Tag: diy

Space Race: a necklace

sarah

My new necklace, plus some bananas

I’ve been getting the feeling that turning my entire crafting stash into finished objects is not really going to be about emptying my stash closet. Plunging into the bead portion of my inventory is making this even more clear: this endeavour is about generating masses and masses of treasure.

I suddenly have three necklaces to my name, and the stash has not gotten visibly smaller. It doesn’t take many beads to make a necklace, at least in the context of my 15 pound supply. Either I need to make a lot of necklaces, or I need to reconsider my decision not to make another beaded curtain.

This is copycat jewellery

I copied this necklace

The first necklace to come out of my stash is my attempt at copying something that caught my eye at the Starving Artist Bazaar. The original was fluorescent red and blue, which triggered my spider senses from afar.

I haven’t attempted to make jewellery since I was about 8 years old, so I’m still getting my inspiration really directly and obviously. I like to think of this in the spirit of sketching from masterpieces.

I’m excited to figure out how to make more things up out of my head, though. All those neck bones and cords to work with!

Basic ingredients and method

I used two units of stash:

  • a bag of about 50 pointy, purple, glass beads
  • a collection of 5 aqua blue, glass beads

Then I went and ruined it by buying more crafting supplies!

  • a length of black cord (used half)
  • a spool of silver wire, which has definitely settled into stash status
  • a set of clasps

It took about an hour to make this, mostly spent figuring out how jewelry works.

I settled on twisting the wire around a pencil to make a long spiral and threading beads onto that. Then I threaded the black cord into the spiral (easy), and pulled the wire at both ends to tighten it against the cord. I poked some of the beads around and made an extra loop to create that bump of blue, then clamped on the clasps.

I judge this a success

I’ve been wearing this a lot. The colours and the blue orbs remind me of retro visions of space. Space Race: a Necklace!

Focus on: Space Race necklace

Things I did in 48 hours, while wearing fishnet stockings

sarah
  • Rode a ferry to Vancouver and got my first slight sunburn of the year
  • Used up a store credit at Diane’s Lingerie
  • Visited two cousins and an aunt, and found out Galen is now considered an honorary cousin on account of my hanging around with him for so long

Two cousins, an aunt, a loverman.

  • Rocked out up front at Dungen, and felt very proud and happy for them even though I don’t know them

God speaking to Dungen.

Jazz flute.

  • Slept for 4 hours (ok, not in fishnets)
  • Rode a ferry back to Victoria
  • Arrived on time for a 10am business meeting
  • Walked to grandmother’s house
  • Battled sleep deprivation, caffeine shakes, and grandmother to produce mitered velvet corners

Grampa's WWII medals

  • Collected my mail from the postbox
  • Stumbled home
  • Wrote a training manual
  • Collapsed
  • Remembered the mail, and discovered our tickets to Pitchfork’s music festival had arrived. Os Mutantes!
  • Collapsed, excitedly

How are we going to get all these bears back in?

sarah

Orca In The City

Victoria has a history, and I think a proud history, of shitty public art. Until recently, the scope of debate could be summed up as a war between abstract sculptures that annoy old people and hockey fans, and a teeming horde of orcas.

Orca murals, orca mosaics, orca sidewalk chalk, maybe an eagle or a salmon painted somewhere for good measure, but most prominently, a whole army of mass-produced, fiberglass Orcas In The City sculptures, each decorated by a different local artist.

Orcas In The City were bland and oppressive (seriously— the organizers put ‘Arts’ in quotations in their goal statement), but no one was supposed to complain about them because they were only temporary and they were auctioned for charity. Think of the children.

I flipped the bird on one of the more overtly branded Orcas at least once, but I regret never having ruined a tourist’s Orca family portrait by humping an exposed tail flipper or something. I have a lingering vendetta about the Orcas, with apologies to The Children.

Enter Spirit Bears

Spirit Bear featuring a funky neighbourhood scene

Suddenly, this spring, a new menace. Sir Bartholomew is not alone, and he’s even less distinguishable from the other Spirit Bears In The City than was the typical Orca In The City. A spirit bear is a white grizzly bear, if you’re not familiar with Pacific Northwest variations on junior high unicorn-and-kitten fetishes, and the decoration jobs seem to have been rationed out exclusively to the artists who made their Orca contributions look the most like the inside of a Starbucks. It’s wall to wall funky neighbourhood scenes. I know I’m biased towards neon red and blue as the official colours of 2006, but I don’t think I’m alone in believing that yellow and purple should take a well-deserved break. Let yellow and purple recover from their hard work portraying free spirits and Italian snack foods.

