Back at it

Fairy house, originally uploaded by Ansis68.

Sorry for the absence, we had to fly down south to see my mother-in-law after she had a bad stroke a week and a half ago. Visiting loved ones in the hospital has to be one of the bleakest experiences in life.

It wasn't all sadness though, we got to catch up with family, go to a rose show and experience a 5.1 earthquake! Hazel and I also built our first fairy house. Pittosporum twig framework, agapanthus leaf walls, gingko above the door, eucalyptus carpet, a hosta leaf for a roof and azaleas on top for decoration. Pittosporum leaves, forget-me-nots, violas and rose petals for the front path. I'm not sure what the blue flowers at the base of the walls are, gorgeous blue colour though!

I changed the flowers around each night after Hazel had gone to bed - the first night I put them in the shape of a heart, so she is convinced that the pixies came each night to visit. I was driven to it by her comment as we went out into the garden to start "but fairies aren't real I don't think mummy". No child of mine is not going to believe in fairies darn it!

Christmas tea towels

In the last couple years I've become a great fan of the souvenir tea towel (dish towel to some), especially stylish ones. This first started when I visited Sweden and brought back a few and just treasured them so much I realised I was on to something and wanted to share my revelation with everyone! I've been planning on making tea towels for Christmas since about...January. I even bought a bunch of fabric so I could started in July and beat the rush. Haaaahahahaha... (ahem) I've tossed around various methods of doing it, ranging from full-on screen printing to freezer paper or contact paper on a screen. The simplicity of the designs changed accordingly too. Basically what it came down to was that the images I wanted to do were too complicated for freezer paper which seems to be a one-use-only kind of thing; but I didn't want to spend lots of money setting up a screen, or have to figure it all out at a very rushed time of year. In the end I decided to go with fabric pens and I'm really delighted with the result! The images I've decided to use are drawings by Hazel and this is how I did it:

First I scanned in the drawing and made them really contrasty black and white images with Photoshop. This made them easier to see through the fabric. I taped it onto a piece of glass and leant it in front of the window. If I do lots of these I'll definitely make up some sort of light table (or this one) so I don't have to work on a nearly vertical surface.



Then I placed the fabric over the top and traced the image with a fabric pen. Hazel calls these her "Cherry blossom branches", although I must admit I've cobbled together a bunch of different examples here so it's not exactly an original, nor are they particularly branchy-looking! The red just seemed like the only colour choice on the white, although a nice sage green would be good too I think.



The finished tea towel - well not hemmed yet!



The rough texture of the cotton I've used gives the lines a real silk screened appearance, which doesn't come across well in the photos but it's very effective. Mat couldn't figure out how I'd done it when I showed him.



I also did a straight copy of one of Hazel's family portraits, in this case all of us out in the garden. After I took the photo I duplicated a few more of the flowers to fill the width a bit better and got her to sign it as well.



These are so quick and easy and, dare I say it, really effective! They'd make great presents for grandparents or aunts and uncles and all your many friends and relations.

Fabric notes upon further experimentation

I did a second lot of tea towels using a different, lighter fabric and have the following to say about fabric choice:

Heavy cotton used above
Pros:
It held its shape well, no stretching and
Took the fabric pen well as it had a dense weave.
Easy to draw on due to dense weave.
Cons:
Possibly too heavy for tea towels but time will tell
Harder to see through to trace - need light source behind fabric.

Lighter cotton with looser weave
Pros:
Very easy to see through, can do on flat surface with no light behind.
Probably a better tea towel fabric, softer and more flexible.
Cons:
Very stretchy, doesn't hold shape well.
Shifts under pen point
Looser weave doesn't show pen as clearly
Much harder to draw on.

The search continues for the ideal fabric on this end, but it illustrates the importance of considering what result you want and what fabric will be both a good tea towel and easy to draw on.

My Place and Yours: Through The Front Door

This week's theme for My Place and Yours over at Meet Me At Mike's is 'Through The Front Door', set by Femme de Montmartre. The brief is "What is it you see when you enter your home? And how do you feel? Whatever happens when you walk through your front door, we want to know about it!"

The first thing I should mention is that we rarely use our front door, everyone comes and goes through the back door, so it's always a bit novel to come in my own front door! I do love it though, it sums up what attracted us to the house in the first place - except better because we've done it up since then.



Our house was built in the late '40s most likely, and was moved onto the section in the late '80s - you can see the line in the floor boards where it was cut in half. The wood is all native rimu, essentially untouched except for being stained/varnished slightly darker, which we removed. I think in decorating terms the skirting boards and doorways would benefit from being painted white as it's very dark altogether, but I can't face it, especially considering it's escaped that fate for all these years! We stripped the floor boards and polyurethaned them all ourselves, I highly, highly recommend NEVER doing that, get a professional in to do it!

