Girl on the Rocks

Woven pincushion September 5, 2007

A continuation of the Week of Weaving…

I find it totally amazing that you can use two squares sewn together to a shape as funky as this one.

When I was a kid and would get dragged to my Mom’s quilting meet-ups, many of the ladies had pincushions that looked kinda like this one. I remembered the name sounding something like “biscuit.” It wasn’t until I saw one of the winning entries in the Craft Stitch ‘n Pitch contest that I remembered it was called a biscornu. I thought it would be fun to make a wee one out of 2-inch weavette squares. I hadn’t seen one in ages and was totally surprised (and excited) to see June’s whiplash entry – a tiny biscornu for your wrist! Then, I saw that Miss Wooly was hard at work on a traditional cross stitch biscornu (she also provided a link to a fantastic history and tutorial at Own Two Hands). Time to throw the woven biscornu into the mix!

I have a flickr set tutorial that I will summarize here, but I encourage you to check out June’s and the tutorial at Own Two Hands, as they do an excellent job. The idea is just to offset two squares so that the corners of one square match the midpoint of the sides of the other square (this is the same as turning one of them 1/8 of a turn). It results in a funky little 8 sided pillow. Traditionally it has a button in the middle, pinching everything together – but I omitted it on mine. The pincushion is so tiny that if it gets cinched down, it will be too small for pins!

To get started, place the squares on top of each other and offset the top one by half of its length. In this arrangement, the corner of the bottom square is lined up with the midpoint of the top square.

Sew together as indicated in the picture. The next step is to twist the top square so that the midpoint of the top square is lined up with the corner below.

This is the process (twist and sew) that you repeat all the way around until 6 of the 8 sides have been sewn together. Then it is time to stuff it. I used some fiberfill, and the yarn scraps that I had leftover from weaving the squares.

Finally, sew the last two sides. Sit back and admire your handiwork.

If you have a few minutes more, you can make a matching needlebook!

Little woven needlebook September 4, 2007

A continuation of the Week of Weaving Series.

Two inch weavette squares are my favorite to make. They only require about 2 1/2 yards of yarn, and whip up in no time. I seem to always have scrap sock yarn (fingering weight) lying about, so I like to double it up and weave it into a little square. So far, this is my favorite use for pairs of 2 inch squares – little needlebooks.

I admit it, not everyone needs a needlebook. But your crafty friends sure will love it. And if you don’t already have one, you will wonder how you ever did without. Constructing the needlebook is easy. It has a front and back cover made from 2 inch woven squares and pages made from felt. Want more instructions? Here you go (More pictures in my Flickr photo set).

Little Woven Needebook Tutorial

To get started you need:

• 2 two-inch woven squares (you can substitute knit squares or felt squares)
• Coordinating embroidery floss
• two felt sqares, two inches on each side
• Embroidery needle
• Pinking shears (or regular scissors)

The plan is pretty simple – sandwich the felt between the woven squares and sew ‘em together. I trimmed my felt squares on three sides to be just a bit smaller than the woven covers.

Stack the pages in between the woven squares. Make sure that the untrimmed edges of the pages are flush with the edges of the woven squares.

I used a blanket stitch to sew up the spine (more details in the flickr set).(edit: Crafty Daisies has piced up some of my slack. Head over to their embroidery lesson #4 for blanket stitch instructions) When it was all finished I added buttons to the front. That’s it!

They are a little on the small side, but even my long tapestry needles fit in on the diagonal.

Zakka Napkin August 24, 2007

To be honest, i designed the whole ‘Week of Weaving‘ idea around my Whiplash entry this month… This month, Whipup is focusing on small crafts, and the Whiplash theme is ‘Zakka.‘ I struggled with this a bit as I never had a good idea of what zakka really meant. I don’t know that I have figured it out, but I was able to see some common elements in all of the examples. To me they seemed to be simple handmade projects often for a practical use, that are occasionally tastefully embellished. I don’t have a lot of free time this month so I thought that I might be able to add a little embellishment to something.

