love list, love themed!

a list of things i'm loving right now, mostly love themed:


Hexies. i LOVE hexies!

Heather Ross munki munki hexies (source)


omg, you should look at the other photos in this photostream... 2304 hexies!! (source)


these are like i spy hexies! (source)


pretty little box of hexies (source)


and on the hexagon vein, i LOVE the Hexagon Park quilt on Moda Bakeshop, designed by Lynne of Lily's Quilts, with large scale hexies and Sherbet Pips fabric. it's so freaking cute! and she's doing a giveaway!


i also love the craftyminx's heart grannies, for her granny a day project


and Pillow Month over at Sew Mama Sew, complete with contests, tutorials, and daily inspiration! The gathered heart pillow is hella cute, though white would be a bad idea in my house!


this awesome folded paper heart, perfect for love notes!


and the free bunny stuffie pattern from All Sorts. omg, the cuteness!



and these papercut hearts, complete with tips to make your own


and Urban Thread's latest anatomical heart design - ooh, i love the frame!



and this awesome double heart shaped potholder from Craft Snob



this super cute ruffled apron from Sew4Home - i'm really loving the Hoopla line, if you hadn't noticed from recent posts!


and Sonja from Artisania's latest paperpiecing pattern, the cutest little fox ever!




a bit late for valentine's Day, but i'm all for celebrating love everyday of the year anyway!

wired crafts are so fascinating!

my lovely j sent me this link, and i thought i'd share it with you all as well!

here's a great article from the NY Times about technology and crafts, showcasing Alison Lewis of http://iheartswitch.com and her amazing home.



the article showcases the interesting and intriguing electronic projects that she's added to an already cozy space, making it welcome you in more ways than just the traditional!



i'm always so intrigued by the melding of technology and craft/art. i've eyed her book, Switch Craft, multiple times, as well as lots of the projects shown on craft and make, but i've always been intimidated. as much as i enjoyed building little electrical thingies as a kid (remember using using a potato as a battery in grade school?), it's always seemed too technical for my right brained ways! one day i'd really like to break through that mental roadblock and play around a bit more.



for more information check out the article, and be sure to watch the photo slide show for more inspiration!


(all photos by Ryan Collerd for The New York Times)

so beautiful!

so speaking of Andrea Zuill/Bad Bird.....

have you seen her new pattern?



i am SO in love! i NEED to stitch this! i think she's so beautiful.

go get the pattern at her etsy shop!

eye candy!

i've been very scattered this week, with a ridiculous number of medical appointments, and trying to get swaps finished up. i made an entry in craft's valentines contest, which i'll post, but in the meantime, here's some inspiration!

these incredible pieces were created by Calliel. she posted them on craftster, and graciously gave me permission to blog about them as well!



she created 4 pieces in total, each portraying a moment in her personal history that had great meaning and reflection on the rest of her life.

all of the pieces are incredibly detailed fabric quilts, with writing and layers of fabric and quilting all joining together.







they are incredibly beautiful and inspiring, and you should definitely check them out! i really adore this style of quilting, and it's something i aspire to do in the future, though most likely never to this degree!

(note that one of the pieces may be triggering for some people)

permission granted by artist to upload and post images

things i love, craftster best of 2008, and a bit of an update!

i've been very neglectful of this blog lately, and of blogs that i follow! healthwise i haven't been doing too well, i seem to just get progressively worse, no matter what we try. i've decided that "horrid" is a particularly apt word!

but there are still plenty of things to love out there! i missed last week, so here's a love list for both -

* rows of small buttons. i love how it looks! i noticed a trend in all of the clothes i've bought lately - my new winter coat has a row of buttons on each cuff, the AMAZING black leather gloves i got on sale have tiny little leather covered ball buttons along the wrists, the fingerless gloves i bought have rows of buttons, and the new stripey knee highs i bought have rows of buttons too!
* stazOn ink. when you see my valentines, you'll understand!
* no more snow! i love the snow, but damn, being stuck at home was starting to get old!
* codeine. opiates are my new best friend! see above for my new love of the word "horrid", these two loves are related!
* polka dots. just in general. i love polka dots. i bought fabric for pencil skirt with big chunky polka dots.
* coloured animal prints. same as polka dots (but the fabric was animal print!)
* the cheesiness of valentine's day!
* acrylic and plexiglass. i've been obsessed with this for SO LONG! i took an acrylics class in jr high, and then moved after the first year. i'm glad we moved here, but i've always regretted that i didn't get to take more acrylics classes! truthfully, i'm not sure i would have, as the teacher was a complete jerk (typical old school shop teacher who didn't think girls should take shop). today i bought a book that i've been eying for ages, Plexi Class. it's super inspiring!
* the jewelery that this etsy artisan makes, it's incredible. i bought a few pieces from her and i adore them. she's local too, which is always exciting!
* january sales. both my joy and my curse!



