• artsy fartsy,  crafts gone wrong,  crazy stuff,  easy on the words,  heavy on photos

    Not all my ideas are good.

    beautiful failure

    I’ve been thinking up Christmas crafts for my next installment over at Alpha+Mom and my recent projects have gone horribly wrong. Luckily, I have enough time before my next post is due to test them out. But I thought you’d like to see my latest failure.

    wrapping party

    I had this idea that I would take some yarn in pretty colors, dunk it in liquid starch, wrap it around some styrofoam cones and make these really cool cone-shaped string trees. Not string cheese, string trees. Cool idea, right?

    string trees

    crafty

    Bethany took some really pretty pictures of the craft while it was going down. It had so much promise…

    first sign things are not really going to turn out

    But the next morning, after the starch had dried, things did not go well. That yarn and string would not budge! I pushed and pulled. I finally had to loosen the yarn with a knife.

    uh...this doesn't look right

    What came off looked pretty sad. Not really very cone-like at all. I fully expect to see this on Craftastrophe someday.

    Princess Leia?

    Maybe I could save them for Halloween next year and be Princess Leia in neon.

    elephant snout? monkey, er I mean elephant see, elephant do

    Or an elephant?

    I think I’ll take another crack at this. Maybe I’ll try more starch or putting some tinfoil down on the cone first…I don’t know. It might work, it might not. Good thing I have about five more ideas up my sleeve.

  • artsy fartsy,  Tis the Season

    Glovurkeys

    gettin' cozy on the dinner plate

    My mom and I were at the 99-cent store the other day, doing I don’t know what, and I spied these 99-cent gloves. I’ve actually seen them everywhere: the drugstore, the fabric store, the dollar bin at Target…it makes me wonder why there is such an influx in cheap one-size-fits-all knit gloves. Is it because they are made in China with lead-based yarn and everyone is trying to get rid of them before we clue in? Or is it just because in Southern California nobody needs gloves…unless they are dressing up as a mime or something.

    99 cent knit gloves

    Who knows. I don’t really care. I just saw them in some interesting fall-ish colors and thought, hey we could stuff these and sew them up to look like Turkeys, and of course my mom was all in for that. We almost even fought over who was going to sew them first. I won because I thought it would be good blog material. My mom likes it when I blog regularly. (Hi Mom!)

    hey hey we're the turkeys

    I guess it’s been done before but I thought you might still like to see my version of knit-glove turkeys. I’m calling them “glovurkeys.” They turned out kind of cute. Kind of lumpy and silly and missing their dingle-dangle wattle thingys.

    cut and sew

    If you need directions, all you do is buy two different colors of gloves. Cut off two fingers from each and swap them. Sew them back together inside-out. Turn them right side in and then stuff them.

    stuffing

    Mr. Turkey's lookin' like he had a few too many.

    Sew on a felt beak and some beady eyes and voila! You have a glovurkey! Mine were a little top-heavy and wanted to tip over so I’m thinking if I did this again I would stuff a rock in the bottom for weight. Other than that I think this is a pretty simple fun craft. You could even make enough for every place setting for Thanksgiving and hang funny signs around their necks with each guest’s name written on them.

    rock out with your...

    Or you could just let your kid play with them like I did.