B Yourself

Set the Black Cat to the task of doing the cutting on multiples of a Paula Best rubber stamp, the "B Yourself Mannequin". I scanned a print of the stamp at 100% and traced the outer edge, cut multiples in cardstock, and then hand stamped using a stamp positioner. It was a little off in places, requiring a tiny bit of trimming, but not much. 

There's probably a better way to do this, but I haven't investigated yet.

It's hard to see in the pictures, but I cut three images for each tag to paper-piece

them together: basically the bottom is the whole stamp, the middle is the

mannequin minus stand and wings, and the top is the head and rabbit.

So that's a lot of mannequin that I didn't have to cut out by hand.
That is an excellent thing.

I tweaked a basic tag shape in the MTC program, and cut tags from Donna Estabrooks'

"the Colorful Life" 8x8 cardstock pack, and then cut a shadow layer in black.

On some of the tags, I used the
Tim Holtz Pickett Fence Distress Stain to tone the colors down.

The "B Yourself" figures were partially colored first with various Distress Stain 

colors and then over-colored with Copic markers. Some of them got a final distressing

with the Picket Fence stain. Added ribbon and a little key charm to finish.

These three also got a "believe" stamp, embossed in white detail EP.

I also used the cutter to design and cut an envelope for the tags, which were then embossed with the cuttlebug and finished with a tiny 3D letter "B" sticker. Some of the mannequins got brown faces, for all of us Mocha Divas (saw that on the TLo blog commentary recently, and it tickled me), and the rest are bit more fantasy face.

A New Home for Yarn

First offload all of the yarn from the super cheap bookcase and put it on the treadmill
(which often does double-duty as a storage unit. More often than it's used for walking, in fact).

Then bring in the china cabinet from the garage where we put it after rescuing it at long last from the storage unit. Its first home that I know about was my grandmother's living room in San Antonio. (I don't really remember what she had in it specifically, but it was used in the traditional way. I do remember what was in my grandmother Nina's china cabinet, because my favorite thing to do at her house when I was a child was to take out the little china figures and animals she kept there . . . I remember some little china dogs and perhaps a shepherdess, women in kimono with fans, I think, and some others . . . and have some imaginative play time with them. I don't think I ever broke any, amazingly enough. She also kept peppermint sticks in there.)

Transfer all of the yarn to its new home! 

(OK, well . . . almost all the yarn. There is still some on a couple of shelves in the laundry room.)

Admire.

Rest on laurels.

Beads should be a controlled substance . . .

 Really.

These are tiny 11/0 cylinder beads. (And my purely selective OCD tendencies are making an appearance, but I am telling myself I labeled the colors for the benefit of party guests.) These are Toho Treasure Beads found in my local craft store, definitely several notches above the generally available craft seed bead variety pictured below, and quite a bit spendier! Evidently it's the cylinder type beads that you need for more precise bead weaving - or is it loom beading? They have a more consistent shape and size and larger holes for multiple passes of the needle and thread. I've learned a lot about loom beading rather after the fact. The party is over, and it's a day or two later that I learn some very useful techniques for such things as warping, changing the weft threads, preferred size of needles, finishing, etc. The books I have in my stash all have a few pages about loom beading, but I learned the most from a dedicated book that I got from the library, Contemporary Loom Beading: An New Look at a Traditional Stitch. And the best site I found for online instruction of various beading techniques is at Fusion Beads.

Sixteen Candles

Another birthday, another crafting party!

This time we did loom beading and made some bracelets. 

I printed out a template graph and the guests made up their designs and got started. I helped with warping and attempted to demonstrate threading a beading needle with an assist from a needle threader, but the thread was too thick and the needles too thin and the threader too flimsy . . . eventually I broke every one of them with nary a needle threaded. The youngers had no issues with threading, though, and were able to do it without the "assist".

A couple of the girls completed their bracelets before night's end and I added a ribbon crimp end and a toggle clasp for them. The others took their looms home to finish up.

Cupcake Liner PomPom Garland

What's not to like about a handmade pompom garland?
This one - directions included - from Handmade Weddings: More than 50 Crafts to Personalize Your Big Day (through Design Sponge), is made from cupcake liners. The directions say it will take about 4 to 6 hours for 6 twelve foot strands. That sounds like plenty (and also plenty labor-intensive), but I suppose it all depends on the size of the room you need to decorate, and whether you have a crowd of willing minions to do the assembly-line folding and gluing. Right?
All I'm sayin' ... start well in advance. Especially if you're prone to searching for the perfect cupcake liners, and not being able to find them in the right design/color scheme, you decide that you can do some Japanese dyeing of plain liners (or substitute coffee filters! Cheaper! Bigger! Probably more fragile and/or too floppy, but you won't realize that until you've dyed and glued 720 of them!), and do some extra fancy scissor work or punching ... times 720 liners, times double that number if you have a big room to decorate ... times triple hours because you're doing it late at night when minions are not available ... times triple stress because you should have started three weeks earlier ...
Still, it can't be harder or more labor-intensive than the felt pompom garland I was thinking about trying a few weeks ago. After reminding myself about how much work goes into making just one felt ball and then multiplying that by a gazillion ... please. There are not enough minions in the world for such a project and I'm thinking garlands of 720 cupcake liners are a piece of cupcake.

Merry Christmas!

It really felt like not enough got done this Christmas, nor done at the right times,

but when you get right down to it, there was some decorating happening, and lights lit up . . .

there were some stockings hung . . .

and a bit of cheer spread around here and there . . .

and a couple or three little collections got out of their boxes . . .

and the Egyptian cat on top of the hall closet got her bell and ribbon.

Some of us made some cookies.

And we crafted some steampunkish crafts.

And we made our version of Christmas crackers.

We ate a lot and we sang a lot and we went to church

and we greatly enjoyed the company of friends and relations.

That seems like the right things accomplished then.