The "Pointy Kitty"

We came across an adorable and fairly simple free sewing pattern for what is referred to as the "Pointy Kitty" from Hillary Lang with WeeWonderfuls.  Grandma gave it a try with some Halloween "BOO" printed fabric we had.  And, the daughter helped sew on the orange button eyes.    
   

She had a bit of trouble getting it to stand up because she didn't use enough stuffing in the legs.  If you try this pattern, be sure to stuff the body as tightly as you can, unless you want a lazy kitty. The head can get really heavy, so I'd go much lighter in the stuffing on it.

 

The daughter, bless her heart, decided to help it stand better.  She CUT it open and restuffed it better.  :o  This is why the legs are a bit knock-knee'd.  But, I'm proud of her for taking the initiative to fix it.



After the black one was finished, the daughter decided to give it a try with polar fleece.  She chose some bright red scrap and said it was much easier to work with.  She hand-sewed the entire thing, which, to me, is pretty impressive.  This cat is about 8" long, which isn't as small as the stuffies she has been making.  That is a lot of stitched! 

 

I believe this is actually the first pattern she has followed, too.  Her sewing book more or less just explains how to make things and you have to draw up the pieces yourself.  But, she did a great job reading it though this pattern to understand it before cutting/sewing.  Her red kitty stood up purrrfectly the first attempt.  ;)



In other news, Grandma is back to working on Pixies and House Elves by request.  She's busy assembling pieces.  We've got to get busy doing some eye experiements since we're having difficulty finding the ones we'd like to use.  But, I think I've got a solution that should work.  Wish me luck.!  I'll be posting more about some other sewing projects the daughter and I have been working on this summer in my next post.

Happy Valentine's Day - New Take on Gumdrop Roses

Daughter and I waited 'til the last minute on her Valentine's cards for school, again. If you read last years post on our Stash Buster Cards, you'll know that we've made the decision not to buy store bought cards. We brainstormed for days before I finally remembers a project my own mom and I made for a school treats when I was my daughter's age. They were gumdrop roses.



Originally made with large gumdrops and toothpick stems, the daughter and I took our own approach and made a few improvements. Couldn't find jumbo gumdrops, but the slices work just fine. We replaced the slightly dangerous toothpick stem with a pretzel stick and planted the rose in a bite-size Reese's Peanut Butter Cup pot. It's the perfect pot!



This was then incorporated into our Valentine's Day card display container made from a single serving yogurt cup and a clear 9 oz. plastic cup. We were pondering how to keep the roses from getting smashed in their paper sack "mailboxes". We were just going to use cardboard circles inside the upside-down plastic cups, but had a stroke of genius at home when we tried the yogurt container under it. This gave us the additional space below to store some extra candy for those who didn't want to eat their roses.



We covered up the Yoplait label with our own which included two different short poems.

"Poppies are pretty. Daisies are dandy.
No Flower's as sweet as this rose of candy."

or

"What can beat a Valentine treat
made with sugar so it's sweet to eat?!"

The daughter didn't want anything mushy. So, we kept them about the roses. :) We printed them in black and white and colored with markers.



I won't go into all the details of how to make the roses. There are an abundance of free tutorials online with many different options for forming the petals. The real trick is to use lots of sugar when rolling out the petals and leaves. Pressing the candy in the sugar frequently while rolling will keep it from sticking.



Butter knives work really well for cutting the flattened gumdrops. Doesn't have to be sharp. Besides that, be gentle wrapping the pretzel stems. Pre-drilling the holes in the top chocolate layer of the pots with something pointy helps, too.



This really is a fairly simple and fun project. And, the best part is you get to eat the mistakes! Mmmmm... I made it a point to mess up on quite a few Peanut Butter pots. ;)



Can't believe we hadn't made these in over twenty five years. My mom was shown how by a wonderful neighbor we had when I was growing up. She was a great lady. She always used to make us the best cookies and other treats all year round always happy to share her recipes and was always there when we needed her. Being a forgetful "latch key kid", I was frequently locked out of our house. :) I also remember my sis and I inviting her granddaughter, a year younger than me, over to our house to play whenever she was visiting. She introduced me to daddy long-leg spiders and chewing on raw spaghetti noodles. Those were some good times. :)

If you'd like the label we used for the cups, you can find a layout of 4 including both poems here. Thanks for stopping in! And have the happiest of VALENTINE'S DAY!!!!

