Moms - All they do for us and all we do for them.

This post is a very late homage to mothers that was due last May when all of this crafting took place, but will be delivered with the 'better late than never'
mindset. ;)

This quilt was designed by Sheri's son, Asher, who spent last year traveling the world before heading off to college this past fall. He took a quilting class in high school (ASFA) and made this amazing quilt with his T-shirt collection. He finished the quilt top and quilted it before leaving to travel, but didn't quite get it finished. It still needed binding, and that's where his mom came in... She asked around the holidays last year if I would help her finish the quilt, which I thought was a brilliant idea. Her thought was that Asher would be so busy with the minimal and very overscheduled time he would have in between traveling and going to college that he wouldn't have time to finish the quilt, so she would finish it and have it ready for him to pack into his college things.

The next wave of brilliance came when Sheri was sorting through some of his things and came across all of his old karate belts. She declared that we should use the belts for the binding. Amazing idea! Neither one of us knows much about karate, but we knew the black belts were the most special, so we put those aside and dug into the orange and blue and yellow and green - all colors that were also in the quilt, so it seemed perfect. We calculated how many belts we would need, then divvied them up to rip out all of the seams and the layer of batting inside the belts. This was a little time-consuming, since there are multiple seams sewn into those karate belts - at least six from what I recall!

Then, we sewed together the belts into one long strip of binding and applied it to the quilt. We did have to trim up the edges of the quilt before this step to give the binding an even application edge. It was great! I finished most of this sewing, but ran out of time, so left Sheri on her own to finish up, and she did an incredible job. This pic is her posing with the mostly finished quilt before I left that night. She had it laid out on his bed as a surprise when he came home and he loved it (of course). ;) I really love the T-shirt quilt idea and originally heard of doing this from Sara Leah, who has a ton of band T-shirts and always planned to make a quilt with them. Such a fun project and a way to keep the old T-shirts that mean a lot to you, but aren't worn much anymore.


This should probably be a separate post, since it was such an event, but I'll keep with the mom theme and move along to my mom's 60th birthday that past May. I made the above placemats for her using the trusty pattern from Amy Karol's Bend the Rules Sewing book - they are just like the robot placemats Ang and I made for Sara Leah and Jim in '08. I really heart these placemats - love the colors and the clean, bright look. The placemat creation involves a LOT of cutting, so it was much nicer this time to use a mat and rotary cutter to get several layers of fabric cut at once. Thanks to Asher for lending me his mat and rotary cutter - I'll keep it safe for you while you're away at college! :)

My sisters and I planned a big birthday extravaganza for my mom's 60th. We all came out to Oregon to climb Mt. St. Helens with mom on her birthday. I came out several days early and we did a ton of great hikes in the Columbia River Gorge area, hit some favorite Portland and Hood River eating and drinking spots, and checked out some new ones. It was a really kickass vacation and so fun to spend this special birthday with such a special lady who is known to rock the hiking, snowboarding, and cross-country skiing like nobody's business. For this birthday, we set out on a challenging adventure that tested her determination, but she made it and impressed the hell out of the other hikers and skiiers at the top (she also impressed her daughters!). By the time we hopped off the summit to glissade down the mountain, she had quite the fan club. :-)

That's my mom. She's fun to design crafty gifts for and even more fun to explore the outdoors with. Happy uber-belated mothers' day to all the moms out there! It's never really a bad time to celebrate our moms and our friends who are moms.

More Knitted Hats.

I have regrettably been out of the blogging loop for some time now and have a ton of projects to get posted in the next few weeks to catch up with all of our crafting. These pics are from last winter. I swear I remember working on these just after Thanksgiving, so these are ridiculously old, but never posted as far as I can tell.

So, let the catching up begin!

I love knitting hats. They're relatively quick and the pattern possibilities are endless.

The hat with all of the "bobbles" was gifted to Angela. It was a great pattern and seemed perfect for her. The sizing didn't turn out right because I'm sure I was lazy with the swatch, but whatever the reason, it was much too big. We ended up seaming it up along the back, sewing a section out to make it fit better, then just cut out the excess knitted fabric. That tactic worked surprisingly well, but I will know next time to be more vigilant with the swatching. This pattern was from a magazine, so I don't have a pattern to link. I'm sure I could find the mag if anyone wants the pattern.