i've been trying to force myself to keep up with things, but i can only manage so many at a time! i'm trying to get caught up on stuff on craftster (check out the new changes! i love it! amnd batgirl/lori's writing awesome blog posts now!), so most of my online time has been spent there. i've been trying to get myself back into swapping and papercrafts, so i'm running a few swaps right now, the alphabet atc STU swap (i keep trying to write STFU!), and the love/hate atc swap in time for valentines day. the love/hate swap is still open, signups end at midnight PST tomorrow (friday)!

craftster also did a best of 2008 list that's really awesome, and you should definitely check it out! one of my projects was in it, the machine embroidered buttons i made for the brother campaign! they're not quite as exciting as my project that was in the best of 2007, so i guess i'm lucky that the machine embroidery board is small!

here are a few other MUCH MORE AMAZING favourites of mine from the list!
embroidered jelly fish bubble skirt - oh my freakin god!
bleached skeleton onesie - why didn't i ever think of this! it's awesome! it would have been perfect for torrin when he was littler!
ballet flats - one day i'll get around to trying these!
Re-imagining Alice in Wonderland - these costumes are AMAZING! absolutely incredible.
felted stone rug - i want one of these so bad!
anatomical heart batik - i'm so fascinated by batik, and i LOOVE anatomical hearts!
veins, hearts and ovaries silk screened fabric - ohmygod incredible! i love this, i want a skirt made out of it so bad.
cast iron squid sculpture - i hadn't seen this before the list, but it's incredible!
woodburned skull, raven and tulip - this is incredible. just when you think that woodburning is totally kitschy, you see this.
lady adventurer steampunk atcs - one day i WILL try beeswax! these are super inspirational!
a book of hope - this is a fabulous fundraiser that alteredmommy put together, with pages from so many amazing craftsters.
freemotion embroidery of a spanking - this is gorgeous! i love freemotion embroidery like this.

see? super inspirational!

ideas and rambling

i started this post nearly two hours ago, and then i got distracted looking through craft blogs, and then i realized what time it was, so i had a shower, and then i put in laundry, and then i looked at craft blogs a bit more.... i'm still not even caught up on the blogs that i try to read regularily, yet i can't seem to resist following links....

not much crafting the last few days! yesterday was a crazy stressful day with appointments and stuff, and today was spent running errands, i went to pick up my crosstitch piece made by the fabulous rachel at confessions of a crafter from the post office, and i went to the giant party supply store to pick up a few little things, and i went to the thrift store (i resisted! i barely bought anything! but i was driving by! i had to stop!), and i went to micheals to buy one thing, and after checking out the clearance, left with more than that - but still only $5 total, so not too bad. i managed to find 3 wooden bangles that fit my hands for only $0.66 each - much better than the $6 they were charging before!

the crafting i did do was a bit of spray painting. the sun came out (finally) just as i was about to leave the house, so i backtracked and set up a few things on a newspaper, sprayed them, then left them to dry while i was gone. i bought a bunch of bottlecaps from the cheesy scrapbooking store a while ago that were black on the backside, but they were all scratched, so i spraypainted them to cover that up, and i found a picture frame for $0.35 the other day that i think will fit the crosstitch piece i just finished, but it needed to be touched up too. so very simple spraypainting!

the only other activity of the day was cleaning... ugh!

i picked up a copy of woman's day special interest publications: halloween celebrations today (oddly, i can't find a link it anywhere!). halloween magazines pretty much suck this year, but this one's not bad at all. there were a couple of really neat ideas in it, one of which inspired me to go to micheals today.

