cranking out the fun

Life as a fifth year college student is no joke. I just found out that I will be able to graduate in the spring (and then start the wonderful search for grad schools catering to German linguistics in between working on my wedding and saving money for the future so I can eat). Therefore most of the stuff I have been working on craft-wise has been for people I know.

First off are these lovely hats. The one on the left and the one in the middle are patterns from Rheatheylia.com. I absolutely love this website. The creator's patterns are so creative! The hat on the right is my own pattern. I made these for my cousins just for the simple reason that I love them and they're pretty cool.

I pumped out this hat in the car on the way to Youmacon a ocuple weekends ago. I was going to be cosplaying as Noodle from the Gorillaz (I'm a big fan of the artist who created them). I was trying to make Noodle's outfit from their Dirty Harry video.


Gini and I had a crochet/knit exchange back in September with a few friends. I ended up with her name and made her a Shroomish hat. Shroomish is one of those adorable, unpopular pokemon. I have plans to someday crochet an amigurumi Shroomish, but that will probably take place after exams.

Recently I decided to give sushi scarves a try. Sushi scarves are scarves that, when rolled up, look like sushi rolls. I searched high and low on Etsy for a california roll sushi scarf, but couldn't find one. This scarf is the first of hopefully many to come. It's going to be a Christmas present for a friend of mine, so shhhhhhh ~_^

Expect more interesting tidbits in a couple weeks as I work more on Christmas presents/birthday presents for people!

Valerie: Portable Sewing Case

Hey everyone!

I'm really excited about my big project for this week. There were several ideas floating around in my head that all came together at once. Let's see if I can make my thought stream understandable.

Before I get into the actual project, a few bits of background info:

For a while I've been carrying around a box with all of my sewing tools in it, but was bulky, inefficient, and definitely not cute.

For the wedding this past summer, we used about 3o yards of blue and green fabric to make tablerunners. Most of the fabric is clean and usable, so now I have a huge pile of fabric to find a way to reuse. I was planning to use it up in a quilt, but all of the pieces for the quilt barely made a dent in the stash.

Ok, with these two things in mind, I set out to make a cute, efficient, and portable sewing case. I have a pile of inspiring fabrics that I've been dying to dive in to, but since this project involved more precision sewing than I'd done before, I decided to use wedding fabric.

The case came together pretty well, and I had efficient and portable down, but because the fabric was plain, it wasn't scoring very high on the cute front.

See?


Around the time that I was getting frustrated with this project from many small mishaps along the way, a friend set up a group on Facebook to encourage creativity by challenging members to incorporate a weekly theme into their work. To kick things off, this week's theme was "Me."

In a flash of inspiration one night, I realized that I could get two birds with one stone by incorporating the theme into sprucing up my sewing case. I browsed through my folder of embroidery designs and found one that fit me perfectly:


I am a craft butterfly. I can't keep my mind on one project for too long and I'm constantly flitting between three or four different ones, always trying new things.

I traced the butterfly using Artists Graphite Transfer Paper followed up with my ever-useful Mark-B-Gone pen. I picked white for the main wings to tie in to the rest of the sewing case and to make sure that it stood out against the blue fabric. Then I just picked colors that made me happy and made a plan using MS Paint. I embroidered the butterfly onto a separate piece of the blue fabric, layered it with a white piece, and attached it like a patch so that I could later easily remove it and move it elsewhere if I wanted to. It took me about 8-9 hours to complete and is probably one of the more intricate things that I've embroidered.

Attached to the back of the sewing case, it makes me happy every time I use it.

Here it is all tied up and ready to go:


The sewing case that I made for myself definitely isn't perfect, but I learned a lot and changed the way I did a few things when I made this second one using some of my delicious fabric stash. I love the retro-inspired teal and brown circles on the main fabric, and how the stripes tie in perfectly.



The rounded corners really did me in for the butterfly case, so I changed to square corners and it was much easier. I like the look a lot better. I also made a mini needle book to fit into one of the pockets! It can serve as a pincushion as well. I'm planning to get this case up in the Etsy shop within the next day or so. Look for more fun sewing cases to come!

- Valerie

Val: Experimental Knitting and more!

Alright, so. Life has been a bit crazy lately, what with the wedding and moving and all. But, we're finally settled in, and still unemployed, so there's been an explosion of crafting.

