Starry earrings

Bones here! Long time no see! So, I thought it was about time I took back the spotlight ;)

Well what I bring before you tonight my fellow crafters are earrings I made for one of my housemates from university last Christmas.

For these you'll need:

- Earring hooks
- A length of fine chain
- Headpins
- Beads (I used a star bead, two smaller clear oval beads, and two rounded beads as you can see, but these can be anything you want to use - I'd tend to keep your 'accessory' beads (i.e. the oval ones) smaller than the 'main' bead (i.e. the star)
- A couple of what I would call 'spacers' - the silver bits below each star bead
- Jewellery pliers - I used round-nose and thin flat-nose pliers

First off, I measured the chain to each length I wanted. I decided to try and get each piece a different length so that the star bead would stay the main focus and be accentuated by the oval beads. This was fiddly, but if you can keep your patience it's worth while! You need to remeber as well that the beads will hang longer than the chain and will have a small drop from the actual ear (because of the hook!), so it's always a good idea to hold the chain up to your ear just to see how long it might end up!

When you have your 3 lengths (for one earring - 6 for both!) you'll need to start assembling your beads. On your longest piece you'll want your feature bead. Get a headpin and place one 'spacer', main bead and a round bead on it. Bend your headpin to create a hook and then place through the end link of the chain. Carefully keeping this link in your 'hook' bend the wire around your round-nose pliers to form a loop so that you have a couple of millimetres between the bottom of the loop and the top bead. Take the end of the wire around the bottom of the loop a couple of times to close this gap and cut off any excess. You should have a bead attached to the chain! Repeat this with the other beads and chains!

The next thing is to put the chains on the earring hooks. All this needs is for the end link to be separated and then placed onto the loop on the end of the earring hook. You'll want each oval bead to frame your feature bead, so put your feature bead chain on in the middle. Once you've attached these you're all done! All that's left is to wear them with pride!

Or in my case send them to someone else who will! ;)

I'll do another post soon with a pictoral step-by-step... I sent these off before I took photos! D'oh!

Anyway, enjoy and be crafty! ;)

Witch's Writing Set, Part One

Me and Bonesy are big Harry Potter fans - like you couldn't tell - so for her birthday I decided to make something faintly Hogwarts related. I looked at owls, and although they were reasonably priced, the implications of raising an owl in an urban community were complicated, so I settled for a writing set instead :)

Here's part one of the how to:

I managed to track down a letter holder type object, so I didn't have to make that, but there are pretty good cardboard makes out there if you need them. When we moved I managed to sort through my fabric collection and came across the perfect covering material: black, not too fine, fairly practical.

What you'll need for the box:

Letter holding thingy

Covering fabric of your choice

Ribbon of your choice

Cardboard tube

Small cardboard boxes (these and the tube can easily be made from cardboard - I just happened to have them)

Scissors

Glue gun / PVA

Decorations

Now, when I started this project I'd lost my glue gun, but if you have one I'd recommend using it from the start.

I also put together a few bits that I couldn't make (from here, an excellent website):

Ink

An emerald turkey quill

Parchment

1. Since the box thingy was covered with a shiny laminate type affair I gave it a light sanding so the glue would take more easily, then I put on the glue - you have to wait a few minutes for it to get properly tacky.

2. It was quite tricky to get the covering material folded over properly - in the end I put in a couple of tiny stitches to hold it in place, and used electrical tape to hold it in place until the glue dried.

3. Once the glue had dried, which took a while, I cut a section of the cardboard tubing to hold the quill. Once I covered it I slotted it into place inside the box thingy, and smoothed out the wrinkles in the covering material with a sliver of cardboard. Since the small box for the ink is unlikely to be seen, it didn'tneed a covering; the shot below is of the inside of the box thingy, with one half of the covering material smoothed out.

Well, that's all for this week. Next week: decoration :D

Starbuck's Mandala Hat

This is the second of the two hats that I made as a trade for the beautiful artwork created by this lovely lady (the first hat being Ma Cobb's Firefly Hat). This one continues the science fiction theme and is based on the beatutiful mandala mural that Starbuck (of Battlestar Galactica, of course) had painted on the wall in his quarters. The pattern was designed by quirkyknitgirl and lives here. It's a really great pattern - beautiful colours, gorgeous yarn and a simple but striking basic lace pattern, which shows up beautifully in the Cascade 220 yarn (which I sourced from the lovely people at PaviYarns).