A Very Merry Twistmas with Handmade Moshlings

I repeated my homade holiday plan from last year, which is to only make my gifts for the daughter from what I had around in my craft stash. It wasn't too difficult to decided what to make. She and her cousin are heavily into Moshi Monsters these days. I thought I'd attempt some of their favorite Moshlings. I made the daughter an Oddie and a Squidge. Then, I made her cousin a Liberty.



Oddie was the easiest of the three. I used polar fleece remnants for most of it except the black of the eye and the feet, which are both felt. The sprinkles are cheap plastic beads.



I was pretty happy with the way it turned out, even if the eyes are a wee bit crooked. He turned out to be her favorite of the two.



Squidge was made like the Pygmy Puffs on my knitting loom with the same yarn as the Puffskein. He has shank button eyes and nose. I used my dremel to grind the nose closer to shape. The feet, ears and wings are remnant polar fleece. I didn't have any of the orangy gold-ish yellow that her feet are, so I cut portions out of a printed scrap piece. :)



Squidge was a tough one. I had the most concern getting her paired parts (eyes, ears, feet and wings) to all align properly. I was glad to see that I succeeded pretty well when finished. I did fail to add the eyelashes, but I wasn't sure they would show up anyway on the furry yarn.



The most complex one was the Liberty that I made her cousin. She is also made mostly of polar fleece, except for the black of the eyes and the dress. Oh, and her nose is a tiny brown shank button. The dress was made out of a striped shirt. You may recognize this fabric from the legs of our rag doll witch from a long while back. The crown and dress are both removable. I put it on an elastic band. I wasn't sure if she'd like it to come off, but she really likes to dress/redress her dolls, so I thought it would be fun for her.



Her body is an alteration of the pattern I used for the polar fleece monster dolls. But, I changed the shape of the body making it smaller. I attached the arms right out of the head, which was actually a little easier, but made the head flop back and forth a bit being so big and with the added weight of the crown. I kinda wish I had done this for the Pet Society Zombie Bunny. It is more closer to what it should look like.

I ran out of time to make the ice cream and wish list. I will be making them and sending them on when I get a chance to. However, all in all, the three moshlings were a success. They both loved them. If it hadn't been for the Moshling Collector's Guide she received from Santa, these would have been the daughter absolute #1 gift this year. Curse you, Santa! :)

Have a Happy and Crafty New Year! I'll be back next year with some more Steampunk projects, including a few more hats!

Having a Ball with Eyeballs

Juggling Eyeballs!!
Yep. Eyeballs you can juggle made from balloons! How fun! We had to try it. Though, I can't take credit for this project idea.



We just celebrated my daughter's birthday this past week. We didn't do anything fancy this year. Just some homemade cupcakes and crafts. There seemed to be a running theme of eyeballs. This would be partially due to the eyeball candy and cupcake wrappers we found in the clearance bins after Halloween. But, the daughter likes eyeballs and other creepy things. Which is probably rather odd. And, there is some irony in this, too. The irony being that all her dolls nowadays have button-eyed. Hmmm...how strange. :)

Anyway, we had lots of balloons left over after b-day decorating, so I remembered this tutorial for making Juggling Eyeballs I'd seen on Michele Made Me. The balls are made simply with balloons and uncooked rice. And the cool part was that they were giant EYEBALLS! Really easy kid friendly project. So, we scouted out what we had; found three plastic bottles and some long grain rice (since we didn't have short); and made a couple. A few minutes later, we had juggling balls!



I must say, substituting with long grain rice didn't work very well. The rice holds it's flattened shape when dropped. And, being new jugglers, we dropped them a LOT. So, we made a second attempt with some expired peeled yellow "mung" beans in the back of our cabinet. They worked much better than the rice.



After making our eyeballs, we also used the balloon necks that we cut off to cover some additional juggling balls. They remind me of billiard or pool balls.



Now we just have to learn how to juggle. It's going to be lots of practice to be able to juggle three of them! I just can't seem to get more than two going at once. :)

Hope you had a great Thanksgiving and/or scored some bargains this Black Friday! I'll be posting some more sewing projects shortly. Later!

