Creative Pursuits

Dinosaur Slippers!

2011-03-14T18:57:00.003-05:00

E loves dinosaurs! Here's the latest pair of slippers I made him using a combination of appliqué and embroidery. Jeff says the dinosaurs look too friendly, but I wanted them to be cute. On the left is Tricarotops and Stegosaurus on the right.

Felt Play Food

2010-12-08T09:46:00.005-06:00

Felt Strawberries and Carrots made for E back in February.

Richard Scarry inspired truck slippers

2010-12-08T09:10:00.006-06:00

These were finished in January 2010. I've been a real slacker about updating this blog. But better late than never!

Octopus!

2009-12-21T15:01:00.004-06:00

I love the way Ethan says "octopus" - he has one in his Fisher-Price Aquarium - so I made this stuffed toy for him. I embroidered the eyes & mouth and added bean bags to the arms and body for weight. The body is fleece and the suckers are flannel. For once I felt like I found the perfect fabric at Joann's!

Robot Toddler Slippers

2009-09-18T11:10:00.022-05:00

Just made little E some new slippers based off this pattern for Robeez style shoes. The pattern is for tiny babies so I had to do some major alterations since he now wears a size 6.5T.

Here are the pieces laid out after embroidering. I used paint in a sqeeze tube so try to make some non-skid treads on the bottom but it's already peeling off in places. :(

The inside out assembly:

And the finished product in action:

Little Man Shirts

2008-05-09T20:53:00.003-05:00

I embroidered some simple shapes on some onsies today for the summer:

Here is a close-up of one of them:

Last week I made these with fuzzy iron-on letters:

And, of course, here is my main project of late wearing one of the shirts :)

Pottery

2007-12-12T16:03:00.002-06:00

It's been a really long time but here are a couple of updates. This is one of the better pots from my last semester of pottery:

And, since we are currently buried under 20+ inches of snow, I will post this picture from the summer. Yellow tree peonies and another vase from pottery class:

Pin Cushion

2007-04-28T21:20:00.000-05:00

I have no good explanation for why I spent hours making this silly pin cushion...

It was relaxing and fun to work on. I guess I wanted to try embroidering something else after the Christmas ornament. The "Starry Night" side was the most time consuming but I'm really happy with how it came out.

Raku Time Again

2007-04-28T21:16:00.001-05:00

This semester I tried doing some tape resist with the glazes. I'm still not thrilled with the results but I guess I like them better than last semester's attempt.

Here is what the pots looked like before they were fired:

This is the pot on the right after firing. It's about 3 inches tall.

This is the pot on the left after firing. It's about 3.5 inches tall.

Bench/Bookshelf project

2007-04-08T20:15:00.002-05:00

I've been working on making this pretty simple bench/bookshelf piece for the living room. I'm done with all the dado cuts now so It's time to assemble it all and start staining. I bought a special air brush finisher to use for applying Polyurethane. It works with the air compressor we bought a while back (for the trellis project). I'm excited to try it.

Here is the finished project:

Getting the hang of throwing pots

2007-04-03T10:29:00.000-05:00

I've been spending a good bit of time in the ceramics lab after work and on Saturdays trying to get better at throwing and I've come a long way in the last two weeks. It's really fun to see such a clear improvement in my skill level :)

Here are two pots I threw last night - they are not yet trimmed so they will change a little yet... I'll post more pictures after they are glazed. These pots are between 8 and 10 inches tall.

Finally it's spring!

2007-03-29T09:28:00.000-05:00

It's been a long time since my last post here. Winter was long... nuff said. The crocus ('Cream Beauty') bulbs I planted last fall are up and blooming - it's nice to see color and watch my plants come back to life!

I've been making lots of stuff in my ceramics class and I'll post some pictures of that stuff next week.

Christmas boot

2006-12-29T14:27:00.000-06:00

This is a felt ornament I made for my sister-in-law for Christmas. She has a western themed tree. I orginally planned to make more than one, but this one took me a very long time to make and I barely got it done before Christmas morning...so...

I had to learn a few embroidery stitches. I thought it came out really cute though. I think I'll make myself a felt pincushion next. :)

Ceramic doodaddery

2006-12-21T23:12:00.000-06:00

I picked up the last of my things from my ceramics class yesterday evening. Here they are:

On the left is a texturing experiment, just an egg shape with knobs and shapes pressed into it. On the right is a tadpole type guy - he's hollow on the inside and his head comes off. The head is held on by little Frankenstein type pins on either side - you can sort of see them in this picture:

This guy has 4 different faces as you turn him around:

Garden heads

2006-12-17T15:26:00.000-06:00

I'm just getting the last of my things out of the kiln from my ceramics class. I made these to jazz up the garden.

They just get pushed in the ground like so:

Thankfully the weather was awesome this past weekend so I was able to take these pictures outside. No snow!

I glued some copper wiskers onto the kitty last night. I made holes for this purpose before firing.

Ceramic "thing"...muffin?

