Hardware Store Necklaces

I got on the subway at the end of a workday, and sat down. A woman was sitting across from me, scrolling through her phone. She was well-dressed, maybe on her way to some kind of event, not on the way home from work. Lipstick sharp. Blue dress with a jacket in a slightly different shade of blue. Blue nail polish. A graphic animal-ish print purse. Oversized glasses, a dark bob.

And a statement necklace.

The necklace fascinated me. The necklace is why I surreptiously took her picture. Look at it! It's a piece of cheap hardware with a couple of carabiners and a lenght of chunky chain. You could go to the hardware store and pick up all the bits you need to make your own.

 Hitching Ring: 

 

Carabiners:

 

 Chain: 

 

What it reminded me of was Anni Albers. Albers was a textile artist and printmaker, who made a number of necklaces out of grosgrain ribbon and plain flat washers. The first time I ever saw one of the necklaces on exhibit, I detoured home past the hardware store and bought a pack of washers, knowing that I had grosgrain at home. It's easy to do - but if you don't have the desire to figure it out yourself, the Albers Foundation helpfully sells a kit. Who needs Tiffany when the hardware store has everything?

The Garment

It looks medieval. You look like a hippie. That garment could have been in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I love it! You made that?

My absolute favorite baby present - back almost 11 years ago - was a blanket made out of recycled felted wool sweaters. It's simple - six inch squares zig-zagged together, all shades of off white, dense and soft and subtle. It was made by Crispina, a woman who - back in the day - used to have a flourishing cottage industry making blankets out of sweaters. In recent years, though, she's scaled back the production and sales business, and now does workshops to teach other people how to repurpose clothing into other things. Because it was an itch I had to scratch, last spring I went to one of her all-day workshops, the sweater/sweatshirt chopshop. Crispina supplies everything you need, and by day's end, my garment was largely complete. It probably would have been finished that day had I not decided that it needed to be knee-length, but finally, after some more snipping and stitching, it's actually finished, six months later.

The schtick is that you cut up two sweatshirts so that you keep the neck/shoulders of one, and the shoulders/sleeves of another. Everything else flows from there. I cut the pieces for the "skirt" in a more-or-less trapezoid shape, so that when they were pieced together, they flared out a bit. The trim piece at the bottom is actually the bottom of two sweatshirts flipped upside down. It's all hand sewn, with six strand cotton embroidery thread, except for the hook & eye tape - that's too stiff to do by hand, so I took it to a costume shop and had them run a zigzag. I probably could have done that myself, except that my sewing machine is old and cranky. Besides, standing hip to hip at the worktable in the shop, figuring out the thread color and making sure the tape was pinned right, you get lines of dialogue like Let me just move that codpiece for you.

I'm so pleased with how it came out. And the funny thing is, people comment on it every time I wear it. Yeah, my 10 year old wishes I wouldn't leave the house in it, but everyone else loves it.

Thread and Buttons

A couple of months ago, I bought one of Julochka's stitched up photos because I thought it would be the perfect birthday present for a quilter friend. Then, though, it needed a frame. I rummaged around and found a frame that was the right size and shape, but had a god-awful hearts and flowers paint job. Bang zoom, I painted it green. Bang zoom, I got out the Mod Podge and stuck buttons all over it.



Bang zoom, I really like how it came out.

I think she's getting it for Christmas though; her birthday's come and gone...

Patchwork and Denim

Besides ribbons, I picked up a bunch of other weird bits in the aftermath of the costume shop going under: fabric glue, zippers, 75 iron-on roses and a odd swath of cotton patchwork that no one recognized.

I turned the patchwork into a cover for a throw pillow, and was left with a strip of material about 5" wide.

Then the girl demanded a new outfit for Ivy, so I made her a black skirt out of the sleeve of a shirt of mine that had ended up in the rag bag. And then she wanted a bag to carry around thus and such, but it had to look like Ivy's denim bag. I keep way too many old blue jeans around, because one day they're going to come in handy - like when you need to make a denim bag! I cut the end off a leg, just below the knee, stitched it closed at the cut side (with a box bottom even, though you can't tell from the photo), folded over the cuff end and used Velcro for a closure. What to use for a strap? Aha! The leftover strip of patchwork turned into an admirable strap - perfectly in keeping with the "San Francisco in 1974" era of her two American Girl dolls.



Oh, and now I have 74 iron-on roses left.

Ribbons

The costume shop in my building went out of business, a casualty of a bad economy, bead-work outsourced to China, more shows in street clothes, and expensive labor. It's a damned shame, and makes me wistful on a number of levels.

