Early last winter I found a great jacket at a thrift shop. It is a dark olive drab cordoroy styled similar to a jeans jacket. With a high collar, zipper closing, it hits just below the high hip. Looks wonderful on me.
Last spring, I started staring at it thinking that it needed some embellishing to make it truly mine. My original idea was to draw the swirls and trials of vapor -like steam off a coffee cup or smoke from the end of a cigarette- but turn these into harder geometric forms. Imagine smoke shaped by triangles.
Initial sketches and trials showed that the medium I had to work with was not right for this more delicate design. Dark cordoroy is not the best format for delicate shapes. It's still in my book. But I like triangular shapes, so I've stuck with concept in part of work.
Last fall, I started stitching.
I quickly came to realize that this jacket will require a whole lot of time to get to my final vision. A. Whole. Lot. Of. Time. The fabric isn't the best to be working with. Cordoroy is tightly woven but very fluffy. The tight weave wants fine threads to easy work through; the thick top wants chunky yarns to stand above the fabric.
I'm adapting my materials and techniques as I go along. Delicate stitching now will be done on other fabrics, cut, fused, and the stitched to the jacket. Chunkier yarns are tacked into place.
I've added a couple fun embellishments to the front.
The way I see it, if I get a bit more stitching done, the jacket will be to a point where I can pack a small amount of the work in a pocket. Wear the jacket somewhere, pull the supplies out and begin working on the jacket wherever I am. Then wear it home.
It's going to be like a master project on stitchery. A travelling, wearable master project. One that I continue to add to until the fabric completely disintegrates.
One thing I've come to expect when reading crafting blogs, is openness and honesty from the bloggers. Sometimes the honesty is sad, occasionally it's hard to read, and sometimes it just plain silly. I love these takes of other people's lives examined.
My workspace... I have thought about showing my area all clean and tidy. But let's be real - that won't happen so quickly. After listening to another crafty podcast on Craftsanity where the blogger chatted about people not being real and only showing the clean snippets of life in their photos and text. Or only sharing the good times and not the bad, I thought it was about time I 'fess up.
Art Junk Girl is reexamining her work and describing growing pains:
Ok, so, yesterday, it occurred to me that I must be going through a growing pain again. Something inside is telling me to stretch. Lately I've been sketching and doing things in which I feel like I am a fish out of water. I painted on a collaged canvas, I sketched, I used a new journal to make character's in. I looked at all of it and thought, this is CRAP! And you know what? It is. But that is OK, because I am growing. I am learning. I am stretching. It's like exercising while being "out of shape". It takes time to built up stamina, skill, etc. You have to make lots of mistakes. You have to make ugly stuff to find what you like to make that is beautiful.
I need balance and focus to be a part of my life. And if you are up for it, I hope to share my path with you as I take this journey. If you are a scanner, I imagine your path might be similar.
After gettin' jiggy with the glue gun last week, nothing around here is safe from being ribbon-ized or trim-ificated. How 'bout clothes pins?!
I've mentioned this before, but I love having a clothes line in my studio space over my sewing machine and/or drawing table. I clip all kinds of things up there like magazine pages, swatches, parts of projects I'm working on, etc. When I was tidying up the space last week I got to thinking about jazzing up those clothes pins with ribbon scraps.
Finally, in the fun that is meme, Girl is Crafty participated in the 30 things meme.
Found this how-to on YouTube and think it's wonderful. Imagine taking a pearl necklace (perhaps an inexpensive broken one?) and restringing it to make a pretty pearl head band.
Happy New Year! While 2008 cannot disappear into the review mirror fast enough, it brought some challenges to the world that are going to show up, I'm sure, in 2009 New Year's Resolutions. The poor economy and lost jobs will encourage "belt-tighting" moves for many. When it comes to crafters, I'm betting lots of us are making serious pledges to work more out of generous stashes.
