w00t! new page!

Hi guys,

here's a little update on the search for my own webspace and a wordpress blog to go with it: if you'd like to see my new blog check it out by clicking HERE

hope to see you there!

bamboo knitting!

w00t!!

yesterday I received my new bamboo knitting toolzz! They're so awesome!! I just can't wait to start some *ANY* project with them!! Anyway, short post today.. just want to share the goods :D

the alpaca top project

Sooo.. I thought I'd let you guys know about the progress I've made on the alpaca top. So far I've finished the front and actually did an attempt to block the work. I've never actually realized the impact blocking has on knitwork! I'm not that experienced and so it's not strange to see that my knitting is somewhat irregular, and even washing and hang-drying my knitting has never really solved that problem. Actually that's one of the reasons I got a bit discouraged when knitting when I was younger. I've always thought that knitwork can only look good and even when you're very experienced, and therefore, all the work you're doing in the past will look uhm.. well.. crappy...

so actually this was a real eye-opener for me! No longer will my knitting look crappy!! I too will produce nice knitting and be proud to be able to wear them :D w00t!

soo.. anyways, let me show you some pictures of my AMATEUR blocking and my (if I may say so myself) nice knitting XD

Ok besides the blocking and stuff I have to say I have absolutely fallen in LOVE with the alpaca yarn!! You know.. being a total amateur has it's pro's and cons. It's soooo good to be amazed at all the things you didn't know before, but the bad thing is that every time you learn something nice you can't help but realize how much you sucked before :P And how much the things you first loved actually suck.. :P
Anyways, here's to improvement!! XD


Yes.. the left shoulder strap is shorter than the right one... blame inexperience.. or the lacking ability to count... (or maybe impatience...)
Anyways... I took the pins out before it completely dried so there's no scallop like shape (thankfully)


And here's a little picture of the happy owner of the knitted hat from a few weeks ago. It's my boyfriends blogdebut w00t!


anyways take care :D

Kirby skinny jeans

Success!!

After the pacman fiasco I could use some good news! And thankfully this time it went well :D The pacman skinny jeans weren't quite 'skinny' after all and I wasn't too pleased with the pattern I saw. I decided to make a few changes in the pattern and hoped for the best because I only had enough fabric for one more attempt.
Instead of cutting the fabric 1 cm bigger than the pattern I cut it exactly the same size. This way I hoped to make the skinny jeans really skinny :P The second adjustment I made was leave out the triangles above the backside. The extra shapes made the jeans too high in my opinion and I removed the frond pockets because I generally don't like the way the fabric wobbles when you put something in the pockets.. and why make pockets if you're not going to put anything in it right?
So anyway I decided to make my new skinny jeans unique by making a kirby + star design on it. Here's some pictures of how it turned out:

pacman sewing

You know the feeling you get when one of your hobbies (yea the one you've been neglecting for too long) starts calling you and starts saying things like: "you never take me out.... you never hang out with me... " :P

anyways that's what happened to me and my sewing machine yesterday. :P I suddenly remembered I still have this piece of denim lying around and decided to do something about it. I've got a subscription on this dutch sewing magazine, but the patterns are.. how to say this delicately.. ajusted for a generation older than me.
Let me explain this.. I saw this pattern of slim fit jeans which were (very very very) high at the waist, so I decided to leave the top waistline out and thought this would be ok. So I started sewing and once everything was finished and I could 'test' wear it I noticed the waistline was still very high.(above navel = high imo).








So the 'hip and trendy' slimfit jeans have been ajusted and actually look very 90's when you follow the exact pattern...

Minor Update

Soo here's a little on how the shirt is progressing. I'm generally not a very fast knitter *yet*. Though I'm trying my best I'm still agonizingly slow. Sure I know that speed comes with experience but puuh-leeeaaazzzee :P

Anyways, it's ok I guess, I'm having fun working on the knitting and I'm seeing some improvements already :D So I shouldn't really be so grumpy about it.