Worst of all, the Spirit Bears have broken free of the tourist containment zone and have been popping up as far from the Inner Harbour as Island Blue printers. I yelled out loud when I spotted the specimen at Fort and Quadra.

What’s a concerned citizen to do? How are we going to get all these bears back in?

Toronto got saddled with Moose In The City, so apparently this ride doesn’t hit bottom until it has dipped deep into Canadiana cliché pap. This aggression must not stand! Besides writing to the organizers at the Lions Club and begging them to at least consider funny animals for future mass-blanding fundraisers (goats are a good standby), what is the fitting response?

Three different people have suggested blowing up the bears somehow, but I’m taken with this Knitta Please textile graffiti. I don’t have the time or the tendon health to knit any quantity of bear shrouds, but I think some sewn hoods secured with zip ties would do the trick. As much as the bears stimulate my gag reflex, I’m a non-destructive kind of person and I wouldn’t want to actually destroy someone’s art.

I favour a sign reading “Out of Order” as the finishing touch.

Almost the same

sarah

Rockridge apartments logo

Rockridge apartments logo

There are a lot of handpainted apartment doors in my neighbourhood. I should take better pictures of them.

1044 doorsign

Two Rs that almost match, two 4s that almost match. Repetition with variation might be the Christopher Alexander design thought that I remember most often. I’ve always been into collections of similar objects, and think the slight variations are the root of my fascination. Add them all together and you can see the spectral range of a Rockridge R, or of 1044’s 4s. They put each other in context. I’ve never thought of handwriting as a collection of similar-but-not-quite-the-same objects, but indeed it is.

Jellyfish dress (made from stash)

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Presenting: the jellyfish dress As explained last week, I have moved from an obsession with dressing like a jellyfish to action!

I made this comfy dress to remind me of puffy bodies, ruffles and streamers. I was pretty sure it was possible to make jellyfish shapes into flattering clothes, but it’s good to confirm that kind of thing. This is the dress that prooves my concept (to myself). The age of cnidarian wardrobe staples has begun!

Progress on the stash manifesto

The best part! This dress ate the following out of my stash:

  • One fitted floral bedsheet I bought in 1999 to cover a geodesic dome at Burning Man. It didn’t fit my bed, and it had a big hole torn in the middle, but I squirrelled it away, lo these seven years.
  • A length of elastic I bought in 1999, intending to make y-front underwear
  • Three blue buttons from a jar Galen’s mum gave me in 2002
  • Some hook and eye fasteners my gramma gave me for my birthday in 2003, as part of a sewing kit

The only thing I bought was extra thread. (I hope the scope of my stash is becoming clear to you, along with the motivations for my stash manifesto. Ripped bedsheets? Seven years? My collection is ripe, and must be harvested.)

Basic procedure

I used the same strategy I like for web design: make the smallest thing that could work, and add things as necessary. I don’t know much about sewing, so I just tried on pieces in the mirror a lot, to see how they might fit together.

The final cuts looked like this, but I worked it out a little at a time by making the biggest parts first and trying to conserve fabric.

Cutting a ripped, fitted bedsheet to make a jellyfish dress.

The skirt

Jellyfish dress, prancing

The puffy skirt was the clearest part of my jellyfish vision, so I started by sewing a tube using the full length of the sheet, and the width between the hole and the notches.

I gathered each end with elastic to make the tube easy to get on and off and to make sure I could still walk in the cinched skirt. In the mirror, it looked like it needed a ruffle on the bottom, so I added a ruffle on the bottom.

As soon as I tried on the ruffled prototype, I could see how this dress would be both jellyfishy and pretty cute, and there was much excited prancing around in a retro floral potato sack. Galen and Marc get bonus points for being supportive and inquisitive, even though I interrupted the business meeting they were having in the kitchen, and, as they later admitted, neither of them had any idea where I was going with this “it’s a bag/it’s a dress/it’s a man-o-war” design.

