Tag Archive for 'fabric'

Day Six - Bunting flags and Camping

Published
by
robayre
on August 13, 2010
in General Update and life
. 1 Comment

It may seem I dropped off the face of the earth with my daily project this month, but I’m still here. I was actually on vacation.

We went camping with some of our best friends. It’s a trip we’ve been talking about taking for YEARS and YEARS. After plenty of research our friend Nikki found a great place for us in Wisconsin to go camping/floating. The idea was that we wanted to find a place that rents giant inner-tubes and then shuttles you to a drop off location and you lazily float back to camp. It was an awesome vacation.

Would you believe that I took 3 cameras, 2 of them being film, and the third digital, and I didn’t take one digital picture the whole trip. So, normally I’d have pictures to show here, but for now, nothing.

Nikki chose perfectly. Our campsite was right on the beach. We drove a bit over 4 hours north to get there but once I saw how close we were to the beach I once again found more support for my whole theory that “Any amount of hard work pays off as long as my feet end up in sand and water.” The first evening, after the long drive, we all stuck our folding chairs in the shallow edge of the sand and sat, drank and chatted with our tootsies in the water. When we woke up the first morning the first thing I did was run straight into the water (about 10-15 steps away from our tent). We took floating trips 4 times, 3 of those being long trips over 2.5 hours in length. It was so much fun to just float along, relaxed, tethered together with great company. Our friends even brought their pooch, Monty, who wore a mini life preserver and was a huge hit with other floaters.

Of course the mosquitoes were out of control, I got crazy grease burns on my legs while cooking on our campfire, we thought our campsite was going to wash away during a crazy thunderstorm during the middle of the night, and despite the sunscreen I still turned quite red. Still, we had a great time, and definitely plan on going back again next year. Hopefully next time the mosquitoes aren’t as bad, but I’m not holding my breath. After all, I think they are the Wisconsin state pest. Within a half hour I killed over 30 mosquitoes in the bathroom and shower alone. FYI, flip flops work wonders as a fly swatter.

Back to creating daily. Before leaving for our trip I created a couple flag garlands (pictured at the top of this post), thinking I would use them to decorate our camp site, but we didn’t have a tree to our site! It was truly a beachy site. So, now I have these buntings that I created. I used this same method as this tutorial of mine from earlier this year. Once I find something fun to do with them, I will share.

I’ll hopefully be back shortly with more projects for the August Challenge.

Day One - Galaxy Zipper Pouch

Published
by
robayre
on August 2, 2010
in General Update and Projects
. 3 Comments

Day One.

For my first creation of the month I made this zipper pouch for my sister. It’s actually part of her very belated birthday present (her birthday’s in May). Earlier this year our Aunt (hi Aunt Susan!) took us to a fabulous quilt shop (Quilter’s Heaven) where they had several amazing fabrics that looked like outer space. I bought a couple and my sister said. “Great, you can make me something with that.” The only thing is, I’m not sure if it was this space fabric or another one that I bought, so I might be making another zipper pouch soon. That will be perfectly fine, because I’ll just add the other one to my etsy shop.

I bought the orange zipper specifically for my sister because that is her favorite color and I thought would be a perfect contrast to the navy blue, as well as bring out the small touches of orange that already exist in the fabric. When I was done I felt like it still needed something so I made three fabric buttons to go on the front. Now I think it looks pretty rad.

Oh, and as usual, I used this tutorial, on skiptomylou, to make the pouch. I really should print that pattern out, because God forbid if it were to ever be taken down, I’d be lost without it. It’s such a simple concept, but every time I make a zippered pouch I have to look it up and make sure I’m doing it correct, step by step.

Day Twenty-Seven - Quilt Pieces

Published
by
robayre
on February 27, 2010
in General Update and Projects
. 3 Comments

Today my sister, mom and I went to my aunt’s house where she taught us how to do a quilt pattern called “scrappy nine”.

This is how far I got today.

Each block is a foot square, so 3′x3′ in total right now.  You start with one square of 9 different fabrics and end up with 9 completely different squares. They look pretty random, but everything is actually very organized and calculated. I have more fabric and more colors that I plan to incorporate. I want to make a whole huge quilt eventually.

After finishing our blocks, my aunt took us to Quilter’s Heaven. It was an Ahhhmazing quilt shop with more beautiful fabrics. It was so hard to resist going crazy and buying a little bit of everything. I will definitely be back.

