Cube rooms

Last week I got all productive in the middle of the night, on Sunday night/Monday morning when I had to go to work, and then I couldn't sleep until 5am.. But that's another story. I worked on a number of things.

One thing I did start to finish was make a prototype fabric room. It's a prototype because I was just kind of winging it and didn't measure well to make the parts match, and did all the edges with overlocking. (OK I never got to do this before with my old machine, and find it fun. Some people might consider this cheating, and that's fine.. haha.)



The floor and ceiling are yellow muslin I dyed an eternity ago (the only other time I can remember using it was as a pat of butter on my toast halloween costume in 2005), the walls are two prints I picked up during The Great "Oh My God We're Graduating" Studio Cleanout and Exchange of 2007. The outside is some cotton I dyed a few months ago with random amounts of like nine different blues.

Some things to consider, should further production occur:
1. Creating groups of these units
2. How to fill them? Will the scale need to change to make filling them a little easier? Felted furniture, animals, people?
3. Embellishment of the outside: using decorative stitching for like.. adding flowers along the ground, maybe making a shingled roof section

So far the only thing that's been inside it is Dosa (our Russian dwarf hamster). It was adorrrrrable.

Crossing things off my list

I made a list of things I think I should accomplish this year.. Sort of a "stuff to make and do" list, rather than resolutions. And it's not all ART ART ART stuff, there are some simpler things that, while the projects themselves aren't ART ART ART, they will just be more experience/skillbuilding that could help in the future.

One of those things was to make a new purse. I've been using this mustard yellow fake leather thing from H&M for a while now - two years maybe? - and it is starting to come apart, as $16 sweatshop-constructed accessories are wont to do. I have neither found a bag in a store I liked enough nor been able to convince myself that it would be OK to purchase one - I made four small totes to choose from for Christmas gifts! There is no justification for not making something myself if I can!

So over to Craftster it was. A quick search for tutorials, and I found one called "pleatness." It's about the same size as my H&M bag, sounds good.

I ended up dyeing a bunch of cotton duck in red and green to match up to some prints I was thinking of using. Which should I use, HMM HMM?


red with space?


green with metrics?

I ended up using the red/space. I learned a lot about the pattern from making this first one, and made a few mistakes.


wholething!


A space print inside, too.

This was a good decision, sort of: I've been carrying the thing around for two weeks now. The rocket print is flannel, which is an unusual choice for a bag.. It's not fraying at all, BUT the front is starting to pill and get reeeally dirty. Ack. My top wasn't wide enough to match up with the end panels, so I ended up just overlocking the ends and leaving them open. I also figured out I really need pockets inside!

Now I'm torn between making another bag with the green/metric print with the pleating, or replacing the pleated panels with quilted panels. Quilted bits would add nice structure, I think.. I'm just not sure what I want to do! I love the metric stuff, but it's corduroy and I don't want to quilt that..!

Intro and Christmas gift roundup

I promised on LJ that my next post would be a roundup of all the things I made for Christmas gifts. Then I decided that I should throw a blog onto my regular site, so I could post exclusively about the stuff I made, and not include so much whining about other things in my life. I guess this decision could backfire a bit - I show up on LJ friends lists, so I theoretically have an audience there, and no promise of an audience here. Whatever. Blah blah.
So, hi. This post will be long and image filled.

Here's the stuff I made for people for Christmas. I made approximately 80% of the gifts we gave. I tried to make thoughtful, personal things, but definitely had some panic moments and threw in some generic Christmassy stuff.

I made ornament sets for all of my aunts and uncles, and my older cousins. I did some drawing/embroidery with my sewing machine and some felting.

On my mom's side, everyone got one of these:


The front is an image from 1950(?) of my grandfather in a motorcycle race in the Pine Barrens of NJ. The photo was printed on thin inkjet fabric, then fused it to another thin cotton, and put it over some poly batting with a cotton duck back. I sewed along some lines in the photo, and then cut a piece from his beloved hideous fleshtone polyester shirt (ubiquitous in family photos) for the backing. Overlocked the edges and added ribbon for hanging. I need to make a few more of these.

The sets:

Uncle


Aunt and uncle

(the pinball machine is my favorite, I think)

Aunt and uncle


Aunt and uncle


Uncle & his girlfriend


Cousin & her husband


Cousin & his wife


Cousin's two toddlers each got a six-page coloring book I had made (just Kinko's) from my drawings, and a crayon roll with her name embroidered on it.




18 year old cousin


13 year old cousin

both bags made from belle epoque's bias tape tote tutorial

16 year old cousin

from a knitting needle roll tutorial whose provenance I cannot remember

11 year old cousin

from Super Cool Wallet tutorial
We wrote out definitions from the board game Balderdash, and I laminated them and put them in the card slots, because my cousin thinks they're the funniest thing in the world.

Boyfriend's parents:

Same method as the ornaments of my grandfather, just with pictures of their dogs instead.

NP: Small wallhangings of my brother and his girlfriend and my boyfriend and I for my dad's mom.

Phew.