2006-12-17T15:24:00.000-06:00

Last Wednesday was the last day of my ceramics class. Here is one of my "objet d'arte" a.k.a. the ceramic muffin:

This was mostly just to play around with carving and see how the glazes would look. It has no function, but it does rattle when you shake it.... does that count as a function?

Raku

2006-11-10T14:21:00.000-06:00

Well, it's been a while. The cold weather has put an end to gardening and most of my outside the house projects.

I'm taking a ceramics class for fun on Wednesday evenings and a couple weeks ago we did a Raku firing. I'd never done this before but it was really cool and some people got some really beautiful pots out of it - unfortunately I wouldn't say I was one of them :(

I only made one pot. I built it by hand, starting with a pinch pot then adding coils. Here are some pictures from the night of the firing:

my pot while in the kiln

someone else's bowl in the kiln

This is the kiln with the top removed. My pot is in the front.

After lifing the lid you put the pot into a pile of sawdust or straw then cover it for about 10 minutes.

my finished pot

close up on the blue drips

top view

My pot is starting to grow on me a little. I was initially really disappointed that the glazes didn't turn out as planned.

Brick drain/retaining wall

2006-10-10T10:43:00.000-05:00

Sometimes you can't start one project without doing another project first...

We've had an issue with drainage behind the garage ever since we had the gutters installed. There is no place for the water to go. After having tried a couple years of a ditch with plastic and pebbles on top (into which washed a lot of soil from the neighboring garden) I've decided to lay a brick path.

What I really wanted to do was sand and paint the back side of the garage, but as you can see in the pics we have a mud splashing issue and until that is resolved I couldn't see the point of painting. I'll use the bricks to make a retaining wall kind of thing to keep the soil back too.

Porch finished!

2006-10-09T22:02:00.000-05:00

We refinished the steps with the same stain we used on the trellis since the polyurethane wasn't wearing very well. The bullnose is on and the porch is finished! Finally! Just in time for the snow we are supposed to get this Thursday.

Giant Hypertufa Planted

2006-10-02T20:23:00.000-05:00

Finally got some plants in the giant hypertufa over the weekend:

Here is a close-up:

The 'porchure' is almost over!!

2006-09-29T08:55:00.000-05:00

Last weekend we added the decorative base pieces to the pillars, caulked and painted them. They aren't shown painted in this picture though. All that's left to do now is to put the railings back up and add the bullnose to the front of the porch boards.

I got just this one bloom from one of the other climatis vines I planted. I can't wait to see them all bloom next year!

Flowers in September

2006-09-18T21:00:00.000-05:00

Yesterday my Sweet Autumn Climatis started to bloom. It's nice to have flowers blooming this time of year. This vine is doing really well on the new trellis.

I also finally got around to planting one of the round hypertufas.

Grate Restoration

2006-09-18T15:17:00.001-05:00

Since the porch restoration isn't moving along quite as quickly as I hoped I decided to post an old project.

Back in January I started looking for a cast iron vent that was just the right size to fill the hole in our dining room floor. It wasn't quite a hole - it was a piece of plywood nailed in a hole - VERY attractive. Some time ago I guess someone decided to carpet our house and they had to move the vents out of the floor and into the baseboards in order to do this. Later someone ripped all the carpet out but left the plywood patches in place and painted polyeurethane on them along with the rest of the wood floor.

I quickly learned how cutthroat eBay bidding can be after I repeatedly lost out on lovely cast iron vents. I learned you just have to wait to the last minute and then be sure you put in the maximum you are willing to pay.

To remove the rust I mixed up salt, vinegar and lemon juice (or something similar...can't remember exactly). Suffice to say, it smelled horrible and looked just as bad:

Then I photographed it while still assembled because I knew I'd have some issues figuring out how to put all the pieces back together. Then I disassembled it:

Scrubbed and rinsed all the pieces:

Spray painted the pieces, reassembled and installed the grate:

Behind the Blue Tarp....

2006-09-11T20:59:00.000-05:00

We finished up with the rented pneumatic floor nailer at 8:30 last night. My hands ache today and I'm wiped out. It was a very long day yesterday.

Here is what things looked like as we were about to get started:

And at about the half-way mark:

You can see the new boards at the top and old boards at the bottom in this picture.

Getting started proved to be the toughest part (as usual). We made about 10 runs to the basement for tools we forgot we needed, but, amazingly, avoided making a single trip to Home Depot! I'm not sure that has EVER happened to us before :).

Weather could be better

2006-09-09T13:24:00.000-05:00

We finally have all the boards ready to be installed and will pick up the floor nailer from the rental place at 3:00 today.

It feels like winter outside and it's supposed to rain today and tomorrow.

BUT, we've rigged up tarps so we won't be stopped! (It took so long that now I almost want it to rain.) I'm really ready to get this project finished! We'll have the nailer until Monday morning and hopefully that will give us enough time to get all the boards down.

