This ain't halfway camp

Untitled
Originally uploaded by fairysari

The biggest project of the year is finally done - our living space. Instead of camping in a hot stuffy tent this year at Burning Man, I built a cube. It's a 10'wx10'dx7'h cubular tent made out of old tents. It's got lots of doors and windows, which all zip up to keep the dust out. I'm hoping It'll stay cooler with lots more room for air to circulate, and not holding our body heat in such a small space. The old tent was *just* big enough to fit our double air mattress, and sit up. Fancy mec winterized tent. Now we'll be able to stand up and keep our bags inside.

The Halfway Camp banner was the last of the necessary projects. Well, I actually made it back in May, I just added the patch at the top that says "THIS AIN'T". See, at CTMF (our early summer camping trip) we're Halfway Camp, because we always have cool art and fires and its the halfway warm-up pit stop for lots of people on their way back to their tents. At Burning Man, we don't do thing half-assed, so, This Ain't Halfway Camp.

It's that time of year...

The man burns in three weeks from today. Which means we leave in two weeks. Which is frickin' awesome! Also awesome is the fact that Beth has decided to come with us, which bring us up to a group of six now. I happen to think that six is the perfect number, since we rented two pickup, and now it makes more sense to get a second hotel room on the way back (only three people per shower!). And we're building a hexagonal shade structure, which will be a living room in the middle, with one tent connected to each side. So now we'll have four tents, then one side will have a truck full of supplies, and the other side is the entrance. Oh and then girls aren't outnumbered anymore! And Beth is really fun and awesome and easy to get along with.

We've got all the sheets cut for the shade structure now, and are in the process of sewing it up now. First have to lay it out in the park to make sure it looks pretty!

Of course I've been busy crafting a whole bunch of stuff lately, to bring to burning man.

I knit a pair of legwarmers out of some leftover colours of Noro. Good for nighttime playa wear, on when its cold, anf taken off easily if its warm.


On the first day while we're building the shade structure, we'll wear white to keep cool. So I made this dress, using Burda 7808. The fabric is so pretty and has an irridescent mandala pattern that I'm sure will look great in the playa sun. Unfortunately the fabric doesn't photograph well.


And I knit this halter top out of Bamboo yarn, with sequins. Daytime playa wear!


And this is the basic slip dress from the book Knitting Lingerie Style. It took a while, but I can't wait to wear it at Burning Man!There's lots more stuff that I have't taken pictures of. Some thing I want to wait and take pictures of them on the playa, and other things I probably won't photograph at all. You'll have to be there to see them!

Burnin back in mind...

So it's summer, which means knitting is seeming less appealing than sewing lately, especially with burning man just around the corner. Ravelry had taken my blogging urges away, since I can updae all my knitting progress there. But there's nowhere for stuff that isn't knit, so...

I've made a few things already for the playa, the first is a night-time dress. I found the fabric for $2/yard, and it has a one direction stretch. Not sure the fibre, probably some sort of blend. I think it will look really good under black light. I used McCalls 4769 but I shortened it a bit, used snaps instead of buttons (love!), added a bit of velcro to the opening right at the waist, and added some sequins and reflective trim to the back.


I also bought a pair of 3/4 length black shiny almost rubberized tights that look awesome with this dress. Here's a close up of the fabric and trim:



Last year we all got together and made our playa coats one night, then made polymer clay beads and jewelery the next day. I had made a cane, which I actually still have a big chunk of, and it may make a reappearance. This year I wanted to go for a different look, but knew Bryan would probably wnat to make some polymer clay beads again, so I got mostly metallic colours of clay this time. I spent a few hours making some pendants a few weeks ago.



And one with the edge of a measuring tape for scale:



I have more stuff to come - some stuff is already finished or nearly finished, and there's lots more ideas, and lots of great fabric and notions I've been collecting lately. I've got Simplicity 2966 partly done, and this pile of fabric and ribbon is now a dress:

Lots o' pink fun fur - Halloween!

Before Burning Man I bought a bunch of cheap fake hair.I started making dreadfalls but it was taking forever with my poor weak kettle. So I still have a ton of it left, mostly in pink, but also some blue and a maroon-ish colour. A pony tail seemed like the obvious thing to make,so I decided my Halloween costume would be a horsey. A pink one, with blue accents, due to the the colour of the hair.


So taking a bunch of pink hair in my pocket and holding it up to different fabrics, in many different fabric stores,I must have looked like a lunatic. I originally wanted something with a smoother texture, sleek like a horse, but I think the fabric I got is great now. The colour is perfect, and it has the texture of a horse in winter. But softer! :) For the accent colour I went with sparkly blue, which turned out not to be so brilliant to line the top with. It makes me sparkly. Oh well!



The costume also will probably go to Burning Man, and I've been keeping that in mind while making it. When finished, it will have lots of parts: there's a top, skirt, legwarmers, armwarmers, four hooves, tail/belt, and headpiece. I've been working a little on each part, I don't think any one part is totally finished.


The top is from a pattern (except the straps), everything else is just straight out of my brain!

Oh my goodness, I never posted my HP crafts!

OK, so chronologically this goes before that tote bag for the craftster challenge, but somehow I forgot to post pictures about. I did mention on the cloud bolero, well, Harry Potter day was it's intended goal, and it *did* get done in time.

The release of the Deathly Hallows was a great excuse for me to do some crafting, since I work in a bookstore. We didn't have a midnight release party, but we did open super early Saturday morning, and had lots of decorations and stuff.

I really wanted a little purple sweater, so I decided to dress up as Luna Lovegood. I also ventured into the realm of polymer clay for the first time, to make her radish earrings:




And made a cork necklace, to keep away nargles:




And decoupaged a Luna quote on the bottom:




I also wanted to make a little cardigan like the one Luna wears in the OOTP movie. I dont crochet, so I found a knitting pattern I thought would look similar (cloud bolero by ysolda) and knit it in a similar colour. People recognized it, so I guess it was close enough




I also made a pair of pants based on ones Luna wore in OOTP, and also put crazy shoelaces in my all stars like Luna's.






I was going to put in an elastic waist, but ran around the house searching for thick elastic for hours and hours before I gave up and decided to just sew on ties. I had to wear a big long t-shirt provided by work, and the bow looked all poofy underneath so that wasn't good, but I think elastic may have looked weirder. Of course pretty much as soon as I got home from wearing the costume, I found the jar of elastic hiding behind a box that I'm sure I looked behind at least a dozen times while hunting. Oh well.






I also made a bunch of buttons. Some to give away to kids coming to get the book:





And some for those of us working to wear:




And wands! These were everyones favourite! People kept asking to buy them, so we started giving them away for a donation to charity. They are based on the tutorial here. I ended up making a few more batches, but only took pictures of the first one:



I just got a CD of pictures from my coworker from that day at work, so hopefully I'll remember to upload them soon!

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!