Monday, October 24, 2011

A big step forward

Monster Hat I made from a pattern by Miriah Gilbert

My friend, Julie Spencer, has been faithfully researching and sending me links to crochet ideas. When she sent me the link to this pattern on etsy, I was really excited to make it. I immediately bought the pattern from www.emiegracecreations.etsy.com and spent the next 4 - 5 hours figuring out how to make this hat. It's one of the more difficult things I've made to date, but Miriah Gilbert, the author and artist behind EmieGraceCreations, did an excellent job of writing a thorough, accurate, and readable pattern. I love the challenge of stretching my boundaries and learning new things, especially when the end product is something as adorable as this monster hat! :)

I immediately fell in love with this hat, and all the variations of it that the pattern suggests, and wanted to make a dozen and sell them all. Copyright issues and conscience, however, made me carefully consider my options. Every pattern-artist on etsy has a slightly different set-up up for their copyright information, and I've been slowly learning the language of it all. The copyright on this pattern said "You do not have permission to sell the finished product locally or online without purchasing a cottage license. ..."



So I wrote to Miriah, attaching a picture of the monster hat, and asked what she meant by a cottage license. She explained that a "cottage industry" refers to an individual person making crafts from their own home. If you buy a "cottage license" from someone, you are buying the rights to sell items made from their pattern, according to a 3-tier system. (I love how everything about the indie-craft revolution is quaint and personalized ~ even the copyright terminology!)


For a solid week I contemplated shelling out for the full life-time license, since it was a relatively big expenditure for such a small, fledgling business as my own. (I hope someday to be able to swallow costs like this without even noticing ... ) After "shopping" her entire etsy site, however, I was thoroughly impressed with her quality of product and instructions, and decided I wanted to take a chance on this. She has been so helpful in answering my emails and telling me her very inspiring story of how her own personal hobby turned into a full-time work-from-home business. With her permission, I may someday pass her story on to my readers here. ... ??


After buying the life-time license, I continued on to buy 10 more of her patterns, and I would highly recommend her site to any crochet-ers reading this. I was a little bit ridiculously happy to receive them and, like a new addict of Harry Potter (or some comparably compelling series, Twilight very much excluded), wanted to stay up all night making them all. The necessity of waking up at 6am to face 150 odd high schoolers the next day, however, compelled me to sleep. (By "odd" i refer to the ambiguous number, not the nature of said students.)

Here's a "teaser" of some of the patterns you can find on her website, and products that I will soon be selling. I'm really looking forward to this new adventure in my emerging craft-career, and appreciate to no end her willingness to share her patterns and the years of experience and expertise that went into constructing them.


 She has so many completely unique and uber-cute patterns! I am especially looking forward to making this hat and slipper set. :)  I will post more pictures in an upcoming blog post, as soon as I make these.

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Sock Monkey Hat

Mary Ann Hacking's amazing photography skills and her uber-cute baby wearing my sock monkey hat :)

 My latest adventures in crochet creations:

A friend requested a sock monkey hat for a 6-month old boy, and showed me a picture of a hat that looked something like this. Based on the picture, I was able to figure out a pattern that consisted of hdc (half double crochet), sc (single crochet), rsc (reverse single crochet), and changing out hook sizes. I adapted the mouth idea and stitched in a mouth-line-thingy. I love the way it turned out! The colors are pretty much the same as the original picture, but I made up the stitches, stitch count, and assembly of accessories ... does anyone know where you draw the line in the indie-craft world between copying and creating? Is something like this a copyright issue? I sure hope not ... because I'd love to sell these! :) 
(On that note, let me know if you would like to place an order. I'll be selling them for $35 - $40 depending on size.)


 I gave this hat to one of my friends in exchange for her photography of some of my hats (see a future post for those pictures) and needed to make another one for my friend who requested this hat. The next day I sat down to recreate it from memory, but tried to make it slightly larger. Unfortunately, I was too lazy the first time around to write down the pattern as I went, thinking, I suppose, that I would remember what I did.
epic fail.



