Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas and everything else, pocketeers!  I finally finished all my wrapping and all my gift tags for the year.  The tags might be better than the gifts this year.  I went with my library theme, and the "title" on each borrowing card is a slight hint as to what's inside.  Wanna see?  (I promised some people I'd post them, so just go ahead and say "yes.")

For Dad, the first one I finished:

 Yep, there's that deer again.  For his present, even the deer has to do with the present. 

And then my sister-in-law's.

 Lots of Tim techniques here.  The little Facet, the Stickles...

I love that Santa stamp.

This one is for my brother:

 I used Tattered Angels masks on this one, and another of those Inkadinkado stamps.  And my bi-color ticket stamp pad.

Then for Mom, because she loves retro Christmas (being the Christmas of her childhood), I used one of Tim Holtz's holiday stickers on grungeboard as a centerpiece:

With a Sizzix holly die, lots of Distress Ink, and LOTS of Perfect Pearls.

Finally, for Alex, I went back to the snowy blues and silvers, with some new stamps and an old favorite:

Three guesses as to what I was watching while I crafted these.  Here's the hint:

(It's a lamppost.  In the snow.  And this is me we're talking about.)

I used the new Vagabond to cut the swirls and such that I put behind/around each pocket.  Just thought it gave them a more finished look.  And it was an excuse to play with the new machine :)

I hope you all are having beautiful Christmasses with your families and whoever else is close to you.  And if you don't celebrate, I hope you're having a good day anyway.

Just because everything's changing doesn't mean it's never been this way before...

(Post title from the same song as the previous post title.)

So I finally have pics of the new and improved Narnia Jeans!





Sorry the lighting is kinda sucky. I was at trivia, and Pam's hubby was kind enough to take the pics but no amount of photo-fu can turn crappy lighting and a mediocre camera into professional conditions. Anyway, I'm actually happier with the re-paint than with the original. Don't know if you can tell the difference from the pictures, but I can see it. They're better this time.

The Narnia Exhibition was FANTASTIC. It was just magical. OMG seeing those costumes up close! Or as close as I could get to the glass, at least. Isis Mussenden is my new hero. The detail in the costumes is just incredible. Also, Tumnus' scarf is not just k1sl1/purl, because it definitely has knit v's on the wrong side too. So I have no clue what it is. I'm just gonna be happy with mine for now. I can't justify doing a third Tumnus scarf. Well, I'm sure if I really tried I could, but I won't... Anyway, I hope the exhibition comes somewhere closer because I would LOVE to go again. If it comes near you, go. It's definitely worth the trip.

I'm seriously itching to MAKE STUFF and it's killing me because I've got homework and the basement craft room is a colossal mess (yes, still) and there's just so much to do before I can really justify sitting down and playing. Argh!

It started out as a feeling, which then grew into a hope...

A new chapter is about to begin in my Narnia fandom. On Saturday, I will get to go to the Narnia Exhibition. Not with every friend that I wished could get together for it, but still with friends. Good friends. Friends that will not make fun of me for being a fanatic. Much.

And it is at this time that I realize that I never posted pictures of my most splendiferous paint job ever. Which really is a shame, because way back here when I participated in one of Michelle Ward's Crusades, I promised evidence of using my first hand-carved stencil. Well, the evidence has been tampered with. Let me explain.

I did indeed use my Narnia stencil, and I used it on a pair of jeans. I also stamped and painted ivy (with an ivy leaf stamp I carved for the project) around it. And I wore these glorious jeans to the midnight showing of Prince Caspian.



There's ivy on the left leg, too, to balance it all out.

One problem.

I didn't heat set the paint.

Yeah, it faded in the wash. Majorly. So now I'm finally getting around to repainting it. And this time, I will post pictures when I'm finished!

The Chronicles of a Narnia Scarf

I promised this last week, and it didn't happen. And I was going to post it yesterday but didn't have the chance. So now on my lunch break I finally bring you the scarf you've all been waiting for! Warning: gratuitous amounts of pictures.

I was rather pleased when I finished the knitting.


It needed to be washed, though, to bring up the fuzz and soften the yarn. So I prepared a bath for it with a bit of Eucalan, and set it in nice and easy:


Swooshed it around a bit, hoping that a teensy degree of fulling would bring the fuzz up more:

(I told you the pictures were gratuitous)

It rather enjoyed its bath, and managed to look its very best while underwater:

(Okay so I just liked the way the color showed in the water...)

So after letting it soak a while and squeezing it out very carefully, I laid it out to dry:

Looks a bit more like a banner than a scarf, no?

The wait for it to dry was agonizing. Except for the part when I was asleep. That part I didn't notice. But I waited all day through work to come home to:

Hmm. That's awfully flat.


I see fuzz, but no defined columns of slipped stitches. Hmm.