First, before we moved, Mike and I spent a few days with Amanda and did some shopping. We found this great, huge, old desk for $20 at a university surplus sale!

Getting it the hour and a half back home with us was an interesting challenge, but Amanda generously loaned us the back of her pretend SUV and drove the hour and a half to drop it off at our house.

It obviously needs some work, but it's turning into a fun project for us. We're currently in the stripping/sanding stage, and we discovered a beautiful reddish wood underneath the gobs of light finish. More details as the project progresses.


Next up, I've been playing around with knitting. I'm really, really new to it - this is only my second project - but I'm quite happy with the way it turned out. I wanted to play around with knitting and purling, so I was planning on making a scarf using stockinette stitch (knit one row, purl one row). Well ... only a third of the way through it, I was getting a bit tired of the project and I realized that I wouldn't have enough yarn to make a proper scarf, so instead I turned it into the Etsy favorite: a cowl!

So, here's the process. I totally made this up as I went along, so no guarantees that I found the easiest way to do it.

The would-be scarf:


I had a lot of fun when I started knitting with this yarn because I had no idea how it was going to knit up. Once I decided to make my piece into a cowl, I knit a few more rows to make sure it would be large enough to go around my neck with a bit of overlap. When it seemed long enough, I cast off from my needles and sewed the extra yarn into the ends of the scarf. Just a warning, since it's stockinette stitch, the edges naturally curl a lot.

The cowl would have tried to suffocate me if I'd worked with it as is, not to mention being unruly from the curl, so I folded it in half (wrong side in) and bound the edges together essentially making a tube. I was lucky that my yarn made a striped pattern, because I was able to match up the lines and make sure that I was sewing evenly. When I was done with the side, I also bound one of the ends.


All bound up and ready for buttons:


I apologize for the slightly blurry photos, it wasn't until the next picture that I realized my camera has a manual focus that makes shots like these so much easier!


I had no idea how to make button holes, and I had a tiny inkling that I needed to have knit them into the piece itself, so I decided to use loops to secure my buttons instead. I braided three strands of the yarn together and eyeballed how long they needed to be to hook around my buttons (which I hadn't attached yet). I pulled the braid around a stitch and made sure both ends were tightly knotted. As an afterthought, I used normal sewing thread and sewed the knots together so they wouldn't pull back through the knitting.

To attach the buttons, I just threaded one short length of yarn through the button and the knitting and tied it tightly on the inside.

A note: While you're working on the loops and buttons, one hand needs to be inside the tube, so it can get a little awkward at times, but it isn't too bad. For the most part, I worked with my tube inside out so I could get to the knots easier.


Turn your work right-side out and you're done!


The next step is to put your cowl away somewhere safe and enjoy the rest of the summer!







Let me know if you have any questions!

Next up: A long sleeved t-shirt refashion.

Gini: Hats, Hats, Hats

I love making hats. They are my favourite thing to knit/crochet. I crocheted two hats this week, here they are:
This one I call my Rockin' Rainbow Hat. It is made of years of saved up Sugar n' Cream scraps, so it is 100% cotton. Great for summer! I can't decide if I want to sell it or keep it. It came out a bit larger than I planned. What do you think?






This hat is made out some some Lion Brand Vana's Choice that my mom picked up on clearance for a dollar at Wal-Mart. I plan on finding some funky/cheap ribbon to weave in the holes. It should be pretty rockin' itself when it is done.




And last but not least, here is a sneak preview of what Will has been working on for the shop:

Amanda's Been a Busy Bee!

Amanda, here. I've got a LOT of catching up to do! I've been very busy the past while. Aside from setting up the legal and financial side of Nimble Toad, I've had many other adventures the past couple weeks that I'd love to share with you! This will definitely be a photo-heavy post. My favorite kind.

First off, Brandon and I tried a new cooking experiment this weekend. We had four people to cook dinner for, some random odds and ends around the house, and we'd been watching the food network a lot lately. So we decided to try something new.

We sauteed some chicken in bacon fat, with the bacon still in the pan, then once they were mostly cooked, we added onions:

Then Brandon put some pineapple slices in the oven to give them a nice, grilled look:

This part was Brandon's idea, and they turned out great!

