My family in felt

Another project I spent a lot of time on in the last weeks of 2011 was this family of felt dolls:

It's not just any family, it's my family! For Christmas I decided to gift all my family members a felt doll that looked like him or her, so everyone could have their own "mini-me" and feel powerful like a giant, you know when they needed it.

First, I had to come up with a satisfactory human doll design, so I practiced quite a lot on a high-bunned redhead:

Then I had a little poll on Instagram (find me, I'm @eleventhmonkey) to see if other people agreed with me on the winner. They did.

So I started drawing designs for everyone, which was probably the hardest, because I wanted people's typical hair and clothing styles to be reflected in their dolls. I wanted each and everyone to be unique and recognizable. Yeah, I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so sometimes I make my life harder than it needs to be.

Then the craft fair suddenly made an appearance in my schedule and my Christmas present project got put on hold for two weeks.

When the craft fair was over and done with, I quickly returned full force to my little army of felt dolls waiting to be put together. It was two weeks of no cleaning, no laundry, and no cooking (thank you my lovely husband for putting food on our table every night), instead I kept myself busy with cutting felt and sewing these babies:

Three of the human dolls weren't actually for family members, they're going to need to find other homes, and they finally made it to my Etsy shop yesterday:

All the others were giftwrapped and hastily sent to the Netherlands on December 16th. I didn't have much hope that these dolls would make it to my family in time for Christmas, because the birthday gift I'd sent my mom in November had taken almost 3 weeks to arrive. Still I was hoping for a little Christmas miracle... 

Then on the 24th, when the husband and I were vacationing in Las Vegas, I received an iMessage from the homefront informing me the dolls had arrived that day! Right on time for Christmas Eve! I was so happy! All the hard work and rushing had paid off.

My family loved their dolls, and they told me it was very obvious which doll belonged to whom. Score! 

Craft fair madness

Guess what this display is? It's practice for my first craft fair ever! This Thursday and Friday (10 am - 4 pm) I will be selling my little creatures at a little craft fair at my husband's school campus in San Francisco.

I only decided to participate less than a week ago, so I've been crazy busy trying to get everything ready for the fair. I've ordered a vinyl logo banner online (it's not here yet and I'm anxious to see how it turned out), and I've been making a bunch of tiny owls (to have some cheap creatures to sell), I've been collecting baskets and Christmas trees to display my products in and on, and I've been working on packaging. So far, I'm pretty happy with the result!

I've also made a little money pouch to carry comfortably around my waist, and now I'm off to attach hundreds of price tags to my creatures. 

I only have a few more days left to prepare! I'm trying not to get too frazzled and to just enjoy the process. I'm really excited, but I think I can manage to keep it together! If you're in San Francisco on December 1st or 2nd and want to come and say hi, eat a yummy candy cane, or browse my little real-life shop, let me know and I'll email you the address.

Yes, I can!

I learned from sewing the new cow and new cats, that I am able to sew little details (like nostrils or noses) on my creatures with my sewing machine. I thought that would be too small and too hard to do on my machine, but it worked. So I wondered if that meant that I could sew my old handstitch designs on my machine. And there's only one way to find out, so I tried:

As you can see it worked, at least with these three animals. It's a bit of a challenge, especially with stuffing, but I'm very happy with the result. And if I can manage to do small versions on my machine, I can do large huggable versions too!

New meows

So I set out to redesign my cat to make it more sewing machine appropriate. I came up with two very different sketches which I both found attractive for different reasons. So I tried them both out to see what they looked like in real-felt-life.

Redesigned cat #1:

Redesigned cat #2:

Which one is your favorite?

A new moo

Although I really enjoy creating on my sewing machine, I still miss stitching creatures by hand. Especially, when one of my lovely customers really wants to order one of those handstitched creatures that have sold out. 

It's impossible to sew the same creatures on a sewing machine, because of the different techniques of sewing and stuffing, but what if I redesign my old creatures to make them machine-sewable? 

That's what I asked myself this weekend after a customer request, and I think I've succeeded with this new cow! Next up, a redesign of my old cat.

Owls, owls, owls - Part four

All 36 owls are done! Of course, I didn't just make these for fun - although it was fun to make them - I made them for my Etsy shop. And every Etsy listing needs some product pictures, so after finishing them in the sewing studio (the table in our small apartment's livingroom/bedroom), I moved the owls to the photo studio (the table in our kitchen).

I chose six background colors and picked which owls would be photographed against which background. And then I got out my very unfancy but very trusty point-and-shoot Canon to take pictures of the modeling owls.

Owls seems to have something magical and people just adore these birds, I wonder if this has anything to do with Harry Potter's popularity. I've been using Instagram and Twitter to document the birth of all 36 owls over the last week, and I was happy to receive so much owl-love from everyone. The wittiest compliment was someone calling an owl 'hootie-ful'!

