Was inves­ti­gat­ing the idea of wet felt­ing as a pos­si­ble group activ­i­ty last night. The tuto­ri­als I read said that a felt­ed bead takes about 30 sec­onds to a minute to make, so I thought, I’ll just give it a try now! I have a bunch of rov­ing and there’s plen­ty of dish soap. 

But after an hour of rolling felt between my palms noth­ing real­ly came togeth­er. Just clumps of shape­less fuzz that aren’t stick­ing togeth­er (they will be put into good use as stuff­ing for plush­es). Pos­si­bly because I was try­ing to see if it would work with luke­warm water, because it won’t be pos­si­ble to use boil­ing hot water in group.

Then I read a cou­ple of tuto­ri­als of mak­ing felt bracelet with kids, and it involves warm water, so I thought I’d give it a try. 

It was indeed a lot eas­i­er. Here I am rolling the ends togeth­er on my own wrist. It was quite fun.

It turned out a bit big so I thread (or more like force, with the aid of a piece of wire) a red wood­en bead onto it.

It feels very soft.

Have a great week­end, everyone! 

And good­bye summer.

Strange. Look­ing at this pho­to (from Mike’s cam­era on our recent trip) I have this feel­ing that my old self is car­ry­ing all the lazy, fun days of sum­mer and run­ning away from me :S

Can’t help but feel a bit sad about the lat­er sun­rise and ear­li­er sun­set and decreas­ing day­light. And every­body’s in a rush again. Sched­ules get filled up. Less time to craft. 

But hey, what­ev­er I can squeeze in, every small project counts!

Ta-da! :D

Found out (by acci­dent) that the local dol­lar store sells glit­ter in tiny glass bot­tles!! Comes in a pack of 6. I used the one with white glit­ter in it. Emp­tied the bot­tle but a few glit­ters still stuck to the glass (you can kind of see it in the pho­to), which I think looks rather sweet. Fol­lowed this tuto­r­i­al to make a pen­dant. Tried a vari­ety of beads and feath­ers to hang inside the bot­tle but did­n’t end up with any­thing I liked, until I remem­bered that I have a col­lec­tion of tiny maple keys in the phone book! I knew when I picked them up from the pave­ment that they will be per­fect for a project one day! :D

I applied a thin lay­er of PVA glue to both sides of the maple key. Prob­a­bly bet­ter to use acrylic medi­um for that, but I don’t have any at the moment.

It’s hung onto the wire loop with sewing thread. I love the slight pink edge on it.

Made my day :D

I have five oth­er bot­tles to play with. Still think­ing about mak­ing the tiny ter­rar­i­um with moss. Mike remind­ed me that the art sup­plies store by the art col­lege prob­a­bly sells them for stu­dents who make archi­tec­tur­al mod­els. Will have to check that out. 

And look! My book order just arrived! :D

Bought it with the last of the Christ­mas gift card mon­ey :D I’m a huge fan of Jes­si­ca Pol­ka’s fas­ci­nat­ing cro­chet sculp­tures. I don’t buy cro­chet pat­terns very often, but I did buy her mus­tache pat­tern to make a Christ­mas present one year — they were so much fun to make and well received :D

Many projects in this book are knit­ted, so I’m going to have to fig­ure them out some­how (I have very lim­it­ed skills in knit­ting). But the cro­chet angler fish is beyond awe­some! (The pat­tern is actu­al­ly free on Lion Brand Yarn, if you reg­is­ter on the site)

Maybe I’ll start with the barnacles…

Have a won­der­ful start to the week, everyone!