Book recommendation

This week Lazy Kid and I are focusing on learning about art, so I checked some books out from the library to expand our repertoire of craft techniques. One of the books I'm most excited about is called Easy Art Fun, by Jill Frankel Hauser. This book is really designed for use in classrooms, but a lot of the projects lend themselves to home crafting, as well.

What I like best about the book is that it's designed to be used by early readers, so the format of each page is the same, and it's all really clearly spelled out. Each project fits on two page sides (which face each other, so there is no flipping back and forth to finish something), and each offers variations on the project to make it more complicated or with a different theme. There are sections that focus on coloring, cutting with scissors, making toys, making gifts, making things for pretend play, making music, and making wearable art.

Lazy Kid is not quite five, but she reads really well, and she was able to breeze through reading several of the projects to pick out one she wanted to do. The book is a great way to get kids some practice with real-life reading, rather than story reading - practical reading really does use a whole different subset of words and phrases that kids need to learn.

And the projects are quite nice, with several old favorites and quite a few that I've never seen before. Lazy Kid chose to make the Monster Mouth game, where you decorate a paper bag like a monster face and try to throw balls of paper into the open mouth. Personally, I want to make some bendy people (paper cutouts with baggy ties taped to the back to let you bend the dude into different positions) and a few other projects that are new to me.

Well, that wasn't nearly as scary as I'd hoped

Yesterday was a momentous occasion for me - I cut my first steek! And, since I'm always driven to do things farther, faster, and longer than anyone else thinks is reasonable, it was 6 feet long.

I've been knitting a fair isle afghan in the round, and once all the main knitting was done, the big long tube of awesomeness had to be cut open so it would be less of a muumuu and more of a blanket. Now, I've heard all sorts of people talk about how scary it is to cut steeks, and how they held their breath and prayed the whole time, and how some people are too scared to even attempt one. There are a multitude of methods for stabilizing the knitting before cutting so that the whole thing doesn't unravel if you look at it sideways. But when the steek is 6' long, hand sewing down both sides of the area to be cut just isn't going to happen, and shoving the thing through the sewing machine isn't a good idea, either. So, no stabilization for me, just a pair of scissors and a blanket I've been knitting (intermittently) since October of 2008...

...And all of my sock club friends from River Colors Studio, who I drafted to help me. We were all new to cutting steeks, and everyone seemed to have some insane idea that I was either super-brave, super-dumb, or super-well-informed-about-this-whole-thing. In order to dissuade them of all of these notions, I figured I'd involve them in the process. So I brought all my cutting materials in to the studio yesterday, and everyone got a chance to cut about 10" of my steek. We are steek virgins no more!

For future reference, what I did was this:

Lay the blanket flat with the steek area centered on the top. Slide a long rotary cutting ruler in between the top layer and the bottom layer of the blanket, making sure it covers all of the area under the steek. Use sharp scissors to cut through the center of the steek section, about 10" at a time. After every 10", stop and stabilize the edges by wrapping a strip of packing tape along each edge lengthwise. This will keep it relatively unfrayed while you cut the rest of the steek open. When you're done cutting the steek open, open out the blanket and admire your handiwork - then whisk the blanket to a sewing machine and machine-stitch down each side of the steek to stabilize the remaining threads. Make sure to sew in the area that will still remain once the excess steek area is trimmed off later in the finishing, if that's what your directions tell you to do.

Since then I've been picking up the stitches along each side of the steek to make a binding to cover up the cut edges, and let me tell you, picking up like 300 stitches SIDEWAYS down a blanket is all sorts of fun. Really. But it's looking awesome, and the end is in sight. Whew!

******

Pictures? You want pictures in the post? Nope, sorry, that's going to have to wait for a while. There are secret things afoot around here ...

Lazy Dad's shawl pins, now available!

My very handsome and talented father has been carving for decades - actually, we can actually measure it in fractions of a century at this point - so it was no problem at all for him to whip up some shawl pins for me when I started whipping up shawls. They were so beautiful and functional that I encouraged him to make some extras to sell. And the owner of River Colors Studio in Lakewood agreed that they're awesome, so now you can buy them there!

Stop in and grab one before they're gone, because you never know when Lazy Dad will get sick of making these and then they'll be gone for good.

Really running behind with this posting ...

Check out how cute the Fairy Skirt pattern looks for raindrops for a school play!

http://juliespp.blogspot.com/2009/09/dancing-raindrops.html

Thanks for sending along the link, Julie, and I'm glad they turned out so cute for you!

Why yes, I am insane - why do you ask?