It's funny that with a standard hat pattern, I've gotten fairly good at testing the size as I go and knitting without a pattern. There are standard diameters to reference for hat sizes, so a normal pattern is easy to adjust for a good fit. I knitted this cabled hat for myself and intentionally went for a loose fit, but once again was a little off with the size and it's a bit larger than desired. I still love it, though - LOVE the yarn and the colors, and it was my first time to work with full-fledged cables. The hat I knitted for my step-dad (also last winter) was a pattern with a play on cables in a nice green cotton yarn - kinda mini-cables, but only in one direction, so more like ripples than cables. I apologize that I don't have this pattern either, but for this one, I just googled for a cable hat pattern, then adjusted it as needed to get the rim and top look I wanted.

For hats, it's just a little math to get the stitch counts to work out for the size you want - for example, if the rows are multiples of 9, plus 3, round up or down based on the number of stitches needed to make the diameter - based on the test swatch that tells you how many stitches you will knit per inch. So, if you have 4 stitches per inch (from the swatch), and want a 20" hat in diameter (at the ears), you want around 80 stitches, so you could either choose to start a little on the smaller size and have the stitch pattern repeated 8 times to start (9*8+3 = 75) or could round up to repeat 9 times (9*9+3 = 84). Then, for most of the hat patterns you'll see a series of decreases once the hat is knitted straight up from the ears to the crown of the head - really you will learn to decrease as aggressively as you want to suit your own personal preference (more baggy or more fitted look), but you basically do a series of decreases every other row until you get to a minimum number of stitches - usually in the neighborhood of 8 - then, draw the yarn through all the remaining stiches into the hat, turn hat inside out to finish, cinch the opening closed, knot, and weave in all the ends. For cables, there's one more layer of complexity, since it looks much nicer to gradually reduce the size of the overall cables, decreasing the number of stitches involved in the cable over a certain number of rows. By the end, for a full cable with both left and right leaning twists, you'll only want one stitch twisted on each side (this is at the very top).

Anyway, noone necessarily wants to know all that, but if you'd like to get into designing your own hats, that's the basic formula - no formal pattern needed! :)

Up next - crafting from spring '09.

Henna Night - a different kind of crafty.

With Eve's help, Angela and I became red-heads for the next month (give or take). She uses henna a lot on her hair and we've been planning to give it a try for a while now.

We had so much fun! The henna itself was a surprise for me since I've never seen it before. It was a green powder - I assume since it is the ground leaves, since this is where the orange-red dye is stored in the leaves of the henna plant.

So, the process is really simple - you basically boil a bit of water, stir the water into the henna in batches until you get the consistency you want - Eve was going for a slightly runny paste since she knew it would thicken up as she worked.

We used the Rainbow brand of henna and had great results. Angela's brown hair looked had a very red tint afterward in the light, but wasn't as bold as she wanted, so we will likely try some other techniques next time to make it set better. We were all a bit skeptical that my hair would take the henna very well, since I've been on a no-shampoo (only baking soda and vinegar) kick with my hair for a few months, which has made my hair extremely oily and horrible. I wasn't ready to give up my experiment yet for henna night, so we ignored the instructions to have very clean hair and went with it. It really took to my hair despite the oiliness - was very bright orange-red when we finished! The orange has faded out mostly after a few weeks, and it's not near as bold (or maybe I'm just used to it now), but is still plenty red.

As a disclaimer, I've since read that any henna that isn't red is not really pure henna. This info is from the Henna for Hair site, which says to use only "body art quality henna". I haven't done enough research to know how true this is or how worried we should be that there could be additives that aren't listed on the label, some of which could be harmful things to your hair (according to Henna for Hair) and/or agitating to the scalp. After reading this, I'm in the category of 'slightly alarmed' that the Rainbow brand comes in a wide array of colors yet claims to have "no additives, chemicals or pesticides". I may look for this so-called body art quality henna next time just out of curiosity, but have no idea whether this is mislabeled or misrepresented henna by Rainbow or not.

Ok, so back to the process. Oh, did I mention that it smells very planty - like green tea - which is a good thing to me, since that provides more confidence in the all-natural aspect. The smell remained for quite a while - a week or so. Disclaimer numero deux: this could also be due to my hair cleansing methods or lack therof, since I broke down and switched back to shampoo last weekend and don't smell the henna any longer.

My hair is dry now, but I couldn't take the oily any more and would rather work to fix the dry dilemna than the greasy, wet look I've had for several months. Ugh. That's a whole 'notha story, though.