What does it mean to bust your stash? For many crafters, it means using what you have whenever possible without comprosing design principles. JudyL at Patchwork Times explained:
I will not spend hours trying to make something work that isn’t working just because I’m insisting on using the stash. I will not run low on something and feel stymied due to not having what I want to work with.
What I will do is try my best to use what I have here. There have been occasions when I’ve started out wanting to use a blue accent fabric and despite pulling dozens of fabric, nothing worked. I might’ve switched to a red accent fabric and still couldn’t pull it together; and then switched to brown and it all fell into place. That’s the kind of things I will try to do in 2009.
Judy has invited quilters everywhere to join her in stash busting this year. She has a pledge you can download to state your own goals, plus links to other stashbusters you can contact for support.
AllenQuilts has been stashbusting for an entire year. This past December she posted progress photos of the change in her "supply closet":
Last year, I posted pics of my stash, when I first started this stash-busting venture with Judy. I really can’t say you can tell a lot of difference yet. Maybe by this time next year, I will have more space on my shelf for thread. I hope so. I also hope someone straightens up those bottom shelves, and the floor.
In the comments, Vickie Welch admitted to stashing about 85 yards this year, but admits: "I’m figuring that it was about 1%!
Barbara from Mainely Stitching put her philosophy for stash busting right out there when she wrote: begin as you intend to continue. Great advice. Begin the year by choosing a big project we've intended to work on. Choose something challenging and rewarding that you've been putting off.
When knitting, it's often imperative to find patterns that use small amounts of yarn. Thus allows us to use the remaining yard from larger finished projects or that single skein or two we just had to pick up at a YS sometime. SmarieK Knits has a number of free knitting patterns to download which take advantage of small supplies of yarn to create projects.
For myself, I started my stashbusting in December when I took two skeins of a Koigu handpainted wool out of my yarn drawer where they've dwelt for several years. I was never going to make them into socks for me (woe is me, wool socks are still too itchy!) and the yarn was too expensive to make socks for someone else. Instead I improvised a very simple fingerless glove pattern. Finished it up in just a couple weeks of knitting in my spare time (I am a very slow knitter). There is likely enough yarn left to make a second pair of these that I can swap or sell or use as a present. So the yarn isn't completely busted from my stash, but it's well on its way.
Have you taken a oath to bust some stash this year? Have you blogged this intention? Is so, please include a link in the comments. To encourage us and give us the excitement of sharing our accomplishments with friends, I've set up a Flickr group to share our stash busting efforts. Share projects in progress, projects as you finish them, items you've given up and given away. Anything that qualifies as part of your stash busting.
Happy New Year! While 2008 cannot disappear into the review mirror fast enough, it brought some challenges to the world that are going to show up, I'm sure, in 2009 New Year's Resolutions. The poor economy and lost jobs will encourage "belt-tighting" moves for many. When it comes to crafters, I'm betting lots of us are making serious pledges to work more out of generous stashes.
What does it mean to bust your stash? For many crafters, it means using what you have whenever possible without comprosing design principles. JudyL at Patchwork Times explained:
I will not spend hours trying to make something work that isn’t working just because I’m insisting on using the stash. I will not run low on something and feel stymied due to not having what I want to work with.
What I will do is try my best to use what I have here. There have been occasions when I’ve started out wanting to use a blue accent fabric and despite pulling dozens of fabric, nothing worked. I might’ve switched to a red accent fabric and still couldn’t pull it together; and then switched to brown and it all fell into place. That’s the kind of things I will try to do in 2009.
Judy has invited quilters everywhere to join her in stash busting this year. She has a pledge you can download to state your own goals, plus links to other stashbusters you can contact for support.
AllenQuilts has been stashbusting for an entire year. This past December he posted progress photos of the change in his "supply closet":
Last year, I posted pics of my stash, when I first started this stash-busting venture with Judy. I really can’t say you can tell a lot of difference yet. Maybe by this time next year, I will have more space on my shelf for thread. I hope so. I also hope someone straightens up those bottom shelves, and the floor.
