Tag Archives: felt

blogging, DIY, projects

DIY : : Bunny & Cow Romper Babies

Bunny & Cow Romper Babies DIY

Jacksons Drawing Supplies in Darwin has a new staff blog!

Our first offering, anticipating Easter, is a little DIY for these cute Bunny & Cow Romper Babies…there are photos and a PDF for the pattern pieces. You may remember that I made one of these for my goddaughter some time ago. This time I took photos and re-drew the pattern pieces. Naturally, it uses materials sourced from Jacksons Drawing Supplies. We work there, after all, and what’s good for the shop is good for us. :)

The shop has been at #7 Parap Place for over 20 years, and still we get locals coming in to tell us that they never knew we were there. No wonder the business is struggling! So, in an attempt to drag the one and only proper art and technical drawing shop in Darwin into the 21st Century, we’ve decided to start a blog.

There’s not a lot on there yet; it’s hard to find the time and coordinate with each other—we can’t do this stuff on the job (that’s why it’s called “the unofficial staff blog”) we do our blogging at home, photographing the steps and projects on the weekends, using our own cameras, laptops, and internet connections.

But that’s okay, we really want to do this…we’re all creatives and, as the main art shop in town, we know so many of the local artists. We’d like this blog to serve as an outlet for our own creations and projects, to feature profiles of Darwin’s artists and art organizations, to keep track of local art events, and to even maybe answer of the many, many Frequently Asked Questions that we get about paints, mediums, materials, techniques, and so forth.

I hope you’ll take a minute to check it out, maybe download and give the Easter project a go, and even subscribe to the post feed so that you’ll know when the next few goodies come up!

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bookbinding, embroidery and textiles

bijou books: biscuit

DSCF2888

Couldn’t concentrate on bigger projects, yesterday, so I resolved to push everything aside (literally…I always start with an orderly table, but by the end of an afternoon it is so piled up with tools, materials, books, junk, that I end up doing all my work at one little handkerchief-sized corner of the desk) and took a break to make a miniature book. A bijou book, if you like.

A great way to test out new binding techniques and use up small scraps that you’d normally throw away, this miniature book took less than two hours to make.

DSCF2891

On the technical aspects of this binding, I’ve used the instructions in The Penland Book of Handmade Books—Eileen Wallace’s ‘Simplified Binding‘ to be precise—to make this. It’s certainly a quicker way of putting a book together, but I have to say that I don’t have much confidence in the way the covers are attached to the rest of the book…it just doesn’t seem strong enough to me, gluing the covers to spine material and the twill tapes, and then a little bit of extra holding from the endpages. But I am probably being paranoid, and unless the book is massive, this technique should hold it together just fine.

biscuit book

What I really do not like about the Simplified Binding, as it was presented in the Penland Book and as you can see in this biscuit book, is the way the spine fabric is visible on the inside of the covers. Aesthetically speaking, it jars, it looks unfinished, exposed, crude.

Which is fine, and which is why you have to try each technique out for yourself…learn the process, in order to improve the process. While putting this biscuit book together, I could visualize very clearly how to get rid of the problem. I’ve started another miniature book and so far so good, I think the solution is very workable. I’m also sure that what I have had to come up with, myself, is standard practice among professional bookbinders, it makes that much sense! But it’s more fun when I come up with these things on my own…

Show you tomorrow!

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embroidery and textiles

Nan desu ka?

turning Japanese

I think I’m turning Japanese.

(I really think so…)

I woke up last Tuesday morning knowing exactly what I wanted to do, and how I was going to do it:

sushi ATC

Kris insists that nobody will be able to tell what it is unless I put a label or something on the card. I’m a bit nonplussed that he says that: he’s lived in Fukuoka and Hokkaido for 3 years with a Japanese woman, if he can’t tell what it is, maybe nobody else will? He even suggested I hold a quiz on my blog and ask readers “What do you think this is?” Hence the title of my post, “What are you?” Pfft. Men.

*ahem* it’s miniature, embroidered sushi…please tell me you knew it at first glance!

This is an embroidered ATC for Hanna, the creative whirlwind behind iHanna…and this is our first swap, ever! We’ve been stalking each other’s blogs for a while now…to find that the respect and admiration each felt, was mutual. So we’re taking the virtual friendship a teensy step further, now, by agreeing to exchange small-scale embroideries.

sushi ATC scale

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embroidery and textiles, jewelry, life

a matching Lotti ❤ pendant

matching Lotti pendant

Couldn’t help myself…I had to make a matching little felt pendant to go with the doll. For Lotti to wear or hang from her little handbag (has Lotti got a little handbag? Maybe I should be making that next?)

“And WHERE is your Cretan stitch sampler for TAST, Miss?”

“Uh…oh, he he, it’s right here, be done soon, I promise! Maybe even in time before Sharon B. announces the next stitch friggin’ tomorrow?!?”

Short and sweet, I got to get back to my embroidery hoop. *sigh*
Lotti pendant (back)

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embroidery and textiles, life

Lotti ❤

Lotti, ready for bed...