Many of the examples used very natural colors and fabrics, which made me remember a stack of 4 inch weave-it squares that I made out of a natural colored hemp-blend yarn. It struck me that they were the size of petite coasters, but had a fantastic hand to them, more like a cloth napkin. As I examined the cloth I noticed that the fabric looked just like counted cross stitch canvas.

And then it hit me… Cocktail Napkins. I started decorating and couldn’t stop. I ended up making more woven squares so I could try out all of my ideas. Want to make some?

Cocktail Napkins – a tutorial

I made my napkins out of a 4×4 inch square that I made on my weave it loom. You could also use a 4×4 knit square, or fabric. I am also figuring that you have some cross-stitch skills. If not, the only skills required are making X’s and the backstitch (which you can learn about here) This is the perfect starter project!

Tools

• 4 inch weave-it or Weavette loom and appropriate weaving needle
• Elsbeth Lavold Hempathy Yarn – less than one skein. You can substitute another fingering weight yarn, but cotton might be best for the look, and the washability.
• Various colors of cotton embroidery floss
• Cross-stitch needle

Weaving the napkin

This part is really simple enough. Weave a standard square on your 4 inch weave-it or weavette using the yarn held doubled. The fact that the yarn is doubled is part of what makes it look so much like cross stitch canvas. If you only use a single strand of fine yarn, your finished square will be too lacy to support your cross stitch. Make sure that that you don’t wrap the yarn too tightly around the pegs. If you do, it will make the needle-weaving part very difficult. Carefully weave in the ends when the square is complete.

Decorating the napkin
I charted up a few of the drinks I designed to get you started.

Click to embiggen – free for your personal use.

The two rows nearest to the edge of the weave-it square are a little loose. Plan the placement of your design carefully so that you don’t have to cross stitch on these rows. Carefully make your cross stitch x’s making sure they all cross in the same direction, and don’t pull them too tightly.

I used appropriately colored embroidery floss, and I used all 6 strands of it. I outlined the designs with a backstitch using 3 strands of black floss. Secure the floss in the back by running it underneath the completed stitches.

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I made 8 napkins decorated with various drinks. Click through to my Flickr set to see them in detail, and figure which drinks they represent…

View all of the posts in my ‘Week of Weaving’ Series.

Keychain Crochet Hook – A tutorial February 11, 2007

I find myself leaving the house and grabbing a “to-go” knitting project to take with me, often socks. Nothing like knitting away while waiting in line at the post office, or in a waiting room, or trapped at an awful social event. Usually I have just a little mesh project bag with my sock and yarn in it… No notions. I will be happily knitting away, then, a moments distraction, and a stitch jumps off the needle.

Dreaded dropped stitch

Of course the best way to remedy this situation is to use a crochet hook to pick up the stitches.

Picking up dropped stitches with a crochet hook

But I don’t have one in my bare bones travelling sock project bag. So I decided to make one that I could keep with me, even on the go.

Behold! The keychain crochet hook.

To make one you will need:

• An Aluminum crochet hook of small size (less than 3 mm)*
• Wire clippers
• Needle-nosed pliers
• Jewelery findings: Jump rings and a clasp
• Eye protection

To start, clip the hook near the flat part in the middle. You want to keep the flat part connected to the hook, and move as far down the handle as you can. If you get all the way to the round part, it may be too difficult to cut through.

Then, use the needle-nosed pliers to fold the flat part of the handle back into a loop.

Use the same pliers to attach a jump ring and a clasp. Now you can clip it on your keychain and remove it whenever you have a dropped stitch that needs saving.

* I know that it is practically unbelievable, but I got this hook for 25 cents at a thrift store.

Angora handwarmers – a tutorial October 17, 2006

The theme for this month’s whiplash competition is Accessories and this tutorial is my entry. I have been wanting to retire my hobo-style fingerless gloves, and find something more fashionable to keep my hands warm at work. I decided to turn a $2.50 thrift-store angora sweater into a pair of toasty handwarmers. I turned the sleeves of the sweater into a pair of fitted handwarmers, decorated with vintage buttons and a crochet edging.

