stash, or do you work with hardly any? How are you going to store your containers? While one or two of these containers is fine, what will you do when you have 6 or more? Sometimes the answer is: Find another method of organization, and that's fine. But if you think that in two months you'll need to completely redo your organizational system, then it's probably not the right system to choose. At the same time, don't buy a ten drawer rolling cabinet if you have a grand total of four seed bead tubes. Choose what's appropriate for your collection.

My bead collection is medium sized. While I would love to have enough beads to need a cabinet organizer to store them, I am nowhere near that point. Right now I have two separate containers for my beads, one for seed beads and the second for all my other beads and supplies.

My Seed Beads

The first container is your generic type of sterilite container with a lid, except that it has two handles on the lid that you snap down to lock the lid onto the body. I love the fact that the lid actually locks on rather than snaps on like your basic sterilite container. Even though all my beads are contained in their own little tubes inside the container, I feel a lot safer with a lid that locks.

This container holds all of my seed beads. Like most beaders, I have a variety of different sizes of seed beads, so I made dividers out of cardboard to separate the box into three different sections. The first holds all of my 6/0, 8/0 ,and 10/0 beads. The middle holds the 11/0 beads, which I have the most of. I've found them to be the most versatile size for bead stitching. The last section holds the 15/0 and a few tubes of bugles.

Every color and type of bead is in it's own container. Most are in bead tubes, which is my preferred method of seed bead storage. When I started beading I mainly purchased czech seed beads which are sold by the hank. When I redid my seed bead storage last week I took each hank and put all the beads into tubes, and when I ran out of those I put them into little bags. I don't like the bags, I think they take up too much space and they are not nearly as uniform as the tubes. However, I didn't have anything else on hand. Eventually I'll go and purchase some empty tubes so that I can get rid of the little bags.

I tried making a holder for the tubes so that they could all stand up vertically, but I found that this obscured their colors. The tubes in the middle were hidden by the other tubes of beads. As I do everything by color, standing the tubes up was simply not a viable option for me. Others have found it a suitable method of storage, so your mileage may vary.

I don't mind digging through the tubes a bit to find the ones I need. When I have 50+ of each size of seed beads it will be a different story. When that happens I'll probably switch to a smaller sterilite container for each color family, or use a container or two to hold a single size of seed beads.

Part Two: Storing Other beads, Findings, and Tools

Spiral Peyote Beaded Bracelet

2011-03-30T18:13:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's been busy around here. Three members of my family, including myself, have birthdays in March. I made handmade presents this year, and got a bit too ambitious with my sister's birthday present. I decided to make my sister a beaded bracelet, and after a bit of research decided to try spiral peyote. This was the first time I've done the peyote stitch, as well as the first time I did peyote in the round.While the pattern was simple, it took a lot more time than I anticipated. I got a very late start, beginning only a week and a half before her birthday. No matter how much I beaded, it was only half done by the time her birthday rolled around.

Luckily, she's a crafter herself and was very understanding. I continued to work on the bracelet, finally finishing after another massive beading session (14 hours). It's definitely the most complex beaded project I've done so far and although it was easy it was incredibly time consuming. Every single silver bead represents a round on the bracelet. I was tempted to count them for future beading reference, but I think it would be too depressing to know how many rounds are in that bracelet! It's a wide, chunky/modern bracelet, which is my sister's style. In case anyone is interested, the pattern is 1 4mm bead, 1 size 6, 1 size 8, 2 silver size 11, 2 purple size 11, 2 silver size 11, 6 black size 15.

I also had a couple of false starts. I tried two different combinations of beads until I found the right ratio of black to silver to purple. I had a spiral peyote pattern that I was basing this on, but due to different bead sizes and amounts I made some major modifications to the pattern. Then when I had the right combination, I realized I didn't have enough purple beads. As I purchased the purple beads many years ago in a different city, I didn't think I would be able to find them again. So in the end I purchased a different color purple, and had to start the bracelet yet again.

The Carousel Embroidery has Begun!

2011-01-27T11:36:00.000-08:00

I'm finally making a carousel horse using my embroidery pattern! I did end up making a few minor changes to the pattern, so I will upload the updated pattern shortly. I'm thinking of converting it into a pdf. If you download embroidery patterns, do you prefer jpegs or pdfs? I'd love to hear what you think.

I have these scrumptious towels that I found at Kitchen Kaboodle that I've been waiting to embroider. I'm using Nature's Kitchen Towels by asd living. They're 100% cotton. They have the same thickness as flour sack towels like I made my owl on, but they have a slightly more crinkly surface. I love their texture. The pack I purchased had three towels: white, black, and this gorgeous blue. I've decided since I want to make a white carousel horse the blue will be the perfect color.