There's still time to order your custom Halloween costume ... mermaid tails are now available in a limited edition spectacular green scale print with purple backing.

Order ASAP for Halloween delivery, but definitely before Oct. 25.

Note to self:

Remember how much more pleasant it is to cut out ridiculously large quantities of fabric when you have a new blade on the rotary cutter. Swish!

Queen of Hearts and Alice in Wonderland Costume Set GIVEAWAY!!!!

http://grosgrainfabulous.blogspot.com/2009/10/queen-of-hearts-and-alice-in-wonderland.html

Okay, I sew pretty well, but there is no way I would ever be able to pull off anything as complicated as this without going completely insane. And she did it without a pattern! Gahhhhh!

You really should click over and check it out ... just don't enter to win it, because the only way LazyKid is ever going to get any costume like this is if WE win!

Look! Free press for Lazy Mama!

I am really excited to have been included in a listing of etsy costumes available for Halloween. You can find the link here.

While you're there, check out some of the other costumes. We've got a lot of really talented folks on etsy, so if mermaids aren't your thing, maybe the baby sushi or cupcake costumes will float your boat. Sooooo cute!

Well thank goodness!

Today was LazyKid's first day of pre-K, and I had almost two hours to work on whatever I wanted in my studio. You should see all the Play/Move/Store bags I've got cut out, and all the legwarmers that are hemmed and waiting for their ribbons and packaging.

And I get to do this three times a week!

It's good to be back!

Parenthacks: Painting without ruining your table

We're working on a dinosaur diorama, and I thought now was a good time to show how we set it up so that LazyKid can do crafts at our nice cherry dining room table without giving me a heart attack.

1. All craft projects are primarily done on some plastic serving trays I got on clearance at Target. This gives us a place (with a rim in case of spills) that she can be messy, but almost everything wipes off. Even dried-on "permanent" paint comes off with a bit of persuasion. And when we need the table for a meal, we can pick up the whole craft and move it out of the way.

2. I've been using heavy-duty foam plates as palettes for the paint, which lets her mix the colors together but limits the volume of paint she gets at any one time. The foam plates are easy to wash off and reuse over and over ... I just finally got rid of the set we'd been using for the past two years. Now we're using some disposable plastic drink cups. I cut the tops off of them so that each cup is only about 2 1/2 inches deep. This means that they're low enough to be hard to tip over, and again, it limits the amount of paint the kid can have. They're also low enough that LazyKid doesn't try to rest the paintbrush in them, which means she doesn't catch the paintbrush with her elbow and tip them over that way. These are wash-and-reuse items, too. We've also used styrofoam egg cartons as palettes, but that's harder to share among several artists, since all of the cups are stuck together.

3. Lots of paper towels, right there at the scene. It's much easier to clean up a spill if you don't have to run across the room to get a towel. Plus, if the towels are right at hand, it's much more likely that LazyKid will try to clean up the mess herself before asking me for help. We've also had good luck with using up some old packages of baby wipes as craft cleanup wipes.

4. Storage for the paints that makes them easy to carry without dropping or spilling. We've only got a few acrylic paints right now, so they're in a small shoebox that's stored with the rest of the painting supplies in a plastic tote. The plastic tote has all the poster paints, paint brushes, paint stamps, palettes, and stencils, all in one place. When we want to paint anywhere - on the easel in the basement, on the floor in the livingroom, at the dining room table, outside on the picnic table - we can just grab the tote and take everything with us in one trip.

5. Lots of supervision. If I'm not actually doing the craft with her (I helped paint some of the larger diorama figures above), I try to be physically with her at the table while I do something crafty on my own. I've got a number of mindless knitting and crochet projects I can grab to fill in a few minutes while LazyKid paints or works with clay ... things that can be picked up and put down a lot without getting messed up too much. I've found that trying to do things away from the table - like cook dinner or wash dishes - ends up with the kid making more of a mess than if I'm right there.

Hope some of these tips help keep you (and your table) crafty but organized!

Busy, busy!

Well, I'm halfway through the wrap I'm doing for my insanely ambitious first real lace project, and while I love the yarn and love the pattern, I don't love the two together. The yarn obscures the lace pattern so you can't even see the diamonds.

Oh, well - I am not so frustrated with it that I'll abandon it, I just have learned that I need to buy quieter yarn when I do intricate patterns. Who knew?