i'm absolutely determined to make this! i'd leave it up all year long. i LOVE cuckoo clocks. we had one when i was a kid, and now i have a little one my sister brought me back from switzerland when she was a teenager as well as a few little fake ones. i bought this necklace last month, and i really want to play around with making vinyl cuckoos... but this one would be PERFECT for my bedroom!


and these spiderwebs are very cool...


and these are actually a funny coincidence! earlier today i came across surprise balls on notmartha.org and was thinking about what an awesome swap idea they'd be. there's a swap that's really popular on craftster called the Magic Yarn Ball Swap where goodies are wrapped in a ball of yarn, and the ball is sent with a pattern and the recipient knits or crochets the pattern and the goodies fall out as they progress (though i think most people are impatient and unwind it themselves!). it's a fun swap idea, but i haven't been doing much crochet in a while, and i think the surprise balls would be fun for the non-fiber craftsters (and the lazy ones like me!). it would be like a cross between the magic yarn ball and the jar of whimsies. i was so enthused about the idea that i actually bought a few colours of crepe paper at the party supply store.

and then tonight i was going through the magazine more carefully to scan the previous two pictures, and found this!

they call them charm balls, but they're pretty much the same thing! is that a sign, do you think? once the halloween swaps die down i think i'll suggest it.

in other crafty news, i'm going to a short class tomorrow morning at my brother dealer that's an intro to PE Design Lite. i'm going to take my sublime stitching samples, and see if they can help me figure out how to get rid of the white bits between the colour and the outline. i'm excited to learn more about it and to play around with it more.

the only other crafting i HAVE to do this weekend is hemming my dad's jeans... i HATE hemming, but he's been bugging me for a while, and he is going to look at my car and see if he can make stop making that noise. so i guess i'd better hem them!

and i plan on starting on some swap stuff this weekend. i still have a bit of time, but i need to get my butt in gear! on sunday i'm hoping to go to the i heart crafts bazaar, but it will depend on how i feel. i really really want to though!

i'm also on a search for bottle brush trees, after seeing this tutorial on the misadventures of mama and jack. so cool! i really really want to try it! anything with bleach and/or fabric dye makes me ridiculously happy. they're really cheap from sunshine crafts (also a great place to get clear safety eyes, that's how i found them in the first place), but i'd like them sooner, and besides, i'm not going to pay $8 shipping for $1.69 or $2.99 worth of merchandise! so i need to find them somewhere local. i forgot to check micheals today, but they're probably ridiculously expensive there. maybe a hobby shop? like the kind of place that sells stuff to make train sets and stuff? we'll see.

politics, crafting, inspirations, and a big fat vinyl bag!

i've been thinking a lot lately about how un-political my artwork and crafting has become. when i was younger and in school, this was really different. i find myself now creating for specific projects or deadlines, making a skirt because i need a skirt, or a collage piece for a swap deadline, and i never create simply for the act of creating. i think that's a big part of the non-political slant my stuff has taken.

i purchased a couple of zines from radicalrags.etsy.com, hoop-la 1 and hoop-la 2 and they were quite inspiring, much along the lines of this amazing embroidery and cross stitch artist http://www.beelisty.com/. in addition, the winner of the craftster.org summer needlework challenge was this amazing piece, titled "Self Acceptance". the creator, zombiekilla, graciously provided the pattern, and i'm dying to stitch it.

and then the Richmond Art Gallery had a call out for submissions for their 3rd annual ATC exhibition. the themes were Life as Art, Correspondence, Gender Roles, Home and Domestic Life, Community, and Friendship Across Distance and Difference. i started thinking about ways to express gender in atcs as more than just binary, of showing femme and trans and genderqueer genders through collage and needlework on 2.5" x 3.5" scale... i got really excited, but due to the the "big secret project", i totally didn't have time to enter.

so i've been thinking a lot about needlework and politics, and reading the most recent issue of fiberarts, which despite an annoying writing style that celebrates "master artisans" as opposed to all artisans, is really blowing me away if i just concentrate on the artwork!

i've also been thinking for months about sewing a line of clothes for fat folks that are actually fun and not cheesy, but of course that's never happened, since i can't even keep my current etsy shop stocked! but fat fashion is still close to my heart, and i regularly follow the livejournal community fatshionista. at one point i did do more fat oriented crafting, like the stuff i made for the fat swap a few years ago, and even longer ago than that, my fat femme paper doll magnets and all the subsequent pieces i did with that image (though she was really more of an inbetweenie i guess!).