I printed out my pattern and traced it with my iron-on pen.

Note that I traced out just the outline of the rectangles on the breast collar and sashing. My iron-pen did not have a fine enough point to do further detail. I will probably end up satin stitching them, so I just needed an outline.

Then I ironed the design onto the towel. I was debating resizing it to be a little smaller, but decided to keep the same dimensions. It's large but these towels are 28"x36" and I'm working on the short side, so I wanted the embroidery to balance out the long length.

Owl Quilt

2011-01-25T17:42:00.000-08:00

In an effort to get back into photography I was perusing the photos on my hard drive when I discovered pictures of the owl quilt! So now you all can see what I'm talking about when I mention the owl quilt. It's still a WIP, I haven't even finished cutting out all the owls yet. The blue and purple owls are cut, I just need to cut out the green ones.

Last time I tried to work on this I was distracted by organizing my sewing room, so I still need to set aside some time to do this!

My First Crayon Tinting

2011-01-24T20:11:00.000-08:00

I embroidered this lovely mushroom. This is the first piece that I've crayon tinted.

Tips for crayon tinting:

Color the fabric with medium light pressure. When I read how to crayon tint, everyone said to use light pressure. Evidently my light pressure is a lot lighter than theirs. Mine was so light that I couldn't even tell if the crayon wax had melted because it was so light. I ended up coloring another layer on top of it and re-ironing. Then it was the desired shade.
If washing or wetting at all, color the fabric with medium (not medium light pressure). I used a washable blue pen for some of the lines and once the piece was finished I soaked it to remove the markings. Some of the wax color left as well. Not much, but enough to be noticeable. Therefore next time I'll color a little darker.

Colors: 824 | 3765 | 945 | 321 | 3853 | 600 | 3765 | white

Super Secret Embroidery Swap Project

2011-01-19T14:17:00.000-08:00

I sent out the super secret swap project, and my swap partner has received it! Unfortunately I mixed up the date (I thought the send outs were 1/15) so it's a few days late. I feel really horrible about it. It was my first swap, and I'm one of those swappers. As soon as I discovered my mistake, I emailed the moderators and my swap partner. Hopefully she's not too upset with me. Fortunately, I'm very proud of the project I created for my partner, so at least I won't be a swapper who sends a project that they spent 20 minutes on.

I used a design I found in her wist. I saw that her wist had a lot of gnomes and several rainbow projects. I decided to combine the two.

The most time consuming part of this project was the roof. I filled it in using parallel rows of backstitch. The window is done in satin stitch.

I used this great tutorial in order to cover the back of the hoop. I traced the inner hoop onto the green fabric, cut it out, sewed it right sides together with a 1/8" seam, turned it right side out then ironed it. Between sewing the seam and ironing the backing ended up smaller than I would have liked, so next time I'll trace the outside of the outer hoop. That should leave me more allowance for the seam and ironing.

Before I sewed the two green pieces of fabric together I embroidered the name of the swap and my username on the back. Next time I need to do the embroidery first, before I cut out the circle. Trying to embroider a 3.5" piece of fabric was not fun. I used my tiny 2.5" embroidery hoop but I had to keep moving the hoop as I stitched additional letters. This made my letters really wonky. I definitely need more practice embroidering letters.

The outer hoop is outlined with a rainbow braid. I wanted something to tie the colors together, and emphasize the fact that it's made with colors of the rainbow. I braided one piece of red, orange and yellow together, three pieces of green together, and one strand of blue, indigo, and violet together. Then I braided all of them together, creating a fantastic rainbow braid.

I really hope she likes the project! I spent a lot of time on it and I was almost tempted to keep it!

Colors used:
550 | 820 | 702 | 973 | 721 | 304 | 718

Center Square of Yggdrasil Afghan is Done!

2011-01-13T21:17:00.000-08:00

The center is done, and it's gorgeous! I'm ecstatic with how it turned out. My one skein of Loops & Threads Silky Soft (300 yds) almost lasted through the entire center square. It lasted up through row 71.

The center panel is approximately 26" x 26".

Delia was supervising as I stretched Yggdrasil out. She is an intensely curious kitten. She especially loves anything knitted or anything that has strings on it.

It was really hard to keep her off of the afghan. I'm not sure what I'm going to do once the aghan is completely. I'd be terrified of her clawing the afghan and stretching out the stitches. She's really hard on her toys, so rough with them that I won't be knitting any more toys for her. Any toys I make her will be sewn from now on. She has a harder time ripping through those.

