Craftiness of 2011 :)

First of all, let me wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! I know I'm a little late, but we've had our family visiting for Christmas, and after they all left, I kind of collapsed and haven't done anything productive for days. But I'm back now, rested and ready for the new year ahead. Will have lots of studying to do this spring (taking an extra class to make up for skipping one this fall), but hopefully I'll be able to blog a little as well :)

To make up for neglecting my blog the past months, here is a summary of the craftiness I did last year :) I didn't think I'd accomplished much, but looking back, I realize that I've done quite a lot! Starting with my own designs in chronological order:

Nesting Love Birds, a free pattern for Valentine's Day.

Three Cute Little Bear Dudes, all made after the original bear pattern (Forest Dwellers vol.1)

Cute Little Dudes - Forest Dwellers vol.4. All birds :)

Cute Little Dudes - Alien Invaders.

In April I got a smart phone, so I knitted a protective purse for it as soon as I could. Important not to scratch the touch screen! :)

Great Big Wasp.

Great Big Aphid.

Finally got round to finishing the Great Big (male) Firefly (to the left). Sorry about the pale picture, I'll never take photos in bright sunlight again! No pattern yet...

Great Big Crane Fly. Longest bug legs ever! Pattern will be done soon, I promise :)

My aunt asked me to make two little bugs for her, so I made these. Mini versions of the Great Big ones. I'm working on the patterns, but I have to remake them to get proper pictures. Hopefully the patterns will be done before Easter :)

Cute Little Dudes - Trick or Treat! vol.1. I had another set planned, but ran out of time (too much school work!). Will save the second set for next Halloween :)

A friend of mine wanted me to make a great big dragon that he could give to a kid for his birthday, so I made this. It's huge! Arms and legs are jointed. I was told the kid's birthday was in October, so I rushed to finish it, but then it turned out the day was not until November. Oh well. At least the kid was happy. From what I heard, the dragon was being fed dinner as soon as it arrived. That's a good sign, right?

Crocheted and felted witch's cauldron, a free pattern for Halloween. I had originally planned to make up lots of creepy stuff to put in it (eyeballs, severed fingers, bat wings, etc.), but once again I ran out of time. Will save the ideas for next time :)

As a Christmas present, I made this heart (from my free heart pattern) that I filled with nice smelling things and put in a pretty bowl with some pretty white stones.

And the very last thing I finished last year was a remake of the Kitty Princess, the first pattern I ever made and published. Gave it to a cousin for Christmas. I am in the process of rewriting the pattern and adding new photos, and hopeully it'll be done before school starts in about two weeks :)

So. That was all of my designs. I did some other things too, but a lot of the projects I started last year are still in progress, so I have no pictures to show you... I will post the few that I have, though :) Again, in chronological order:

In the beginning of January I took out Rose Langlitz's book Tasty Crochet and started crocheting some food. I was obsessed for a while, but I only managed to complete two things, a pear and a salami/lettuce sandwich:

I have more half-finished food items lying around, but no pictures... 

After that I knitted a new bag for my rpg dice, the Dice Bag of Doom! Pattern free for download on Ravelry.

My next obsession was bugs, as Lesley Stanfield's new book came out, 75 birds, butterflies & beautiful beasties. I made a black slug, plus some butterflies and caterpillars that I pinned to a cork board:

Then I moved on to Hansi Singh's bugs. I started with a praying mantis that never got finished, but I made earthworms, a sea slug, Kraken (giant squid) and a Blackdevil anglerfish:

 

 

Again, I have lots of WiPs that hopefully some day will be done. They are just too pretty to be stashed away in a bag...

During the summer I got started on June Gilbank's dinosaurs. I think I've started about five of them, but none are done yet. It's just silly, really. On one (the Parasaurolophus), all that remains is sewing on one last leg! Sigh. I think I have an aversion against finishing things :/

I found this really cool knitting pattern on Ravelry, of a dancing goddess figure:

The pattern itself is very simple (knit in the round, and it consists of only two parts, so very little sewing is required), but I wasn't quite happy with my knitting (uneven stitches and a few holes - I'm no good at knitting in the round on double-pointed needles!), so I decided to felt it. Unfortunately I felted it after stuffing, so it almost didn't felt at all. It just became sort of lumpy and disproportionate. I wanted to make more of these, but I'll have to do it differently next time.

The last project I finished last year (not counting the Christmas presents) was this little dice bag:

The pattern is Deep Sea Flower Dice Bag, found HERE. Well, to be honest, it isn't actually 100% finished, since I haven't made the cord yet. I just got so tired of knitting with that stupid yarn that has absolutely NO stretch what so ever, I just tied it with a piece of yarn to be done with it. Love the pattern and the bag, though. Plan to make more some time, when I can get my hands on some lovely multi-colored Noro, which the pattern is designed for.

