Ella Crafts
My mom and I discussed Eva’s artwork from the last post. Ella put her arms around me and said, “Mama, I want a blog about me!”
That was perfect timing, because she just finished a wall hanging. It is mostly made from craft felt. She arranged many buttons, which I sewed on for her. We had fun adding trim and sequins and beads.
Ella’s favorite question for anyone who admires the wall hanging is, “Do you think I embroidered on this?” The admirer is supposed to say, “No, surely a four-year-old can’t embroider.” Then Ella taps the embroidery and says, “I did.”
Then the admirer gasps with amazement, and Ella cackles with glee.
Here’s another of Ella’s creations. It is a doll carrying a red bag. See her blond hair? Ella sewed that on. It was very long, until Ella gave her a haircut.
Ella is often hard at work, as you can see in the last photo. She loves the process of making stuff. I have learned to step away and let her make whatever she wants (within reason).
Angels Done!
I finished the last of the felt angel ornaments! Yay! I expected heavenly music or a beautiful fanfare when I snipped the last thread, but all was quiet as I hung Angel Number 7 on our ficus tree.
Before the job could really, really be finished, the project bag had to be emptied. I sorted embroidery floss, threw away the dog-eared instructions, and stored the extra sequins. I shook the lint out of the bag, folded it neatly, and put it in my bag-o’-bags to await another project.
I have two unopened Christmas felt kits. One has four ornaments, covered with sequins—oooo, spaaaarkly. The other is a tree skirt with sequin poinsettias. They are lurking among our stuff that is in storage, waiting for us to build a house. I can’t find them, and it’s probably for the best.
Now I can concentrate on finishing Ella’s pink cardigan, which is coming along nicely. The measured approach worked so well with the angels, I plan to set similar goals for the cardigan.
Eva Crafts
We came into a mother lode of buttons a few months ago. (Thank you, Joy!) They’re plain shirt-type buttons in many colors. Eva can think of more ways to use them. She wanted to make Christmas ornaments from pine cones, and the buttons seemed the natural choice. Here’s her button pine cone. We nestled it on a branch of the Christmas tree.
Eva read The Dark is Rising, by Susan Cooper, for Language Arts class. Her project was to dress like the main character and tell his story. She needed props, so she made the signs described in the book. The signs of iron, stone, wood, and brass are polymer clay; the sign of water is cut from a sheet of vinyl. We tried to cast it in epoxy resin, but that didn’t work very well.
Our favorite, and the favorite of her classmates, was the sign of fire. In the book it is encrusted with lots of jewels that flash like fire. Eva cut her sign from felt and encrusted it with sequins. They flash like fire, too. She sewed a back onto the piece, and stuffed it.
I read the book, too. Eva and I had the same reaction to it. We found it interesting intellectually, and we were pleased with the ending on general principle, but we didn’t love the book.
Football, Knitting, and Angels
Friday was a sad, sad day for Texas Longhorn fans. It was embarrassing, really. We’ve always told Eva, who goes to school with a number of kids whose parents are Aggies (which means they’re Aggies, too. It runs in families.), that when UT and A&M get together, all bets are off.
One good thing about the ballgame was that I got lots done on Ella’s pink cardigan while we watched. I could have gotten a lot more done, if we hadn’t spent so much time groaning in dismay. Ella tried it on after the game, and the sleeve fits better now. Hurray!
The angels are coming along on schedule. Here are two more all finished, and I have two more to go. I really work well with a scheduled amount of work to do each week, especially with a stalled project like this one. I like it, because when the work for the week is done, I can quit without feeling guilty. I should schedule more of my projects that way!
Sweater and Angel Progress
While the Dallas Cowboys played on Sunday, I worked on Ella’s cardigan sleeve. I used the usual method of decreasing one stitch each side, every fourth row, from the beginning of the armhole shaping down to the wrist. That proportion works for almost every long-sleeved sweater I’ve ever made.
“Ella, let’s try your sweater on,” I said, after the game. Oops! Her arms don’t decrease one stitch each side, every fourth row! They stay the same distance around, down to her elbow. So I had to pull out about three inches of knitting, and adjust the decreases accordingly.
The beauty of knitting from the top down, is that you can try the garment on before you finish it. Thank goodness!
I am trying to finish the components of the felt angel ornaments, so that all I have to do each week is put them together. The wings are all finished now. Aren’t they cute?! The embroidery and sequin-sewing seem fiddly, but the result is so nice that I don’t mind at all.