Yggdrasil

2011-01-10T20:24:00.000-08:00

Yggdrasil is coming along very well. In Norse mythology, Yggdrasil is the world tree. Nine worlds exist around Yggdrasil. It was hard to stop knitting long enough in order to take it off the needles and take photos. I'm finally in the "purl zone". The most complex parts of this tree are in the beginning (the tree branches) and the end (the tree roots). In between are the purl rows which create the trunks of the trees. The purl rows are zipping on by; it's amazing how nice mindless knitting can be. It's been such a long time since I've knit something completely mindless. Andrea's scarf was repetitive, but I still needed to keep an eye on the chart.

I love trees, whether it's sitting under them, climbing them, or drawing them. When I saw this pattern on Ravelry I knew immediately that I needed to knit it. I found the perfect color of green acrylic yarn at Michaels.

Free Embroidery Motif from Aimee Ray

2011-01-09T19:49:00.000-08:00

Did you hear? LarkCrafts and Aimee Ray are partnering up to give away a free embroidery motif every week from Aimee's new book Doodle Stitching: the Motif Collection.

Aimee Ray is a great artist with a fantastic taste for color. It's part of a stitchalong for the month of January. If you'd like to share your interpretation of the pattern, she's started a Flickr group.

I love the first available pattern, the Gnome and the Mushroom. I'm not sure if I'll have time to participate in the stitchalong, but I will definitely embroider the pattern sometime in the near future.

The Pirate Santa Embroidery is Finished!

2011-01-09T15:37:00.000-08:00

I finished the pirate santa! I spent about six hours embroidering last night, primarily working on the swap project and then finishing up the pirate santa. I'm not sure if it's due to the curves or the black outline on the really dark navy fabric, but I really dislike embroidering letters. It's not fun at all. I finished the main character of the santa over a month ago. All I had to complete was the letters, yet this embroidery project has sat in my workbasket for over month.

The letters are finally complete. Now that I'm looking at the photos I think I might fill in the word rum with a light green. I haven't fully decided. I'm tempted to just leave it as it is.

Colors Used:

413 | 321 | 975 | 699
3852 | 905 | white |black

In other exciting news, the swap project is almost done. I just need to embroider one little piece, about an inch in width. All of the foreground and background is complete. I spent about four hours trying to finish it up last night. I didn't manage to finish it all, but it was incredibly close. Now I need to decide how or if I'm going to decorate the small 4" hoop. Then I can send it off to my swap partner.

Part of my push to get the swap done is because my swap partner has already finished her hoop, and sent it off to me! My swap partner sent me this adorable butterfly! She chose the colors incredibly well. Look at that gorgeous satin stitch!

The purple flowers remind me of the wisteria we had at the house I grew up in. My dad built an arbor in front of the house and planted wisteria. Within a few years wisteria had completely taken over the arbor and the surrounding fence. I love the smell of wisteria in the summer. The flowers were simply beautiful.

Vintage Buttons

2011-01-07T21:18:00.000-08:00

While organizing my sewing room, I created a new way for stowing all the buttons I have collected. Like my lace find, I had an amazing button find at Goodwill. For $6 I purchased hundreds of assorted buttons, snaps, button covers, hooks and eyes, and miscellaneous fastenings. Most buttons are vintage. I took them off cards advertising them for $0.50 or less. I don't know enough about buttons to know whether any are antiques. I have lots of metal buttons, an equal amount of gold and silver.

Although I sorted and grouped the buttons by colors shortly after I purchased them, all of these buttons have been sitting around my sewing room in a gigantic plastic bag. After cleaning off my half of the sewing desk, I decided it was time to display these gorgeous vintage buttons instead of shoving them to the back of the closet.

I purchased a dozen of small glass jam jars at Goodwill. They worked perfectly for displaying the buttons. Of course I was not satisfied with the fruit decorating the tops of the lids, so I created my own fabric lids. Each lid corresponds to the color of the buttons inside.

I stacked them in various arrangements before deciding on the classic pyramid.

Now that they're all organized I just have to decide what to do with them! I have a button for everything. I think they'll be used in my sewing or in my embroidery. I might even make a button tree.

Organizing My Sewing Room

2011-01-07T20:30:00.000-08:00

I had the best of intentions yesterday. I was finally going to work on my owl quilt. I laid out all the pattern pieces on the table, and was about to take inventory (I've moved houses since I last worked on this quilt) when I realized I could not find the pattern. It should have been with the pattern pieces, yet it had mysteriously disappeared. I knew it had made the move but I could not figure out where it was hiding.