Or maybe we'll just leave the house like this :-/

El Muerto Munny

2006-09-05T22:36:00.000-05:00

Here are pictures of the current state of the El Muerto Munny paint job:

I'd guess I'm about 50% done.

Makin' Munny on the side

2006-09-04T19:56:00.000-05:00

This is one of my side projects I've been working on for a while now. These little dudes are called "Munny" http://www.kidrobot.com/munny/products.html. They are vinyl toys you can paint. Below are two designs I came up with and I'm in the process of painting the first one right now.

This is "El Muerto" my Day of the Dead dude:

and this is a design based on Maori tribal tatoos:

This is what the Munny looks like when you buy it. They also come in black and glow-in-the-dark.

Just to be clear, I didn't make the form (doll) I'm just painting it.

Porch update

2006-08-27T23:14:00.000-05:00

We purchased the remaining 40 porch boards this afternoon. I still have one more coat to go on many of the first 40 boards. Jeff was hoping to rent the floor nailer this coming Saturday but I'm pretty sure It'll take us at least until the weekend after next. It's been raining a lot over the past few days and there is only so much room in the one car garage! We've stored all the new boards in the basement. Here's hoping that this week holds better weather.

Picture this - The door is now a window!

2006-08-27T22:51:00.000-05:00

One of the previous owners had tried to turn our house into a duplex so we had two front doors when we first moved in. As you can see in the picture below, it was pretty clear they had turned a picture window into a door. The window sill is still there on the edges!

About a year ago (in October) we decided to take this project on. The new picture window went it faster than we thought it would.

The new insulation really helped keep the living room warm last year ! Below you can see my plaster patching job.

Then there was the matter of matching the wall surface to the old plaster. I found a sand compound to mix with paint and that did the trick.

On the outside we decided to replace all the pieces of siding rather than patching in new boards. We bought nice long pieces to run the entire 15 foot length.

Here is the finished product from the outside:

And today we finally cut down and installed the trim and added that to the window sill we made a few weeks ago.

Here is a close up of the window sill. We were able to find a router bit online that matched the 1890's profile of our other window sills exactly. It was worth waiting to do this the right way.

Round Tufa

2006-08-27T22:42:00.000-05:00

Decided to experiment with making some round hypertufa this weekend. It turned out to be harder than I though it would be to get the hypertufa mix to stick to the outside of the ball. I made a chicken wire frame but still had to create the sphere in two sessions - waiting for 1/2 to dry first.

'Board' to Tears

2006-08-24T10:40:00.000-05:00

Spent two hours with Erika painting porch boards last night. It's tedious work and not exactly a creative project. I just keep thinking - this is only half the boards! This is gonna take forever!

Must...press....on.....

Rocko is also bored! I mean, look at that face!

Porch Chops

2006-08-23T15:10:00.000-05:00

Our front porch has been in need of help for a while now. The sun and rain have taken a real toll on it. I thought we could save some of the boards but once we discovered they were just fir, and not treated lumber, we decided to redo the whole thing... sigh...

The faux column had some rotten wood at the bottom too - but the pressure treated 4x4 support beam was fine, as are all the other structural boards so far - what a relief.

In case you are wondering about the abundance of wood fill in the above picture... I'll admit there was a point when I hoped to avoid this entire project by using wood fill. I realize now that I was deluding myself. :(

Is wood fill the new duct tape?

We counted about 88 boards on the porch. So far we bought half of what we need and have cut and primed all of it. Tonight Erika will be helping me to put on the first coat of green.

1,000 Years of Trellitude

2006-08-23T11:54:00.000-05:00

I seriously started to think this project would never end. Originally I planned to get it done over the weekend of May 27th... hah!

On August 7th we finally put the copper caps and finials in place and pronounced it finished!

The Process:

It all started when I couldn't find nice cedar lattice at any of the home improvement stores. Next thing we were buying 2x6 cedar boards and ripping them into lattice slats on the table saw. I made a pattern for assembly on a piece of pink insulation and managed to get a new toy out of the deal... a pneumatic stapler! So nice! So much faster!

This was the original design which we later discoverd was too tall for the city fencing code.

So surgery was necessary - fortunately that part didn't take too long.

Finally! We set it in the concrete!

I wanted to decorate all the bases with pebbles, but it was so hot the concrete set up before I could even get to the second one! :(

The clematis vines seem happy and I got the planting in the front done.

Here is the commemorative copper cap I made. 2006 - Year of the trellis!

You want the 'tufa? YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE 'TUFA!! Seriously... It's really heavy.

2006-08-23T10:25:00.000-05:00

The hypertufa is so big Jeff and I can't move it with just the two of us. Erika helped move it from the backyard but then we had to kind of just push and slide it around to get it into position when she was no longer around.

It's not moving now....ever again!

I just have to wait for the lime (from the portland cement) leech out now... a couple more weeks of watering it and I may actually get to plant it before winter!

It will be nice to have something growing there - rather than the cement lawn...

Here are some hypertufa I made with David and Mark earlier this summer.