Then we put the whole thing over brown long grain rice and added okonomi sauce:

Super yummy. ^_^

So, that was our little cooking experiment this weekend. And you know it's a success when I'm eating pineapple, because I don't usually like pineapple.

Next up... Let's see... I'm working on making my own pin cushion. I took a scrap of fabric and some cotton balls and I'm just finishing sewing it up:

I have just one little bit of sewing left and it will be done.

For some reason, I felt compelled to make my own instead of buying one. It just seems like such a simple thing; it's just a tiny pillow, right? And it doesn't even have to be pretty. Something tells me i'm missing some super important detail and I'll be eating my words soon. But at least I got to pick a pretty fabric:

I think it will do the trick.

Once I'm done with the pin cushion, I can start the third bracelet in that series I showed you last week.

Okay now for the fun part. This weekend, I went on a garage sale adventure with my roommates and my boyfriend. My roommates are moving into an apartment together and need kitchen stuff, so we drove all over looking for garage sales, and we found a TON of them. I got a few choice pieces.

I can't explain why, but I love vintage luggage. I've been looking for an old suitcase for a long time. I want to rip out the lining and put in some funky, bright fabric on the inside. Well, I found a suitcase that's funky enough on its own, it definitely does not need my help:

How cool is that? check out that color! Screaming bright orange. Perfect for me. ^_^

It was marked for $8, but I was able to talk him down to $6. I'm so thrifty.

It's in great shape: not very worn, and the inside is clean.

Now I just need a vintage train case that I can re-line the inside with funky fabric. I want to use it for my sewing supplies. Then I'll be happy. Vintage luggage, who knew?

So, I also got some great crafting supplies. I found this old mirror for 75cents. I'm going to repaint the frame, and sell it:

Someone did an awful job of painting it, so I wanna do something funky (that's my go-to craft adjective, can you tell?)

I want to accentuate the little details, like do a bunch of different colors.

What color scheme do you think I should go with?

So, then I also got some crafting materials. I got this lacey cloth (it was someone's blinds, I got 4 panels for 4 bucks) at a garage sale near my house:

Dunno what I'm gonna do with it yet, but I figure it's always useful to keep collecting bits of cloth and thread and yarn, etc... especially when they're super cheap!

Then I got this at the thrift store... It's a bit of a mystery:

It's a brighter orange than it looks here. Kinda like the suitcase.

What is it? It's too thin to be embroidery floss, but it's on the wrong kind of spindle to be thread. I'm gonna use it as thread. Anyway, it was really cheap.

Okay so, I had one last project I wanted to show you. I've been having some problems with litter training the rats lately, so I decided to eliminate the top shelf of their cage and replace it with some tubes for them to crawl through. My goal here was to reduce the number of corners they could 'go' in. They like to go on the top shelf, so of course that was the first thing to go. But they love the new tubes! Let me show you:

Here is a side view of the cage. New litter tray is on the bottom-left, and the new tubes are on the top-right.

The two ends feed them to their two favorite spots:

This end takes them to the level with the nesting box.

This end feeds them almost right into the hammock.

I was really worried they wouldn't use it, but I was walking by the cage and I saw this:

I was much relieved. ^_^

Alright, that's it for now. See, I told you I'd been busy!

More Bracelets!

I just made a bracelet. I'm very excited about it. I got the pattern from Princess Lasertron's website, except I used knitting instead of ruffled felt. I'll take nicer pictures and post it on the Etsy shop once it's open, but I just couldn't wait to share it with you!

I took pictures of it sitting on my Indiana Jones hat because I was pressed for time. That leather strap isn't part of the bracelet.

I got the yarn from an estate sale for really cheap. I have a lot of it, and it's a fantastic color.

The purple one on the end is for the closure.

The buttons are all cloth: my mom has been collecting buttons and she gives me all the cloth ones because she doesn't like them. So, they're all vintage and used, which I really like.

Sorry for the fuzzy picture. I was rushing due to overexcitement. ^_^

I need to work on the green stitching on top of the ribbon. My next one will hopefully be a little cleaner. And the buttons should end up being different on every bracelet.

I have 2 more knitted up already in this color, and a bunch more of this ribbon. I want to keep making them in various colors, which should be fun.

What do you think?