The Daily ATC Challenge: Day 11

Today’s theme for your dailyATC is: SLEDS

I love sledding. I grew up without snow in the southern US after having spent just a little bit of my preschool time in Canada around the wonders of snow, a sled, and of course a great neighborhood playground cool enough to enjoy most of the year. When I moved to Colorado in high school, one of the first things I bought was a beautiful Radio Flyer sled from an antique shop. I rode that sled like crazy every winter throughout high school and hopefully once I’m living out at the farm, I’ll have plenty more occasions to use it. I may not be coordinated enough for skiing and snowboarding, but I sled with the best of them 🙂

Here’s my painting of my vintage sled! I’m tremendously pleased with this little painting.

PRANG watercolor on 140lb Artist’s Loft watercolor paper

Fair Projects for 2015

It’s getting to be the time of year when you’ve got to start thinking about what projects you’re going to be making for your county and state fairs. Ideally you’d start too as working right up to the deadline is never fun, though it seems to happen more often than I’d like!

So far, most of my projects are rather bland looking, but I promise there are colorful projects coming too!

Here we have a lace baby sweater which will ultimately be part of a three-piece set, a knit lace doily, and a crochet lace bag all in progress.

I’ve also been working on filling the first of three bobbin lace pillows I’m making for myself. I really enjoy the bobbin lace beginners kit I got for Christmas, but the failings of a beginner ‘pillow’ are more than apparent. I done some research on the best and longest lasting bobbin lace pillows and how they’re made. Then, I presented this information to my physical therapist and we worked out a stand set up to prevent any undue stress on my body. Now I’m building that stand and pillow set up! This is the first pillow in progress.

Kaia seemed rather displeased with my pillow stuffing as a few bits of straw landed on her in her bed!

The pillows are filled with natural straw cut into 4″ or shorter pieces. Cutting the straw is a painful and dull process, and stuffing the pillows is painful and slow going as a result, but when they’re done, I’m going to have fantastic traditional bobbin lace pillows, a standard 24″ cookie pillow and a more rectangular pillow with a roller in the back for making yardage. The pillow above is the roller that will go into the rectangular pillow. The exterior is a natural canvas material sewn into a tube with drawstrings on either end. Inside, there is a dowel running the length and I have two discs cut from 1/4″ plywood. One disc is already in place at the bottom of the pillow and the other will go in just before cinching up the other drawstring. The dowel sticks out a few inches on either side which is how it will connect to the support pillow.

The last big WIP keeping me busy lately is a paper craft project. Some friends asked me to make a 4′ tall LEGO minifig as a decoration for a Boy Scout party in March. After that party, the gigantic LEGO man will be a county and state fair entry for me before finally being sold to the highest bidder to fund some new LEGO sets for me! The main framework of the minifig is cardboard sheeting from Costco. Some of guy pal’s friends from work taught me how to use anti-fatigue mat foam to create the complex curves and gave me some foam to use for the project. Atop the cardboard and foam frame is paper maché. This will create a surface I can sand to a perfect finish. With the glossy paint a LEGO minifig has, any imperfections in the body will show. That’s why I’m doing the paper maché coating. There will likely be some spackle to help fill any gaps prior to sanding as well. Here’s the first two pieces being coated in paper maché, the head (which is upside down in this photo) and one of the arms. They’re the most curvy pieces and thus require the most paper maché to get perfectly smooth.

Scroll Saw Dragon Pendant

About a month ago I started a project for a friend of mine from my online fiber artists with chronic pain support group, the Chronic Bitches. She loves dragons, and was oogling the many free dragon patterns in Steve Good’s scroll saw pattern catalog. Since I had many pieces of thin board on hand from the dog and cat pendants I’ve made, I figured I’d jump right in with the dragon pendant.

These are the first three dog necklaces I made and won runner up in the Gorilla Glue Contest on Lumber Jocks!

When I first started looking at the pdf for the necklace, I was shocked. This was just WAY too big to have be a necklace in my book. My chest isn’t that big, there’s space taken up with boobs! I pulled the image over to Microsoft Word for easy scaling with rulers. It’s amazing how often I use Word for pattern making actually. My reduced pattern measures 2 inches wide and just a smidge over 3 inches tall. I kept the same proportions as the original so my pendant wouldn’t end up elongated or smooshed looking.

I mounted up my pattern to some 1/8 inch thick walnut, drilled a few holes, and started cutting. It wasn’t long before I realized I had missed some of the entry holes I would need, that I wasn’t good enough to cut such bitty details accurately, and that getting so tense trying to cut something so small was only making my pain worse in my shoulders and upper back. I set the pendant on the back edge of my Excaliber’s table and proceeded to ignore it for a full month while I worked on other projects like my inkle looms, some toy cars for charity, and another Siamese cat necklace.

Tonight I went down to my friend’s garage to visit with my saw. I had to prepare a set of necklace blanks for a small workshop I’m teaching tomorrow night on how I make my inlay dog and cat necklaces. We’ll be making one of my favorite dog breeds tomorrow, the border collie! Once I got all my border collie blanks done, I still had a little time left before it was time to head home. The dragon pendant was glaring at me from the back of the scroll saw table. I fished out a size 60 drill bit, put in the bitty holes, and had a go at it since I already had a 00 reverse tooth blade in the saw.

