Tie-Dye!

I taught a class on tie-dyeing t-shirts at my mom's quilt shop last Saturday.  It was fun :)  My mom taught fabric-dyeing in the afternoon, and I experimented with new tie-dye designs :)  Here are my experiments:

I made an octopus!

This looks like an ichthys symbol :)

Doll Clothes

I volunteered to make a sample of a pattern for doll clothes that Mom has at her quilt shop.  It was so much fun!  I couldn't decide which fabrics I wanted to use, so Mom said I could make four dresses!  It's a modkid pattern, and it might be the best pattern I've ever worked with.  The instructions were very clear, the illustrations were helpful, and it only took about 2-3 hours to make each outfit.

We got out Mom's old doll and let her dress up too :)  We need to make her an appointment with a doll restorer though (we know someone who's really good).  For some reason, the poor doll has had her head partially shaved, and she's missing half of her eyelashes...

 

More Bears!

 I'm having a hard time coming up with names for some of my bears...  I guess I don't need to have them named until I get on etsy, which should happen around the middle/end of July :)

I just can't think of a name for this guy, but his face reminds me of Winnie the Pooh.

This one may wind up being named Alex.

I think I've decided this one will be named Blueberry Ice.

This is Andy.  He reminds me of Andes mints :)  His colors were inspired by the Indiana mint brownies we make every Christmas :)

Oh, p.s. all of these bears are two inches tall.

Amy

This is Amy (short for Amethyst).  She's one inch tall and made of ultrasuede (and fully jointed, like all my bears).

"Lemon Zest"

Meet my latest bear, Lemon Zest.  He's two inches tall :)

Dolls

I've decided to start experimenting with making dolls.  Here are my first ever attempts at making hands, feet, and a face.  If I can be patient enough to keep practicing and making these, I think I could get pretty good at this.

"Hi," the highlighter bear

Here's my latest one-inch bear!  I love him; he's so bright!  He really is the exact same color as a yellow highlighter.  I might make a couple more like him.  He might be only one inch tall, but it's pretty easy to see him clear across the room, even if he's grouped with a few other animals :)

And people think MINIATURES are hard...

Yesterday, I decided I wanted to make another one-inch teddy bear.  I sat down, traced the pattern, cut it out, and, three or four hours later, I had a completed teddy bear sitting in my hand.  I love one-inchers, they're so fast and easy.
After completing that teddy, I decided to get out some Minkee fabric I bought years ago and make that cat pattern I found at Market.  It's huge!  It's about a foot tall and long!  Really, I think making things that big is just so much harder than making a miniature.  You wind up with handfuls of slippery fabric, you have to use pins, you get covered with fuzz, you have to feed it all through a sewing machine and try to keep the edges lined up, you have to fight with it as you stuff it...  It's all just so big and cumbersome.  Okay, I'm exaggerating my frustration a little bit; I just think it's so funny that it's so annoying for me to make something larger than about three inches tall :-P

Works in Progress and Ideas

Mom and I just got back from the Spring Quilt Market in Minneapolis.  It was awesome!  I got so many new ideas!  I also wound up showing several people my miniature bears, and their responses really motivated me to get to work on making some more!

Here are some projects I'm working on right now:

We have some Dolly Dingle fabrics in Mom's quilt shop, and she thought it would be really cute to make some little "pocket dolls" out of one of the prints.  I volunteered to do it :)

I'm also working on a store sample of a clothesline basket.  I'm using a Mint Chip Bali-pop.

There are some other store samples I'm really excited to make.  One is a sample of doll clothes, and another is a fusible applique horse wallhanging.

Here's the scrappy quilt I'm working on right now.  I picked a pile of fabrics I like and some focus fabrics, cut the focus fabrics into large-ish pieces, and randomly sewed the other fabrics around them.  After the blocks were big enough, we cut the edges strait.  Now, I just have to sew them together and baste and quilt the quilt.  Another quilt I want to make is a t-shirt quilt, since I acquired quite a pile of t-shirts during my two years as a collegiate rower.