Ok, so Eve pasted away - using a basting brush for hair to apply the henna paste to as much hair as possible - starting at the roots, then going down the length of hair. Once she was done pasting, we covered our heads with plastic shower caps and a towel, then went off to the bathroom to use low heat from a hairdryer all over our heads. This heat is to help the henna take to the hair. After about an hour, it was time to rinse out and give the new henna hair a shampoo (or whatever crazy concoction you choose to use).


Voila! Red hair. It's that easy.

I didn't get a front shot of Angela after, so you will just have to know to identify Angela's after pic by her lovely wavy locks.

There are some hints on the Rainbow site for getting the henna to take better to gray hair - like coffee and vinegar and olive oil... - I'm wondering whether that will actually help with any hair color. That leaves us room to experiment next time!

Métiers d'Angela.

So... finally a post dedicated to all the craftiness of the fellow craft night cohort. I am so very excited about this one. There's so much damn good stuff you're gonna see here. ;-)

I mean, this chica really did it up for the holidays. She crafted like a mad-woman and made really awesome things - and she went the extra mile whenever possible (you'll see what I mean a little further in..). Some of these photos are from projects that were completed quite a while ago, so this will be some major fun catching up with Angelina.

A while back, we started adding some crocheted edging to our dishcloths, so the first pic is showing a couple dishcloths she made to go with some yummy soap for her sister's birthday. She always packages things up very prettily and this post will be especially good because she takes much better pictures than I. :D

The hat and scarf very handsomely modeled by Sir Tim was her very first knitting project - can you believe it? It turned out really great. Nice colors ta boot.

The hat was really special craftwise, since it was her very first pattern and first time in the round, first time on double-points, first time with ribbing,... lots o' firsts. I tried to help design the number of stitches for the pattern and think I inadvertently helped make it a little big, but I'm sure we can all agree that this is better than too small, and hey, no hat head for this guy - just better hang on in the wind. hahaha.

The hat was kind of a surprise for his birthday. The scarf was no surprise since he had to try it on several times before it was decided that the length was good and it was finito.

His outfit is so complete with the short-sleeves because his birthday is in August- whew, hot. Though, just in time for fall?!? :)

The lovely blueish/purpleish (I think it's more of a true purple in person) is modeled by Ang's lovely mother. It was her birthday gift this year. It was so dang soft. I tried it on a couple times and it was hard to pry from my neck each time. hehe. kidding (sort of).

It looks from the picture like her mom was relatively happy with it. ;) Great color on her, too!

Oh! Next are the clutches. She made four of them for Christmas!

Outstanding. The fabrics are all amazing. The one on the left is the one that I talked about in the previous post - she seriously surprised me with it at the beach. :D Hooray for surprises - I love it!!! Now we gotta get one going for her. Every girl needs a clutch, right?

This tote is living with Becky now. I can't remember if I know who Becky is, but that makes no difference of course. She adjusted the simple tote pattern from that Bend the Rules book to make it a bit bigger - more like a traditional tote size. The outer handles match the lining and vice versa. She also added a pocket on the inside - a little of that extra mile thing I was talking about. ;)

The apron is truly one of my favorite things she's made so far.

It turned out incredibly gorgeous and really shows off the extra mile factor with the embroidery she added to the pocket fabric. Great touch. Gorgeous main fabric that just pleads to be an apron. I'm pretty sure most of the fabrics are Anna Maria Horner - some aren't, I'll bet, but I know the apron fabric is for sure.

So now to show off some more of her embroidery from this past year. She really loved it and completely took off with every embroidery project. Each one had new and different stitches with neat design elements she came up with on the fly. This dishtowel on the right is the very first embroidery project. I really loved what she did with the margarita glasses - you can't see the stitching too well in the photo, but she improved on a basic satin stitch to bring margaritaness flowing through the glass. Very cool.

Oh, and each of her dishtowels is edged with handmade binding - the neat binding fabrics really make the the gifts one more level of special and unique! We used the continuous strip method described in an earlier post for all of her binding and mine, too.

The last towel is for Ang's little sis, Adrienne, and her husband, Tyler, for Christmas.

Most, if not all, of the pattern is from the Sublime Stitching "Rock-n-Roll" iron-on. It's perfect for them since they're in a band (a great band) - she plays guitar and sings, he plays drums. They live in cheese country and beer country and sausage country...

Anyhoo, I digress - back to the crafts. I was really blown away with this one - the lettering looks awesome and there was some rockin' details on the instruments. She ends up creating her own stitches a lot - gotta love that!