I worked at it for about an hour and a half, stubbornly in denial that something was fundamentally wrong.You know that slowly sickening feeling that you're making a big mistake but you know very well that you're not going to stop the chain of events that will ultimately lead to the impending disaster? All melodramatics aside, that was pretty much how I felt.

I'm including pictures here to prove to myself (and anyone else who cares) how vital it is to write down a pattern as you create something.

 and yet ... 

This experience, like all mistakes, provided the potential for learning on a deeper level. Spending hours on this "mistake-hat" forced me to analyze and perfect my color-joining technique. I plan to start creating mini-posts on techniques I figure out as I go, in hopes that the details I learn can be of help to other crochet artists. I took pictures of each step of the process as I went so that I can include step-by-step pictures and instructions in a future post regarding how to make perfect joins, as well as how to securely and invisibly tie off all loose ends.

The picture on the left is my original method of joining colors, which created a bump the whole length of the hat and distorted the shape. I tried something different on the next one and it worked beautifully.


I now have the pattern written down in a shorthand format that makes sense to me, but I would like to rewrite it in a user-friendly form, and possibly sell it on etsy. Before I do that though, I want to experiment with colors more so that I can claim this as my own invention in every regard. I'm thinking about a hat pattern that consists of hdc stitches with a red and tan yarn together and multiple sizes, so that somebody could make two as a psuedo-gag gift for a father and son :) I'm doing plenty of mother-daughter sets, and thought it would make for such a cute picture to have a father and son wearing matching sock monkey hats! ... more on that later. 

 This picture is proof of my eventual success in recreating my own pattern. I posted this picture on my facebook page (SandiesSofties) and got 26 likes/comments in one day! :) 


And finally, here is a picture of my lil workstation ... I'm still dreaming of one day having my very own studio with a litany of storage options. :) (see my post titled "Visions of Bookshelves ... ")




Saturday, May 14, 2011

Purple Baby Blanket

This will be one of my most simply written blogs; I am just taking a few minutes to post pictures of my most recently finished project. I was inspired by a picture I saw online of a blue and white granny square baby blanket, and made my own based on some patterns I had found in some crochet books I had at home. (Beyond the Square: Crochet Motifs and Around the Corner: Crochet Borders).

This is a picture of one possible design of squares -- I decided not to go with it because the white was too overwhelming.


After I had put about 7 hours into the blanket (each square took about 9 minutes to make) I realized my work had just begun. My husband took this picture of me beginning to sew all the squares together (which turned into a 3 1/2 hour project excluding the nap).
My book on crochet borders has an incredibly fun assortment of border ideas ~ I chose this one for this blanket, but will probably experiment with others on future blankets, since there are so many to choose from.


This is an up-close picture of the border ~ it is a lobster-stitch chain woven through a double crochet stitch. The entire border took another 3-4 hours, and the final trimming and fastening off loose strings took at least an hour. (that's the most boring part ...)

Both sides of this blanket have a unique look and could serve as the display side.

And this final picture shows both sides together. I am going to post it on my etsy site for $130, based on the 14+ hours it took to make, and the going rate for similar products on etsy.

Saturday, April 2, 2011

quite a lovely saturday

so this morning i woke up early (well, before the tornado sirens went off at least), determined to add to my head covering collection. (as in, hats and head band scarf things ~ see pic ~ i don't know what they're called)
I laid out all the head-related things I still have (i wish I had taken pictures of the ones that I've already sold or given away!!). I'm hoping to get some time with my wonderful photographer (megan!) and some beautiful friends tomorrow to do a nice photo shoot of some of this so I can finally start listing things on my etsy site.