Also - I'm typing this from my couch, because I got a new laptop and a mobile broadband internet account, so I can blog from anywhere! Ostensibly, this will maximize the time I can work while LazyKid is in school (pattern design at the library, anyone?), but really, I just hated my old computer. The thing is basically an expensive paperweight. But I luuuuuuurve my new laptop :)

Worked on a new quilt pattern this week, and as soon as I can convince it to tell me what sort of border it wants, I'll get it live. It's a relatively quick-and-dirty one that's for a twin bed (with mods for a throw size), so it should be a welcome addition to my projects. Plus, it used up a lot of my stash fabrics! Twenty-one different ones, as a matter of fact ...

Finally - new merchandise!

Introducing the Play/Move/Store bag ... aka the "Stop Yelling At Your Kid To Pick Up The Legos" play mat.

Unfolded, it's a great place to spread out those toys with a billion pieces - legos, blocks, barbies, plastic tea sets, etc. It lets kids see all the pieces without having to dump the whole container in the middle of the kitchen floor. And the best part - when they're done playing, all they have to do to clean the whole mess up is grab the drawstring and pull. Voila! A very portable, very storable tote bag full of tiny pieces of plastic!

Now available in a wide range of colors and prints (which I'm listing gradually as time and LazyKid permit) on my shop at etsy.com . You can find them here. And if you have a color combination you'd like me to make up for you custom, I'd be happy to give it a try! Just contact me at lazymamadesigns@yahoo.com and we'll see what we can work out.

Mother's Helper

Oh, the joys of knowing a 13-year-old who will come and play with Lazy Kid for money while I get massive amounts of work done. In two four-hour bursts, I have:

- designed a new product for etsy (all that's missing are decent photos and a good name)

- made half a dozen of said new product

- finished up and published a pattern that's been sitting on my desk for months, just waiting to be proofread and listed

- listed and relisted almost a dozen items

- got together another submission of my Awesome Underappreciated Quilt Design, which goes out in tomorrow's mail.

- possibly spent a little too much of my "work" time on Ravelry, looking for "inspiration." Yeah, that's it! Inspiration!

Here's hoping she can come back next week so I can get these new dealios listed on etsy and write up a couple of extra patterns and edit some photos I might try to sell online and ... oh, crap, guess I'm going to need more than one day, huh?

Rapunzel braids now in the shop

You can find them here.

Free pattern - Circle towel

I picked up some inexpensive linen yarn while I was on vacation earlier this summer, and I had grand visions of making it into some sort of hand towel.  All of the patterns I could find seemed to involve rather a lot of mindnumbingly boring stockinette stitch, so I decided to modify a cool sock pattern to see if I could make a towel that had a nice texture and a pattern that was fairly easy to memorize.  

The modification was a little challenging since the sock is worked in the round and the towel is back-and-forth, but I managed to get my head around it all right. As a bonus, the back side is nice and uniform and looks presentable enough that it won't be horrible when it's seen during use.

Don't be freaked out by the 20-row pattern repeat ... it's actually just 10 rows with a slight jog over to make the second 10 rows, and there's a lot of "do the same thing, only K instead of P" in there, too.  Trust me - once you've gone through it once or twice, you won't need to look at the instructions for the rest of the towel.

So, without further ado, here's how to duplicate my Circle Towel:

Lazy Mama's Circle Towel:

Finished size - 17" wide x 12" tall before washing and blocking; size after blocking will be added once this makes it through the wash :)

Yarn - light worsted weight or DK weight linen or cotton yarn.  I used every bit of 100 grams of Euroflax Athens by Louet Sales, which is approximately 200 yards.

Needle - whatever gives you a nice medium-firm fabric in stockinette stitch.  You need it to be a bit loose to comfortably carry the slipped stitches up seven rows in the pattern.  I used a US 2.

Gauge - not important.  Just make sure you're not making a super-lacy cloth, or it won't hold up to actually drying your hands.

Pattern stitch (multiple of 8 stitches):

Row 1 - Purl across

Row 2 - Knit across

Row 3 - Purl across

Row 4 - (P3, sl 2 st with yarn at front, P3) across

Row 5-  (K3, sl 2 st with yarn at back, K3) across

Row 6 -(P3, sl 2 st with yarn at front, P3) across

Row 7 - (K3, sl 2 st with yarn at back, K3) across

Row 8 - (P3, sl 2 st with yarn at front, P3) across

Row 9 - (K3, sl 2 st with yarn at back, K3) across

Row 10 - (P3, sl 2 st with yarn at front, P3) across

Row 11 - Purl across

Row 12 - Knit across

Row 13 - Purl across

Row 14 - (sl 1 st with yarn at front, P6, sl 1 st with yarn at front) across

Row 15 - (sl 1 st with yarn at back, K6, sl 1 st with yarn at back) across

Row 16 - (sl 1 st with yarn at front, P6, sl 1 st with yarn at front) across

Row 17 - (sl 1 st with yarn at back, K6, sl 1 st with yarn at back) across

Row 18 - (sl 1 st with yarn at front, P6, sl 1 st with yarn at front) across

Row 19 - (sl 1 st with yarn at back, K6, sl 1 st with yarn at back) across

Row 20 - (sl 1 st with yarn at front, P6, sl 1 st with yarn at front) across

Note: after your first pattern repeat, the first row of circles may look a bit flat on the cast-on side.  This is normal, and will not occur in any of the subsequent repeats of the pattern.

