More Voting!

I entered my pink pony costume in the contest on craftster. If you'd like to vote for me (or anyone, there's some pretty cool costumes) check it out here.

I'm the pink pony!The rest of the photos are in the photoset here.


We picked names for Secret Santa at work today. I am totally knitting slippers, I know that's what Judi wants!

Vote!

For my bag!

It's called "The Answer is Blowin in the Wind"

Craftster Challenge #20 - My entry

I made the whole thing from recycled and thrifted materials (because of course, thrift stores keep treasures out of landfills). The printed and plain white fabric I found just as weird shaped ends hanging with all the sheets in one thrift store, and on another occasion, found a bag of webbing, and a bag of crazy 70's pom-pom trim. The only thing that isn't reused is the iron-on on the front, and the thread.

I had quite a few sources of inspiration, and I figure I'll explain the whole thing

Well, I knew I had to enter this challenge, as we already shop at a grocery store where you have to bring your own bags, or pay 5 cents each for the plastic ones. So we bring our own bags of course, and we definitely need some more!

Immediately I knew I wanted to have something related to wind power on the front. My BF works in the wind power industry, so it is an issue that is personal to me. His work has sent him on several trips to visit wind farms and he always takes great pictures, so I decided to use one of his pictures for my tote bag. And after going through his bumper stickers and badges with windpower slogans, I thought they were all pretty cheesy. So I decided to use the lyric I did, kind of change its intended meaning a bit. I'm sure Bob Dylan would approve .

So I took the photo, my slogan, and went off to work in photoshop. I'm no expert at it or anything, but I had a lot of fun tweaking the colours, making it look like the turbine and trees were glowing and stuff. I'm pretty happy with how the image turned out.






For the shape of the bag, I sort of based it on the PC 'Canada's Greenest Shopping Bag' which you can get for 99 cents at any grocery store that sells President's Choice brand stuff.

And I also wanted to include pockets like the ones on a tote bag that my friend brought back from Japan for me. They are awesome pockets, so I copied them!

This is me holding the pockets up out of the bag so you can see:




Theres lots of tucks and stuff, and I am *super* proud of how they turned out. In the process of pocket-making, you can see the pleats:




And the finished pockets:




The pockets in use:



Here's a few more shots from different angles - the back:




The inside, empty:




And the inside, full. Well, not totally full, it can still hold way more:




All the seams are reinforced three times so it doesn't break, and so it holds its structure better, like the PC bag. And the pom-pom trim is sewn in between the layers at the top, then tacked down on the outside so it doesn't get in the way of putting groceries and stuff inside.

The bag made its debut this weekend, it came camping with me. It held my biggest warmest sweaters, and I am impressed at the amount I was able to cram into it.
Hope fully the last image above is clickable to a very large downloadable image you can use for your own tote bag. Make sure to flip the image before printing.

Craftster Swap

Well my first Craftster swap is officially finished now. I am really happy with how everything turned out, and the stuff I got was amazing. I took a ton of pictures, and now that my partner Susanne (TAOJ) and I have both sent and received our packages, I can post pictures.

Way too many pictures...

First, here is the wonderful package I got from Susanne. All together:


First was a magic yarn ball in the most beautiful shade of pink, that Susanne dyed herself:


I immediately unwound it to find the treasures inside:


There's a mask, kool-aid for dying yarn (with instructions), and eyes to use in dolls. The eyes made a great rattling sound wound up inside the yarn, which made me even more curious to get to the middle. here's a close-up of the eyes:


And then wound the yarn back into a ball. I am not sure what I am going to make with it yet... any suggestions?





Then there were two little books. The first has two recipes for chocolatey stuff:





And the second is a mini scrapbook of my guinea pigs! TAOJ stalked me good! It is so awesome, you get to see every page!











And finally, a beautiful knitting needle roll, with flower applique:


The inside:


There are also stitch markers tied onto the end of the tie for the needle roll. At first I thought they were charms on the end of the tie, but Susanne pointed out what they really were.

And here is the package that I sent to her. First, a picture of everything together, taken by Susanne:



And the pictures of everything before I sent it:



The close-up was of a Hello Kitty dishcloth I knit for TAOJ, since she said she likes Hello Kitty. Hopefully the character shows up okay in the picture, its hard to photograph:




A wallet with cherry print. It's lined with lime green, and has two small pockets, and one larger zippered pocket. I thought I'd made peace with bias tape after the last apron I made, but apparently I was wrong. The bias tape is a little wonky, but for the sake of my sanity, and as a monument to my ongoing battle with bias tape, it stays a little wonky:




And this is a close-up of the button I made to close the wallet, using a phrase TAOJ suggested. I did it in illustrator and tried to make it match the fabric:




And the last small item is a set of buttons (badges, pins, whatever you call them!) There's two done in illustator, two done by hand with markers and gel pens, and one is fabric. The words on them are both things I thought up, and things my partner requested:




And finally the medium (large?) item - a skirt! TAOJ listed brown as her favourite colour, and said she liked retro fabrics too, and I thought the teddy bear print sort of had that feel. It's made from a free pattern from fitzpatterns.com, but I fudged the pattern to get the panel of contrasting fabric. It's a wrap skirt with a kangaroo pocket. I really hope it fits her, it's adjustable, but still, I am nervous!

The front:


The back:


Thanks Susanne, and thanks Kishcrafts for organizing!