Day 10 - Buttons

Published
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robayre
on February 10, 2010
in Projects and life
. 6 Comments

Today I made all sorts of fabric covered pinback buttons for thing-a-day. Just for fun, I will send a button to the first three people who leave a comment here and tell me which button they like best.

I woke up this morning to my bed shaking. I laid there while I wondered what was going on, turned over and watched the rattling windows then contemplated if I should run to the doorway, the bathroom or downstairs. Decided to just lay there. After everything stopped shaking I went downstairs to see if we had an earthquake. At first I couldn’t find anything, but as I refreshed the pages then it finally popped up. Sure enough, we had a 3.8 earthquake which very close to my city. On the radio this morning they were talking to some “expert of something or other” and she put it this way: “As long as it’s just a small earthquake and no damage was done, the result is just a little bit of excitement.” I was sad because Matt was playing video games late last night and ended up falling asleep on the couch in the basement. He’s a deep sleeper so he missed the whole thing. If he had been in bed you better believe I would have woken him up.  Today the most frequently heard thing was “It sounded like a snow plow ran into the house”.

Okay, off to bed.

Day Five - Quilted Rings

Published
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robayre
on February 5, 2010
in General Update
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Quick before I get to my thing-a-day, I just wanted to say 2 things. One- Last night I went to the local art league meeting and Natasha from Esther’s Place (a local fiber shop) spoke and demonstrated needle and wet felting. It was really cool to watch her layer on the fibers and I was surprised to see how similar to painting it could be. I was very inspired to explore felting some more. Two- I finally, finally, finally got my replacement check card (after “Lost Wallet Debacle of 2009″) and have decided to celebrate by reactivating my netflix account. If you are looking, you can find me crafting away with eyes peeled to the TV or computer monitor.

Okay, now back to our regular programming. Once again this is cross posted from the Thing-A-Day site, but I encourage you to please visit TAD and check out all the lovely things that other participants are making everyday. There’s lots of inspiration flying around over there.

Riffling through my jewelry the other day I found an old quilted ring I’d made years ago. I remembered how much fun they were to make, so, for today’s thing I worked on making more and decided to offer them in my shop online.

-Robyn

My previous Thing-a-day 2010 posts: Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four, Day Five

black and white stripes

Published
by
robayre
on January 3, 2009
in General Update, My Artwork and etsy
. 1 Comment

black and white framed yoyo set, originally uploaded by robayre.

I just posted a new framed yoyo set in my etsy shop. The fabric came from my sister who spotted some black and white striped fabric for me. Did you know even width striped black and white fabric is difficult to find? Well, it is, trust me as a black and white striped fan. It is hard enough to find it in quilting fabrics, and even harder to find it in apparel knit fabric. Actually, for apparel knit, I’ve never found it. You look in the pattern books and see items of clothing that you can make in black and white stripes, but good luck finding the fabric. After searching for it in fabric stores for years I finally asked an employee about it and was informed that “they just don’t make it.” I’m sure we’ve all seen tons of clothing made from black and white striped fabric in the stores, so it has to be made somewhere.

update update

Published
by
robayre
on March 26, 2008
in General Update
. 2 Comments

Earlier today I saw this knit piece on flickr and was inspired. I want to knit a vest using my handspun, I’m excited. And then if you notice the belt in that same piece. The pattern is so perfectly suited (small and repeating) for such a piece. It has inspired me to create the pattern at the top of this post to iron onto fabric. I love fabrics with small repeating patterns. Often I see fabrics with the cutest patterning, but it is so big, so if you cut or sew the fabric down you can’t really see the pattern much anymore. So I decided to design this tree pattern where each tree is less than 1.5″ in size.

On Monday, my sister and I went into the city to the Art Institute to see the Hopper and Homer show. Chris liked Homer and I liked Hopper. I kind of had this impression that Hoppers work was all like Nighthawks, and kind of lonesome and distant, but after seeing this show I don’t think that anymore. His pieces really spoke to me because of their interesting and unusual composition, angles and obvious inspiration from film noir. His work is not sad and lonely, but like a screen capture of a story. That being said, my favorite piece in the show was a very simple painting that actually didn’t really have elements that I listed above. The above painting titled Hodgkin’s House, has a pretty central composition, the content isn’t very dramatic, but just a sweet house with angles of the light and spectacular use of color; greens with splotches of dramatic red flowers.

One last thing: here is a cool tutorial to turn an altoids tin into a tiny water color palette.