I started searching. And searching. When it became clear it was not in the handful of places I could think of off the top of my head, I decided it was time to clean up my sewing room, and find the pattern in the process.

The Sewing Room

When we first moved in it took us a little while to determine where we would store all our fabrics and our sewing machines. We live in an apartment where space is at a minimum. My mother is my roommate right now (ie. we split rent) and she has been quilting for over 20 years. She has a lot of fabric, and I have a decently sized fabric stash. We had too much fabric to just store it in rubbermaid containers.

Instead, we decided to convert an extra large pantry into a sewing room. This would allow us to shut the doors and hide all the mess if we had company over. The adhoc sewing room has 4 shelves on each side of the closet, but none of the shelves span the width of the closet. These shelves are about two feet wide by two feet deep. There's some serious space and potential fabric storage area. There's a large open area in the middle of the closet, perfect for a sewing table. We purchased a desk from Ikea measured to fit exactly in this open space.

For me (the right side of the blue line), it's perfect. For my mom (left side), who has been collecting fabric about as long as I've been alive, it's a bit tight but she's made it work. In both cases, proper organization is essential. While I rudimentarily organized my half of the sewing room when I moved in many months ago, I hadn't done any further organization. So while I looked for the owl quilt pattern, I organized. Sewing notions went up into clear rubbermaid boxes, which I then labeled. Ribbons, elastic, nylon webbing, and any type of cord went into one box. Sewing tools, like scissors and my rotary cutters go in the other one. I have another box for fabric scraps, and another for my box quilt blocks.

Here's the result. I still love the rainbow cover on my sewing machine, and the button jars I made. And of course, I found the missing owl quilt pattern.

How did you design your sewing room?

Knitting the Great American Afghan

2011-01-07T05:22:00.000-08:00

I just realized that I've never posted photos of the Great American Aran Afghan I'm working on for my Mother. I started knitting it a long time ago. So long ago that I'm not sure I want to admit when I first started it. My original deadline for finishing it was 2010. I thought that there was no way on earth it would take me that long to knit. Well, wave to that deadline as it flies on by.

My new goal is to have at least four blocks done this year. That's a reasonable goal. When I do work on the blocks, they knit up relatively quickly. The problem is that I just have so many great things to work on! There's the swap project I'm embroidering, yggdrasil, my owl quilt, and I still need to finish the lettering on my pirate santa. I'm sure that there will be a whole host of new projects started this year as well. One of my biggest resolutions for 2011 is to do more crafting, and I guess that's a good thing considering all the WIP's I need to make some significant progress on!

So far, I have completed two blocks of the Great American Aran Afghan. The Great American Aran Afghan is an intensely cabled (aran) afghan from the Best of Knitter's Magazine. It is definitely an heirloom afghan. The afghan was the result of a design contest open to all Knitter's Magazine readers. Each knitter submitted an aran block design to the magazine, who then chose 24 blocks to make the Great American Aran Afghan and matching pillows. The afghan itself is comprised of 2o blocks from 20 different knit designers. Each square is 12" x 12".

The yarn I'm using is Rowan Cashsoft DK in creme. It is absolutely heavenly. A little splitty in parts, but for the most part I'm pretty happy with it.

So far I have finished the square designed by Dana Hurt (square K63). I really enjoyed knitting this square, and it was fairly straightforward. My favorite part has to be the honeycomb-like cables capping each end.

The second square I finished is Ginger Smith's square (square K64). Very easy, even easier than the square previously mentioned. I love how cables can look so incredibly complicated but still be extremely easy to knit.

I'm now a quarter of the way done with Suzanne Atkinson's square (K65). I don't know how on earth she came up with this really unique design, but I think my mom will love it.

Thoughts and Tips on Making an Amy Butler Birdie Sling Bag

2011-01-03T17:52:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year everyone! I had a fabulous New Year's Eve, then decided to celebrate the new year by getting an awful head cold. Exactly how I wanted to be starting the new year.

However, I did manage to make a project that's been sitting in my fabric closet for quite some time. I've been planning to make an Amy Butler Birdie Sling Bag for over a year. However, I kept getting distracted by other shiny things like my owl quilt (to be posted soon) and my mom's Springtime Pillow. So the Birdie Sling Bag just sat there, waiting for me.

