Some very pink crafts

I'm taking a quilting class, so I thought I'd make myself a new pincushion. My old one is very lame, just part of the sleeve of a felted sweater sewn into a little pillow. Totally functional, but not cute at all. I followed these directions to make a much cuter one.
My aunt gave me some quilting fabric for my class. I used some charm squares for the pincushion. What are you supposed to do with charm squares? They seem too small to make any kind of quilt.


Then I made a zippered pouch. I'd made a lunch bag out of the puppy fabric to give to that aunt. I thought it looked so cute with the checkered fabric that I put them together again. I've started some appliqued pouches that are going to look much cooler.
The pixel bow barrette was supposed to be to sell on Etsy, but the glue looks really messy. That's alright, since I wanted to keep one anyway. I made it ages ago but I just got the clips for the back.

Cat pictures!

Do you like pictures of cats? If you don't, I'm sorry. I'm going to show them anyways.

My house has five cats. I think that's totally way too many, but it's not like we can get rid of them. They make things more exciting, anyway.
This one isn't one of our cats. It's one we're watching for a shelter. It's super cute! It has a brother who's more outgoing, but they're both very cute and playful.


Even though this one's orange, too, it's not related. This is my boyfriend's giant cat, Deimos. It's huge! Even though it's pretty fat, it's also just gigantic.

I normally brush my hair, I had just woken up in those pictures.

I quilted the doll quilt!

I wanted to quilt my doll quilt from the Sew Mama Sew sew-a-long, but I didn't have a darning foot. I tried to find one at Hobby Lobby, but they don't carry that kind of thing. I got some nice fabric to send out in a fat quarter swap, but I kind of wish I'd waited. There's a sewing and vacuum shop really close to my house, so I thought I'd try there. Turns out they carry fabric now, like really cool prints and for good prices.
Anyway, I got myself a darning foot. To do quilting, you're also supposed to "drop the feed dogs" on your sewing machine. Those are the things that pull the fabric from the underside. They don't retract on my sewing machine, so I had to unscrew them. I was so worried I'd screw up my machine but it worked out just fine.
So here are pictures! All I have to do now is put a binding on it.

Aquarium animation

The assignment was to use frame-by-frame animation to make some kind of short movie. The wiggliness of frame-by-frame animation reminded me of the wiggliness of underwater creatures. I'm very happy with my tiny little movie.

Doll quilt update: Now with leaves!

I ended up going with my idea of embroidering leaves on the blank squares of the doll quilt. I picked Oak and Maple since they're the most recognizable and interesting looking. It took a long time to do but it turned out awesome!



I did the leaves by printing out shrunken pictures of leaves and tracing them onto the fabric with a disappearing marker. I just backstitched the outlines.

Do you see where the side border pieces are a little too wide? I had a dream last night that I tried to even them up and accidentally cut off almost the whole border! That's a really weird thing to dream about, but I'm definitely going to be really careful cutting it.

My first quilt, in a Sew-A-Long

I've never finished a quilt before. I started one when I was a kid, but I was way too impatient to sew nine-patch squares by hand. I tried my hand at a postage stamp quilt with all different fabrics gathered from lots of people, but I only made an ugly 1 by 1.5 foot rectangle of crooked chaos.

I came across Sew, Mama, Sew!'s doll quilt sew-a-long. It was so cute and simple looking I just really wanted to try it. A lot of the comments are people saying "I've never made a quilt before but I'm going to try this!" I got all pumped up about it and made my front in one sitting. I like the combo of wood patterns and green I used; I wasn't sure it would turn out right but it totally did :D


I'm proud of the back. I only mis-pressed one seam.
In the background you can see the much more detailed quilt my grandpa's wife/step-grandma/Louise made me for high school graduation. She's the one who taught me to knit and tried to teach me to make a quilt when I was small.

The next step in the sew-a-long is to embellish the quilt and baste it together. I'm not sure how I'm going to decorate it. It would be really cute if I embroidered a leaf on the plain squares, but I'm trying to think of something simpler, too. This is going to be too little to use for real so I don't want to make it too fancy.

New Blog!

I just realized I had no place online to really share my crafts with other crafty people. Hopefully this will be a place where people can go to check them out.
I'm a little busy lately, but that just makes me want to do more crafts. I'm finishing up my last semester of my associate's degree in Computer Graphics (really it's graphic design). I'm also working as a grocery store cake decorator part-time. Both of those things constantly inspire me!

For the first post I'll give you some pictures of some magnets I've made out of perler beads. I've been thinking about doing pictures from video games out of these beads since I was little, but I didn't have the patience then. I saw some pictures of some really awesome video game bead sprites and it made me try them out.


The pictures are from Pokemon games and a Dragon Quest spin-off with the slimes. Stay tuned, I'm about to finish a really cute knit toy!