I also picked up a pattern for a cat at Market, and I'm excited to make it and learn some new tricks :)

On the ride home from Market, Mom and I listened to the Lord of the Rings soundtrack, and I started thinking about how I would LOVE to make some LOTR-style clothes.  I'm thinking of starting doll-making and making the clothes in miniature :)

There are also some larger animals I want to make (like the cat).  I bought fabric years ago to make a floppy dog, and I still haven't gotten around to making a pattern for it.  I'd really like to make a huge bear.  There were a couple of big, big, big bears on display as samples for a new line of Cuddle fabric at Market, and I just wanted to pick them up and give them a big hug.

Wow, I am not doing a very good job of keeping up on this.  In my defense, I've been really busy, and I don't know that anyone actually reads this anyway :)

I sold several animals this weekend, so I know I have potential.  I really want to work on becoming an artist and selling more animals, but it's hard to balance that with school sometimes :S

Hopefully I'll get better at this and have some new creations to post soon(ish).  In the meantime, I've discovered that Play-Doh is great for studying, so here are a few pictures from studying.

Here we have a trilobite:

Now some crayfish appendages:

This is a barnacle:

And this is a penguin, which has absolutely no relation to what I was studying:

Felimath the dragon

Apparently one dragon wasn't enough, so I decided to make another.  I needed to do something with all the things I learned and ideas I came up with while working on Oscar.  This dragon is named Felimath.  The only reason he's named that is because it just came into my head while I was working on him, and it seemed like a good name.  Felimath is actually the name of one of the Lone Islands in the Chronicles of Narnia, but it just sounded good for this dragon.

I made Felimath in the same way I made Oscar, but I used ultrasuede this time, and it was MUCH easier to work with.  I also made his armature slightly differently, and used 26 gauge paddle wire, so he's much more posable than Oscar is.  Here he is fully felted:

 

He actually looks something like a wingless dragon in this picture.  In the really early stages, he looked more like some sort of carpet monster that had been run over by a vacuum cleaner.  He's blue and purple because I was planning on making his body that shade of blue, but I found out I didn't have enough fabric.  The purple is because I ran out of blue wool.  I actually wound up making him grey, which was a bit of a problem because the wool fibers liked to get caught in the seams.

 Here's a side view:

 

Here he is with the start of a skin:

  

Woohoo!  Body and tail all done!  That would be my physics homework that he's on top of.  The sun had set, and the only place with enough light to sew by was occupied by physics, and I didn't see any need to move it. 

 

Okay, now comes the insanity part.  After I finished his legs and body, I need to do his feet.  This is one of his feet before doing anything with it:

Now each of those toes needs to be covered, so I need to cut out a piece of fabric to sew around them:

 

Done!  Well, almost, he needs a little piece of blue sewn on there as a paw pad.

Just showing off how dexterous his little toes are.   That's a pin he's holding.

Next day, better lighting, holding another pin.  I have no idea what he's doing with it, maybe he's conducting an orchestra.

...and now he's holding my scissors.

 

He still doesn't have wings.  These I sewed the normal way, right sides together, then turned them right side out and put the armature in.

All done!  Well, mostly done, he needs some eyes and a face.  I think I made his wings a little small, oh well.

And now he is finally done!  I'm not sure what he's doing here, maybe he's singing.

 

Feed me! (Oh yeah, he has a tongue. :))

 

Nap time.

 

Oscar decided to jump off his perch on my cardboard wall and explore the floor while I was working on Felimath.  

Felimath decided to check out big brother's perch while Oscar explored the floor.

Then he decided to check out a lamp.

Then I realized that he matches my bike almost perfectly!  He looks like he's singing again in this picture.  Like he's just gently rocking the wheel back and forth and singing.

 

He can hold on pretty well with those little toes of his.