"The Voice of the Rain" Print Download

New to digital scrapbooking? Never downloaded a digital kit before? What in the world are .rar files anyway? Get your answers here: How to Unzip Files So You Can Digi Scrap.

This past week, I needed some new art for my living room. I whipped up this print, using Illustrator and Photoshop. I've never done anything quite like this before, so it was especially fun. I've done a lot work in both programs, but nothing quite so much like an illustration.

The poem making the rain is a beautiful one by Walt Whitman called "The Voice of the Rain" from Leaves of Grass. Bonus points for it being out of copyright. (Obviously, I wouldn't be offering it as a download if it wasn't.)

Right now it's 11x14", but could easily be cropped to a different aspect ratio. I hope you enjoy this print--I'd love to know if you end up using it for anything.

(Click to Download)

Momma and Baby Knit Monsters

I was just about to start writing this post, and as some reconnaissance, I casually asked my daughter if she had a name for her knit monster toys. She told me no, and that she "didn't necessary like them that much." Ahhh, the fickleness of four year olds. And here I was, all prepared to rave about how much she loved these monsters. 

Direct quote after asking her about her monsters, "I'm getting super mad at you for not letting me [eat] anything." I'm sure I seem like the most horrible mother ever, making her wait 10 minutes to eat until dinner is ready. So, her dislike might have been influenced by her rumbling tummy and my horrible mommy meanness.

I love these monsters. If she doesn't like them anymore, I will start sleeping with them at night. I went to five different fabric stores looking for real wool felt to make their mouths. I carefully selected the yarn. I agonized over what type of eyes to use. I even had to use double pointed needles! Heck, I may even change out the yellow in my gray and yellow bedroom to pink and green to match, I'm so darn fond of these little monsters.

They were knitted using this pattern, by Rebecca Danger of Danger Crafts. It's kind of rare for me to use a pattern, but this one was easy to follow and worth every penny. I made my nephew a pair for Christmas that were gray and dark blue. As far as my sister reports, he's still delighted with his!

How could you not love their little faces?? Aubrey will come to her senses after dinner.

I feel like if I don't learn how to do something new on a project, I've somehow cheated. On this project, I mastered stripes. I tried this jogless method (the traveling one--the first one described), and I learned how to change colors, carrying them up and twisting them before changing.

I've got the whole knit stripes down now, and they don't scare me anymore. Take that, knit stripes! I will take you on, any time, any place. I can knit stripes, chew gum, watch TV, check my email, and arbitrate hellish sibling MMA fights all at the same time. I'm pretty sure if I can do that, there isn't anything I can't do. Pretty sure.

In which I beg, take on the Patriarchy, and enter a contest.

I recently read this post on a (feminist) blog I often read, which basically says women don't like to brag for fear they will seem attention-grabbing or not self-effacing enough.

I do and do not have this problem. You don't write a blog about your life and your projects without a certain amount of fondness for navel-gazing. (My navel used to be so cute, by the way, but now it is just so not, after four pregnancies. So wrong. Not sure how long I could stand to gaze at my actual navel before combusting, requiring a ferocious pep talk back into liking my body again.)

Remember this project? (Click on the link for a tutorial.)

It is far and away the most popular project on my blog. And my enterprising friend, Shaunte, entered me into a contest on this awesome site. I didn't even ask her to! It required no begging! And it ends up that I am a finalist. Very unexpected development.
 
Anyway, the point of all of that is to ask for votes! A thing which I have never done before. I bet you were wondering why I was going off on that odd, not craft related tangent there at the beginning! But, you would probably ask for votes too, if Shaunte was your cheerleader. Her encouragement and enthusiasm is like bird-flu-strength infectious. So, I'm trying not to care that I am vote-begging/bragging. Take that, patriarchy.

I could win a $100 gift card if I garnish the most votes. Which is a great prize. So, if you'll tolerate me asking you to vote, here's the link to the contest. And, of course, feel fee to vote for whichever one you think is the best. But, I'd be pretty darn happy if you think it's mine.

Grace Lace Beret

I knit this Grace Lace Beret to escape the deep, dark abyss I feel into when I graduated from college in December. The name of this abyss is "what in the heck am I going to do with this degree and therefore the rest of my life besides being a wife and mother which is awesome and all but not the whole sum of my existence because I'd really like to do things in addition to being a good wife and mother because most days kids make me want to eat my fingernails and bend my brain into itself except when they are being totally adorable and drawing cute pictures of flamingos (see exhibit A)?" This question is much too large, even for my newly enlarged, degreed brain. So, I quite naturally fell to knitting to ease my mind of such weighty questions. I knit a lot in January. A lot.

