Look who I found in my garden:
The reclusive yarn snake, finally waking from his long winter hibernation.
Although he is small (6″ long), he doesn’t fit the theme of my new set of mini animals, but this is what my hands decided to make yesterday, and I like the way he wiggles. The curves are crocheted right in – clever, huh?
The finishing touch – a tiny felt tongue.
I’m so glad you guys like my tiny designs! I unfortunately don’t have the time to reply to every blog comment I receive, but I always reply to any questions you ask in the comments (either by e-mail or on the blog, if I think it’s something others may want to know the answer to as well). And want to assure you that I read and appreciate every comment I receive. Thank you, and please keep on commenting!
Thanks to your feedback, I’ve decided these tiny crocheted animals will be a new range of patterns, and I have a new theme in mind (although no name yet – I’m working on it). Here’s the latest mini ami: a teeny tiny mouse. I’m keeping him away from my cat, as I think, especially with a little catnip inside, this would make a very tempting cat toy (with yarn or felt eyes for safety, of course)!
Like the others, he’s only about 3″ long (plus tail) and he is super simple to make.
I’ll let on what the pattern theme for these little ones will be when I’ve come up with a couple more designs. Any preference over whether you’d like them to be released individually or as value-priced sets (or both)? Let me know – I love to get your feedback!
UPDATE: Looking for the pattern? You can find the PocketAmi Set 1 crochet pattern in my shop.
While I was in the UK, my sister handed me a piece of fabric (a gift from Jodi) and asked me to make it into something for her. We decided a makeup bag would be a good choice for the cute fabric, and I had the brainwave of adding a layer of clear vinyl over the lining, to protect the lining fabric from getting makeup smudges all over it.
I used splityarn’s zippered wristlet tutorial because it’s worked out for me before, but I skipped the wrist strap and layered a piece of thin clear vinyl over the right side of each lining piece before assembling the bag.
It was… not easy. The vinyl wanted to stick to the base plate of the sewing machine, and kept moving with respect to the lining fabric. It was really tricky to keep all the layers in position to sew the bag together. About halfway through, I realised that sewing the vinyl to each lining piece (around the edges within the seam allowance) before I started would have kept the pieces together – isn’t hindsight great?!
But I struggled on, and eventually finished the panda bag. And now I see that the vinyl lining, because it is clear, doesn’t show up at all on any of my photos! But trust me, it is there, and the panda faces on the inside will be protected 🙂
And then – the very same day – I saw Jessica’s post about iron-on vinyl. It would have been perfect for my project, had I only known it existed a day earlier… So, if you decide to make a clear vinyl-lined bag, I recommend you try the iron-on vinyl, if you can find it, and make your life easier!
Dawn: hope this is what you had in mind! I’ll send it to you soon xx
Whilst browsing the Food Network Canada website, I stumbled upon the Foodtv.ca Cooking Club Challenge: a monthly online challenge to make a specific recipe from one of their shows, with some cookbook prizes for the winners. The challenge for May is Michael Smith’s Banana Brownies, and I just happened to have all the ingredients in my kitchen already, so I thought I’d join in.
The original recipe is somewhat very high in calories and fat, so I made a few modifications:
They turned out very well – not overly sweet or rich, nicely dense, and very tasty. The banana flavour is quite noticeable, although I think that may have been due to my bananas being very ripe! With a bit of whipped cream on the top (which is entirely justified with the lower fat mods and smaller portion size) they make a very nice dessert. Have a virtual taste:
To enter the Cooking Club Challenge, you just submit a photo and a description of your creation. I submitted mine and now I just have to wait and see…
I really don’t expect to win, but the club is a nice motivator to try out a new recipe every month!
Yesterday’s amigurumi piglet needed a friend. Here is the smallest, simplest bunny I could dream up:
If you’re interested, there will be patterns for the pig and the bunny – sign up for my mailing list if you’d like to know when they are available 🙂
And now I have a question for you. I could keep designing these simple tiny ami for just about every variety of animal out there. They are a joy to make because they are so small and easy to whip up. Would you like to see some more (a whole new mini pattern range), or is two enough? Help me to decide!