The alpaca yarn is quite fine and the knitting is being done with a 3,5mm circular needle. So I think I can use this as my defence for being so slow :D
Anyway my mother-in-law gave me this supercool box for my knitting the other day! :D I'm going to decorate it first with nice drawings and painting stuff before I'm actually going to use it :D




it's soo cuute :D I can't wait to start working on it! Anyways, the new semester has started again and I'm affraid I'll have a lot less time for crafting and stuff, but I'll try to keep updating as much as possible :D

handwarmers!

w00h00!! Another busy week and two niiice purple handwarmers! :D I found a very nice pattern handwarmers!
I've actually been looking for nice handwarmers for a while but I never seem to be able to find handwarmers I actually like in the stores.. I used to have a white one and a grey one but there's always something I don't like about them, so I end up not using them and going back to having cold hands/ fingers.

So I've been searching the net for some easy to knit handwarmer patterns since I'm still a rookie and don't have the confidence (or the patience) for something a bit more advanced than pure basic... :P Besides it's cold outside and I really needed something to keep my hands from freezing.


And this is how they turned out! I'm so happy with them xD
they were actually very easy to knit but very warm and comfy! :D O yeah, did I mention they're very easy to knit?

Anyway, since I can knit with warm hands now it thought it was time for a new (and bigger) project. A while ago I posted a picture of the drops yarn I had bought. I have three skeins of blue alpaca yarn which will (hopefully) look like this in a week:

The pattern is from garnstudio.com (Dutch: DROPS nummer 88-18).
It's not a very nice picture because of the light but I guess it's ok. I'm working on the front now and I can't wait until it's finished, tho I have to say that working on it is a lot of fun because the alpace wool feels so soft and warm. The color actually matches my new handwarmers.. lol



Anyways, I'll keep you posted on the progress :D

Airbrush practice

I've always been a fan of different kinds of art I guess but I know I've wanted an airbrush since I the first time I saw one. Since I found out about youtube I've been looking for airbrushing videos and actually started learning before I actually owned an airbrush.
But finally in the summer of 2008 my dad bought me an airbrush and a compressor!! So anyways I tried out a few things at first to get the feel of it and then started on my first real freehand project:

I made a blown up copy of a Yu-Gi-Oh card monster art thingy my brother collects. It's a purple red eyed dragon (I think). So the first thing I did was mask the dragon part to create an outline.


This is what it looked like after the white and the blue. The dragon emanated a blueish glow, so here's where the white and blue is for.


Once the mask is taken off the edges look nice and crisp, and luckily there's no bleed :D


After the unmasking there's filling in to do, and because of the many different shapes and the fact that masking is a very timeconsuming thing (well it is for me..) So I started filling in the shapes of the scales freehand.


After layers and layers and layers of airbrushing, this is what it looks like :) I'm very happy with it because it's actually my first (semi-)freehand work and it actually turned out good!


And here's a picture of the proud owner: my brother Shiwi:


I'm hoping to do a lot more of these :D

Crocheting again

Soo since I finished the bonnets a while ago I decided to start on the other garnstudio yarn I bought. I bought 100gr. of drops Safran only to realize I actually need 150gr. for the top in my size. To make it even worse I needed a 3mm crochet hook but only own a 4mm and a 2mm hook...
Anyway, stubborn and impatient as I always am, I started the top anyway. Since it's not finished yet I can't really tell if I'll need another skein or not, but since I'm crocheting with a bigger hook I'm sticking to the smallest 'size'. So far it seems to fit and 100gr. appears to be enough, but only time will tell I guess.

Anyway I actually wanted to have it finished first before I posted it online, but today I realized that I had made a big mistake somewhere at the bottom and actually had to unravel the whole thing so I couldn't finish it.... So anyway here's a picture of what it looks like right now.



I'm actually very happy with the quality of the garnstudio yarn. It's so incredibly soft! Especially the cotton-viscose ones, I can't wait to start on those when I'm done with this top!

Anyway, before I came across the Drops yarn I had bought 9 skeins of some brand (I actually forgot the name) to make myself a crocheted poncho. It's very basic because I wanted something that was easy to make because it was my first crochet'project' after a very long while but I actually like how it's looking so far and try to work on it as much as I can. It's supposed to become 1.40mx1.40m and the hole for the head comes in at 55cm. Right now I'm at 30cm after the second skein so I think I have enough.