What to do with all that leftover Easter egg dye

Egg Dying is one tradition our whole family enjoys, and will probably never be given up no matter how old we get. This year, since it was just my daughter and me, we decided against buying the kits. Instead, we just made our own using ordinary food coloring, vinegar and water. It's very easy. The mix we used was:

• 10-20 drops food color
• 1 tablespoon vinegar
• about 1/4-1/2 cup of water

I put the dye into individual plastic ice cream sundae cups. If you try this, you'll want to put your dunking cups in a larger container or baking sheet to catch any overflow and drips. You'll really only need to make the primary colors of red, yellow, and blue. Redipping will produce other colors. We used the "magic" crayon from one of our previous years egg kits to add some designs. It's just a clear wax crayon. A candle should work just as well. The eggs in the pic were refrigerated after dying, which mottles the colors some (I kinda like the effect, myself). The condensation will make the dye stain your hands, so be sure you let the sit for a bit to warm and dry off. Wipe excess moisture away with a paper towel.



After we dyed our eggs, we still had quite a bit of dye leftover. We wanted to use it up on something else. There are many things you can dye with this stuff. We went ahead and poured some of the dye from each of the three primaries into three more cups to make the secondary colors of purple, orange and green to dye some pistachio nut shells. This was a great way to use us the rest of the dye. We also tried dying some cotton crochet yarn, but cotton doesn't take dye as readily and we're letting it sit longer in hopes it will eventually set.



After soaking overnight, the shells are very brightly colored, fairly permanent and ready to use in some crafty projects. Stay tuned for what we make! :)



And, to add even more resourcefulness to this day, the paper we used to dry the shells on will also most likely wind up as end sheets in a hand-bound journal. With a little forethought, they made a very nice pattern. Another sheet (not pictured) turned out even more unusual when we blew the dye around with a straw (as I'd learned to do in grade school).



Hope your Easter was a good one!

Stop by Craftster.org and vote...

... for your favorite entry in the "Back to Basics" Craft Challenge!



Daughter and I entered a Craft Challenge. We submitted our "A Fan-tailed Spider-fish Dragon". It's actually two projects masquerading as one. ;) I tell more about it at my Tabistry blog and on the submission post.

Skelly & Kitty Witch BOO't

My final project of this past craft swap with Crafterella was another witch boot by request. When I asked her what she'd like on one, she mentioned skeletons and black cats. So that's what she got. And, a lot of them, too. ;)



I did something different, again. I ran the diamond black/while pattern around the top and lace edges. Then, made arches around the ankle of the boot to frame in the three scenes. Both sides have a black cat and JOL pumpkins on an iron fence. One with a hanging spider and one with bats.



The back is a skeleton juggling more JOL's. And, on all around the heel are three skeletons who look to be holding up the shoe. More skulls are dotted around the bottom edge wrapping around both sides.



I even managed to squeeze another juggling skeleton on the tongue peeking out from the ribbon laces which I wrapped the ends of with copper wire.



I painted "Happy Halloween on the tongue with some crossed bones under it and put a skull and crossbones custom polymer clay bead dangle on the toe using some more copper wire. The copper should age in time to a nice darker orange to match the boot.



Well, that's it for this swap! I'll be posting a final post to link all the individual items and show then all together.

Mom's "Fairy Godpumpkin"

For this past craft swap, I was stalking my partner, Crafterella. I was browsing her wist for ideas and came across something that must just have been fate. I had just the thing sitting over here.



She had wisted an adorable set of pumpkins wearing witch hats. Coincidentally, my mother had started one very similar awhile back while playing around with some air-drying clay she had. Her pumpkin was so adorable, I just had to get her to finish it up. Just look at all the detail she put into it! I'd say that is amazing considering the medium she chose was very disagreeably to work with in this way.



I helped her glue it to a resin base that she had found at a secondhand store while visiting my sis in Kansas. It was actually three books fused together, but she had my sis's husband cut them apart. This one is a book labeled "Cinderella" on the front. I think that was just perfect for her little guy. We painted and stained it to go better with the pumpkin's colors.



I was so terribly nervous about this item making to it's new home with Korinne in one piece. I'm so glad it did make it. Yay!

The next item I'll be posting about is much less fragile. It will be another wee house for tiny birds of the six-legged variety. :)

Stash Buster Valentine's Cards

This Valentine's Day the daughter and I decided to use some of our existing craft stash to make her school Valentine party cards, instead of buying the typical cards that kids just toss in the trash. We found some spare pieces of cardstock, loose pom poms and various google eyes. So, we made "love bugs". She wanted them to be removable so the kids could play with them.



We wrote up the poem in the car on our way home one day. And, with a little help from Adobe Illustrator's stock brush borders and a nice font called "Algerian", we designed a simple card the night before her party.



