Sunday, February 15, 2009

Sorry, I've been cheating :)

I have something to tell you all.

I've been seeing someone else.

His name is "crafting". No, not just crochet, but OTHER stuff too.

I'm so ashamed.

...

But look at the cool stuff I made!!!

The first one is a teddy bear that I made for my son, to help him scare away the mean monsters under his bed. Well, actually, in the time I've taken to make it, we've managed to convince him that there are nice monsters too. The nice monsters come and have a party with him after we've put him to bed, and the bonus is that the nice monsters scare away all the mean monsters. So he doesn't really need a teddy anymore, but he still loves it! Here he is:


I started out hand-stitching everything, but eventually gave up and turned to my old Singer 99k for help. It took a while to get it right because the tension discs were messed up for some reason...Anyway, turns out that the manual that came with the thing (keep in mind it's like 50 years old) is AMAZING! It gives really good step-by-step instructions on how to take apart absolutely everything, so I was able to fix it myself. Eventually I got it working with this fabric, which is really just an old Gap jumper that shrunk in the wash.

Probably the hardest bit of this project was doing the blanket stitch around the edge; it took nearly all of an 8m pack of embroidery floss, which I had to pull through every stitch. If anyone knows a better way of doing this, I would appreciate the advice!

Long story short (too late!), Jim loves his teddy :)

And here's an older shot of my sewing machine. It's an oldie, but goodie! In this shot, I was sewing a purple crinoline into a dress.

Happy crafting!

noisypitta.etsy.com

4 comments:

Estrella said...

Oh God! it is old! is it the kind that have a wheel and a pedal tath you actually step into? i have one of those but i never thought it could work! your teddy is so cool!

Noisy Pitta said...

No, this one doesn't have a foot pedal. You can get ones with electric pedals, but this one's only hand-operated! I didn't think it would work either, but it does :) Once I figured out how!

Anonymous said...

This reminds me of Emma Jane Hogbin, she's a geek developer who iss into arts and crafts and stuff.

http://www.emmajane.net/about

.

MainyMike said...

I'm sure my mother had that same Singer ... I remember that I was the only one with good enough eyes to thread it up. And that dangerous needle banging down. I'm sure it was solid enough to survive nuclear attack though!

And I get to type the word 'clort' into the captcha below. Crickey.