I had some coupons for Hobby Lobby and Michaels (both are right down the street) so I went out and bought some more yarn and some buttons and random scrapbooking stuff that was on clearance. I've pretty much made it a policy to only buy things at Hobby Lobby or Michael's if I can get it at least 35% off, and I've found out that if you go weekly, the sales rotate around enough so that you can buy everything at a very discounted rate! :) Here's the results of my shopping adventure today:



I branched out into a new brand of yarn today: Baby Bee Sweet Delight. I bought 6 different (mostly coordinating) colors and had a lot of fun making this hat. I love the multi-colored yarn, because it's like a mini-adventure making any project, discovering how the pattern turns out as you go. (lol, i guess that officially makes me a yarn geek??) I don't know if this will actually fit anyone ~ I just kept shaping it as I went according to some imaginary picture of a child's head ... I need to get some set of standards for head/hat dimensions so I don't have to keep playing this guessing game everytime. Is there somewhere I can buy a bunch of different sized styrofoam heads? That would pretty much be the coolest thing to line up against our patio window :). {Anyone up for a Paint the Foam Heads party?} For now, I'll have to try this hat out on a few of my friends' kids and make adjustments as needed to the pattern I made up for this hat.



I also began three other things but they all were being a little bit too much uncooperative and frustrating, so I changed gears and decided to write this blog post. I know that at some point here I'll have to pick a few items that people like and just make tons of those, but I haven't quite transitioned into the business mindset yet. At this point, everything I make is still a unique idea (or based on a pattern, but with the goal of learning the basics so I can venture forth into uncharted copyright-free territory). I've come up with a few things that I really like based on requests from friends and family ~ I'm always honored when someone asks me to make something, like an elephant or a baby boy bear hat, b/c it gives me that giddy feeling of theythingiknowwhati'mdoing!!! anyhow, somewhere in the process of manning up to the challenges and being too embarrased to admit that I really am not as talented as they think, I discover how to create amazing things that I never would have attempted on my own accord. So a big shout-out to everybody who has faith in me: Thank you! :D

and one last note and pictures for this post, before I turn back to the rebellious piles of unravelled yarn and half-begun projects behind me. ...

sock yarn!
 I've been tempted to buy sock yarn every time I go to a craft store, but I've held back so far ... well, until my friend took a trip to Portland, OR and discovered an epic yarn store and brought me back the neatest sock yarn I've ever seen. So today I broke down and bought some more to add to the collection and picked up a few patterns and knitting needles. :) that will be another story, I'm sure.




Monday, March 28, 2011

behind the scenes

So in between posts on life, creativity, and the pursuit of happiness, I thought i'd post some of the back-stories to my creations.

story number one, in which sandra finds alternate uses for skulls

so, to make a simple story complicated ... My friend has a friend who has a little girl and is pregnant with a little boy, and she (my friend) wanted a baby shower gift for her friend's baby. Actually for the little girl. Because baby gifts are never really for the baby, who wouldn't know a Gucci baby rattle from a dandelion, but might prefer the dandelion due to its edibility. Baby gifts are for the parents. And the older siblings, often on the brink of a pyschological meltdown from the epiphany that some scrunched-up crybaby is about to monopolize the Adults' Attention, gets left in the dust while the new ball of babyness gets loads of diapers, toys, clothes, and burp rags. So a plot was devised to care for big sister and Mommy. I was to crochet a baby boy doll to give to the girl to help ease her into the idea of having a baby brother. I loved the idea and was up for the challenge.

I found a pattern for a boy doll, changed up just about everything except the head, and ended up with an anorexic big-headed boy in footie pajamas. It was very disheartening. I posted pix of my failed experiment and put it away for a few days. I knew that something needed to be done soon, but wasn't sure what to do about it, and didn't really like it anymore, now that it was all skinny and ugly.



Soon enough, my friend asked about the progress of the doll, and I had to admit that I was starting off my crochet business on the wrong foot, what with disappointing people and not following through on orders in a timely way. L I learned all about that from my weekly etsy emails. Anyhow, she said the anorexic boy was cute and I should just send him. That kicked me into gear, because there was no way I wanted that droopy doll with a dangly head haunting my sales history forever. (admittedly, an overkill on the alliteration) I knew I could do better than that, and if the new adopted mommy of this boy was going to say that I had made him, I wanted to at least not be ashamed of him.