and then last week i hauled my butt in vancouver to buy the most recent issue of craft (after searching aimlessly in my city and it's closest neighbour, and even calling craft itself, but they didn't bother to return my call) at mayfair news and walked out with craft, the new burda world of fashion, the most recent canadian dimension, west coast line issue 55: cedar table - art and anti-colonialism, the current briarpatch, and the summer issue of Our Times. after much reading (i'm terrified to eat anything at the moment, thanks to canadian dimension - god, why did i not know how TERRIBLE soy is for the environment?), i started thinking about how i never relate my politics into my work. sure, i PLAN out labour inspired pieces... but do i ever get around to making them? nope! i need to stop crafting for others, and start making stuff for myself, obviously!

so on that note, combining politics and crafting and needlework, i started thinking about crafting something more political than usual. the amazing and inspirational pam at faster kittykill works at Portland Women's Crisis line, who are putting on their annual Safety In Numbers gala and auction to end domestic and sexual violence, and i was determined to make something more than my typical cool but un-inspirational stuff to donate. i really wanted to make something specific to the crisis line, but all the ideas i had were distinctly canadian (like the cfs no means no campaign, or a memorial of December 6th, 1989 Montreal Massacre). since people in portland probably didn't grow up with the distinctive purple and black stickers (no means no campaign), or with 14 red roses on december 6th (memorial of the 14 women murdered), they probably wouldn't know what the hell the piece was about! so i decided to go with a more general issue that affects so many folks, body image and fat positivity.

and now that i've rambled for sooooo long, i'll actually show you what i made!

unfortunately, it photographed TERRIBLY. i ask myself regularly "amy, why do you work so much with a material that absolutely refuses to photograph nicely?" and then i think "because it's vinyl, and i adore my vinyl-y goodness, and that's really all the answer i need!"

so i will show you the blurriest picture first, because it actually shows the image the best!


the bag is made of vintage deadstock vinyl that's textured (hence the worse pictures than usual!), with an image of a fat woman reclining in a bikini freehand machine embroidered on the front in this awesome variegated thread that my friend linda sent me. the backside has the word "gorgeous" embroidered the same way as the image on the front. the bag has 21" straps, so that anyone can carry it (i hope! it's still MUCH better than purchased totes that don't fit around your arm!), and is lined with teal blue cotton fabric. the inside has two pockets, both made of vinyl. the larger one is zippered (vintage deadstock metal zipper) with the word "fat" embroidered on it. the second zipper is smaller, sewn to hold pens. one portion of the pocket is larger, perhaps to hold a sharpie for "commenting" on ads? (hint!)

front




inside



side


back



detail
all the topstitching was done with the same variegated thread used for the embroidery




i love it. it was sad to mail it away!


ADDENDUM!
i posted this on craftster, and some stuff came up that i wanted to talk about, so i did another post about it here - http://craftydame.blogspot.com/2008/09/addendum-to-fat-girl-vinyl-bag.html just FYI!

inspiration dotee dolls

a week or two ago i signed up for the dotee doll swap on craftster. dotee dolls are a style of art dolls created by dot. she posted a tutorial for them, and it seems to have exploded from there!

i just spent a very very long time tonight (my butt's numb!) sitting here looking through the dotee doll pool on flickr. to be perfectly honest, a LOT of the dolls aren't my style. at all. but there are some AMAZING dolls as well!

like these art themed girls with photo faces
this graphic black and white doll
this elvis dotee doll (hee hee!)
these awesome voodoo dotees
this beautiful icicle shaped dotee with a photo face
and all these AMAZING dolls made by hoola tallulah. i really really love the faces she does, especially the ones with black hair and beestung lips! (i'm predictable, i know!)

i think my big thing about the dotees is that i love any that are non-traditional, and beautiful faces make me so very very happy. i know i need to get started on my own dolls, but i'm still feeling rather overwhelmed even thinking about trying to find fabric in my studio....

but i know i need to. i still have a few weeks before they're due, but i'm trying to be less late with stuff, and besides, my sister sent over season 3 of weeds tonight, and decorating dotees will be the perfect project for watching it!