In the comments, Vickie Welch admitted to stashing about 85 yards this year, but admits: "I’m figuring that it was about 1%!" If her calculation is accurate, then her stash - at a low valuation of $5/yard- is worth $42,500. It is not earning interest until it sees the light of day as part of a project. Do any of us truly have this have kind of money to allow it to sit around?
Barbara from Mainely Stitching put her philosophy for stash busting right out there when she wrote: begin as you intend to continue. Great advice. Begin the year by choosing a big project we've intended to work on. Choose something challenging and rewarding that you've been putting off.
When knitting, it's often imperative to find patterns that use small amounts of yarn. Thus allows us to use the remaining yard from larger finished projects or that single skein or two we just had to pick up at a YS sometime. SmarieK Knits has a number of free knitting patterns to download which take advantage of small supplies of yarn to create projects.
For myself, I started my stashbusting in December when I took two skeins of a Koigu handpainted wool out of my yarn drawer where they've dwelt for several years. I was never going to make them into socks for me (woe is me, wool socks are still too itchy!) and the yarn was too expensive to make socks for someone else. Instead I improvised a very simple fingerless glove pattern. Finished it up in just a couple weeks of knitting in my spare time (I am a very slow knitter). There is likely enough yarn left to make a second pair of these that I can swap or sell or use as a present. So the yarn isn't completely busted from my stash, but it's well on its way.
Have you taken a oath to bust some stash this year? Have you blogged this intention? Is so, please include a link in the comments. To encourage us and give us the excitement of sharing our accomplishments with friends, I've set up a Flickr group to share our stash busting efforts. Share projects in progress, projects as you finish them, items you've given up and given away. Anything that qualifies as part of your stash busting.
This year, I'll mention a different idea to take in endeavoring to bust a stash every month. Look for it the 2nd Saturday of each month. What are some of your preferred stash-busting techniques?
Vision Boards. This year the New Year's discussions throughout the blogosphere and twitter has focused on the advantages of vision boards over traditional New Year's Resolution. While vision boards have been around for years, the concept has reached a tipping point in the general consciousness.
Assuming that I'm not the last person on the vision-board-bus, let's see what these things are, why they might be a more successful tool than New Year's resolutions, and how bloggers reacted to designing one.
A vision board (also called a Treasure Map or a Visual Explorer or Creativity Collage) is typically a poster board on which you paste or collage images that you’ve torn out from various magazines. It’s simple.
The idea behind this is that when you surround yourself with images of who you want to become, what you want to have, where you want to live, or where you want to vacation, your life changes to match those images and those desires.
With this positive take, it's plain to me right there why vision boards might be more popular than New Year's resolutions. Miriam Webster defines resolution as: something that is resolved (ie. to reach a firm decision about). There is something about that phrase "firm decision" that sounds just a bit restrictive to me. Like punishment or rules. It doesn't sound like it allows for change and growth and adaption.
I doubt that many make their New Year's resolutions with this firm intent. There often sounds like something tentative about most of these. Whether we state the wish to lose 20 pounds or exercise more, make more money or take a big vacation. I'll agree the hope is there; I don't believe the resolution necessarily exists.
Vision boards, on the other hand, seem like an adaptable method of planning the future.
1. Write your goals down 2. Look for visual representations of your goals in magazines or online 3. Make a collage with the visual representations 4. Put this in a frequently viewed area 5. Extra: put your written goals in the middle, so that the visuals are flowing outward from the actual original ideas.
Michelle at New Moon Journal asks: Who Says New Year's and Vision Boards Go Together? Because her blog focuses on astrology, she suggests that the best time to construct a vision board is in the spring. Yet she sees a value to beginning work on a board now. By beginning a vision board, now it can worked and tweaked over the next few months. My favorite of her suggestions:
Shadow Dancing: Listen for the inner voices-your mind chatter. Look for black and white thinking then seek to balance the negative self talk and doubt. Look for your issues with FEAR- fear of success, fear of failure are two biggies that dance with me.