Actual instructions:

• Cast on 80 stitches.
  
• Knit two rows of garter stitch (knit each row).
  
• Begin pattern instructions, KNITTING FOUR EXTRA STITCHES AT THE BEGINNING AND END OF EACH ROW TO MAKE A GARTER STITCH BORDER.
  
• Repeat pattern instructions a total of five times (100 rows in pattern).  If you are using a larger skein of yarn than I did, you may wish to keep repeating until you're almost out of yarn.  Just make sure you end on row 10 or 20 before you finish the rest of the towel.
  
• Knit two rows of garter stitch (knit each row).
  
• Cast off all stitches.
  

If you decide to make one of these, please share it with me on Ravelry!  Thanks!

Yeah, that was a disaster. Look! Pretty scarf!

Okay, so apparently ugly + ugly = "oh my god, it burns!  it burns!" ugly.  The socks have been frogged, the yarn thrown out, and then the whole mess set fire to, for good measure.  I am done wasting time on that.

But let's not dwell on failures, shall we?  Especially when I have such pretty pretties to show!

Yep, I've jumped on the Noro Striped Scarf bandwagon, this time with Taiyo, a cotton/silk blend from Noro that's ohh soooooo soffffffffft and smooooooooooooooooshy.  And did I mention the colors?

Oh Taiyo, I am so glad I have enough of you left over to make a matching hat ...  which I will not allow anywhere near any washing machine that is set to "hot," I swear!

ugly + ugly = ?

No photos yet, but I wanted to let everyone know what I was doing with the Fugly Yarn of Doom.  Various swatches with it proved that while the dye improved the look of the resulting fabric, it's still no beauty queen.  With that in mind, I searched Ravelry for a pattern that might either disguise or highlight the peculiar fug I've got.

That's when I found Bellatrix (Rav link).  It's got a pattern of deliberately "dropped" stitches, which make an allover design of really gnarly holes.  And so far, I'm liking it.  I mean, boy, is the combination of this yarn and that pattern a LOT of fug, but I'm hoping that it will somehow balance out and become magically infused with some awesomeness.  Barring that, at least I'll have used the yarn up, and I'll have socks to wear when cleaning up cat puke.

What happens when you forget about the load of felting in the washer?

This used to be about 10" tall.  It was supposed to felt and get smaller, but I wasn't aiming for something that's too small to hold my cell phone.
This used to be a hat.  A very, very big hat.  Now it's a bowl.  A relatively small, very attractive bowl.

And the fuzzy red slippers that I had previously felted to be slightly too big for my feet, which I was trying to refelt to be a little more snug?  They're about 3/4" too long ... for my four-year-old.  Oops.

Oh, hai! Guess I should post once in a while, huh?

The solution to the yarn issue from my previous post? Find a pattern that only needed the original number of skeins of yarn, and use a completely different color to finish it. Thank goodness for Dahlia!

Now, I just need to find a use for the extra five skeins of yarn in the powder blue lot ...

So very, very disappointing

After scoring a good deal on some Rowan Summer Tweed yarn at the local yarn store, I realized that they didn't have enough of the purpley-blue color for the sweater I wanted to make. I hopped on Ravelry and found a couple people who had the same colorway in their stashes, and I arranged to buy them for even less than I paid the local yarn store. Double score!

The additional skeins are different lot numbers than the original purpose, which usually means you're in for some minor variation in color. So you can imagine my surprise when the first of the additional skeins showed up and looked nothing like the color with which I had already started the sweater:

Yes, they are the same colorway (at least according to the labels). No, the lighting isn't a factor - they look this different no matter what lighting I use. This is just the worst dye lot variation I've ever seen.

I'm hoping that the other four skeins that are coming from Scotland will be somewhere in between these two colors, so that I can fade gradually from the purpley into the powder blue. Or that they're powder blue and I'll have enough to make the top part of the sweater without the three skeins of the purpley yarn I originally bought.

Or that I get up the nerve to just knit with it no matter what color it is, then overdye the whole thing black or really, really dark purple or something.

Crud.