 Exhibit A (Courtesy of Aubrey)

I knit it twice. Because I am a contradiction. I hate figuring out gauge. I would rather guess. I know enough about the way I knit and crochet to know that I have a very tight gauge. So, I guess. Educatedly.

I've always thought my incredibly tight gauge was due to my Type A personality. Gives a new meaning to the phrase "tightly wound" when considered in the context of yarn crafts. Ha ha. So, you'd think that someone as anal as I am would love the concept of gauge, but no. Because I insist on being quirky. And my Type A quirky personality thinks that gauge is a waste of time. It's largely inefficient when I can guess correctly most of the time. Or when my tension is so tight that I have to adjust the pattern anyway (my rows are rarely tall enough). However, my guess was none too good on this one. I ended up taking out some of the pattern repeats even on my second attempt.

This pattern is the only one I can recall where my problem was the item turning out too large when I followed the pattern exactly. Even my 2nd attempt is a tiny bit too big, but I'm going to deal with it. If I make this hat again (which I totally would), it's going to be with much nicer yarn than this, so no way was I frogging it again. I'm too embarrassed to say what cheap-o yarn it is, but you can buy it at Walmart. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm just turning into a yarn snob, and this yarn does not make my snobbery glands salivate. It makes them ashamed that they were caught in the yarn aisle at Walmart buy sub par yarn. Not that some of the yarn at Walmart isn't good. I shall stop now. Shopping at Walmart for yarn is certainly convenient. They have much longer hours than my local yarn shop.

I really like this hat. It's jaunty. I'd never considered jaunty as a look for myself, but I'm quite taken with it. It's very clever how the band goes into the lace pattern. It was a pretty easy pattern to follow too. Always a good thing.

The Bee's Knees Digital Scrapbooking Kit Freebie

New to digital scrapbooking? Never downloaded a digital kit before? What in the world are .rar files anyway? Get your answers here: How to Unzip Files So You Can Digi Scrap.

Apparently, I've gone too long without designing a kit. Shaunte, over at This Too Shall Pass has progressed to harassment in order to get me to design another digital kit. This is good, because I apparently need harassment levels of persuasion in order to get me motivated to do anything after graduating. While harassment isn't supposed to make you feel desirable, I feel privileged to be Shaunte's object of harassment. If she progresses to stalker I will probably never be able to deflate my ego.

(If you don't read Shaunte's blog, you should. She's the type of funny that makes me realize that my attempts at humor are. . .how can I be kind? . . .underdeveloped. Perhaps if I had gone the extra step and had five children like her instead of four, I would have gone that extra bit of insane that would have imbued me with the truly funny stuff--not that I'm commenting on Shaunte. Really. Just on me. But, it's too late now to add any more crazy to our house. I must be content with envying Shaunte's comedic ability and forever wishing I had her finely-honed thrift-store shoe-finding abilities.)

I'm also hoping that this kit will be helpful to another friend who is in charge of an girl's camp this summer. Their theme is centered around bees, hence the theme of this kit. It just so happened to work perfectly with Aubriana's Halloween costume from this past year. Even if you don't have a need for a bee theme, there are plenty of unrelated papers in this kit--I'm quite fond of the clouds and the chevrons.

So, cheers all around for my first digital kit in ages! I enjoyed making it--I forgot how much fun it is to have an excuse to watch endless TV and dink around in Illustrator. I hope you like it!

(Click to download)

Kit contains: 33 pattern papers, 1 set stitches, 1 overlay, 1 sheet honeycomb stickers, tags, 1 mask, 1 torn edge, 2 bee stickers, 2 flower stickers

Is that a 1? I believe it is.

Remember this?

It now looks like this.

One more week, baby. Then I will be a college grad and a human again. Instead of a subspecies with a laptop type growth on her fingers.

Sunshine Paisley Throw Pillow Tutorial

Ok, here it is. What I've been meaning to write and put up for ages. If I didn't have to keep doing that pesky schoolwork (five more weeks until graduation, five more weeks!), this would have happened a lot sooner.

Once I finished the five embroidered paisley squares (click for pattern), I knew I wanted to make a pillow out of them. I was worried though, because I didn't want it to get too "patchwork quilt." I didn't think that would go with the modern feel of my bedroom.

I wanted to do solid yellows and grays, but the quilt story nearby didn't have any. This was perplexing. Normally, when I get an idea, there is nothing that can prevent me from doing that idea. I mean, small adjustments, they normally make the project turn out better. Large adjustments like substituting a print for a solid? I will normally not proceed. I think the saleswomen in the shop thought I was being completely unreasonable. Like, I had gone into a restaurant and said, "But, these green beans aren't green enough, I wanted more of a Christmas green, not so much an olive green. And I wanted them cut 1/4" longer. Do you have different green beans in the back?" (I did not ask for super-secret back-room fabric, FYI).