After printing the cards she colored and cut them out herself. Instead of trying to cut the circle for the bugs to fit in with scissors, I showed her how to punch out most of the circle with a regular hole punch. It took us three well aimed punches to remove enough of the circle. She signed the backs to pass them out. I put another small circle at the center top of the heart to be hole punched for a possible ribbon to be strung through. But we didn't end up using it.



Feel free to use this card for your own personal St. Valentine's Day cards perhaps for next year. A pdf of a 9 card 8.5x11" layout is available here.

Homemade Holiday - Part Two

In my previous post I showed the dollhouse that our daughter received from her father made out of cardboard. Now, I'd like to show you the plush stuffy and accessories that I made her. It was a real challenge not to buy materials for this challenge.



If you have kids, she may look very familiar to some of you. My daughter's been wanting the vampire, "Draculaura", Monster High plush doll for some time now. I just couldn't see buying something I can make. So I attempted Draculaura's close cousin, which my daughter named "Batsy", and her pet "Batley".



She and her clothes are almost entirely made from remnant polar fleece I already had around. Even her hair is thin strips of fleece. I made her a two piece black dress, red dress, black coat, apron, and a spare skirt. Batley's body was made out of a pom pom with red button eyes and polar fleece covered chenille stem wings. (My daughter said the bat looks like the crystal bats from the Jim Henson movie "The Dark Crystal". I hadn't thought of that 'til she said it. :) )

Polar fleece is great to work with. It doesn't fray and my messy stitching doesn't show too badly. :) However, there is one thing about it that I could do without. That's the shedding. I had to take the lint brush to everything several time before I was finished.



Here hair is a removable wig that is velcro'ed to her head. I will probably make her a few different hairstyles/colors to mix and match with her clothes, in the future. She has button eyes and embroidered mouth and teeth. I even added some bite marks to her neck. The necklace was a wine bottle charm my sister had given me a long while ago. She thought it might come in handy for something, and it did!



The coffin was made of cereal and other cardboard boxes that were covered and painted. I added the remnant satin lining. The lid has a pocket for her accessories.

Well, that pretty much wraps up what we did for Christmas. Hope you've enjoyed taking a peak and are inspired to try this yourself next year. :) Happy Homemade Holidays!

Homemade Holiday Dollhouse

Daddy and I made what I think was a challenging decision this year for Christmas. Since "Santa" was getting our 8 year old daughter popular name brand items, we thought we'd try something a little different and make her gifts. This wasn't new to me. I 'm accustomed to making my gifts for the holidays. But, for us both to only make gifts and not buy anything was the challenge. It's always nice to have a backup gift just in case your idea doesn't actually work in reality. I'm glad we made this decision, though. It was interesting to see her reaction this morning. She really did prefer the homemade gifts more than the store bought ones. Probably won't be the case when she's a little older. :(

So daddy, being an architecture major in college, set out to create her a cardboard dollhouse inspired by a $250+ dollar plastic Calico Critter Manor house.



It folds out just like the original version. Forgot to take a pic of it closed. He started building it 2 weeks before Christmas! I must admit, we (mom and I) didn't think he'd have it standing in time. But, he brought it thru the door at 10pm Christmas Eve. :) Whew! Time to spare! ;D Of course, it needs some paint and details still. He wants her to help him out on the colors and furniture. :)



It has lots of large windows, and the little doors actually open! Pretty amazing for cardboard.



He still has some supports to add at the corners in the interior. They'll be needed to withstand the weight of her plastic furniture pieces.



The Calico Critter families couldn't wait to move in to their new home (even if it's not finished, yet). :)



I really liked the spiral staircase. It looks so delicate, but is surprisingly sturdy. I'm really proud of him. This was a LOT of work to take on. But, she loved it. Making a unique gift like this is truly worth every bit of the effort. I'm sure she will treasure it for years to come. This is Samedi's first year to make gifts. He doesn't really even give gifts. Being Asian, he really doesn't celebrate Christmas.

I'll post about my gift to my daughter next. And, I'll be sure to post some progress pics as they start decorating. Until then, Merry Christmas!

***** UPDATE 01/06/11 *****



Just wanted show a small addition to the house, I posted this image on Craftster, so you may have seen it already. He won't leave well enough alone. He finished the front balcony railing and a round attic window. I'll keep you posted when more improvements are made.