The other view you get when you come in the door is our sideboard of knicknacks. I think they pretty much sum up our interests in total - except for books. And Hazel. And the cat maybe. But otherwise it's all there! I've tagged it over at Flickr if anyone's interested in a rundown of what all that crap is.

Two birds with one stone

Though I can assure you that there is no way I could hit one bird with a stone, let alone two, because I throw like a girl.

Fabrics, a flash test and hopefully some recommendations from readers

I bought some fabrics yesterday at my favourite fabric store Global Fabrics as they were having a sale on knits. I know, any excuse to get in there! They have so many beautiful things at the moment, just gorgeous. I was in a trance the whole time, wandering around thinking "oh I could make something with this! And this! And ohhhhh, that's amazing! And oh! look at this, I could make something from this" with visions of fabulous garments floating in front of my inner eye. I ended up with the ones in the pictures below. The right-hand fabric is a cotton voile which will be a floaty summer top. The other three are knits destined to be tops and the orange one will be a dress. I'm going to make Hazel a dress from the kitty fabric and she faithfully (and rather desperately) promised me that she'd wear the dress if I made one. There should be enough for a dress for her and a tshirt for me.

Now the second part of this post is a small test of the flash diffuser idea from the previous post. I discovered that although my SLR is a Canon, the integrated flash isn't quite like the one in the tutorial and doesn't have the long metal arms. I managed to get the paper attached anyways. Robyn, I think that you could do this with a point-and-shoot too, I had a quick try with mine and just taped a bit of paper below the flash. I think you'd need to do a lot of fiddling with the position of the paper but once you'd sorted that it should work the same. Anyways, here are the results:

No flash, light coming in from the window to the left. Not bad, but a few shadows here and there.


Full flash. Again, not bad but you can see it's burnt out the shadows at the bottom of the orange fabric.


Bounced flash. Pretty good - more even lighting than no flash, but it hasn't burnt out anything. I had to fiddle with the angle of the paper a bit, the first time I had it angled up too high and there was a dark patch in the middle of the photo.


Third part - I need recommendations for a pattern to make a dress for Hazel from the dot/cat knit fabric. Just something really simple with a one-piece A-line body and short sleeves. I have in mind something maybe with a gathered neck and gathered puff sleeves. Nothing too frou-frou because that fabric is all about simplicity I think! Does anyone know a good tutorial or purchased pattern they can recommend?

Taking photos indoors

I came across this great tutorial on bouncing the built-in flash of an SLR off the ceiling instead of having it burn out the object you are photographing. I got there via Sew I Do and she's got some good examples of how useful it's going to be for photographing things inside on those (sadly frequent) rainy Auckland days! I don't like the lighting I get outside on the deck which has a plastic cover, the camera doesn't seem to cope with it well and it often has an odd colour cast. If I could combine this technique with natural light from a window it could be a real winner!

Spam spam spam spam...

Is spamming not the most inherently stupid way of trying to sell your product? Or is it just the ones I notice doing it aren't very clever? I'm wondering this because my waterproof sheet tutorial keeps getting spammed by people selling mattresses or latex covers for mattresses. It's a bit annoying on one level because I have to go in and delete them; but on the other hand it's pretty funny. Firstly it's funny because obviously there are people whose job it is to go around finding blogs who have a post that might relate to mattresses so they can spam them. And not only do they spam me, but they pay me compliments when they do it! Then it's funny because they aren't targeting their market very well - people looking for free tutorials on making a waterproof sheet aren't likely to be wanting to buy one. And finally it's funny because my stats don't really suggest to me that I'm worth spamming. I mean really spammer people, do you want me to show you the number of hits I get a day? Was it really worth the 5 minutes you took to leave the comment and type in the verification word?

I had a really odd comment last month from a woman looking to exchange photos for 'friendship' and then discovered it was as a result of leaving a comment on another blog and all her commenters had been spammed with the same comment on their own blogs. That made it a LOT less creepy for sure, and again, rather funny. I mean really, what's the point of sending someone a comment like that when you've found them on a craft blog? They're likely to be a) a woman and b) not on the internet looking for love. Well ok, maybe crafty love but that's not what this lady was offering I imagine!

I can see sending out a million emails to random addresses in the hopes that 3 will respond, that's not a lot of effort for not a lot of return. But this personalised spamming seems to involve moderate effort for no return at all - not a very good business model!

Scrappy felt

Felt is my life at the moment, but it's not too bad having to look at such beautiful colours.



My favourite is the orange, especially when paired with pink.