handmade « CrumpArt

March 8, 2010

In a spin.

Filed under: craft, friends, knitting, yarn — Tags: baby, handmade, hat, present, spinning, yarn — Crumpet @ 7:40 am

Yesterday I got news that my friend Alex and his partner, Rebecca, had welcomed a little boy into their family. Now, I knew they were having a baby, knew when it was due, but still somehow had only imagined making a present.

It turns out I can make one of these in half a day. Hooray! It’s the Umbilical Cord Hat from the first Stitch ‘n Bitch book, with 8 extra stitches and as such, an extra lot of decreases to make up for the thinner yarn and smaller needles. Rav details here. I hope it’s still cold enough in China for a tiny new babby to wear a lovely wool hat.

It is getting colder here. And when I was choosing a yarn to knit the hat with, I found two bags of ‘Summer’ wool/silk roving from the Melbourne Handweavers and Spinners Guild in my stash. What better time to start spinning it than just after summer’s end, on the weekend of constant storming when we get hailstones the size of golfballs?

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January 23, 2009

Hand over.

Filed under: art, craft, crochet, film and tv, photography, pups — Tags: greyhound, handmade, hands, heavy cameras, self portrait, sore arms, twitter365 — Crumpet @ 7:59 pm

The twitter365 week three round up.

Turns out taking decent photos of your own hands is a lot harder than you think it will be.

As I mentioned, I was at work for a lot of the week, so had the added burden of less than stellar* light for some of the pictures. Like this one, taken at 10:44pm, as soon as I got home from work one night.

I have a soft spot for this next one. It’s taken against my bathroom wall, in a patch where the morning sunlight shines through a textured glass brick, throwing up all sorts of fun overlapping, wrinkled light. Yes, greyhounds really do have necks that long. Again, I didn’t have much time with this… it was taken in the minutes between showering and leaving for work in the morning.

I’d tried taking some pictures of my hands in various poses, but it turns out that hands often look incredibly ugly and lifeless in photos. Well, the ones that I was taking, anyway. I promise I don’t have ugly hands. My solution to this problem was to pull out the macro lens.

This next one is the photo I tried to take at the start of the week. It was an incredibly difficult shot to capture, what with my moving hands, the self-timer and the problem of focussing. I’m making a gift for my new niece or nephew, due in February. I still haven’t started the second sock.

Handwork that fits in my palm. It’s less than the width of three fingers.

Finally, all week long I’ve been pondering Doubt, most notably the cleanliness and length of my fingernails.

*Quite literally, really.

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January 16, 2009

Still waiting.

Filed under: bookmaking, craft, crochet, reading — Tags: bookmaking, books, crochet, handmade, soap — Crumpet @ 10:02 am

Yes, I’m still waiting to hear whether or not I’ve been accepted into Honours for either Printmaking or Media Arts. If I don’t get a letter today I’ll be starting to ask what’s up again. In the meantime…

I’ve made my first ever batch of soap! We had a severely blocked drain in the bathroom, and when I went to buy something to clean the drain with, I found a tub of caustic soda that said “perfect for making soap” on the label. How could I resist? I still don’t know if the soap I made is any good or not, because it has to sit for a few weeks before use. And if it is good, we won’t have to buy soap for about a year, because the recipe made a crapload of it.

After the soaps were done, I had to go buy a button for something and didn’t have any cash on me. So I used my card, and in order to get the purchase up to the $10 EFTPOS minimum, had to buy some yarn too. Just had to. There was no alternative. So I bought some bamboo and bamboo/cotton blend yarn and have started crocheting facecloths with it. Being a crochet newbie, I decided to use a pattern, and picked this potholder. The Patons Serenity yarn is lovely and soft, if a bit splitty, and I’m really happy with the end product. Rav details here.

And all of you who’ve been asking for new books in my Etsy Store? I’ve caught the bug again. Behold.

I read a review for How to Make Books: Fold, Cut & Stitch Your Way to a One-Of-A-Kind Book by Esther K. Smith on the CraftyPod blog the day before receiving a $10 off wishlist items coupon from Fishpond. So I ordered it and Magic Books & Paper Toys: Flip Books, E-Z Pop-Ups & Other Paper Playthings to Amaze & Delight and I couldn’t be happier. I’m so happy with these books that I’ve deleted every single other bookmaking book from all my wishlists. I have a couple of bookmaking books already, and have borrowed a few from libraries in my time, and on the whole they’re either so dry they could catch fire at any second, or they have that slight scrapbooking, “here’s how to make this exact project this way, look! pretty!” vibe. These two books are the perfect combination of whimsy and practical, and you can expect to see some new books from me here soon.

In the meantime, I’m off to work…

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January 12, 2009

Fancy boy.

Filed under: knitting, photography, pups, the weekly puppy — Tags: dressups, greyhound, handmade, knitting, naughty boy, puppy, snood, the weekly puppy, tom — Crumpet @ 7:50 am

I’ve been a bit slack with The Weekly Puppy of late. I my defence, I did actually take these when I was supposed to, I just didn’t post them here yet. And I haven’t taken any puppy photos since…

Anyway, something I wasn’t expecting about having a greyhound in the family is the potential to dress up a dog. Tom has no undercoat and no body fat, and even in summer needs to wear a coat at night to keep warm. As a knitter, this excites me to no end. I never thought I would get so much joy from dressing up a dog.