To do this, I suggest you build a strong foundation on which to create your best life ever. That means looking at the things you gave your attention to last year and if need be, making a fresh start to get where you'd like to be this year. There is no point in building a vision of the future on a foundation muddied with unfinished business, unresolved issues, old hurts, deep resentments and feelings of regrets. If you drag this negativity into the New Year I assure you that your new vision will not be fully realized. Bringing in a New Year is a great time to let go of any attitude, project, relationship, or people, places and things that weighs us down or impedes our progress towards a more purposeful and joyful life.
Am going to use images from the internet which is free and put them in a collage or 'poster board' style using powerpoint. Then will get it printed and mounted as my own vision boards.
A4 pages on various topics, at the moment topics that relate to my intentions for 2009 (I never call them resolutions – that way they don’t sit there asking to be broken!), but as wishes, wants, thoughts and ideas change throughout the year, the images will multiply.
Last week, fellow BlogHer contributing editor Karen Walrond wrote about twists on New Year's resolutions. She closed that post by discussing making vision boards with her four year old daughter. She found it a great activity for a winter afternoon. After showing the (gorgeous) boards they had contructed, she interpreted Alex's for us:
judging from the images Alex chose, 2009 is the year she's going to be a princess, Tinkerbell, and an incontinent cat.
In case you're wondering, I have NOT made my vision board yet. In part, it's because I, too, lack magazines from which to tear images. I am writing down words and concepts that I want to embrace in 2009. While it's easy to imagine the image for white water rafter, I don't know how to image "take more risks" or "live more fearlessly" when I can't imagine what some of the risks and/or fears could be. How would you picture fearless?
I am committed to getting together with Leslie Madsen-Brooks next weekend to start constructing one. I am tempted to follow Michelle's advice above and let the process stew and develop until the astral year begins in Aries, but I fear (there's that word again!) that I'm just using it as another excuse to delay and avoid making a commitment to my future.
My last pair of fingerless gloves (or gauntlets) took me nearly a month to knit. They were fingering weight yarn and #1 needles (very small). Last night I started a second pair with an Extra Chunky yarn and #13 needles.
Ya think size doesn't matter? I finished the pair in about 2.5 hours.
Siel asked for the pattern for these. So I'm going to show you all how "improvisational" I get with my knitting. It will not be shocking to those who've worked any craft project with me, but the rest of you, enjoy:
For the chunky gauntlets, I used Lion Brand Wool-Ease Thick and Quick yarn and size 13 needles straight needles.
I cast on 17 stitches. Experiment. Some odd number that fits comfortably around your knuckles but not too loose.
Row 1: k1, p1 across Row 2: p1,k1 across Row 3: repeat row one.
Row 4: k across Row 5: repeat Row One.
Repeat 4, 5 until piece is long enough to reach from below wrist to first knuckle on thumb. (for me this was 14 rows total.). End with a Row 4.
Next row: Add Thumb hole, casting off. Determine center stitch of piece plus two stitches on either side. Continue pattern (k1,p1) until you reach that first stitch. For mine, I k,p'ed for 7 stitches. Bind off the next 3 stitches. Continue pattern to end of row.
Next row: Add Thumb hole, casting on. Knit the worked stitches until you come to the gap. Cast on 3 stitches. (I turned work to other side and did 3 knit-wise cast ons. It's not pretty but it works). Continue pattern to end of row. Anyone who can suggest a better method of casting on, I'd appreciate it.
Next row: k1,p1 to end of row. 17 stitches again.
Continue pattern until the gauntlet is long enough to cover first knuckles on your hand. For me, that was 7 rows.
Cast off. With last stitch, cut yarn leaving a long tail. Slip yarn through last stitch and pull tight, then using a tapestry needle sew the side closed. Weave in loose ends. Repeat for 2nd gauntlet and wear.