The bodice

The remaining fabric had notched corners where I had cut the elastic out of the fitted sheet. I held one notched end up to my chest as a potential bodice, just trying to be thrifty by starting at the end instead of the middle.

The notch happened to make a decent armhole, and the narrow part wrapped around to the middle of my back. That seemed like an easy solution, so after some draping and measuring in the mirror, I cut a matching notch for my other arm.

Rather than mess with facings, I cut a second identical piece and sewed the two together. I.e., I made a something that felt like a pillowcase.

The back and straps

Back of the jellyfish dress

I only attached the bodice along the front of the skirt, to leave room for the elastic to stretch over my hips when I stepped into the dress. To accomodate, I hand-sewed little hooks and eyes under the back of the bodice to keep the skirt up.

This turns out to be a ridiculous fastening strategy, and there is no way I can get it on or off by myself. (The armholes are too snug to wiggle into or out of with the buttons done up, so I can’t twist it around backwards.)

The bodice looked cool from the front, and buttoned together at center back, but the shoulders weren’t attached to anything. Adding straps seemed like the easiest solution.

I thought stubby, straight straps would look like an apron or a work dress rather than glamorously submarine, so I made the straps extra long and let them hang down from the shoulder seams.

When I looked in the mirror, it needed a sash. So I added a sash. I need to learn to tie it in a pretty bow.

If this was knitted, I’d be so uptight right now

Any seamstress could look at these photos and deduce that I have no idea how to sew. Parts of the dress ride up, buckle, wrinkle, tug, sag, etc. I think I learned a lot for next time, especially about bodices (so that’s why side seams are sloped…), and I got a jellyfish dress that fits securely and comfortably out of the experience. Verdict: success! Sewing and I might just become friends.

Double-breasted wool cardigan (stash update)

sarah

Photo of me in the infamous double-breasted cardigan

This is the first knitted sweater I’ve actually finished and worn. (I made one up on trains in Europe, but, well, you know how sometimes, when people make sweaters and they don’t know what they’re doing…) Everytime I hit a section of ribbing I stalled out for a few months, so this sweater was in the works for about a year.

Those two facts, taken together, add up to a very proud little lady (formerly a bit of a whiny knitting martyr— when I wear this now, at least one of my friends is likely to blurt out some congratulation/consolation about my hard-won sweater with its miles of double-ribbing. It’s kind of embarrassing that my “hardship” is so memorable.)

It turned out about one size too small but now that it has stretched out a little, I wear it almost every day. It looks babe-a-licious with a dress, in a wholesome, scratchy wool way. All in all: success!

Stash items liberated!

I love buttons

  • Two thirds of a bag of wool yarn from my mum. This came, I think, from the project she was planning when she finally abandoned knitting for good, in favour of sewing.
  • A thrift store knitting magazine from the 1970s. It feels good to actually use one of my vintage patterns, instead of just admiring them with a wistful look on my face.

New purchases

  • Six wooden buttons, had for about six dollars at Gala Fabrics aka The Den of Temptation.

Learning opportunities (ahem)

These are not good buttonholes.

  • What am I going to do with the leftover yarn? There’s enough to make half a small sweater. I could have just made a bigger sweater in the first place.
  • There are no better buttonholes than E.Z.‘s one-row buttonholes. There is no need to try the technique recommended in pattern books. Next time, I’ll substitute the master buttonholes. What is up with these straggly excuses for buttonholes?
  • No really, change yarn at the seam edges. I have saved so many extra inches of yarn that I don’t know what to do with the remainder, and as a bonus there are minor lumps across my tight little sweater.

I think I will have to work on the stash manifesto for a long time before I can see any change by looking at my stash closet. But the treasure I’m extracting from the craft clutter is very tangible. This makes my closet seem like a magical, bottomless cornucopia that breeds wardrobe staples. That’s ok with me.

A project I’d like to make*

sarah

I’d like to collect stories and descriptions of people’s epiphanies. How they snapped out of depression, or figured out their life’s work, or fixed their relationships, understood parenthood or life or sex or death or generally how to deal with reality. People’s answers to “What’s the secret?”

I’ve been thinking about this for awhile, occasionally stoked by articles like this one, but I had assumed it would be hard to find enough stories to make a worthwhile collection. Talking to Andrea at our small-business breakfast yesterday, we both had potential contributions to this topic. More than realizing I could find enough contributions, I remembered how totally compelled I am by people solving problems and figuring things out, and dealing with basic tragedies like the fact we’re all going to die. I want to go hunting.

