This was a triumph!

I'm making a note here, huge success.




I finally finished it! My very own companion cube.



All it took was about 14 skeins of chenille acrylic; 7 dark grey, 6 light grey and one pink, an 8mm crochet hook, a 15mm hook for the hearts, a whole heap of fiberfill and I've forgotten how much time.





I kinda used this pattern but changed it to suit my wool. But that is the basic idea of how I made it. Cos it's fluffy wool, it's very forgiving- you can't really do much detail work, so perfection isnt really an issue. Like on one of the small light grey triangles I was a row short, but you can't even guess which was the mistake once it was sewed together.

My huge chenille wool was fantastic for this project- meant that it was super quick to crochet each piece and keep the cube huge, my problem is that there were just so damn many pieces! Each face has like 28 individual crochet pieces that had to be sewn together. So that's 168 pieces in total, ish. It took a long time, and they, while quick to make, were pretty monotonous. Plus I'm easily distracted. :)

ETA: because I was so super excited to show off my finished companion cube, I used my iPhone cameras and editing tools, and we all know that they don't always turn out quite as nice as my actual cameras photo when taking crafty photos, so here are a few of my cube with the good camera :)

Project infodump!

I've been loving my crayon arts and crafts lately.
I adore playing with them.
This one is my favourite:

Materials: Crayola 24 packet of crayons, hot glue gun, canvas, a hairdryer and about 40 minutes of my time.



Materials: Cheap 64 box of crayons, hot glue gun, canvas board, twine and a bunch of $2 fake yellow flowers.




Below is the one I did tonight.
I discovered that the best way to get good drips without having to go between a candle/lighter and the canvas was to light the paper crayon cover on fire... not my smartest move because that gets hot, and crayons are mostly wax, and now I have the welts from a spitting crayon (cos I relit it after I doused it in water), and my house stills smells faintly of burnt crayon, but damn this was fun :)

It also contains my first attempt at pretty poor papercutting.
My knife wasn't nearly sharp enough to get good lines, nor did I plan it very well, but I think its damn cute. :)





I also bought these cushions at christmas, with the intention of making a crochet net cover, letting the pretty pattern show through, but I didn't find any I liked, so I knitted a big square with big wool and 12mm needles. I really like the texture of the wool over the satiny pillow cover, I think it works well.




Then I made these Turks Head Knot bracelets:


My sister gave me heaps of this nylon cord (about 2mm thick?) that she had no use for anymore, so I decided to use it.



I also made a lightbox to take better photos in.

I think it works pretty well if I say so myself. Even if I did manage to stain the bottom of the box with its first trial model (apparently Lego rubber wheels deteriorate and leave an oily residue on things once they age a little..) And whoever knew that white poster paper would be so damn hard to find? There must be a shortage in Geelong at least, cos I tried three stores before I found ANYTHING I could use.

More Clay Things!

Good afternoon all!
I've been having a lovely time crafting things, and have been really bad documenting what I've been up to. So here goes:

1. Playing with Polymer Clay: Getting the hang of al-foil as a sculpture medium.
These both have aluminium foil cores, covered with Sculpey III.


Still learning how to think like a clay artist who can fire and re-fire pieces as many times as needed. I finally fired all the spots, then put them into the mushroom, cos I kept squashing them!


It's really hard to make a ball symmetrical... Needs some smoothing down in this photo still.



2. Getting the hang of blending up colours, and using my new pasta machine clay conditioner machine.






3. Putting all the tricks together and making a birthday present!



He's about 12cm tall, and is an al-foil skeleton covered in Sculpey III clay- mostly bought colours, but a few I blended myself, varnished with clear nail polish.


PS: Have started to upload larger images of my work too - 640 is a little small for this day and age... but due to my blog being somehow to awesome*, the Lightbox feature of Blogger is totally not working or even an option, so if you'd like, even though its not quite the same or as easy, you (firefox users at least) can right click and 'View Image' and it will show you the larger image on my photobucket account which loads in a grey window anyway and then use the back buttons to come back to the page... If I've made the image lots smaller for blog use, instead of just compressing the image in the browser and making you all download huge images, I'll link to another page where it's made big properly. :)

*Somehow my blog was converted to dynamic view, even though I use a standard Awesome Inc. template, and even if I go through and reset all of my settings (and I customised this template quite extensively) with a standard template, my beautiful blog I love the look of, looks funny AND Lightbox still doesn't work. So I've spent the better part of two hours playing with this, and now I'm giving up. I tried, I promise, but it's not going to work right now. Maybe when I try again in six months it will work no worries :)