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! ;-)