Handmade Halloween

This years Halloween was pretty fun.  I returned to my favorite mask designer, Oxeyedaisey, on Etsy and purchased her fox and skull mask patterns and went to town.  I made all the masks from wool felt this year, and purchased pieces from Prairie Woolens - what an amazing selection they provide!

I stayed with a traditional skull for my husband but worked embroidery into my mask and turned it into a Catrina theme with flowers and a veil.

The pirate designed and developed her own costume from the (sadly) increasingly neglected dress-up box.  My three woodland creatures took a bit of help from me.

The fox was straightforward and we added an improvised tail from flannel and fake fur.  The hedgehog mask was purchased from on The Masked Menagerie on Etsy.  I self-designed the body suit with lots of inspiration and a tutorial from Alida Makes.  The whitetail deer was improvised off the base pattern from the fox, with inspiration for coloration and details from Magical Attic on Etsy.

Overall the costumes turned out great and the masks will be heirlooms in our costume closet.  Indeed, this holiday I loaned out our wolf, rooster and hen masks to friends for Halloween fun!

"Who" knows what next year will bring...maybe a family of wise owls?!

Spring sewing

With spring finally around the corner I found myself back in the sewing room gazing upon my fabrics. I have been watching this amazing quilt tutorial and so wish I had the time to jump in on it. Regardless, I really wanted to get my machine going again. I settled on a small wall hanging to go at the top of the stairs - a stacked coin quilt with vintage fabrics.

I participated in a vintage fabric swap last summer and have been using bits and pieces for various projects. In the fall I got a little ambitious and planned out a quilt project that would really show off the fabrics. Denyse Schmidt has an amazing pattern for flying geese and I was hooked. Unfortunately, my execution was awful. I spent time cutting what felt like a zillion triangles, laying them out in just the right order, and then sewing them up. The rows turned out terribly - really crooked and I never managed to get the points of the triangles to match up. (Does anyone else have this problem?) So the cut fabrics sat in a corner. Until a new idea hit me: a stacked coins quilt, inspiration here and here. I cut down the remaining triangles and re-purposed them.

Here it is, hanging at the top of the stairs. It is a tri-color front with vintage floral prints and the back is made from another vintage fabric, with a bold blue stripe down the middle. I think it measures about 22 x 24 inches. The sashing is a white Kona cotton solid - what a dream that fabric is to work with!

This piece just screams spring to me. Now...where's the spring weather?

Silent Auction

The daycare that my twins attend, 2 (short) mornings a week, is having a silent auction this Friday night. I couldn't make up my mind what to make for it (do I knit, sew or craft something?), and settled on a piece of woven fabric art like the one below. I didn't manage to get a photo of it before it went off to the daycare today, but I will try to get one this Thursday; maybe of it up on display. I used three batik fabrics - the orange and green ones from the "3 Great Bags" post, with a blue one that I had in the stash. It is framed 4x6 in a brown wooden shadow box. It turned out remarkably well. I titled it "The Elements" as I felt the flame orange, green and blue all represented a few of the fundamental elements of life - fire, water and foliage. Hopefully someone, other than my husband, will bid on it :)

Speaking of fundamental elements of life I have just started reading, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver. What an amazing book. I am sure that I will be blogging about it on the family blog shortly.

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UPDATE: My fabric art piece went for $35. There were two bidders and I even overheard other women commenting that they had wanted it. Pretty exciting! It is good to know what the upper end price for a piece like that might be.

Fabric art

Here is a photo of a piece of art that I completed to finish off a blank wall in our living room. I am very pleased with the result. I basically took scraps of favorite fabrics, grouped them, cut them into strips and viola! Instant art. Well...the process was more cumbersome than that, but it truly wasn't as difficult as I had expected. The most difficult part was committing to a final design and gluing the things together.

My inspriration came from another piece of art that I noticed while surfing Etsy.com. I give full credit for my inspiration to collagecreations, with her piece, Woven Series 4. Unfortunately I am unable to justify purchasing her art at this time, so I crafted my own.

Dan really likes this too - which is rare as he doesn't like fabric as much as I do. (For that matter, I don't care for wood in the same way that he does!) He has even encouraged me to do a piece for a silent auction that is coming up for the girls' daycare. I do have some ideas for another, more intricate piece, so we'll see what I am able to come up with.