My project for the new hobby challenge :)

A needle felted Chinese dragon! Since the Chinese New Year's Eve was earlier this month, we are now in the year of the Dragon. I love dragons :) I like Chinese, too, I have to learn more of it some time..

I'm pretty pleased with how it came out, even though I omitted some detailes I had planned. I just didn't have time to make ears, nostrils and more color, but I like it how it is now. It's modeled over a frame of pipe cleaners, with red, brown and orange wool. The horns are made with metal wire and seed beads. They came out a little small, but it was kind of hard to calculate the right size. I probably should have used bigger beads, these are tiny.. The eyes are black beads that are glued on.

I have taken lots of photos along the way, so maybe I'll write up a tutorial later (after my exam on Tuesday). The contest ends tonight, the winner is announced tomorrow. I'm very excited :)

Good news & bad news

Okay, the good news first: I have found my missing beads and macramé supplies! That is, my mother found it, at my grandmother's house. It had gotten mixed up in the Christmas decorations and packed away shortly after we left. My mother will send it to me over the weekend, and I can finally start making stuff in red and black again :)

The bad news: I don't have time to do more crafting :( The exam on Tuesday is closing in on me, and I'm way behind with the reading. I'm still depressed from yesterday's argument, and today I haven't read anything, so that just makes it worse. To top it off, we're having guests tonight (in about ten minutes), so there goes my chance of catching up a little reading. PLUS the Olympic curling final starts at midnight and lasts for 2.5 hours, and I have to see it, so tomorrow probably won't be much better than today :/ This means I most likely won't have time to finish my needle felting project by Monday, but I'll see how far I get tonight and post the result tomorrow anyway. It's almost done, but all the details are missing...

Well, our company just arrived, so I have to go...

Snow days & needle felting

A few days ago the snow had been melting for a while and it looked like spring was on the way, just like my crocheted groundhog predicted :) Now, however, winter is back again. With a vengeance. It snowed for 24 hours a couple of days ago, and yesterday everything was chaos. The traffic stood still and the power was out some places. The plough has left huge piles of dirty snow on the sidewalks, walking to school feels like walking through narrow alleys. This is how our street looks right now:

Can you believe that underneith that mountain there actually is a car? It's a fairly small sports car, but still... The poor thing's been there all winter, I have no idea where the owner is. I placed my boyfriend by the heap for scale :)

Dug up my wool and felting needles today and I have started my latest project for the new hobby challenge. But, since I want the result to be a surprise, I'll just post some pictures of my first attempts at needle felting from a few years ago. A horse, cow and a pig, a few sheep, a hen, rabbit and a ladybug. They have a sort of boxy shape, because they've been stuffed in a bag for a long time.

Anyway, my current project entails a framework of pipe cleaners, and I'm going to make it a lot more detailed than these old creatures, so I hope I get it right. If I do, maybe I'll try making one of the dogs from this cute book:

It's in Norwegian, but the English edition is called "Fleece Dog" by Nobuko Nagakubo. The book has instructions for 20 different dog breeds, including an Afghan Hound, a Poodle, Chihuahua, Scottish Terrier and a Dalmatian. I'd like to try making a German  Shepherd :) There are color charts for each dog, and silhouettes that clearly show the shape of the dogs.

All I need is a few more colors and a set of these things, whatever they are called in English...

Well, not a dog brush like this, but the kind you use to straighten out the wool fibers. Handy for mixing colors, too. They're just a bit expensive, so they'll have to wait a while :/