April 27, 2008
Pretty Little books
I saw the Pretty Little Patchwork and Pretty Little Potholders books at the bookstore yesterday! They both look awesome. I can't wait to get my copies so I can start making stuff from them. I was really excited to see that my coin quilt is featured on a chapter start page, and the staging for the green patchwork potholder is super cute.
Posted by maitreya under Crafty Book/TV Review | permalink | Comments (4)
April 26, 2008
finished resin jewelry
Here's how I finished some of the resin pieces I've posted lately.
Glued to ring blanks
1 layer clear, 1 layer yellow pastel, dremel drilled (I need to practice, obviously) with 4x fishing line
screw eye plus contact case molded and pastel colored
Posted by maitreya under Jewelry | permalink | Comments (4)
April 24, 2008
new design
Time for a site update. I feel kind of sad to see the old design go, since Becket designed it with me. It's been a long time coming, though. In the process of messing around with all my archive pages, etc, I noticed that craftlog hit the 5 year mark last week, and 1 million hits some time last month. That is crazy.
1. The font for the header is Ahnberg. I made the header and graph paper background myself.
2. I made a nifty iPhone icon for craftlog using the directions here and a free graphic from 123cursors (thanks, Google image search!) Obviously, it's a little pair of scissors to match my favicon. I will be shocked if anyone else in the world has craftlog bookmarked on their iPhone, but it at least makes me happy. :)
3. Also added a few new things to my bloglines (including one devoted entirely to googly eyes).
4. My artists and shops page had a giant update, since I don't think I've even looked at it for over a year. If you haven't checked there in a while, I started a list of shops that I've bought from. Also, lots of new links for things like resin jewelry.
5. Finally, I don't think I ever pointed out that I use a Creative Commons license for this whole site. That means that you are all welcome to take and repost my photos, replicate my projects, remix my ideas, whatever you want as long as you give attribution (a link is fine) and it's noncommercial.
Next on the list is updating my craft library.
Posted by maitreya under Random | permalink | Comments (0)
April 21, 2008
cork ring
Adhesive cork cabinet bumper + ring blank = the easiest ring ever that is still super cute.
Posted by maitreya under Jewelry | permalink | Comments (1)
April 17, 2008
shoulder bag
I made Amy a shoulder bag for her birthday a while back. The outside fabric is a tablecloth from Ikea that I absolutely adore. Luckily there's a bunch of it left so I can make more stuff from it. Because it's a plasticy coated fabric, I didn't want to have lots of bulk at the seams, and I was worried my machine would stick on it, so that gave me the idea of using seam binding for the whole thing. I cut cross shapes from the tablecloth and the lining fabric (if I make another one, I'll also add a layer of interfacing), folded the edges up to meet and form the sides, and enclosed the raw edges with the binding. I love how it turned out, and it was remarkably easy (well, except for the part where I realized I couldn't bind the top edge with the sides already bound, but that wasn't too hard to fix). The handles are the same ones that Becket used for her pleated purse; they're from Tall Poppy (if you get them, don't forget the rivets). The lining fabric is a nice dark green cotton.
Posted by maitreya under Sewing/Fabric Crafts | permalink | Comments (2)
April 11, 2008
more resin
I'm moving to Seattle in a month, so one of the many things on the todo list is to use up all my unshippable resin. What a good idea for a craft night. :) Besides these ones, we also embedded buttons and coins, and I played around with layering colors with only slightly better results than last time. I'm mainly having trouble getting a flat first layer. Anyway, these are my favorites from the night:
My friend Matt embedded some bits from a circuit board. I like the LEDs best.
Another great model railroad figure one made by my friend Dannie. I love the composition.
Creepy little Mizna Wada girls from some stationery.
I really like these, colored with pastels and molded with a 96-well plate (finally found one flexible enough!) I have plans for necklaces and rings with these, if I can ever find any ring blanks I like.
These are some silver findings from a bead store. They have little holes on each side, which are too small for the resin to leak from; I didn't think to put a headpin through the hole until I'd already poured in the resin. :P
Posted by maitreya under Jewelry | permalink | Comments (7)
April 06, 2008
googly eyes
There was a sketch on SNL last night where Christopher Walken put googly eyes on all his plants (sadly, the video's been wiped from YouTube), and it's just aggravating my irrational desire to put google eyes on everything. They even had giant googly eyes for a tree.
Posted by maitreya under | permalink | Comments (8)