I think I'll have a hard time 'calculating' where the hole should be because I know I'm very good at messing up at important points of the process haha. :P

Here's some pictures of the 'under construction' poncho

Art Journaling

So today I've been making some additions to my art journal. I've got inspired to make even more art since I started this blog so I finished one page and then made another. There's nothing like making art and drinking tea on a stormy and gray day like today. I don't know where you are and what the weather's like where you live but in Rotterdam it's windy and rainy today. So I'm sitting by the window (and the radiator) and I'd like to show you what I've been doing this morning :)

The funny thing with me is that I sometimes buy art supplies but don't use them for a long while. The same thing happened to my watercolor pencils and oil pastels. I'm a sucker for art supplies and stuff. Shopping for clothes just doesn't do it for me.. shopping for shoes however does, but even them I'm mostly thinking about customizing them. Like the new rip-off all stars I bought made my boyfriend buy me. I'm going to customize them soon and I'll post the pictures here when I'm done :D

Anyway, when I buy art supplies I usually get very inspired to do a lot of drawing and such. This actually goes for everything creative or possibly creative I buy. But with the pastels it didn't work. I was in a rather uninspirational period of my life back then and as a result the pastels and the watercolor pencils remained untouched. That is, until I started journaling. I've noticed there's a LOT you can do with oil pastels and watercolors. I, unfortunately, don't have water soluble oil pastels but I can still get cool effects with mineral spirits or my clover mini iron.


I use the mini iron for wax as wel. This is a little trick I learned from Suzi Blu (you really should check out her videos at youtube.com). Though instead of using beeswax I use colored candles. I really like the effect the colored wax adds to the pages.


I don't think is really visible on these pictures but I've used some of the glitter glue pens on these pages for a little sparkling effect :D I'm really happy with how it turned out :)


This page is actually not for me but for little princess Mandana. My cousin gave birth to a cute little baby girl three weeks ago and I can't help but wonder about how she's grow up to be and whatnot. So I wrote down all of the things I whish for her to have and be like happiness and all of the advice I could give her. I then wrote some more things that I'd like to tell her when she's grown up and all of the things I wish for her and then covered it with a magic princess wand and little harts.

Are you feeling the love yet? hahaha
I also made this on tho it's not really finished yet :) I'm going to finish it soon.

Knitting hat

When I was little my mother used to knit a lot and on rainy sundays I used to sit with her and knit or crochet some but since I was soo slow I gave up on it altogether. Last week I was browsing in the internet when I stumbled on the website www.garnstudio.com and when I was done browsing through the free patterns they have I decided to buy some of their yarn :D



here's a before and after picture of a bit of yarn I had left :D


yay! my bonnet has a little friend to play with! :D


Anyway while I was at it I made a little sock for my phone :D

Dollhouse Drama

I've been inspired a lot by a few people (a lot of people) on youtube.com but especially by Suzi Blu and Willowing. I've always been interested in drawing and painting but the concept of an 'art journal' was unclear to me untill a few months ago. I was browsing on youtube when I came across this very personal art journal and amazed by the way these people told their life in images instead of plain writing in a diary. I realized it Before this happened I had actually stopped drawing for a few years and had forgotten how happy it used to make me to draw.

So I started an art journal. At first it was more an attempt at drawing than an actual art journal but in time the drawings started to actually mean something and I got better at making an image of what I really felt that day. The journal was a small blue molesine like booklet i got from an ikea store a while earlier and was not exactly what I felt my art journal should look like. It wasn't the least bit inspiring to draw in so I worked on the cover untill it looked nice :)

and this is what the cover looks like now:





My art journal isn't filled with pretty images yet but I'd still like to show a few pages that mean a lot to me already:
These two images were both made after a dip and both made me feel ver happy!







One of the things I sometimes find difficult is to show people who I really am. I can be a very loud and happy person but I can be extremely shy and quiet as well....





Though it may sound strange or lame, it really has helped me out a lot :) I don't want to spend my life in the shadows, being affraid of what people think of me.

Anyway, so I got myself (actually I made my boyfriend buy it) a pack of Glitter Glue!! I'm going to have so much fun with it! I'll put some pictures online when I've got some nice drawings :D


bye for now :)