Posts Tagged ‘pattern’

New Pattern! ‘Tree Bowl’ on Etsy

Monday, March 28th, 2011

Last year was not a great one for my development of my Etsy shop. I did not get a single new pattern in! Last year I wrote up three patterns for the next One Yard Wonders, half finished two soft electronic patterns that I gave up on because I didn’t want to deal with possible people-shocking-their-children liability issues, worked on some doll house food I never finished that I’d still like to re-visit, went through a ‘sticks and string’ dreaming-about-a-book period that I don’t think even made it to the blog, and then there was that doll pattern that has been sticking me up for months. Not one of those made it to my Etsy store, and in December I shut the whole thing down until now, because I was so depressed about it! But it is open again! Hurray!

Obviously the One Yard Wonders patterns are not a ‘failure’, but it was several months worth of working on patterns that were *also* not going to my Etsy store. 2010 was a sad year for that store, no progress! 2010 was also the year that Penelope went from 6m to 1.5yr, so there were lots of reasons for no progress, but I still felt bad!

But by picking a reasonably small goal though, I’ve made it from start to finish on another pattern, which is good, because I’m probably going to be going back to work for several months now, and getting very little done other than basic house and child survival. We will see how the blog fares through that, if I suddenly disappear completely until June you will know why! I still don’t know exactly when my contract will start though, so I’m in an odd holding place, trying to get things wrapped up so we can survive being a two-working-parent household, briefly anyway. I am so rambling right now. But YAY, new pattern in my Etsy shop.

Also, YAY, we won Rebecca’s school lottery and will be going to our local progressive hand-on parent-participation PUBLIC school. Which means FREE (almost), which means we will not be (trying to) save 20k (and then 40k for two kids) to spend on private education (that was going to be a difficult budgeting problem!), and I am SO glad we don’t have to choose between a great school and retirement. Maybe we will go to Egypt (NOT right now) and see the pyramids instead of paying for private school… Stay tuned, six years from now I’m sure I will be stressing about this all over again for middle school…

Singing don’t worry, about a thing,
’cause every little thing, it’s going to be all right…

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Posted in Crafty, Life | 2 Comments »

St. Patrick’s Day, Pattern Tester Please

Saturday, March 19th, 2011


We like St. Patrick’s Day. On St. Patrick’s Day all the Leprechauns around the world swarm out, looking for new homes and nice places to stay in the coming year. Maybe they’re tired of their old home, maybe they’ve multiplied and need a little more space, I can’t say. So we make beds for them, and find in the morning that they have left chocolate coins sprinkled about, as if to say, thanks for the effort, but we’re not moving in this year. Someday perhaps we will get a Leprechaun to move in, but we aren’t upset with the chocolate coins and occasional jewel.

This year Rebecca chose to use the soft tree bowls I’ve been working on to turn into beds with some lace doilies we had out for ‘tea party week’.

Would you like to make one of these lovely hollow tree stumps? I’m sure you would! Would you like to test my pattern for me? I know you would!

To qualify you need to either have a blog, or have commented on my blog before when it wasn’t a massive cross-blog giveaway day. This is really just so I know you are a real person, if you have another way to show me you are a real person, by all means let me know.

Comment on this post, and I will choose one person to get a free pattern to test. You will need to have 2/3 yard of fabric and medium/heavy interfacing, and it will probably take about one hour (maybe more?), if you are good at this sort of thing and don’t have kids hanging on you. You are committing to have feed back to me by next Sunday (just let me know the parts you had a hard time understanding), or give me an estimate of when you think you could find time to do it in your comment.
 [I'm giving the job to maryanne.]

Also, if anyone can come up with a nicer name than ‘Tree Bowl’ and I decide to use it, I will send them a copy of the pattern too.

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Posted in Crafty | 6 Comments »

Supersized Doll House Chair

Friday, June 4th, 2010

So, when I created the tutorial for this felt doll house chair I wondered what would happen if I turned it into a toddler chair. Well, when the next One Yard Wonders book comes out, you’ll be able to decide if it was successful or not. :-) Clearly the ‘muslin’ (canvas) pattern holds weight, but, I don’t know, I’m not totally satisfied with it. Is tying a chair weird? Should I have used upholstery buttons instead of just thread? But I don’t think I can do any serious redesign now.