But I really didn’t want to remake the head. So I tried untying it.

When that didn’t work I just cut it off and gave up on the whole neck idea.



After remaking the body I tried to re-attach the head but it was very disproportionate.

So I undid it, stitch by stitch, still hoping to take it down to a reasonable size and just make it smaller from there on out. But the sewn on wig cap ruined that idea.


All of which is to explain how I ended up creating the skull bowl.

Determined to show the doll how disgusted I was with him, I decided that his upside down empty head looked quite reminiscent of a bowl, and if coated in plastic, would actually serve quite well for cereal.



(i would insert a clip here of the scene about eyeball soup from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom ... but i'm not quite sure that it's appropriate or funny, having never seen it myself ...)

Anyhow, eventually I redid another head, used other eyeballs, since the original child-proof eyeballs were irremovable, and attached it to the (neckless!) doll.




And in the end, I kinda like him. :)

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Visions of bookshelves and baskets, meet Sandra.

A year and a half later and a half-size craft room acquired ... one which serves the purpose well but leaves much to be desired from my original dream ... (reposting this Jan. 3, 2013)

Sometimes I lay awake at night plotting to the minutest detail what my dream craft room will be like. It seriously gets me pretty worked up and I have to think about boring things (like cleaning up that craft room) to calm myself down and fall asleep.

Of utmost importance will be the shelves. A whole wall of shelves, like my favorite coffee shop in Seattle (Bauhaus) that is two stories high and has a bookcase running floor to ceiling along one side, a spiral staircase leading from the bar up to the loft, another entire wall of paneled windows overlooking the space needle set among the eclectic skyline and waterfront of downtown, dimly lit old school chandeliers, Harry Potter style, hanging sporadically from long rafters over rough-hewn wood tables where college students play chess like old men or homeless men read books like college students should, the remaining walls dark wood-paneled and graffiti-ed with the personality of an earthy, free-spirited, musty summer evening, and the ultimately-seattle aroma of freshly brewing coffee …

Wow. Homesick much?

Aiya.

Back in Oklahoma on a sleepless night …

Dang. If I could design the perfect art studio, it would be exactly that.

This wasn't where I was intending this to go at all.

Blaming it on the Sudafed. (taken purely for medicinal purposes. Although the inspirational writing side effects are nice …)

Ok, ok. Take 2:

A whole wall of shelves, some long, some cut up into cubes (yes, definitely lots of cubes!), some double-wide or tall … it doesn't have to be fancy. Actually, Timothy could build it for me from some re-purposed scraps of wood panels. (panels? 2x4's? boards? ...) I want more spaces than I could ever imagine needing, so that I can have a place for everything I have, and then more spaces for when I pick up the beyond-everything-i-need stuff. The problem with finite space is that I start multi-purposing and trying to coerce things that really don't go together, like useful scrapbooking scraps of paper and old birthday cards that I haven't reasoned away yet, into cohabitation and the results are just plain ugly. Soon enough my organize-able cubes turn into boxes of confused disaster with no governmental system telling things where to go and what to do. And then I turn into a disaster b/c I can't find anything and don't know where to put things b/c they just don't want to go with the birthday cards … yup. So the obvious solution is lots and lots more cubes and shelves. And baskets. Maybe I'll write a blog post about my affinity for baskets later. Or maybe Timothy should write that one. It might come out more interesting from his perspective … it would probably be titled something like "my wife's eerie and completely unreasonable obsession over wicker baskets especially if they have cute gingham lining or are "discounted" 50% off so as to still be more expensive than one should ever have to pay for a box." Anyhow, I shall have lots of baskets on my shelves and tidily tucked away in the cubes.

And then there will be project tables. There will be long expanses of Flat Space. And a big coffee table with cushions on the floor on which I shall sit Japanese style as I fiendishly piece together amigurumis in time to make it to the post office by 5:55.

And a wall of windows. Preferably. Or mirrors. Notsopreferably.