*I can’t believe I don’t post daydream projects more often. It’s my most common conversational topic and constant preoccupation.

Just passing the time

sarah

A vagina fan wrote me today, with a kind little note about how I’d helped him expand his perspective on women, etc. Apparently he’d been reading my site for awhile, but was finally motivated to write when he realized I was a knitter.

“Personal experience had taught me that knitters, cross-stichers and crafters are sexually repressed introverts just passing the time until they die. Golly, another theory blown all to Hell.”

I am going to tell people that all the time now. “Oh this? I’m just passing the time until I die.”

Stash dilemma / fear of variegation

sarah

Stash item: yarn. 225yds Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Worsted in color 37-forest (greens and blues).

If I were blind, I’d love this yarn

Photo close-up of blotchy stripes in my Clapotis. I like stash stories, so I will note that I scored this yarn as part of a $1 bag of odd balls at a thrift store in Seattle. I reached through a barricade of unsorted furniture and parts of vacuum cleaners for a bag of unidentified but potentially worthwhile yarn. I felt suitably triumphant once I realized it was not only 100% wool, it was brand name artisan yarn. Word. I love thrift scores.

The wool is very, very soft, and machine washable to boot. I understood immediately why Lorna’s Laces had a reputation. Way to go, reputations! Helping me make $1 purchase decisions.

The only catch is that I’ve never liked variegated yarn. It looks lovely in a skein or ball, but the blotchy, broken stripes that happen when it is knitted up remind me of all the knitting I hate. It looks like church sale dishcloths or acrylic slippers.

To me, there’s a reason you never see commercial clothes made from variegated yarn. Tweedy, sure. Striped, sure. Even space-dyed. But blotchy? No. Variegated colourways are one of my warning signs of knitting for knitting’s sake, of knitting things that are only cool to people who know how knitting works, of giving in to the hype.

Can Clapotis save me from variegation?

Since this yarn feels so nice, I decided to keep an open mind and try it out by finally making a Clapotis. Clapotis being another item with a glowing reputation: a scarf with dropped stitches, which uses variegation to create diagonal stripes.

I got through the set-up rows only by virtue of my determination to give this yarn a chance. Blotch city.

After dropping the first stitch to make a ladder down the middle of the fabric, I thought Clapotis might save me after all. The column of stitches left intact was short enough that the variegation looked like real stripes. Most of the stripes stretched across the entire column, without looking too broken. Cool!

But. Once I got about a foot into the scarf, the piece got large enough to start manifesting larger-scale colour patterns and it blotched up again.

Can I save Clapotis from myself?

It was a drag to lose motivation at that point. I’ve had a lot of knitting momentum since the weather became obviously autumnal a few weeks ago. If I had photos, I’d tell you about the cool scarf and hat I invented, but projects with no images are boring.

I had a little executive meeting with myself about this blotchy Clapotis. I couldn’t think of anything else I would want to make out of the yarn, so there was no point saving the yarn for later. It would be silly to try to sell one ball that had been partly knitted up, so again there was no reason to unravel the project.

Someone would probably like this scarf— strangers on the bus said they liked the colours. (Strangers on the bus love to talk about knitting. Oh man. “What are you making there?“) Maybe I should finish it.

It would be satisfying for me to get this entire unit of stash to the fledgling stage, and at that point it would probably find a home one way or another. Mainly though, it would be out of my stash closet.

Most of all, I’m committed to depleting my crafting stash. I love ambitious super-projects such as documenting just how much crafting potential was contained in my closet when I declared a moratorium on new purchases in September 2005. Even a variegated (but reputable) scarf could contribute to the super-project.

Can I save Clapotis and me from my knitter’s ego?

Someone will get this scarf for Christmas, I guess. It will be a lovely present but it seems like a generic choice. And I don’t think of myself as a knitter who gives the gift of variegated scarves. I give the gift of custom-designed complicated shit that doesn’t rely on gimmicky yarn!

Zing— maybe this needs to be an exercise in humility! That is actually more motivational that the prospect of giving this scarf to a loving home.

In summary, priorities are hilarious.