However, I did eventually find some fabric I liked. I'm still not sure about it. I think I would like it better with solids, but heck, it's done and it's cute and I adore the embroidery, which is really the point of this pillow. And, it's growing on me.

So, here are the steps if you'd like to make your own and show off your own embroidery. I love this idea, because embroidery just doesn't happen often enough, in my opinion! It's would be cute as just a patchwork pillow too, with regular fabric instead of the embroidery, so don't feel left out if you're not in the mood to embroider.

Sunshine Paisley Pillow

Supplies:
3/4 yard fabric #1
1/3 yard fabric #2 (Four squares of coordinating fabric cut to 5 1/4" and two 45" lengths of 1" wide strips sewn together to make one long length)
Five embrioderied squares at 5 1/4"


Square of muslin around 20x20"
Square of low-loft batting around 20x20"
Cording approximately 72" long
Fusible interfacing (2 pieces approximately 13x19")

Step One: Embroider five squares with paisley in any color you like. Embroider within a 5 1/4" square. Once finished, cut to 5 1/4".

Step Two: Cut four pieces of fabric to 5 1/4" square. If your fabric is patterned, you may want to consider cutting the squares so the pattern is symmetrical (this may take additional yardage). Also cut two lengths of the sashing fabric (gray in my pillow) to 1 3/4" wide.

Step Three: Lay out your squares and determine where each square will go. Sashing only needs to go on the inside between the two squares. Pick up the middle squares, leaving the outside squares in place, and sew sashing on each side of the middle squares. I chain stitched mine (shown below). I didn't do mine as methodically, so my photos are slightly different.

Step Four: Once you've chain stitched one side of the three squares, trim off the sashing at the bottom roughly, leaving a tail (we will trim this more exactly later). Iron seams toward the sashing. Then sew sashing to the other side and iron seams again.

Step Five: Now, you need to trim sashing. This is easiest to do with a rotary cutter and clear ruler. Line up sides and trim off excess. Do the same for the other side.

Your finished square will look like this (with only one side done).

Step Six: Sew outside squares to middle squares/sashing. Iron and trim.

Step Seven: Sew sashing to top and bottom of middle row. Iron seams toward the sashing. Trim.

Step Eight: Carefully pin top row to sashing of middle row. I spent some time making sure the corners of the squares lined up exactly. I pinned every spot there was a seam. Sew. Do the same for the bottom row of squares. Iron.

Now your top is almost finished!

Step Nine: Cut two more lengths of sashing 1 3/4" wide. Sew sashing along both sides of square, iron and trim. Then sew along top and bottom. Iron and trim.

Your finished top will look like this:

Step Ten: Next is the quilting. I wanted something very subtle, so I used a very low loft batting. I also knew the back of this part wouldn't show, so I used a cheap muslin. Cut batting to 1 1/2" larger than finished pillow front. Then cut muslin 1/2" larger than batting.

Step Eleven: Pin layers together. You can use quilting basting adhesive spray, but I decided to use pins for mine.

Step Twelve: Quilt pillow. I did simple in the ditch quilting, making a sort of tic-tack-toe pattern along the lines of the sashing, stitching in the ditch along the squares.

Front of my finished quilting:

Back of my finished quilting:

Step Thirteen: Trim batting and backing along pillow edge. (I seriously need a new ruler. One of my kids stepped on mine and cracked it.)

Step Fourteen: Using the 1" yellow strip of fabric, make encapsulate the cording. This is a good tutorial of how to do this.


Step Fifteen: Pin the cording all around the outside of the pillow front, with the cording part toward the center and the raw edges lining up against the outside. Around the corners, clip to stitching so that the cording will turn around the edges, and make them as sharp turns as possible. At the bottom of the pillow, overlap the cording slightly and run it off the edge and downward, so that the ends will be caught when you sew and no raw edges will show (see photo in next step for more of an idea of how this looks).

Step Sixteen: Baste cording in place.

Step Seventeen: Cut 2 fusible webbing 1/2" shorter than height of backing pieces. Fuse to wrong side of fabric. Iron raw edge along top down, so that the raw edge touches the top of the fusible webbing. Then fold it down along the fusible webbing, so that the raw edge is folded in. Pin. Then topstitch. Do the same for both backing pieces.

Step Eighteen: Make sure the back pieces are the same width as the pillow. If not, cut down to fit. Then, pin first back piece on front, right side toward pillow front, with finished edge across the center of the pillow. Pin the second piece, layering over the first piece, with right side toward pillow and finished edge across center, creating envelop. (See photo in next step to see how finished back will look).

Step Nineteen: Stitch back to front. Trim corners. Turn. Insert pillow form. And that's it! You have a beautiful new pillow!