Owls, owls, owls - Part three

After sewing on all the white parts of the eyes and beaks, it was time to have some fun with my supplies again. I got out several boxes of buttons, organized by color and size - I love that kind of thing - and got to work selecting button eyes for all the owls. It always surprised me how long this process takes. First, I have two find buttons that are the same which can be a time consuming challenge because almost all my buttons are vintage and I'm lucky if I can find a matching pair. And then the buttons need to find a home on the owl that they work best with, and I did this 36 times! Choosing the ribbons was a lot easier, because I only have 6 different colors, so I just made 6 loops of each color for the owl ornaments.

After sewing all the buttons on by hand, which I need to do very slowly to not exacerbate my arm injuries, it was time to sew with my friend the sewing machine again! 

After sewing almost all around the owls bodies, it was time to stuff them. This is my least favorite part because the American polyfill I use these days, just falls apart in little pieces around me and makes a huge mess on my clothes and on the floor. Soon I'm going to check out some Japanese 100 yen stores and see if they sell some of that Japanese polyfill that's so wonderfully soft and never left a mess, I really hope so.

Now that they're all stuffed it's time to sew them closed and make sure they all have ribbons to hang them from! They're almost done, come back tomorrow for part four ;).

Owls, owls, owls - Part two

After I cut out all the felt shapes for the owls, I went through my fabric stash and picked colorful tummies for all the owls. I used my marvelous sewing machine to sew the tummies behind the felt. It takes a while when you want to make that many owls but it's great practice.

After attaching and exposing the tummies, I went back to cutting felt this time for the owls' eyes and beaks.

My sewing machine makes it really easy to switch between different colors of thread, because it threads the needle itself and I can basically just drop the bobbin in and start sewing. Still, I like to minimize the thread switching, so first I'm going to sew on all the yellow beaks, then all the orange beaks, next the red beaks and finally all the white eyes. Oh, how I keep myself busy!

Owls, owls, owls - Part one

So I really liked the owl I designed the other day, so I made a few more in different designs and colors to see how I liked those, and I do! So I've decided to make a large bunch in different colors and in 3 different shapes.

So any process of making felt ornaments starts with felt, obviously. And in this case lots of it. I cut out enough owl shapes for 36 owls. I always like to organize the leftover pieces of felt by color, so it's easy to use that for smaller shapes in future projects, and because I simply love organizing.

For some reason, owls make more sense as a decoration in fall and winter than in spring and summer, so it seems like the perfect time to be working on a bunch of owls, with a nice cup of tea!

Experimenting with designs

I like drawing designs and imagining what they might look like in felt. And when it seems like a good idea, I turn my drawing into a felt plushie and sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't. 

Like this week, I'd hoped to make a cute fat laughing Buddha, but it turned out to look more like a weird crying baby. But I did manage to finally make an owl (something I've been wanting to do for a very long time) which did turn out the way I'd hoped. So now I'm off to make some more owls!

Newly designed bears

Before making something new I always start with sketching ideas and coming up with a design that pleases me. The huge bear the other was made from this design but without a pattern, I just kind of shaped the bear while feeding the felt through the machine and shaped the bear. I decided that it was way too large and that I really needed to make pattern to get the desired shape. So I made a cardboard pattern, cut out a lot of felt shapes and soon there were nine new bears!

Someday soon, I'm going to make a cardboard pattern for the monkey I drew next to the bear and give that a try too!

Boo

I have been glued to my sewing machine for a while now, I just can't get enough of it. Here's a peek of what I've been working on for Halloween:

Ghosts, screaming because they're trying to spook you, or yawning because they've been up all night haunting people!

Whatever they're doing I love them because they're so colorful, quirky and sewing them on the machine was so much quicker than could ever be done by hand. This means I can sell them a lot cheaper too! Yes, yes, I'm liking the machine, and I'm doing a little happy dance!

Machine practice

So I've been practicing on my sewing machine, a lot! And I'm pleased to report that it works swimmingly! I found some tutorials online, to try out, and I've already made several drawstring bags, of which this one is my favorite. Oh, and it's even lined on the inside!

But what I really want to make on my machine are little felt creatures. So I found another tutorial for a tiny Japanese owl, which I tried and really liked. But it still had me sewing by hand too much and it was made of regular fabric instead of felt. So then I tried something of my own improvised design: a huge felt bear, which is kind of a mash-up between my old hand sewn bear and reindeer.

I like the things I've been able to sew with my machine so far, and I'm pleased with the control the machine gives me over the stitching. These were just practice runs and now it's time to draw some new patterns, because the old ones aren't really suitable for machine sewing, and start creating new creatures... en masse!