aren't these the fun-nest cacti you've ever seen?
(and YES, fun-nest is a word, at least in amy land!)

they'd be fabulous pincushions!

zines, mail art, fabric collage, typewriter

i made a simple quilt this weekend, for the weekend halloween swap on craftster.org, but i think i'll let my partner receive it before i post it.

lately i've been thinking a lot about making fabric/applique/collage postcards. partly because i owe a few people something fabulous in the mail, and postcards are always perfect for that, and partly because i signed up for the halloween/day of the dead postcard swap on craftster.org (because i really can't resist anything halloween- though i'm not letting myself start on them until i get caught up on other stuff!). i've done some fabric ATCs lately, and i kept thinking how fun it would be to make them bigger so that they could go through the mail...

totally coincidentally, i found this blog tonight with some pretty amazing collages. wierd coincidence, huh?

but it's totally inspirational, and now i'm even more impatient to play around with them.


in other crafty news, the studio clean up project is going s l o w l y . . . .
part of the problem is my inability to stop making stuff long enough to actually get it clean, though the sheer amount of stuff i have in there is also to blame.

i did load up the trunk of my car with two boxes and two big bags full of stuff destined for the thrift store. i'm sure there will be more.


tonight i opened up an envelope of vintage embroidery patterns and hit a jackpot - there were 5 other envelopes stuffed inside! lots of pretty flowers, vintage cars, stuff like that. it inspired me to dig out a couple of other vintage embroidery envelopes i'd stashed away, and found some lovely letters and more fleurs. then i remembered that some of my old workbasket magazines had embroidery patterns in them too, so i had to search for them. i only found a few issues, but one of them had embroidery patterns in them, and they are super duper cool - paper lanterns and a pagoda and a lotus blossom and a dragon and a bonsai tree! so gorgeous, i need to find the perfect project to use them for.


i'm working on an ATC for the alphabet ATC swap on craftster, this round is Y and Z. i made a card that was Z for zipper, but i decided that it was too common, and it occurred to me that z can also be for ZINES! so now i've decided to make an atc sized zine for the swap, and i've been typing up the little pages on my fabulous new typewriter.




(click to see the full pic)

it's probably the best $4 i've spent in my life! i ran out of ribbon today, but damned if i know where any of my back up ribbons are in my disaster of a studio, so i decided to just rewind the ribbon enough to type the last few pages of the zine. so i took the ribbon off, winded it nicely, and then realized i had no flippin clue how to put the damn thing back in.

i mean, i THOUGHT i had a clue, i thought i totally knew how to do it, but i proved myself wrong. after much cursing, many inked fingerprints everywhere, waiting for my mom to get home and try to load it (since she's actually USED typewriters for more than crafting in her life!) and then much more cursing as neither of us could figure it out, it popped neatly into place, just to prove us wrong.

speaking of zines, i love them. i finally found the box in which i packed ALL my zines (it's a big box, actually, though i managed to lose it for almost 2 years) and i'm excited to start reading them all over again. zines are actually one of the few things that i'm super organized about - they're all stored in alphabetical order by title in little japanese notebooks (like the one i decorated here), and i have a corresponding excel file that documents the title and the author so that i can search it and see what i have before ordering more (i started the excel file after i bought my third copy of the same brainscan issue!) and find all the zines i have by the same author.

i especially love crafty zines, and i think there needs to be way more of them out there. i love love love CROQ zine and i fell in love with the cuteness of a zine called scrappy a few months ago, and just realized tonight that the author (niku) has an etsy store called The Ephemeral Mailbox Museum! where she sell several other exciting looking craft zines. i have to admit that i've had a mini i've-never-met-you-but-you-seem-super-cool crush on niku for several years now - she wrote a submission for one of our femme affinity group compilation zines, and her bio made me swoon. she's a pretty amazing crafty political femme, and those are all my favourite things for people to be.

since i have yet to figure out how to get moola off my paypal account, i ordered all the zines listed on her etsy that i don't already have, and i'm very excited for them to come! i also got really enthusiastic a few days ago and bought a ton of zines from not sorry distro. (that paypal balance was really burning a hole in my pocket!)

i'm super duper excited about all the zines - maybe the time has actually come to get my ass in gear and write my own??? we'll see, won't we?