On the other hand, I'm never buying Christmas ribbon again, and my packages will be the best dressed ever.

Sugru

So, the sweater error. I decided to punt and put in a zipper, so I wouldn't have to learn to make the damned buttonholes. I lucked into a zipper from the costume shop that was downstairs in my building, but, you get what you pay for: it was too long. So I cut it off. Alas, I cut it off without enough room to turn it properly so that it would form a stop at the end, meaning that the zipper pull was liable to go flying off. That'd be one thing for a sensible grown-up, but a chance not worth taking with a seven year old.

What to do? Sugru!

I read about Sugru sometime last fall, somewhere on the web*, and I promptly sent the link to my husband thinking his tinkering self would love it. Time went by; I forgot about it. But! Bestill my heart - I found some in my Christmas stocking! It is the coolest. It comes in tiny little packets, each holding a couple of teaspoons of this stuff that's sort of like sticky Play-Doh. You form it as needed, and over a day or so, it cures into silicone.

So, I made stoppers at the top of the sweater zipper so the zipper slide won't fly off.



And then, because once the packet of Sugru is open you need to use it all up, I made feet for a little ceramic bowl, to replace the felt feet it had - because the felt feet can't go in the dishwasher and the Sugru can.



And I made two pins - brooches? - out of cobbled together bits and pieces of stuff that was kicking around, just because I could!



It's insanely wonderful, the Sugru. It's only problem is that the packets have a shelf life, and mine has to be used by mid-May. I have more than enough left to fiddle around with, so if you'd like to try it, say so in the comments, before the end of the week. I'll send three packets out into the world, so more people can experience the joy of Sugru.




* I can't find the reference, but I think it was something that Katherine Belsey wrote about.

The Sweater

I finally finished the sweater for the girl. Well, I actually finished it about a month ago, but then I did something stupid - something that I managed to fix, but I'll tell you all about that tomorrow*. In the meantime, here - at last - is the sweater on the girl, the girl having put together one of her inimitable outfits.

The reason the stripes look kooky is because the yarn was multi-colored, and it's a top down sweater pattern, pretty much knit all in one piece, and I was basically knitting back and forth from placket to placket. Oh well. Another lesson learned: multi-colored yarn behaves strangely unless you are knitting in the round.

In any case, I am happy to have completed another item off my FIFTY list.




*It's craft week here at the ranch. I'm in a flurry of projects.

Be My Valentine!

I could grumble about the silly "shoebox snack" project that the second grader has to do for Valentine's Day, but instead I have a gift for you. Your kid is probably expected to bring in valentines for the whole class, right? And if you're like me, you have zero interest in buying some ugly branded character cards at the drugstore, right? You could do what we did when I was a kid, and glue cut-out hearts on a doily, or you could be more twenty-first century crafty clever.

I'd seen cute cellphone valentines in two places - a folding one on Family Fun, and a flat one on Dandee (which I found through The Crafty Crow). We could have cobbled something together based on the sketchy instructions given in those two sources, but instead, my husband made a template that let us print out four on a two-sided sheet, with the only trimming to be done on the ends and the corners. Snip, trim, cut and glue, and we had 24 valentines done in a jiffy.

If you'd like to make up a mess of cell phone valentines, download the pdf I put up on Scribd, get yourself some card stock and find some candy buttons - the little sugar blobs on a strip of adding machine tape. The pdf includes a fill-in box for your kid's name, and each of the four valentines has different text. Experiment with your printer to figure out how to get page 1 and page 2 properly back to back. You'll probably need to make a couple of test runs - do that on plain paper so you don't waste card stock - and then you'll want to run out several copies of page 1 and then run them through again for page 2. We used yellow card stock because we had it; silver would be more cell-phone-like. Once they're all printed, you'll just need to trim the ends, cut the phones apart, fold, and round off the corners. Then get to work with a glue stick and add the candy keypad. Some of this is work you'll have to do, but some of it is certainly kid-appropriate - depending on the kid's age.

Have fun!

Transformation

Remember how I said that I'd découpaged an old stool as a Christmas present? The recipient's parents sent me some pictures, since I'd forgotten to take any before wrapping.



All the greenery is from magazine advertisements, catalogs, invitations or brochures. I save seas of green grass, aerial landscapes, stylized leaves, water droplets. I collect stuff without text or figure or structure - but with pattern and texture and color.

