Alec

Here's one of my latest one-inch bears!  His name is Alec, and he's fully jointed and made of ultrasuede.  I have him on etsy here: http://www.etsy.com/listing/76662247/alec-ooak-1-miniature-teddy-bear

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I'm on etsy!

Well, I finally got myself on etsy.  Here’s my “store”: http://www.etsy.com/shop/katrinasminiatures

Right now, I’m posting all the animals I’ve made over the last few years, but never gotten a chance to sell.  Some of them are a little old and others are quite new.  I’m hoping they’ll do well.  I’m also hoping I’ll be able to get new ones made, so I can keep putting new ones up for sale.  I have so many ideas and so many projects I can hardly keep up with myself sometimes!  As long as I keep things balanced and work on things a little bit at a time, I think I can keep going at a slow and steady pace and get things done.  It’s a little challenging to balance everything I want to do (work, studying, art, reading, school…), but with priorities, deadlines, and patience, I should be fine.  I just need to set aside a little time for everything each day, or each week, and I can slowly work on getting everything done.

Store Sample Quilts

I just keep making quilts as store samples for Mom :)  Here are two of the latest:

This first one uses a book panel we have at the store, but I made it into a quilt instead.  I love it.  It reminds me of a book I used to check out of the school library all the time in the third grade.

I really like the fabrics in this one, too.  I tend to like animal fabrics, and I really like the animals in this one.

Quilts of Valor

Well, after a long absence, I thought I'd see about maybe getting this going again.  I'm back working at Mom's quilt shop now, so I've been mostly making store samples.  I've made quite a few since coming home!  One of the first ones is a Quilts of Valor quilt.  It was designed by Robert Kaufman, and it's my first quilt with actual pieced blocks!  It'll be donated to a wounded veteran.

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.