Surprisingly, my skills have improved enough over the past month or so for me to be able to fly through making the pendant. Sure, I still spent about an hour finishing the cuts and another hour sanding down to a 600 grit paper and gently buffing in a mineral oil and beeswax finish, but still, I was flying compared to a month ago. I’m so excited to have it done! Before long maybe I’ll actually be able to do some of the more advanced ornaments from the book I got last year! I’d really wanted to make the train ornament for my dad and the motorcycle for my brother, but I messed up and broke the spokes in the wheels of both. I hope by next Christmas I can fly through those ornaments and give them out!

I love how it came out!

Tags: blade, chinese, craft, dragon, dragons, fantasy, free, jewelry, necklace, pattern, pendant, project, scroll saw, scrollsaw, walnut, wioodworking, wood, wooden, woodwork, woodworking, working

13 New Hexipuffs put me at 175!

Here are the first 13 hexipuffs of February 2012:

The castle puff is from the duplicate stitch tricks tutorial. The cat puff and one of the matching puffs are made from Premier Yarns Serenity in Lavender Topaz. I’d received enough for a single puff in a swap and mentioned to a friend on Monday that I wanted more of it for puffing. She offered to give me two puffs worth from one of her balls of Lavender Topaz destined for sock knitting. I duplicate stitched a black cat on one of them to forever immortalize her in my quilt. It’s actually quite appropriate as she’s had black cats as long as I’ve known her and her name is Kat! Before Kat offered me some of her Lavender Topaz yarn, I’d also mentioned on Ravelry that I’d loved these colors and was shy on purples. Did anyone have any? Ajsgramma said she had some Purple Spice in the same brand of yarn that she’d be happy to send me! Her yarn arrived and I knit it up into the two fake isle puffs here. The two semi solid purples and two semi solid pinks are some of the Maple Wool Farm soda pop kettle dyed yarn! I love how bright and summery the soda colors are. The three green/blue/purple ones are from a swap on Ravelry from Minibrrdie. She sent me several wonderful yarns in exchange for a hand turned nostepinne from my woodshop. I made that this weekend and am getting ready to send it off to her. I actually like it better than the darker one I made for myself about 7 months back. I think it’s got a better weight in the hand, but I do like the deep beading of mine’s handle. Looks like I need to spend more time getting comfortable with my lathe so I can perfect a nostepinne design.

So there you have it! Thirteen brand new puffs to add to my puff pile and a beautiful pine nostepinne to head out for a swap. I’m particularly happy with the past 8 days of puffing because each yarn has a story, from swapped and gifted yarn from friends, to pictures representing my friends (the castle is in honor of a friend who’s making 1:24 scale castle dollhouses with me for fun, but more on that another day), to some of my own soda pop yarn!

The next batch of puffs is going to be a Valentines set done in all lovey-dovey colors because I’ve got a shortage of pinks and purples in my quilt. I’m not a big fan of Valentines, but I’ll try. I guess I’m just of the belief that it’s too commercialized and that someone who loves me can tell me any day, and it’s more special when it’s unexpected! Plus, my valentine won’t be bringing me chocolates. He’s furry and can’t have chocolate. Maybe I’ll commemorate the day by making a puff of him! I’ve already got the chart ready and waiting.

Will you be making a special hexipuff to put a bit of your loved one in your quilt?

Toy Society Holiday Drop

On Christmas Eve, I dropped a handmade toy for the Toy Society. I made this little tow truck and car set:

I used a free pattern from Steve Good. You can download the pattern here if you want to make your own car and truck set. The only addition I made was to glue a small strip of wood across the back of the truck bed to keep the car from rolling off too easily. I left off the smoke stacks and the little button lights. The smokestacks have not held up well when my friend’s kids play with the truck I keep at my house and I didn’t want to have bitty lights that a small child could chew off.

I cut the body of the two cars from a scrap of 2×4 leftover from another project. The truck bed is cut from a fence picket scrap. I ran it through my planer to clean it up and get it to size. I actually like the look of the redwood fence picket truck bed more than the pine truck bed I’ve done on previous tow trucks. The wheel well strips on either side of the cab are cut from pine as the redwood was a bit too brittle to hold up well to tight curves on an item meant for child’s play. The wheels are all pre-made oak wheels from a local specialty wood shop. I cut the body of the car and truck with a HUGE blade in the scroll saw. It’s a reverse tooth blade from Woodcraft that’s so big it doesn’t even have a number. I used size 7 blades to cut the wheel well covers, the truck bed, and the dowels for the axles.

The drop was made on Christmas Eve around lunchtime in Old Colorado City on a bench in front of an Italian restaurant, some souvenir shops and art galleries. There was a gaggle of kids visiting Santa just a block and a half away, so hopefully a lucky boy or girl found this set just in time for Christmas!

In general, if you’re into scrolling, check out Steve Good’s site. He’s got TONS of free patterns, and several of them toys for doing Toy Society drops! This was my first drop, and it was fun. There will certainly be more! I cut several tow truck and car sets for my Christmas Eve drop, but I ran out of wheels, none of the wood shops were open, AND I couldn’t find my hole cutter set to make my own wheels. Talk about failure!