Eeep! Running late with my Cretan stitch sample for TAST. Ye Gods, how boring it is! Especially as it’s nearly identical to last week’s feather stitch, and I’ve really had enough of this family of stitches, lately. But I’ve pencilled in a nearly solid design, so there’s nothing for it but to plod along, laying rows and rows of Cretan stitch beside each other. *sigh-argh*

The other reason I’m late is I was suddenly overcome with a desire to make this little poppet…this is Lotti, getting ready for bed.


I’m sending it to its namesake, the real Lotti, who is two-and-a-half already.

Lotti recently drew a lovely pink scribble in a Christmas card for me, and looking at it yesterday I decided to put everything else on hold until I’d made something to send back to her.

A few years more and I will have missed my chance to eat all her toes…

eating Charlotte's toes...

Hard to believe she went from this

to this…
ye Gods, two-and-a-half already...

Just. Like. {snap}.

Lap it up, as this is about as close to my recessive, atavistic mothering instinct as you’ll ever see…the irresistible compulsion to stitch cute little felt figures for my goddaughters…
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Spike Jonze & Olympia Le Tan’s animation of stitched book covers

felt books on shelf

Vintage first-edition book cover designs of classic reads, rendered in felt and embroidery, and animated into a tragicomic love story between literary characters…holy shit, what’s not to love about Spike Jonze and Olympia Le-Tan‘s new stop-motion animation, filmed upon the fabled shelves of romantic, nostalgic Shakespeare & Company bookshop in Paris?

This turns me on in so many ways, as a bookbinder, a reader, an embroiderer, an artist…I feel so full of inspiration right now that I think I might explode. First Jillian Tamaki’s book covers, now this…this has really got me wanting to embroider and stitch fabulous bookcovers…

Note: I have no idea whether the movie embedded properly…it might be blocked for sharing this way, I don’t know, maybe it’s a WordPress thing…but do make sure you hop over to Nowness and watch the short animation, which is mostly funny, in a bawdy and irreverent way, but with a brief moment of sweet sadness. Links to Nowness are at the bottom of this post.

felt books closeup

In Mourir Auprès de Toi (To Die By Your Side), director Spike Jonze’s stop-motion animation has given a wonderful life and story to the fibre artistry of Olympia Le-Tan.

On a shelf in the iconic Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Company, the star-crossed love story of Macbeth’s skeleton and his Bride of Dracula amour plays out amidst Le-Tan’s fabric and felt illustrations of vintage first-edition book cover designs.

The project started when Jonze asked for a Catcher in the Rye embroidery to put on his wall and Le-Tan asked for a film in return. With French filmmaker Simon Cahn co-directing, the team wrote the script between Los Angeles and Paris over a six month period, before working night and day animating the 3,000 pieces of felt Le-Tan had cut by hand. “I love getting performances from, telling stories about and humanizing things that aren’t human,” said Jonze of working with Le-Tan’s characters.

i am fucked

shakespeare and company

 

Spike Jonze: Mourir Auprès de Toi on Nowness.com.

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Bakin’ the Biscuits: part 1 of ice-cream sandwich tutorial

Felt ice-cream sandwiches tutorial: part I

As promised, Part 1 is up, over on from Hell to Breakfast. Apologies all around for the yellow cast in the photos, and the rough instructions, and the nail polish (ye gods, I will never be able to atone for the nail polish…)

Part 2 tomorrow, in proper light (my eyes are killing me! Aren’t laptop screens shocking?!) G’night!

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Ice cream sandwiches

felt ice cream sandwiches

More kawaii felt goodies for breakfast…little roundels of fantasy ice-cream, sandwiched between puffy biscuits. The how-to for these came from a Japanese craft magazine that I purchased here. The diagrams are simple enough to understand, if you have some sewing experience, that it doesn’t seem to matter that the text is in Japanese.

The one with blue sequins (the Dance Fever ice-cream sandwich) was a bit of craziness that I added because the color of the sequin braid exactly matched that of the felt; but what a strange thing to have on something that’s supposed to look like food! Personally, I prefer the pink one, with just a sprinkling of french knots and some shading.

One of the best ideas to come from Japanese felt craft magazines is the way they color the felt. I love working with felt, but the limited color palette has always been the one drawback of the material. In these craft magazines they use wax crayons, oil pastels, soft colored pencils, creamy makeup (for rosy cheeks on dolls) applied with cotton buds, to give an object shading, texture, depth. On the felt pastries and things, a golden brown edge makes them look like they’ve just come out of the oven. It’s such a simple trick—certainly easier than applying bits of felt roving with a felting needle (materials and tools I don’t have) or embroidering them—but perfectly effective. It can make a felt object pop into realism…or at least it might have if I hadn’t put blue sequins on the poor thing!

As I made these I also took photographs for a tutorial, which I’ll be posting on From Hell to Breakfast later (so don’t rush over there just yet, give me a day!) after I’ve cropped and fixed the photos, written up instructions, and drawn a diagram or two. (Tutorials. They seem so simple, but wow, how the hours fly when you’re tweaking and putting one together!)

miniature Ice Cream sandwiches

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