More Works in Progress Wednesday

This week has been kind of crazy, but I've still made progress on a couple of projects.  First, the sweater I have been longing for for about a year, the Vine Yoke Cardigan, is almost done.  I just need to graft the underarms and then add some buttons, still TBD.

I also started what should be a quick crochet project if I ever take a couple hours to just sit down and work on it.  It is a striped owl, intended as a belated birthday gift for my baby girl (don't worry, she won't have any clue it's late).

So far it is only pink and brown, but I hope to add some fun accent colors.  I found some honest to goodness Red Heart wool at a garage sale over the summer and have been looking for something perfect to use it on, and this will hopefully be the project.

And because Little Miss had a birthday this week, I had the perfect excuse to test out the new Silhouette.  Using just the fonts already on my computer and the free shapes that came with the machine, and a little mod podge, I was able to make this box for the birthday girl.

Because the box is always more fun than the presents, right?

And a custom banner, which was a lot of fun to design.

So those are my works in progress this week.  I can't wait to see what everyone else is up to - here is the roundup of other Work in Progress Wednesday posts.

Holiday Countdown

It's funny how those holidays sneak up on you, right?  Valentine's day has come and gone.  New Years?  Pffsht..., that is so two months ago.  So before we lose track of things, here's a countdown in days to the next few up and coming events:

St. Patrick's Day                         15 days
Easter                                          53 days
American Independence Day     124 days

And, if you are really enthusiastic about taxes:
Tax Day                                       44 days

However, if you are looking for a reason to celebrate right now, it is National Pig Day!  Pig macaroni art, anyone?

Wrenna - my first Finished Object Friday

Whoever thought of knitting lace in bulky yarn was just genius.  Seriously.  I fell in love with the Wrenna cardigan from the book French Girl Knits after seein a few finished online.  A lot of knitters finished the sweater as quickly as only two days.  Mine took closer to two weeks for the actual knitting.  However, it took a lot longer to figure out how to fasten it - laced with leather, as the pattern calls for, isn't quite my style, so I just finished sewing on hooks and eyes.  Mine also took longer because I added sleeves, roughly 3/4 length in stockinette.  Here's the finished product.

Close up of the hooks and eyes:

And here is the lace:

AND.... I am so excited  - this week I bought a Silhouette craft cutter.

For years, I had considered getting a Cricut, but just could not justify buying lots of cartridges.  But the Silhouette does not take cartridges, it connects to the computer and cuts any true type font and any of the digital images you download from the Silhouetter online store or create in the software that comes with the machine.  Here's an action shot:

That's part of a birthday cake popping right off the sticky carrier sheet.  Can't wait to see what projects this new toy can handle!
P.S. Finished Object Friday roundup here.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled blog...

Yeah, that's not really what things have been like around here.  Without any sort of posting schedule, I just have not posted anything.  So, taking a key suggested in a group in one of my favorite places on the entire world wide web, Ravelry, I've decided to adopt some regular posting days.  Welcome to the first NJMA weekly Work in Progress Wednesday!

Here goes:

So what is in the works at this moment?  Well my little boy wants me to knit him a sweater.  A green one, specifically.  But since he is on a Where the Wild Things Are kick, I think he'll forgive me when he sees a cream wolf suit sweater.  The pattern is from Splendor Knitting.  Major mod I'm making is sticking it on my Bond USM knitting machine.  It's slow going at the bottom of the ribbing, since there's a lot of hand converting purl stitches to knit stitches for several rows, but it should go more smoothly once I get past the bottom couple inches and only need to convert a few garter rows at each end every other row.  (The Bond USM feeds yarn through a carriage across a bed of latch hooks.  As the hooks catch the yarn, it creates rows of stockinette stitch, which are purled side facing the knitter.  Any thing other than straight stockinette requires manipulation with spare latch hooks and needles).

So that's what's going on in these parts at the moment.  Hopefully I'll have something that actually looks like a sweater to show soon!

P.S. There is a WIP Wednesday roundup is here!

Bowl - it's really a roll of tickets!

Here's another idea I wish I'd thought of.  It's a ticket bowl made from a roll of tickets and some mod podge.  The original was posted at Buggie and Jellybean, complete with a tutorial full of pictures.  I saw this and immediately thought of my dad, who received a coordinating set for Christmas.  Here's how his turned out:

It took six little cork disks to fill in each roll center but now they are solid.