And on these tables will be some wire letter organizer things, with cute manila folders in them (only they won't be plain manila ~ I'll find some cute ones on etsy or cover some plain ones with wallpaper or magazine cut-outs). I don't know what those are for yet. But once again, if they did have a pre-determined purpose, then I would need twice as many so as to have enough for the emergency purposes.

The only problem with this whole dream world is that I don't belong there.

This picture gives a little insight into what my crafting environment most often looks like. Although I cleaned up for this picture, so you have to imagine lots more scraps and tape and pens and tea and Kleenex and cats (hence, the Kleenex) … I usually try not to take pictures when I'm in process, b/c it's such a cluttered messy mess that is very messy and I'm altogether in denial about it, preferring to think that the end justifies the means. (Thoughts/comments are welcome at this point. Just don't judge me.)



(it's a scrapbook I made for our one-year anniversary)



Here's a more genuine shot:


I wonder what would happen if my visionary self ever met my disheveled chaotic spontaneous self. I'm not sure that they know yet that the other exists.

No conclusion. But Sudafed is wearing off and I'm going to sleep.

Monday, March 21, 2011

Reasons I enjoy crocheting, and the like


The gentle, lulling, repetitive motion
One loop after another after another … flows into a gentle sinusoidal wave of comfort, erasing jumpy, haggard patterns of stress and anxiety
An imitation of the great act of creation, watching a hat, a doll, a blanket, a mobile slowly emerge from my hands at the impetus of my own will ~ understanding in some small measure the joy and pride of my God, as a mirror humbly beholding and reflecting His creative essence
Projects turn to prayer as a friend, a brother, a joy, a fear is shared with God, my Comforter
In turn calmly crocheting or passionately exploring new designs and dreams, as my mood and energy dictate
I used to struggle with myself over the irony of the apparent futility of creative endeavors. Before I discovered crochet, I used to enjoy making puzzles, and yet I couldn’t quite stand up to the annoying reasoning voices telling me that putting together a picture that has intentionally been cut apart is the epitome of vanity. So I became a closet puzzler, hiding in the recesses of my mind from myself as I enjoyed long periods of piecing together a puzzle, finding irrational pride in matching pieces of cardboard  together and watching dazzling images emerge, even as the voices were saying “you could have bought this picture whole to start with!” As I began to emerge into the mature adult I might become I ventured out into the world of cross stitch as a direct act of defiance to the voices that nagged at me. “Why would you spend twenty hours making something that serves no purpose? Who will ever appreciate this? You could be doing something else to make the world a better place right now. Or you could be sleeping. Who are you trying to impress anyway? Seriously? One stitch after another after another … ?” Sometimes it got to me. I don’t know how to answer any of those questions. There’s no point. But my mom does have one of my cross-stitched masterpieces framed on her wall. And I did find an indescribable peace of mind and heart every time I sat down to add another color, a new thread, an extra element to the picture. When I recently got married and started embellishing my dabbling interest in yarn, I would give voice to all these doubts and questions and often get myself worked into quite a frenzy, crocheting a hat while explaining that I really didn’t know why I enjoyed this (but I did, somehow, in those closets of my mind) because I knew it didn’t matter and I could just buy one and I know I’m not really accomplishing anything that counts for anything and I could be doing something better (or sleeping ~ that’s always an option!) and etc, somehow feeling obliged to side with “the voices” now that I had a sounding board (aka, my “hubband”) who might, just might, contradict me and release me from the bondage of perpetually making sense. Which he did, interrupting me, poking me, laughing at/with me at the absurdity of my sense of sense-making and encouraging me to just relax and enjoy the simple things in life. If you enjoy it, that’s good enough. … oh glorious freedom! J
I realize now that a lot of those downward spiraling thoughts of “this isn’t worth anything, don’t waste your time, what’s the point?what’s thepoint?what’sthepoint??” was symptomatic of a ferocious hunger to be seen, noticed, appreciated … and of a depression that was eating away at the joy of simply living. Since finding my husband I have discovered a precious ability to enjoy life, now that this anxiety to count for something or matter to someone was set right. With a companion to love, one in whose love (because it is growing with the Love of God) I could rest securely and confidently, I was able to face life in a fresh way and not be caught up in a whirlwind of anxiety-driven “dosomethingamazingnowandeverymomentoryou’reworthless”-ness.
I wish I had been able to reach this point earlier, but in my journey, I needed Timothy to set me free to be me and be happy with me. If I have a daughter, though, I hope she can learn to appreciate herself and enjoy discovering life and her own talents in a peaceful way, instead of feeling compelled to throw herself to the wind, hoping someone will catch her when she falls.
And I’ve digressed sufficiently from yarn to esoteric musings on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness so I shall call a halt to this blog post. Blogging. That is definitely an onomatopoeia.