Skills required:
Basic sewing (machine not necessary, but helpful)
Simple crochet
Knowledge of felting/fulling is also helpful

Materials required
sweater for sacrifice made of wool or a wool/angora blend
needle and thread
10 small buttons
A few yards of sock-weight yarn for the edging (i used knitpicks undyed sock yarn since i had some and it matched).

Felting
To turn the sweater into a dense, warm fabric that I could cut up without fearing unravelling, I felted the sweater. This is a process that involves a lot of agitation and temperature shocking of the natural fibers in the sweater (you can read more about it at knitty). For this reason, your sweater should be a NONwashable type of wool and/or angora with a low synthetic fiber content (less than 10%). mine was 60% angora, 40% wool. Keep your eye out at the thrift store for these. most of the angora sweaters that i have found there have already been accidentally washed and shrunk – a great bargain for you! you could also make this project without felting the object first, but you would need to machine sew all the edges to prevent unravelling.

Okay, on with the felting. i don’t have my own washing machine, so i boiled my sweater on the stove with some harsh detergent, then dumped it into my sink and ran cold water on it while agitating it with a wooden spoon. I am sure i looked like a crafty madwoman, but it worked. I then put it in the dryer to heat up and dry. it is very important that your fabric be completely dry before you start, otherwise you may stretch it and distort it while you work.

sweater after felting. you can see how it shrunk more in the vertical direction and is a little short looking

Cutting
The wristwarmers only utilize the sleeves of the sweater. the cuff of the sweater will become the cuff of your handwarmer. stick your hand up the sleeve to get an idea of where you will need to cut.

Chop off the sleeve above your fingers.
Put a pin in the fabric to mark the space between your thumb and your hand.

Snip above the thumb:

Trim off the excess fabric as you make a cut down to the pin to define the thumb of your handwarmer:

Cutting Complete (for now. don’t put away the scissors)! Now it is time for a bit of sewing.

sewing
We want to accomplish two things in the sewing section:
1) secure the raw edged to prevent fraying (just in case)
2) sew the side seam to close up the handwarmer.

The photo below illustrates where this is going to happen:

The blue lines indicate where first you should stitch over the edge to secure the fabric. this is probably unnecessary if it has been fully felted, but just in case…. Make sure you don’t sew the finger and thumb openings shut. Next turn the fabric so the wrong side is out. Stitch a seam where indicated by the red lines. When this is complete, you should have a loosely fitting fingerless glove! I folded down the finger edge and pinned it down (to be secured later). this way it will extra thick and toasty when i tuck my fingers in. to create a more fitted glove we will next cut open the other side… get the scissors.

More cutting and attaching buttons
Snip all the way up the edge of the handwarmer on the side opposite the thumb.

make sure you cut all the way up!
If you want, you can stitch over this edge as well to prevent unravelling. Remember how you folded the finger edge in and tacked it down with a pin “to be secured later”? Now’s the time. i just hand sewed a few stitches that disappeared into the angora fuzz.

The newly cut opening will be folded over and secured with buttons. Turn the mitt right-side out. Put on the mitt, fold over the freshly cut side edge until it is fitted to your liking, and use pins to mark the location of 5 approximately evenly distributed future button locations. Mine is folded over a lot more at the wrist edge than at the top (obviously since my wrist is narrower than my hand) and it makes a diagonal line of buttons that looks very nice on the finished product. Sew on your buttons where marked with pins.

So close to the end…. you can make it!

Crocheted Edging

The final step is to crochet along the edge to make a decorative edging complete with buttonholes. Keep in mind that I don’t really crochet. there may be more elegant ways to do this, but the final product works and looks good.

Use the crochet hook to puncture through the edge of the felted fabric and SC along the edge. When you reach a button, chain 5 stitches (maybe more for larger buttons) the reattach with a SC after the button. this creates the buttonhole. I found that i was able to just work along and eyeball where to add the buttonholes. You may want to mark this with pins before you begin. Once you have crocheted all the way up the edge, sew in your ends (yarn and thread) and you have completed your frist handwarmer.

Repeat everything for the other hand, and you will be done! make sure to invert the side for the thumb. Also pay attention to make sure that the buttons are placed on the opposite side so that the two handwarmers will be mirror images of each other.