12/16/2014

I have been a busy little beaver today. And I'm so proud of myself I could just spit. LOL

First off I should tell you I'm anything but a seamstress. But my knees ask me to make some pillow covers for her two-year-old's favorite and I quote "nasty pillow".  He's in love with the ninja turtles and so the fabric she handed me had ninja turtles on it.

 I wanted the pillow covers to be tough, you know for a two-year-old. Attractive and functional to the point of safe. In other words no ties for him to choke on our get wrapped up in.  So I made overlap pillowcases. Kind of like pillow shams, and of course I doubled the seams so that if one seam pops the other will  to hold it together.

The reason for that is that the pillow has those little microbead things for stuffing.the inside of the pillow. So this is what I came up with.

I stuck one of my throw pillows in it just for picture purposes.

So cute!  Even if I do say so myself.

My friend asked me to make some Christmas ornaments for the grandparents of her children. She wanted handmade and we decided between us that I would try and do them in her nine year olds hand writing. So I sent the sliced pieces of Cedar home with her and let him write whatever he wanted on the ornaments for his grandmothers.

 Then I got out my Dremel and engraved the pieces of wood exactly the way he wrote on them. I then put shellac only in the grooved out portions i.e. the lettering, so that they would be shiny and kind of stand out a little bit from the rest of the piece. Her son saw them last night and simply adores them.  

Today I gave them a coat beeswax and used some jute to make bows on them where they can be hung, they can hang on a Christmas tree, or they could even hang on the wall. We're searching for some green ribbon because that's what he asked for but I thought that this would do in case we couldn't find any that he liked.

So here is a shot of those two ornaments…

We're also going to do a wall hanging for the new baby's arrival. As a Christmas present to her mother. 

We decided that we wanted to put the babies handprint,  or maybe footprints on the pace. So I got out a piece of Juniper and this morning we took some tempura paint, remember the baby is only two months old we had to be really careful about nothing toxic etc. etc. etc. they Didn't come out as black as I might have liked, they are more like a gray color but they're stinking cute. I think graphite will be perfect for drawing the rest of the peace, it will match that gray color beautifully.

Now I get to put the writing on the front that she asked for, but those pictures will come late.

I am also working on a very sculptural basket, my first actually. Yesterday I put some beads on it for peepholes and because they were glass they kept cutting my thread. I also found out the hard way that their coloring was a layer applied to the outside that would peel off. So this morning I got to get up and ripp out three hours of work.  Those beads simply are not acceptable.  

I am going to show you a couple pictures though and the beads are indeed still on it, they're gone now but I thought you might like how the piece is coming along.

If you look where the beads are you will notice that I would then go around over the top of them with the next row that's creating peepholes between each bead. That's not going to happen at least not with these beads at this point in time.

The peepholes would've looked something like the ones I did where the wooden inserts in the sides are…kind of like this…

So now I get to rethink that process. The inserts are a little larger than I would've liked, which makes the humps above them much taller than I really want.  I'll think of something though so stay tuned pictures will follow in a couple days or so.