PS – Catherine Andrews: please contact me with an alternate e-mail address. I keep getting a delivery failure when I try to send your patterns to the e-mail address you use for PayPal!
UPDATE: Looking for the pattern? You can find the PocketAmi Set 2 crochet pattern in my shop.
Sometimes a quick project is the most satisfying. He was quick to design and easy to crochet, but my amigurumi piglet does make me smile:
He may be small (about 3″ long) but he has big ambitions! This little piggy is hoping for a grand adventure – I’ll have to see what I can do about that…
UPDATE: Looking for the pattern? You can find the PocketAmi Set 1 crochet pattern in my shop.
In case you’ve never heard of needlefelting before, here’s the basic premise (ignore the rest of this paragraph if you already know all about it). By stabbing unspun wool repeatedly with a barbed needle, the wool fibres get tangled together and the wool begins to form a denser, more coherent piece. The more you stab, the firmer the piece becomes. By building up layers of wool in different colours and in different areas, it is possible to form complex sculptures with fine detail. That’s the theory, anyway!
There are some amazing examples of finished work in the Needle Felting Flickr group pool. I think I first heard of needlefelting over a year ago through articles in CRAFT magazine, but I’ve never tried it until now. I had my first attempt this weekend, using the supplies I got from the show last weekend. I couldn’t decide whether to start with something simple to learn the techniques, or to jump straight in and try to make something I actually wanted to make. In the end, I decided I didn’t want to ‘waste’ my wool on a test piece, so I dug out my photographs of Cinnamon (the best guinea pig ever) and started work.
I really liked needlefelting – I found it to be like a combination of my crocheted animals (texturally) and polymer clay sculpting (you can build up areas by adding more wool, in the same way as you can with a clay sculpture). It takes a lot of stabbing to get the wool to felt together firmly , but I discovered that, by compressing the wool first as much as possible, the wool begins to hold together after only a few stabs. I also discovered (after a few hours of make-it-up-as-I-go-along experimentation) that there are some very helpful videos on YouTube that show the process – I recommend watching a few if you plan to start needlefelting for the first time!
Now back to my guinea pig sculpture. It took a long time and a lot more wool than I expected. I tried to make the markings as accurate as possible, so I started with the white wool at the head and worked my way back, adding darker sections where they were needed. With hindsight, I think it would have been a lot easier to make and shape an all-white guinea pig body and then add thin patches of darker wool over the top to create the markings – I’ll know for next time!
I needlefelted in tiny black wool patches for the eyes, and then sewed round black onyx beads over the top to give them that realistic glint. I also used two strands of embroidery floss to stitch on a tiny nose and mouth. Apart from that, the whole mini-pig is solid wool.
I’m very pleased with this as my first piece, and I have enough wool left to make a few more little sculptures. It’s very satisfying when the piece comes together, and if the shape isn’t quite right, you can just add a litle more wool over the top to reshape it.
Another craft conquered! Well, the basics of it, at least. What shall I try next…? Any recommendations? Please leave them in the comments!
One of my personal challenges for my other blog, Crochet Along, is to come up with a banner design to reflect the new blog theme every two months. I try not to be influenced by my personal preferences for colour, style, etc and I think it’s helping to improve my graphic design skills.
I thought I’d share how I came up with my design for the new Summer Crochet theme.
First, find source graphics. I looked through stock photography sites for royalty-free photos that matched my design concept (‘orange’ in this case), and made sure to only save images that had no copyright restrictions or required credit to use – no copyright infringements here!
When I had saved about 20 images, I looked at them all together on the screen and eliminated them one by one until I had narrowed them down to my final source images (I took the crochet hooks photo myself):
After that, it’s time to cut, paste, resize, arrange, change colours, erase unwanted backgrounds, and add some text. Here’s the end result:
If you’d like to see the full sized banner, or you’d like some Summer-themed crocheting fun, head over and join the Crochet Along!
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Ravelry: June