p.s. for clarification sake, I didn’t actually hear voices. And I hope I haven’t offended anybody who does, b/c I can imagine that must be an incredibly frustrating experience, not to be belittled. Seriously.   

Sunday, March 20, 2011

fanatical, fantastical, financial figures

$11/ hour. That’s how much I make teaching 8th grade math in Oklahoma.
I’m so glad I didn’t calculate that until now, but now that I have enlightened myself on the futility of money-making in this particular line of stress-intensive (insert-descriptions-here) work, it does make facing the final 9 weeks a bit of a daunting and discouraging task. How can America at large expect teachers to produce an intelligent-and-competitive-in-a-global-economy generation of young people when They (the Great and Unknown entity of They-ness) pay teachers $11/hour?? Oy. But that’s another story for another book. (coming soon to your local trash can)
So in a moment of transcendent inspiration, following months of considering this idea of taking the crafty crafting world by storm, I decided that I could earn myself $11 an hour crocheting and skip the stress of daily teaching drama (left purposely ambiguous in this rendition of the story).
Since $11 is my “real” money after all the taxes and insurance and retirement and feed-the-hungry-millionaires percentages are cut out, I did the math (trust me ~ I’m a math teacher) and figured that if I made $140 dollars worth of products, five days a week every week, I could make up for all taxes, insurance, cost of materials, etc. and still come out ahead of my teaching salary. If I throw 5 hours of math tutoring a week into that, I’m down to about $100/day. That’s 3 hats. One bird mobile. Or 2.43 frog-and-turtle duos. (I just made that up. … but it sounds cute. I think I’ll try it.) Of course I still need to build in time for Research and Development (aka, designing the frog-and-turtle duo, since it inevitably won’t be quite right the first time), blogging, posting to etsy, facebook, twitter, etc.
Number theories make me giddy. Within minutes of this fanatical and fantastical epiphany I was sky-high in my dreams of living the high life in the delicate balance between creativity and insanity. Talking it over with my ever-faithful-and-pragmatic business partner, my husband, brought me quickly back down to earth. It’s too dangerous to take this leap of faith when we’re $100,000 in debt from college loans and trying to start a family in the reasonably near future. Etc. He was very loving and gentle in his reasonings. I was equally thankless and harrumphed in my murmurings against his reasonable reasonings.  But of course it was what I would have told myself if I didn’t have him there to tell me.
But still… $11/hour??? I don’t want to go back to school tomorrow… I think that’s what this all comes down to … (apologies all around if any of my students ever end up reading this ~ I heart u all!)
So I’m signing off a bit discouraged … I have so many dreams of projects I want to do and so many leads to follow through on (see future posts) and not nearly enough time. I’m afraid that these dreams will shrivel up and die and my potential customers will forget about me if I don’t follow through soon. And strong. And my present career path is draining me of everything. That’s seriously another book though.
Closing quote from my dearest “hubband:” Honey, I think you’re wonderful.
Me: well, I know that, but I just want to be more wonderful.
Vote of confidence: 1
Vote of discouraged-i-just-want-to-hide-in-a-hole-and-not-go-to-school-tomorrow: 1
Score tied. Overtime play-by-play to be continued.

in the meantime, here's a picture of a knit headband i made today :)