The block letters of the name are cut from a glossy brochure that introduced the Gehry building at Bard College - its undulating roof of shimmery steel shingles abstractly blue in contrast to the greens underneath.

I didn't do much to prepare the stool - I roughed up the flat surfaces with some sandpaper, and set to work with the Mod Podge. I'm pleased with how it came out - but even better? So's the nine month old recipient.

Upcycling

I don't know when I learned the word upcycle - but it wasn't long ago. However, I love it - it's what I like to do! Take something with little intrinsic value and transform it into something new. A quilt made of scrap fabric, a knitted hat made of odds and ends of yarn, a wool sweater felted and remade into a bag. It's a particularly thrifty version of craftiness: there's little or no need to purchase raw materials.

For years, I've been collecting pieces of scrap paper - pretty bits torn out of catalogs or magazines. The things that appeal to me have pattern, color, texture - no text, no figures, no illustrations. They're architectural details, oriental rugs, grasses, paisleys, shimmering seas. Finally, I got around to buying some Mod Podge and began transforming everyday objects.

I took a handsome turquoise and blue chocolate box, covered the top and bottom with a wallpapery pattern, added some rectangles of oriental rugs, and ended up with a gift box for a handmade scarf.

I covered an old stool with rough squares of leafy greens and distant landscapes, added a name in blue block letters cut from the undulating roof of a Gehry building, and produced a personalized step stool for a not-yet-walking baby (which I wrapped before I took its picture).

And the little wooden box that had once held a tasty wheel of Epoisses got a new life with some (different) oriental rugs.

There is the danger that I will découpage everything in sight.

Eco-Monograms in the Lunchbox

Everything has a story.

Years ago, my sister-in-law was working for the company that was assembling the land to build what's now a fancy hotel in New York. One of the properties that got bought and demolished was an old, funky hotel. In the brief moment between the last paying guests and the wrecking ball, we got access to the hotel and swooped through - acquiring leaded glass windows, kitchen ladles, #10 envelopes, oval platters, champagne buckets, a ceramic table lamp, a mess of stainless steel flatware, and a couple of bricks of plain white cotton dinner napkins, still wrapped in plastic fresh from the cleaners.

They're nothing special, the napkins. They'd look fine starched and pressed in a dimly lit dining room, but in the bright lights of my kitchen, lo these many years later, they're showing their liver spots, yellowy stains of indeterminate origin, resistant to bleach. I don't really care - I have so many that we can use freshly laundered cloth napkins with every meal and not run out before laundry day rolls round again. And given the amount of ketchup that gets blotted up on a regular basis, no napkin would emerge unscathed.

Back in September, when I was agonizing over what to do about lunch for the newly minted kindergartner, I assembled a bunch of plastic containers of various sizes, and some plastic utensils, and a little thermos - that is, lots of things to send back and forth to school. And I decided that, as long as the lunch box and all the bits and pieces were going back and forth, I'd send her to school with a cloth napkin.

I pulled out five of the hotel napkins, got some fabric paint and a stencil kit, painted her initials onto one corner of each napkin, and doodled on the other three corners with colored Sharpie. [Word of advice: Sharpie doesn't come out when you want it to come out, but it doesn't hold up terribly well in the way that I used it here - it bled a little and the color faded.]

You know what? It's March, and those five cloth napkins are still in circulation - which means that we've not used more than 100 paper napkins. Score!

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These cloth napkins are brought to you by Nature's Source and the Parent Bloggers Network, and I approved this message.

Brandied Fruits And Felted Ponchos

Not because of the economy, but because of an inborn general frugality coupled with a crafty urge, I managed to purchase very few Christmas presents this year. There were a number of things culled out of the cellar (yes, I regift!), there were things I found at the thrift shop when I was donating some stuff we no longer needed, and there were things I made.

The two little girls of my acquaintance (Miss M. and her six year old cousin) both got ponchos. Months ago, I'd seen a poncho for sale on the website of an Atlanta based craft cooperative, and I said "I can do that". I felted a couple of shetland wool sweaters, cut them out freehand, blanket-stitched the edges, and added some appliques made from scrap felted wool (from last year's projects).

Here's one of the sweaters, showing how it was cut. I also cut the neckhole just along the transition to the collar ribbing, though if it had been a v-neck sweater, that would have been completely unnecessary. The V at the bottom starts just above the ribbing along the lower edge of the sweater, and the indent under the arms is at the point where the sleeve meets the body.