I’ve only made him one thing so far, but have plans for more. I recently finished this snood using a ball and a half of Cleckheaton Nurture, and am going to make another from a random skein I have of Noro Iro. Rav details are here.

Tom was being a naughty crazy boy at the time of photographing — he stole the snood and ran off with it when Mr C tried to put it on, which was actually pretty hilarious even if it was naughty — but he really does love it.

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December 22, 2008

Christmas Kraken

Filed under: animation, art, bookmaking, craft, printmaking — Tags: animation, books, christmas, gift, handmade, i love puns, kraken, model, recycled, stop-motion, tentacles — Crumpet @ 12:09 am

In my family we do Kris Kringle giving for Christmas, and this time around I’m giving to my brother. I have a couple of bought gifts for him and wanted to add one of my coloured lithographs. He’s a commercial printer and last year he saw one of my lithographs at the printmaking auction. Before he even knew it was mine, he’d commented about how much he liked it. He wasn’t successful in his bidding, and I’ve been meaning to give him one as a gift since then.

The frame that I found wasn’t big enough for the coloured print on its own, so I tore it down and decided to add one of the models from my latest animation. I’m tempted to keep it for myself, and think I’ll do something similar with the other animation models.

In other handmade news, these are gifts in disguise…

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December 9, 2008

Whatever happens, I’ll still have an awesome new outfit.

Filed under: Melbourne, craft, knitting — Tags: handknit, handmade, interview, job, knitting, time for a long overdue career shift, waiting — Crumpet @ 8:47 am

Back at the start of the year, I started knitting the Puff Sleeve Cardigan from Stefanie Japel’s wonderful book, Fitted Knits. I got most of it finished before going back to school, until I knitted the button bands on the wrong size needles and had to frog them. It sat there until October, unfinished, with just the button bands and bottom halves of the sleeves to go.

Turned out to be maybe a weeks work knitting on the tram while procrastinating during assessment.

And then it sat there again, until now, unblocked. I think there’s something wrong with me. Blocking… ten minutes of work washing and pinning it out, and then it just sits there and dries and it’s finished.

I have to thank Damo here from Australian Country Spinners. The beautiful yarn that I used for this project is Paton’s Merino Deluxe, and it was a gift from ACS for attending one of their marketing nights. And it’s exactly the colour I would have chosen were I to buy it from a store. Rav details here.

I had a good excuse to block it this week though (not that I should have needed an excuse!) I had an interview yesterday with a particular knitting and needlecraft shop that is opening up soon in Melbourne. And obviously I needed to have some knitted things to take with me. Of course, it was too hot to actually wear the cardigan until the trip home (my interview was in the evening), but I planned my outfit entirely around the cardigan anyway.

I think the interview went okay. The thing that I’m most concerned about is that I couldn’t be specific as to what my future holds. I still haven’t found out whether I’ve been accepted into Honours yet (two people have heard and the rest of us who applied haven’t received any indication either way) so I don’t know if I’ll be back at school yet, which means that I don’t know if I’ll be available for full time or part time work. It’s very frustrating. It also means that I still have Pixar plans, but I don’t know if or when they’ll come to fruition, and the people interviewing me obviously don’t want to employ someone who isn’t in it for the long haul. I hope I was able to communicate how much needlecraft means to me. It’s not simply a hobby, it’s one of the major focusses in my art and therefore my life. I know that I can do this job and do it very well.

So we’ll see. All I can do now is wait.

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August 24, 2008

“Little Ewoks. An entire empire brought to its knees by small, furry creatures.”

Filed under: art, craft, geekery, yarn — Tags: art, chaos, crochet, dice, dye, handmade, lorenz, mathematics, science, strange attractor, universe, yarn — Crumpet @ 12:46 pm

Remember these?

Well, the green and white Pi circles have now been frogged and turned into these…

I dyed them using the d20 die set method. As you can see in the following picture, Mr C’s 8-sided die determined the colour, the 20-sided die indicated the length in centimetres of the colour and the 10-sided die determined the overlap of colour.

All of this is part of my latest art project, crocheting the Lorenz Manifold. This stems from my interest in space, the universe and Chaos Theory.

As the Oxford Amercian Dictionary on my laptop puts it, chaos theory is

the branch of mathematics that deals with complex systems whose behaviour is highly sensitive to slight changes in conditions, so that small alterations can give rise to strikingly great consequences.

My lecturer at uni did advise me to go all out with my geek this semester, and as such, I’m lovingly referring to this project in my head as Jaffa Cakes and Coat Pockets.

This was my Ravelympics project, but I didn’t have the yarn ready in time for the opening ceremony and ended up starting this a week ago instead. There is no way I’ll be getting Ravelympic gold here, but at 23 rounds of a total 47 in, I’m pretty damn proud of my progress anyway. Before this project, the only crochet I knew was the basic stuff needed for knitting, so I’ve learned how to crochet on the coolest (“cool” in geek terms…) project ever.

I’ll give more details as the project goes on, but my proposal this semester is looking at the links between fabric, stories, creation, science and the universe.

As such, this podcast, which I listened to on the tram coming home from work the other night, almost made me cry with its wonderfulness. Thanks to Alex for turning me onto Radiolab.

Happy National Science Week everyone!

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