The feel of the scarf is fabulous. I love it. I just am a bit disappointed in how it washed. The stitch definition was perfect before I washed it; after the wash, not so much. The slipped stitches just settled down next to the regular knit stitches and refused to stand out. So after wearing it for an evening, I gave it another bath. Swooshed it around quite a bit in hot water, by hand (just a teensy amount of fulling, but not significant) in hopes that it would tighten it up a bit and thus (in theory) squish the slipped stitches out from between the plain old knits. And instead of laying it flat to dry, I put it in the dryer on the no-heat, air-fluff setting to dry. Plan backfired. Still rather flat. With more wear, the slipped stitch columns are showing a little bit more, but it's still not the movie look I was going for.

Very elegant, though.


Very soft and comfortable, too. I just wish it had turned out looking the way I had wanted. And who knows, maybe it'll gradually spring back to its un-blocked state. And maybe Aslan will appear in our world. Don't want to end on such a negative note, though, so I will say that it's fabulous to wear and I will definitely be ordering from Stansborough Fibres again. And I will be wearing my Tumnus scarf to the midnight showing tomorrow night!!!

By the Lion!

Oops. My, time did fly past this month, didn't it? Here it is, last day of the month again, and I'm just now posting my GPP Crusade entry. And I apologize, fellow Crusaders; I haven't kept up with everybody else's entries either. Only read a few of them so far.

This month's crusade assignment was stencil cutting. OMG. Michelle is such an enabler. I mean, there are worse things to be addicted to, true, but really, how many addictions does she think we can handle?

For my stencil, I decided to go with a Narnian theme. Gee I wonder why. Anyway, what came to mind was Peter's shield, the one that Father Christmas gives him. "The shield was the color of silver and across it there ramped a red lion, as bright as a ripe strawberry at the moment when you pick it." The shield of the kings of Narnia.

And of course I couldn't do something easy and/or conventional. That wouldn't be any fun. But more on that later...

So I dug out my little Dover heraldry book that I've had since the 6th grade, enlarged a lion rampant and a shield, and lo, I had my design. So I got a slab of glass that Mom happened to have lying about from our days of experimenting with polymer clay, dug out some quilter's template, and opened my brand-new handy-dandy little stencil burning tool, popped in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe DVD, and set to work.



The design:

See all those little points? Why I do this to myself remains a mystery.

Step 1, the Lion:

All those little black spots are where the stencil burner actually, well, burned the quilter's template. Apparently that stuff's not as hardy as it looks. Works, though.

After cutting out the Lion, I then cut the outline of the shield. This way, the shield with the Lion cut out of the middle would be a combination mask+stencil, with the additional Lion mask that came out of the middle of the shield. (Was that coherent?) Two pieces of plastic = two masks + one stencil. w00ties! My master plan. I'm sure someone somewhere has done this before me. But I didn't know about them, so I'm gonna claim it as my idea. *plants flag*
Dum-dum (that's me) didn't take a pic of the shield before actually using them, so you only get to see its shape after it's been doused with paint. These, and others, to be precise:


The results of which are such:

The one at the far left bottom had the Lion mask laid down and the paper spritzed with copper Shimmer Mist, then the mask peeled up and the shield laid down and pounced with red acrylic paint on a sponge. The middle top one was the same sequence, with gold and red acrylic paints applied by sponge. The far right was also the same sequence, with acrylics and Shiva Paintsticks sponged on.

And yes, I know, it's supposed to be silver, not gold. Gold shows up better and I like the way it looks with red. And copper is just what we happened to have in the Shimmer Mist. Oh well.

With the Lion laid back into the stencil after all that painting, it looks like this:

Pretty spiff, no?

Anyway, I have now purchased some spray fabric paint, and have grand plans for this stencil. I'm also resisting the urge to stencil it on EVERYTHING I OWN.

Me? Obsessive? Nah. Well, maybe a little.

And...
Coming Soon to a Pocket Near You: The Chronicles of a Narnia Scarf

Red Woolen Muffler

It's spring and the days are not only getting longer, they're getting warmer too. But that's no reason to stop working on this:



It's my Tumnus Scarf, version 2.1. Version 2.0 was a gift for a very dear friend, but this is the same stitch pattern, with the addition of two stitches of garter stitch at each edge. Dunno if that'll help the tendency to roll at all, but there it is. If you recall, I'm working this one in the real thing, the yarn from Stansborough Fibres :) I've had some difficulty settling on a needle size, which is why I have so little done right now, but I've finally found a satisfactory size, so I'm going with it. Should be a quick knit. I gotta keep with it though, because my new deadline for it is May 16. Why May 16, you ask? Scroll up. Yes. I have to wear it to opening day. I know Tumnus isn't in Prince Caspian, but still. It's Narnian anyway. Yes, I am aware that this is an illness. But I can think of worse things than Narnia-itis.