When I started it, I was surprised and impressed with how well written Amy Butler patterns are. She explained things very clearly through words, then each section had a diagram that completely summarized all of the written content inside the drawing. I have never seen sewing diagrams so clearly labeled. The fact that I, advanced beginner sewer, could follow this pattern while having a vicious head cold speaks for itself. Her designs are clean and beautiful, and her patterns are very well written. This was a great break from another bag I'm making, whose instructions are incredibly convoluted and open to multiple interpretations. It's very clear that Amy's patterns were proofread, while the other pattern was not.

This bag was a pleasure to sew. It took me a bit longer than I thought it would, but that might just be because of the head cold. There was also a time when I somehow managed to break my bobbin housing, luckily only temporarily. That's why I love my Bernina sewing machine. It's all mechanical and all metal. It doesn't break. In this case, the bobbin pieces simply came apart, they didn't break. It was simply a matter of reassembling them in the correct order to get it working again.

This pattern also has a lot of cutting. There aren't very many pattern pieces, but nearly each piece is cut several times, and is interfaced at least once. Some even use multiple layers of interfacing. However, I would much rather cut out duplicates of pattern pieces than cut out a hundred different pieces.

Overall, I am really impressed with this bag. It's a great modern bag that has minimal pieces and is easy to sew. The instruction are very clear, and well depicted. I plan on using it as my everyday purse, to carry all of my personal items in addition to a knitting or embroidery project. I could even carry my DSLR in this bag. I'm sure I'll make another one in Spring fabrics, and perhaps another for Summer. The possibilities are endless.

Tips for Making the Birdie Sling Bag

When matching up the centers of pieces (pockets and lining, and bands to exterior and lining) pin from the center outwards. Fold each piece in half to find the center. Place a pin on that center fold, then match up the pins on both pieces and pin together. Then work your way from the center out. This way you eliminate all potential fabric shifting.
Press your pleats with a warm iron before basting - then they will stay in place during the basting.
If you find your pleats are a little uneven, don't be afraid to re-iron them in the correct position! Although fusible interfacing can get so hot that it no longer sticks, as long as you press with moderation you will be fine. I had my iron set to the wool setting (5 out of 6) and it was just fine. It takes a lot of heat to burn out the fusible, and a little re-ironing will go a long way with this bag.
When easing the band around the exterior of the bag, you can always modify your pleats so that the band stretches more along the length of the exterior. This was my first time pleating and I found that some of my pleats were a little too shallow, therefore the exterior was a bit too wide than the length of the band. A quick snip to the basting stitches holding a narrow pleat together allowed me to make the pleat deeper and line up the band and the exterior correctly. If the band is a little smaller than that exterior( 1/4 inch or less) that's okay because you will pivot while sewing. But if it's more than that I recommend adjusting your pleats.
Add a magnetic snap to the interior band. The Amy Butler Sling Bag is big. Really big. While that is fantastic, it also means that as soon as you put weight in it, it's going to gape open a bit at the top. An easy way to prevent that is to add a magnetic snap. Although they look like creatures from the black lagoon, they're really easy to add. Craft Apple did a great tutorial on this, as did JanetsJunk. I added the snap without additional interfacing, as each piece of the band is already backed with interfacing. When I do this bag again, I'll probably add another piece of interfacing behind the snap for support.
When top stitching the band, make sure you pin really really well! I pinned when doing the first top stitching, but I didn't pin when I stitched in the ditch between the exterior of the bag and the band. Big mistake. The fabric slipped, and the stitching on the inside migrated about a cm down on the lining, instead of staying between the band and the lining. I'm going to need to rip out a bit of the stitching, pin, and re-stitch.
An edge foot is a beautiful thing! If you have one, use it! If you don't have one, get one! Presser feet can be expensive, but don't forget that you can always get third party presser feet that are designed to fit your machine. It can save you a lot of money. Offbrand presser feet can be found in a variety of places, but I prefer eBay.

Fabrics Used
Body - Birds of Norway by Michael Miller (Patt#CX-3589)
Handle - Beatnik Blur by Hoodie's Collection for Michael Miller (Patt#C-3184)
Lining - Fresh by Deb Strain for Moda (orange)

All fabric purchased at Boersma's. Normally it's quite a drive for me, but I was in the area. However, it's such a beautiful store that it's definitely worth the trip!

How to Make Pretty Presents

2010-12-27T01:46:00.000-08:00

I went all out in wrapping presents this year. First, I made my own origami boxes out of scrapbook paper. I then decorated them with various strips of paper.

I even ventured into making my own bows out of paper. The boxes and the ribbon bows were super easy to make. I made three boxes and two bows. I plan to make the boxes and the bows for future birthdays and Christmas's. I also made homemade giftags. No sharpie pen on wrapping paper this year.