The blue sweater had been a cable-knit, but once it was felted, I decided I liked the inside better - it had a more interesting appearance. The points of the star are plain pearly shirt buttons, and both ponchos are blanket-stitched along the edge with black wool. Miss M. got the one with the star, and her cousin got the one with the heart.

Funnily enough, that same Atlanta craft cooperative has just opened a shop in the next town over from us. I went in there before Christmas and found a rack of the ponchos, and felt oh so smug for having made my own.

For grown-ups who needed gifts, I started some brandied fruits in June, with 13 ounces of perfect strawberries.

By mid-July, I'd added sour cherries, blueberries, apricots and plums. And in August, peaches and nectarines went into the jar.

Last week, I decanted it into seven assorted jars and gussied them up as gifts with scraps of ribbon and tags made from last year's Christmas cards received. I kept one for myself, and I'm looking forward to spooning some of it over a dish of vanilla ice-cream.

Repurposed > Hats & Blankets

So last weekend, while I was at my mother's house and casting about for things with which to occupy myself, I found myself raiding a drawer of tee-shirts to turn them into hats for babies in Haiti. I swear, there must be two hundred tee-shirts in her house - but that I had the time to cut and sew more.

Two tee-shirts, a red one and a yellow one, became four little baby hats - one yellow, one red, and two half and half. But then, the remaining pieces of the shirts cried out to me, "you can't throw us out!", so with a rolling cutter (a genius device if ever there were one), I cut out a mess of 5" squares, sewed them together, backed it with a piece of a flannel sheet, and tied it with red embroidery thread. Ta da!

You may notice that there's some blue & white striped fabric in that there quilt, but no matching hats. Well, that's because the first two hats I tried, using a blue & white polo shirt, were a complete disaster because I failed the cardinal rule of sewing: I sewed the right side to the wrong side. And since it's a jersey knit, it was just impossible to rip the seam so I gave up.

Today, the hats and quilt are going in the mail to Maine, and from there they'll be packed up to be sent to Haiti, to be included in Safe Birthing Kits. These kits - consisting of plastic sheeting, hand sanitizer, a sterile piece of string and razor blade, and these newborn baby caps - have the potential to reduce infant and maternal mortality, and give babies a safer, healthier start.

There is something inordinately gratifying about repurposing a tee-shirt to help make the world a slightly better place.

(crossposted at Did You Buy That New?)

Craftiness

Christmas is truly over: the tree got picked up from the curb this morning. And since all of my handcrafted gifts have been distributed, and the "pay it forward" prizes have been mailed, it's time for the reveal.

A while back, I came across Alterknits, a book of offbeat knitting projects, which included instructions for a tote bag made out of an old sweater. I loved the idea. Some years ago, I had the idea to make throw pillows out of old sweaters. And one of my favorite baby presents was a blanket made of felted squares of old sweaters. So I started haunting eBay and Goodwill for appealing cheap wool sweaters, and got to work.

I ended up making six tote bags - all different. One had a lining and an outside pocket, two had webbing handles, some had button/loop closures.

And it turned out that the cut-off sleeves and collars were useful too: I turned them into little bags, for an iPod or cellphone or whatever. Of the two purple ones here, the smaller one was made from the turtleneck of a sweater and the larger one was the forearm part of a sleeve (turned inside out).

The whole project was a lot of fun - even if I did have to run the washing machine over and over again with HOT water. And the cellar ended up full of lint. But I was enormously pleased with myself, and feedback from the recipients has been good: my sister-in-law is worried that she's going to wear hers out from overuse.

If you're at all interested or inspired, the directions for these totebags are here.

A Different Pay It Forward

I've been furiously fabricating Christmas presents, which I can't discuss in any detail because all or most of the recipients read this here blog. (Hi!) Anyway, I'm on a roll, and I've got the supplies, so, when I saw Dawn's post this morning about a "Pay It Forward" homemade object exchange, I had to sign up.

So - the first 3 commenters to commit to doing a give away of something homemade will get something homemade from me.

“I will send a handmade gift to the first 3 people who leave a comment on my blog requesting to join this Pay It Forward exchange. I don’t know what that gift will be and you may not receive it tomorrow or next week, but you will receive it within 365 days, that is my promise! The only thing you have to do in return is pay it forward by making the same promise on your blog.”

For the first 3 people that respond I have a handmade thing that I’ll send you, sometime in January. Your job?

1. Post a comment here and make sure I have (or can find) your email address so that I can contact you for your mailing address.
2. Put this on your own blog, and send something you make to the first 3 people that respond.