A Creative Journey...

Drawing is not something I excel in, but I like to sketch out rough drafts for projects to get a feel of things to come. It's also a good way to whittle down possibilities that seem like good ideas in theory, but might look silly in real life.

These are my sketches for a chunky page that I'm working on for CDM's Book of Hope (relay for life fundraiser). A couple of these have potential, but I'm not particularly enamoured with any of them. Perhaps I'm overthinking things...or perhaps it's time to go back to the drawing board...literally.

A couple more of these purses because I quite like the pattern that I used for the first one I made!

One's probably gonna be up for grabs in the STS swap, but I will be keeping one for myself. Question being which one shall I keep?!?

The mustard hued lovely?







Or the dotty cutie?

I'm getting a headstart here! It follows (by reason?) that a fabric lover must love to sew, no? I guess it's also possible that a fabric lover collects fabric for petting or for visual stimulation? Anyhow, I digress. For the fabric over scavenger hunt, the categories are as follows:

* Something local

* Something green

* Something lucky

* Something vintage

* Something tiny (under 2")

* Something related to the letter "M"

* Something sharp

* Something bumpy

* Something cozy

* Sender's choice

And I get to select 5 categories to fulfil! Well, I'm sending the following items because it's sewing-related.

Something vintage...



Something tiny...



Now I need to work on ideas for three additional categories!!

Last weekend, I had a fabulous time hanging out with CD for our 2nd Annual Crafty in Cincinnati. After having so much fun the first time round, we booked rooms at the same hotel with plans for trying new crafts and catching up.

Friday evening, we played with paper and made a couple of chunky houses!

My chunky house "A Virgin of Yesterday"!



CD's fantastic cat chunky house!



Saturday was a busy day! We went to IKEA (boy oh boy!) followed by a visit to St. Theresa's Textile Trove (an absolute gem!). In addition to a good selection of eclectic fabric (hand marbled, hand dyed, African batik, etc.), they also had all kinds of beads, whimsical charms and general kitsch. I won't gab about my fabric purchases, but I did find quite a few things that I had to have!

Porcupine quills. Yep, sharp and beautiful. I hope to inject resin in the hollow shaft and turn them into hairsticks for myself...soonish.



Okay, I wasn't planning to talk about fabric but this particular fabric has such a neat story to it. Apparently, the design is based on "ladies of the night dolls" that were handed out as, erm, calling cards in Mexico. The designer, Terrie Mangat actually had names for the dolls in the fabric, and these are names of her friends and family. How cool is that!



Fiber, fiber, fiber!!!



First fiber project for the evening - felted soaps! CD chose a good selection of colours for her bar of soap...and it turned out beautiful! I opted for forest green and hunter green shades. It seemed like a good idea at that time...but in retrospect, I shouldn't have. My felted soap looks like a Brillo pad!



Next, we embarked on making wet felted scarves. I was too excited and didn't get any pictures of the layout of the dry fibers or even take very good pictures of the process...but here's the progress pictures of CD's colourful scarf!

Prewetting the fiber prior to soaping...



Close-up of pre-wetted fiber!



Soaped and partially felted...



It's darn near impossible to take pictures with soapy hands, but here's my soaped and partially felted scarf. I opted for using white wool roving because I wanted to dye the scarf after I was done felting it.



Scarves hung out to dry!



Close-up of CD's colourful scarf...



Close-up of my boring pre-dyed scarf (which is still undyed)...



And then we dyed a couple of skeins of yarn with food grade acid dyes...because we had a microwave in the room!



Close-up of the lovely dye effect on one of the skeins (I love grape Kool-Aid!)



You'd think we would call it a night after all the fiber crafts. Nope, CD promised that she'll coach me on needlework and she made good on that promise.

Awesome scissor fob that she made for me!



Here's the sampler she worked on to show me a variety of stitches that I could learn:





Sadly, I was getting too cranky and tired (hey, it was now Sunday morning!) to learn them. I could bearly keep my eyes open at that point :P I stitched this...



And partially got this started...



But finished it when I got home!





I can't wait to do more needlework!

And for the record, my hair had pink highlights (it was purple for last year's meetup)!