And that was all. Whew! Longest post ever... (It's taken over four hours to write!) Well. My plan now is to finish the patterns for the things I made last year, preferably as soon as possible. I'll have a lot less time once school starts, and I think that if I don't finish them now, I probably never will. So one of my new year's resolutions is to finish all my Bugs, Dudes and any other patterns before I start any new ones. Have lots of projects going right now, but no new Bugs or Dudes before the others are done. Period. Will try to post again soon :)

Happy Halloween + free pattern :)

Hi! How are you all doing? Looking forward to Halloween this weekend? I've been really busy and stressed out these past weeks, but I've still managed to cook up a new free pattern for you! A crocheted and felted witch's cauldron, complete with lid :) 

It's a fairly simple pattern, and if you are just a little quicker than I am (which doesn't take much), you can easily make this up in a couple of evenings and have it done and filled with goodies by Monday :)

You find the pattern on my other blog. I would have posted it last night (to give you more time to make it), but I had trouble uploading the pictures, and in the end I had to go to bed. But now it's finally up (and added to Ravelry's database), and I can get on with my math homework. Have an assignment due Wednesday, and I'm clueless... So you probably won't hear more from me in about a week, when I might have another pattern ready. We'll see :)

Halloween Dudes

Anyone else getting ready for Halloween? I plan Halloween patterns every year, but this is the first time I have actually managed to get a pattern ready in good time before the holiday. Not much use making a pattern if no one has time to make it...

So here they are, an all new set of Cute Little Dudes: Trick or Treat vol.1. The pattern is available both from Etsy and Ravelry :)


There is a scarecrow, a vampire bat and a cute little imp. The bat wings require some shaping (i.e. counting), but other than that, these Dudes are on the same difficulty level as all the others. Hope you like them :)

Ps.: I have another set planned, but time will tell if I can get them ready within reasonable time for anyone else to make them. Have lots of homework to to as well...

Weaving

Look, I have a loom!

I used to do a lot of tapestry weaving about ten years ago, and recently I've started to miss it a lot. Unfortunately the frame/loom is stashed at my grandmother's house, and it's way to big and unwieldy for me to keep here, so I went out and got this little one instead. Remember making lots of tiny rugs with wool yarn in kindergarten, it was so much fun :D

I know I can't really make fancy tapestries with this thing, but small motifs and potholders and stuff. So far I've made this little test strip with scrap yarn, but I want to get more shuttles (or really long needles) and work with several colors at a time. But honestly, the shuttle that came with the loom is horrible, so I need to find alternatives soon or I'll go crazy... Any suggestions? :)

More Dudes!

Silly me - I forgot to mention a whole set of Dudes! Forest Dwellers vol. 4 :) These were also made this spring, and if I remember correctly they were actually finished before the Alien Dudes. Yeah, I've had a lot on my mind lately, important things slip away...

The mallard and the bald eagle had been in progress since last summer, but the owl was made this spring to complete the set, which this time consists only of birds. The bald eagle was a request/challenge from a friend :)

Little buggies

Last summer my aunt who works in a kindergarten asked me to make her two little bugs, a bumblebee and a beetle. She liked my Great Big Bugs, but she wanted something smaller to illustrate a song or something, so I started these two. I didn't have time to finish them completely before the summer was over, so I brought them back to my apartment to give them eyes and legs and then mail them back up to my aunt. 

Well, that didn't happen... The bugs managed to get lost on the bottom of one of my yarn stash boxes, and I forgot all about them. I found them again when I was packing up my yarn to go home this summer, so I brought them along to finish so I could finally give them to my aunt.

I did it, but only just! I sewed the legs on the last one late at night the day before I was leaving again... But they were finished, and my aunt is very pleased. Haven't heard anything about what the kids think about them yet.

I wrote down the instructions as I went, but I've discovered that I didn't take very good pictures, so I'll need to make them again if I'm going to publish the patterns. For the new ones I want to use safety eyes, but I don't have the right colors (in the right size), so I'm waiting for a shipment of eyes before I start remaking them. Hopefully they're here by the end of this week :) I'm thinking about making these little bugs in sets of three, and so far I have ideas for four sets. Either that, or I'll publish a gazillion of single bugs, with a discount if you buy more of them. What do you think, would you be interested in the patterns?

Three Great Big Bugs at once :)

I finished three Bugs this summer, a wasp, an aphid and the male firefly. I started the firefly shortly after I finished the female last fall, and the other two I started some time around Christmas. The bodies and most of their body parts had been done for months when I finally sat down and finished them. You'd think that assembly is the easy part... :P

Anyway, here they are:

The wasp is modeled after the Common wasp (Vespula vulgaris), and it's my most complicated pattern so far, with all the color changes on the body. I tried to keep it as easy as possible, though, with the patterning and the decreases/increases on separate rounds :)

The aphid is modeled after the Rose aphid that I've seen on my grandmother's roses. They are mainly green, but they also come in red/pink or black, so feel free to experiment with the colors on this one :) There are a couple of rounds of front post single crochet on the body of this Bug, but apart from that, it's not a complicated pattern.

The firefly is the same species as the first one (the common glowworm), but the male and female look very different. The male is a fairly ordinary brown beetle with a glowing bum, while the female stays more like the larva her whole life, and never develops wings.

The patterns for the wasp and aphid are available on Ravelry, and I'll be adding them to Etsy soon. I'm still not quite finished with the firefly pattern, because I've been so busy with my exam lately. Things should calm down soon, so I hope to have it ready before the weekend :) I've thought about listing the two fireflies as a set, though I'm not really sure how this would work on Ravelry. Do they allow you to post the same patterns twice, in different combinations? I'll have to do a little research and get back to that. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the aphid and the wasp :)

Craft store sale!

The craft store had a sale today, 70% off on lots of stuff, and I got a whole lot of different beads for less than a dollar per pack! :D I bought five boxes of 15mm wood beads in all the colors they had:

Wax beads in two sizes:

These really heavy long beads, one in lead gray and one in black:

This awesome bug pendant that I intend to make into a necklace:

And a set of small plastic containers for odd beads or other small things:

Yay for sales! :)