Replaced

I bought the old machine on a whim at Target and it being a Singer made me think it would be a decent machine for just $70. But the Singer Quick Fix is a really bad sewing machine. It bunches up the threads, the tension is impossible ending in superloose threads on the bottom and it broke both needles that came with it. I don't want to bore you with more frustrating details, but if you need more convincing on why not to buy this just read these reviews for the Pixie-Plus (which is the same machine just with purple colored knobs instead of green).

So the Singer is useless and my arm is useless... Hence, the new sewing machine. It was about $150 at Walmart and it's not a Singer this time. The new Brother is a computerized sewing machine and so far, while playing with it, it has just amazed me with its abilities. It has 80 built-in sewing stitches and even easily threads the needle for me! 

I've promised myself to do no more sewing by hand, so I'm hoping to get a lot of practice time with my machine and come up with some new designs for awkward creatures made on a machine. And I hope creating on the Brother will be just as satisfying as sewing by hand has been for me.

A peek at my worktable

Well. I'm done cutting all my scraps of felt, and most of them have been turned into parts of future skulls. And after cutting all that yummy felt, it was hard for me not to start sewing, so I gave in. Carefully, with my arm and wrist locked into two braces, making it look like a robot arm, but sewing nonetheless. And this is what has become of it so far. 

I wonder when all these skulls will be done, photographed and posted in the shop... Well, don't hold your breath. Especially, since tomorrow is a special day: my birthday and the first day of a ten-day road trip! Yay.

I loved combining all the different colors of felt, and the different buttons, for the skulls. I spent many hours figuring out all these different combinations. What's your favorite color combo? I can't choose between fuchsia-orange and teal-lime.

Cutting felt

While I'm giving my wrist a rest from sewing, I've been keeping myself busy with cutting felt. I seem to still stubbornly believe I don't have to give up sewing. Perhaps it's because I'm still waiting on a new brace from my physical therapist, which I hope will work miracles compared to my current braces... 

I have so many felt scraps and they were just screaming to be cut into shapes. Looks like I'm preparing to sew a new batch of colorful Halloween skulls.

How to code a blog button

These past couple of days I've been having fun making new buttons for this blog (see right sidebar) and the eleventh monkey blog. Buttons are images that other people can share on their blog, usually in the sidebar, to link straight to blogs or websites they like and want their readers to know about.

Some logo buttons made with Inkscape:

Some old buttons that I still love:

My new Hipstamatic buttons:

And a bunch of monkeys serving as 'square' PNG buttons:

It has taken me a while to figure it all out perfectly and delete unneeded parts of code, but I ended up with an HTML code that really works well for me. It allows me to show a message to people who hover over 'grab a button' and most importantly to adjust sizes quickly without resizing and reuploading images. 

If anyone else wants to make a button but doesn't know how to code it yet, here you go:

Sewing hurts

Today I had my first appointment with a physical therapist. Apparently, I have a tennis elbow, some kind of tendinitis near my thumb and something wrong with my nerves, because I sew too much! It's basically repetitive strain injury sustained while hand sewing my eleventh monkey creatures... I do it too often, too long and too intensely.

But I love it so much.

Thankfully the therapist realized I wouldn't be able to give it up. Especially, since it makes up so much of my daily life, but I'm going to have to change things. I need to sit up straight when I sew, I need to do several minutes of stretching every 30 minutes, I need to take more rests from sewing, I may need to wear a brace and I need more treatments and appointments with the therapist.

Whatever it takes, as long as I can keep making my little creatures. And it would also be nice if I could pour my own drinks and carry things by myself again. 

Rabbit felt and buttons

After finishing the templates the fun part starts. I get out my felt and buttons and start choosing materials for my new creature. Because there are so many possible combinations, this always takes a very, very long time...

After making the tough decision of what colors to use, I cut out all templates shapes and piece it together to be able to imagine what it'll all look like when it's done.

I like this combination, it's very sweet. And I'm sure I'll make a few more bunnies in a lot more awkward colors as well. 

Rabbit templates

After giving up on sewing a rabbit on the sewing machine, I started drawing a design specifically for hand sewing purposes in the eleventh monkey style. Which is much easier because I'm experienced in that. It took me a while (my eraser came in very handy) because bunnies just seemed too cute and unsuitable to be turned into an awkward looking creature. 

Once that is done, I have to figure out what parts will be sewn seperately, what parts will be sewn on, and how many different colors of felt to use. And I carefully start cutting around the edges of the sketch.

I trace around the cut-out parts on thin cardboard, which will be cut out too to create templates which I inted to use over and over to cut felt.

Next: selection of felt and buttons!