Band Crafts and Angel Count
We went to Hamilton on Saturday night, to hear Eva play in the All-District Middle School Concert Band. They sounded great! Eva looked great, too. She talked me into making her this green skirt. She was going to try sewing it about a year ago, but got distracted by other stuff. It was already mostly cut out, and all I had to do was sew it. Eva and her blond hair look fabulous in green.
She’s pleased to play the oldest clarinet in the whole band—over thirty-five years old! It’s the one I played in junior high and high school. The handle was beginning to fall apart, so we repaired it with a scrap of beautiful leather, courtesy of Wendy Allen Saddlery.
Angel count: three done and four to go! When one is done, I hang it from a tack in our kitchen. Ella usually notices it right away. We are hanging them on our ficus tree, which is inside for the winter.
Angel Hair
The hair of these little gals is what finally put me over the edge, and caused me to put them away, unfinished, for several years. It never seemed to work out right.
For one thing, I could never get it to adequately cover the blue dotted lines on the face, which mark the hairline. The only reason you can’t see them now is that I carefully fixed the hair before scanning the heads. I think glue may be in order.
Just thinking of the hair made me feel queasy when I recently got them out to finish. “Get it over with!” my inner me said. So I gritted my teeth and finished five heads full of angel hair this week.
It makes a big difference to just be able to pick up the head and plop it onto the body, without having to worry about embroidering smiles or sewing strands of hair in place. I feel like I’m well on the way to finishing the project in time for Christmas, as planned.
A Pink Project and an Angel Count
Last spring, when I was consumed by crocheted flowers, four-year-old Ella looked at me soulfully and said, “Mama, when you’re done with your book, would you knit me a pink and purple sweater?”
How could I resist such sweetness, not to mention the big brown eyes? Well, I couldn’t.
We ordered Knit Picks’ Merino Style. The pink, called “Petal,” is just lovely. Here it is, down to the back armhole shaping. The stitch is “Wheat Ear Rib,” one of my favorites from Barbara Walker’s A Treasury of Knitting Patterns. I spaced the ribs out a little further than she did.
My strategy is to knit from the shoulders down, so I can lengthen the sleeves and hem if necessary. Ella is a tall, tall girl. She’s wearing clothes that Eva wore when she was seven and eight years old. Anyway, the ribs will go straight down from the shoulder to just under the armhole. Then I will increase between the ribs, so the rest of the sweater flares out. It will look like this.
Angel count: two done, five to go.
Felt Angel Ornaments
I just love sparkly Christmas ornaments, and it’s so much fun to make them from kits. Yes, I love having all the supplies already gathered in one place, and to let someone else do all the designing and decision-making, for a change. I get my kits from Herrschners.
These are parts of angel ornaments from a Bucilla kit I started several years ago. It had a dozen angels, all blond and brown-eyed. Surely not all angels are blond, so I gathered wool for some different hair colors, including gray. And I varied the eye color, too. The designs on the dresses were too repetitive, so I decided to use different beads and stuff to decorate them. So much for letting someone else make all the design decisions.
Five angels have been done for several years. The last seven have been in pieces ever since. Now that my big, secret project is done, I’m going to finish these little gals. If I finish one angel a week, and they should all be done before Christmas.
Secret Project Revealed, At Last
A few times over the last year, I mentioned a big, secret project I was working on. I couldn’t say what it was at the time. However, since you can already order it from amazon.com, I can now reveal the details.
Yep, I wrote a book! It is called Crochet Bouquet. Lark Books will release it in May 2008. The book has lots of crocheted flower and leaf designs with step-by-step instructions for making them. You’ll see how to use the flowers to decorate clothing and accessories. I give practical tips for choosing yarns, and several finishing techniques that you can apply to all your crochet projects.
A little over a year ago, I started designing and crocheting the flowers, leaves, and projects for the book. I badly wanted to post about it, but as the folks at Lark told me, it’s better not to show too much of a new book before it comes out. So I restrained myself, and worked on flower designs instead. Oh, there are a few glimpses of the flower designs, here and there, but not enough to spoil the surprise, I hope.
After I turned in all the samples and instructions in May, the editorial and art teams at Lark Books got to work. Lark takes care of all the photography, illustrations, and layout, in addition to the editing. They produced a very happy and pretty book. I love how it looks.
We all sighed with relief, when Crochet Bouquet went to the printer on October 16. Now all we have to do is wait—and start on another big, secret project!