Well, let's hope it isn't quite so long before we see things from Angela again - I'll try to keep up better with her finished projects along the way with mine. We are both in the middle of several things, so there should be another post relatively soon - ya know, maybe before summer. ;)

Court turns 26, and crafty gifting from the holidays.

Wow. It's been a while, but not for a lack of crafting. Some of the holiday gift pics had to be held until after the season passed, so now that these have been received, I can finally show them off. :) Oh, I couldn't resist putting a pic of the kitties even though it's a fuzzy one - they were helping me finish wrapping up gifts before shipping the box off to Oregon and were quite mesmerized by the candle.

This clutch went to my sister, Courtney, for Christmas. The pattern is once again from the Bend the Rules Sewing book by Amy Karol. It was actually relatively quick easy to make - in hindsight, I guess. The whole process always takes longer than you think from choosing the fabrics, doing all the marking and cutting, then finally getting to the fun part - the sewing. :)

It was really fun to figure out the fabrics to use with this project - for the inside and out. I ended up going with a more 'evening' look and dressed it up some with the satin and suede on the outside, then some pretty Joel Dewberry fabric (Aviary collection) for the lining. I had a lot of super cool buttons to choose from thanks to Danielle's button donation last year (thanks, Dan!).

Angela made several of these clutches for girls in her family, and she surprised me with one at Christmas! It's gorgeous and come to find out, I helped pick out the fabric for my own present - ha! Apparently, she just chose the fabric I had uber-gushed over when we were helping each other match up outer and lining fabrics from the stash. I'll post a pic of it soon - hopefully along with more of Angela's holiday gifts.

We did have a tad bit of trouble (again) with the turning / flipping aspect, but maybe practice makes perfect because I really think we have it now. It took some time looking at the discussion threads of the BTR flickr group and reading some of the other BTR patterns in the book to get it. I'll report with our interpretation of the instructions in the next post with Angela's clutches to explain where our confusion was and hopefully explain it in a different way that people like us can understand. ;-)

This scarf also went to Court - for her 26th birthday. I felt so ahead of the game working on it for quite some time before her birthday, but somehow ended up blocking it at my uncle's house in Wisconsin over Thanksgiving and mailing it from there, since her birthday is very early in December. I really liked the way it turned out - it's the most complicated pattern I've attempted thus far and the bobbles were wacky fun.

The free pattern is from the Jimmy Beans Wool site and I used the same brand of yarn, Lorna Laces Shepherd Worsted, that comes in incredibly rad color combos. I love their solid colors, but especially covet all of the multicolored colorways. One skein is enough for most of the free 'scarf of the month' patterns on Jimmy Beans.

I probably shouldn't point out mistakes, but in this case a mistake was designed in thanks to Angela's suggestion after I realized several pattern repeats into the scarf that somehow the first pattern instance was reversed - right side stitch on the wrong side, etc. Since it was the first section, I just left it that way and made sure to make the last section reversed to match. Gotta love the merging of mistakes with a pattern to make it even better! :D

This hat was finished several months ago. I found the yarn and knew I would make something for my mom with it - it's really the most gorgeous yarn I've ever owned - it's a Berroco Jasper yarn. Originally, I guess I was thinking scarf because I bought two skeins and balled both of them. The hat only used one skein, so I still have one to use for something else one day - maybe a little neck wrap for mom - we shall see.

So, the pattern is just a standard hat pattern, but with a bit of a different band at the bottom - a wider band with the seed stitch. I've been lovin' on the seed stitch lately - it really adds nice texture. It feels a bit feminine to me, but that could just be me. You can't even really see the seed stitch in this pic, but trust me, it's cool. ha.

While the actual hat was finished months ago, I ended up adding a little to it, since the original plan for my mom's gift was to have more with it - but I'm holding off with that project for her birthday. So.. I decided to just amp up the hat with some fleece lining around the ears. A friend has a hat with fleece lining and she has always raved about it, so I thought I'd give it a whirl. It was really easy - just cut out a strip of fleece (first I measure all the way around the inside bottom of the hat), sew the strip together to make a band (by hand or machine), then handstitch the band into the hat. This stitch is a rolled stitch that I learned from this tutorial on the purl bee site. Just grab stitches that show on the inside of the hat and use any color thread, since it won't show with this stitch. You could also use a blind stitch or any other stitch that won't show - or you could use a contrasting thread and purposely show it, for that matter - go wild! ;-)