I do still need to make the final version, that’s next on my table. I’ve finished one project for the book, and I have two more and a looming deadline that is totally stressing me out! It’s like I have a real job again! Stress! It makes me want to crawl into bed and wait until those in authority come and haul me away for pretending that I can accomplish something good. Erg. But! One foot in front of the other, and not wasting time online can work wonders. Also, just a little sake before I sit down to write really helps me get out the first draft of a pattern! I found that out last week. Is that bad? Should I not admit that? Maybe, but it was nice to have a little help with the voices in my head saying, ‘no!’ ‘that’s awful’ ‘no one will understand that’ ‘that’s too basic! People will think you’re condescending!’ ‘give up!’ But what would be the point of life if we gave up, right? So, forward forward forward.

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One Yard Wonders Exhibit A

Saturday, May 8th, 2010

I had a problem with timing this year, the call for submissions to the second One Yard Wonders book came out while I was packing to move, and with the approaching deadline last month at the end of March I was still unpacking. I was not very happy about this. So a week before the deadline, desperate to submit *something* I made this fairy skirt and play silk. And I told them about all these other brilliant ideas I had that I didn’t have time to make before the deadline.

Long story short, they did not take this skirt, unsurprisingly really, but they *did* extended the deadline for everyone for another ~2 weeks, one of which my little sister was visiting playing au pair. So I got three more projects sewn, although one was a little late, and they were accepted! The down side being that now I have to finish writing up the instructions for three projects and re-make them with the soon-to-be-provided fabric for the final versions. So along with making things for Rebecca’s birthday party next week, I’m going to be pretty busy for the next month! And here I was wanting to get back to working on patterns for my sadly neglected Etsy shop. But life just is. I’m doing what I love, so I can’t complain.

And here’s a picture just for fun:

This picture sums up what I love about my bounce flash. Is that shallow? Okay, silver lining lifestyle comment: since our mattress was saggy and pokey by a year after we bought it, 8 years later Rebecca is allowed to jump on it whenever she wants. Bonus. She jumps on the couch too. It’s a nice couch, but we got it for free from family, and jumping always seemed more important than preserving the couch. It’s holding up so far. :-)

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Soft Car Pattern

Saturday, November 28th, 2009

Car Pattern

Finally finally finally! This is what I’ve been working on for the last month besides my 2007 photo book. And suddenly I find I have nothing to say… I think the pattern came out nicely though, this time I decided to illustrate it instead of photographing it. I like how it looks, it isn’t overloaded with pictures for each tiny step, and I think the illustrations are easier to understand. I wanted to get this done further before the holidays, but it’s pretty easy to make, so maybe I’ll get some adventurous takers.

pinned-bottom

I think finding wheels is a little intimidating, so I put some sets of those up for sale in my shop too, although I really don’t want to get into the business of selling wheels. If I was a business major I’m sure I’d think it was great and call it something like horizontal productization or leveraged diversification or something, but there’s a reason I’m not a business major, and I don’t run a store. Because I want to make things, not resell them. Except, now I have a store. Hrm.

On a separate note, Thanksgiving was really low key at our house this year. We were going to go over to a friends for a group shindig, but Rebecca got sick Tuesday night. Thursday it got to be time to cook dinner, well, 20 minutes until dinner is supposed to be ready is a little late to start, and I felt lame that we didn’t have anything Thanksgiving-ish. So in 40 minutes I managed to cook elbow noodles (Rebecca survives half on whole wheat noodles and half on milk and fruit), sour cranberry relish, biscuit wrapped chicken sausage bits, and roasted chestnuts. And the biscuits didn’t come out of a pop-tube either. We opened a bottle of wine, and had the chocolate cream pie Jesse made for the party for dessert ourselves. I was quite pleased with my adrenaline fueled speed cooking session. :-) It brought back the days when we used to have Iron Chef cooking parties at our house.

I should probably have some kind of giveaway now, shouldn’t I? Maybe tomorrow.

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Posted in Crafty, Life | 2 Comments »

Woo! Finally.

Saturday, October 10th, 2009

Finally finally finally I have a pattern in my Etsy store. Now of course I need to start another one! But the ice is broken and I’m getting my toes wet, or frozen, or something!

DSC_6325

Now I have to go do one of those sidebar widgety things…

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Posted in Crafty, Life | 1 Comment »