My one goof-up was not finding the perfect little glass bowls until after the mod podging (is that a word?) was complete.  Once the bowls were finished, I found the perfect bowls at the dollar store and with the proper planning, I could have formed the tickets to the glass bowls for the perfect washable lining.  Ah well, better luck next time.

Alien Abduction Lamp

With little kiddos and Christmas and New Years to take care of, I got pretty lazy about posting.  But with the holidays over, I have some fun things to share!  This alien abduction lamp one of my favorite projects from our most recent round of homemade Christmas gifts. 

It was inspired by the lamp created at Dollar Store Crafts.  Heather at DSC had the brilliant idea to make a lamp out of two bowls and an acrylic glass.  My modifications were using a round wooden cutting board as a base and adding polymer clay creatures. 

I painted the cutting board brown, then sponged it with shades of green for a ore grassy look.  Then a coat of mod podge sealed it up and made it look a little more finished.  This pic is before the mod podge shined it up.

I did not find small animals or aliens that were quite cute enough, so I made a sheep and some aliens out of polymer clay.

The glass is a green acrylic glass from Target.  I only had a drill to work with so cutting the bottom of the bowl out was not going to work.  So instead, I drilled as many holes into the bottom of the lower bowl as I could before the drill battery died.  The way the light filters through the holes gives the lamp a little bit of a fun eery feel.

Check out the link above for more details on how to make one!

Polymer Clay Knitting Needle Pens

There's tons of Christmas crafting going on in these parts right now, but with projects needing to stay on the down-low, I haven't been able to share them here.  Luckily my knitting group's second annual potluck was a week ago, so one project is no longer secret. There were a lot of fantastic stocking stuffers at the potluck, some hand made and some pre-assembled.  These were my contribution:

They may look like Boye knitting needles, but they are actually pens. 
These would have been a quick and easy project for someone who was experienced with polymer clay, but I'm not so it was a long road.  Here's what it took:

• Polymer clay (I used Femo and Sculpey mixtures for the bodies, Sculpey III for the knobs, and Promat for the cap mold)
• Large knitting needles - US 15 looked large but turned out to be a good size
• Oven safe pens - Bic sticks worked great, but I also tested Paper Mate Eagle in the oven and they did not melt either
• Silver acrylic paint
• A little bit of blue painter's tape to keep the paint tidy

The first step was to make cap molds.  I found a large knitting needle and stuck it into a wad of clay to make a mold, and then baked that according to the package directions. 

I originally started with a US size 10 needle, since that seemed large enough in relation to the pen.  However, the end caps lost some size due to my wiggling and compressing the clay to get it out of the mold.  So I made a second mold from a size 15 needle, and that worked much better.  I then made replica end caps by putting small balls of clay into the mold and pulling them out to bake.

Luckily the clay can be rebaked, so I had nice solid pieces to attach to the pens after they were rolled in the clay.  The needle caps may have worked better if I had made them in Femo.  With the Sculpey III being softer, it was pretty difficult to wiggle the clay back out of the mold without distorting the image.


After setting the baked needle caps aside, it was time to remove the pen innards.   It's easy to do with a pair of small pliars; just rotate and pull the plastic portion of the tip (not the metal point), along with the ink chamber, out of the barrel.

The next step was to roll out the clay.  I used a mixture of Femo and Sculpey III.  The Sculpey was a lot softer the Femo, which flaked like crazy through the pasta machine. 

After conditioning the clay for what seemed like hours, I rolled it out in sheets and cut it in rectangles to fit around the pens, just short of overlapping at the seam.  Setting the pasta machine at 5 produced a nice thin layer of clay that seemed to have a neater appearance at first.  Unfortunately clay that thin was not very forgiving because there was just not a lot of clay on the pen.  So I went up to setting 4, and the clay was then thick enough that I could lay the pen on top of it, roll it a few times, and the seam would virtually disappear.  The next step was to pop a pre-baked end cap at the end and set it in a manilla folder folded accordian-style to bake.  This is how they turned out:

The white caps just weren't right, of course.  So I took a little bit of blue painter's tape and wrapped it around each pen to create a sharp line.

Then I brushed on some silver acrylic paint and pulled off the blue tape.  Voila!