I've not come across Cascade before, which is surprising given what a lovely range of yarns they make - and I'm really impressed with Cascade 220: the colours are stunning and it holds the pattern well without being too fiddly. The lace pattern is so simple and so effective - a basic moving 6-1 pattern - and very satisfying since it looks way more complicated than it actually is. Originally it was written as a circular needle pattern but I have problems with circs when it comes to maintaining an even tension, so I decided to work it on dpns, since I'm much more confident with them. It's a great hat pattern for someone who's mastered either dpns or circ's and wants to try something slightly more complicated, or someone who's mastered flat basic lace and wants to try something three-dimensional.

It's a brilliant hat and was great fun to knit - and another work-in-progress ticked of my list! Thanks again to Limlight for agreeing to draw my characters for me and challenging me to knit this hat!

Gigantic PomPoms

Just a quick shout out to YesJess Knits over on Flickr who has made a really easy to follow how-to on gigantic pompoms (and if you know me and pompoms, you'll understand how easy). POMPOMS AHOY!

Guest Post - Rubber Stamp Carving, Part Two

... and, in conclusion: part two of Krystyna's rubber stamp carving post (part one lives here).

So, first off you'll need some materials, I have here a Rubber (just a standard eraser from the shops, this one came from Wilcos I think), a Pencil, a Cuticle Tool (as above) and an ink pad or marker pen.

Next, I draw around the rubber so I know how much space I have to play with. This time I decided to use the largest side. So in my sketchy little box I draw what I want to stamp. As I've been reading a lot of Potter themed things lately this little doodle seemed appropriate.

Then I press the rubber against the image so it transfers across, not always terrifically clear, but we can go over the lines with our pencil to make the image clearer and easier to work with. In this case I think I altered the image a little bit in the transfer but it still looks good.

Now we go to work with our cuticle tool, it's fairly easy going, just try and make the longest runs you can to keep your lines nice and clean. Just apply light pressure and let the tool do the work, remember, you can always take away but you can't really stick rubber back on if you take too much.

We're getting there, nearly done now really. So lets colour our stamp in with the marker or ink pad.

Looks good, so lets do our first stamp!

So we can see here where I need to take off a bit more rubber. Some at the top and a little at the sides. Re-ink and re-stamp and see what we've got.

And there we have it, one stamp, one rather pretty stamp if I do say so myself.

Northern Craftoholic signing out.

Guest Post - Rubber Stamp Carving, Part One

Over to Krystyna!

Ok, so, Hi! It's me again :D

Hrm... where to start. At the beginning I suppose.

So my beloved and I are organising a group trip to Cardiff at the end of this month (ARGH! Panic! Battle Stations! and the like) for our Aikido buddies, it'll be a week of training and boozing, erm, socialising, yes, socialising and one of the many jobs I'll have while we're there is registering people at the training sessions, for this we give each person a little A6 card with their time table on and we stamp each session as they arrive. All good.

Oh Noes! We don't have any stamps! Whatever shall we do?

I know! I'll make some! Only one thing, those carving tools are pricey and hard to find in the UK, probably have to order them from the interweb and that costs even more, but WAIT! What's this? A cuticle tool in the bottom of my make-up bag (2 actually but they were free with some stuff I bought a while back) no idea how to use it on my cuticles and that's a kind of scary prospect anyways but it looks very much like a stamp carving tool.

So how hard can it be? With some shaky nerves and a lot of nervous lip biting I managed these.

Of which, I am infact quite proud.

You're curious you say? To see how they came to be? Well it just so happens that I was asked to write about them, so I've made a little how to, to share my discovery with the world!

To be continued... (here!)

Northen Craftaholic

Ma Cobb's Firefly Hat

So, it's been a while since I got around to posting on here. It's been a hell of a couple of months, let me tell you! As soon as I'd got into the swing of having a job, I lost it, so I'm back to being impoverished - but that doesn't mean I've not been busy, oh no. Not too long after that, we found out that we had to move house at short notice, which was pretty annoying since we'd just signed the new lease - landlords, I don't know - and it took us a while to find the new place. As you can imagine, crafting and blogging was rather put on a back burner, not least because all my crafty stuff was thereafter boxed up ready for the move.

Then, around three weeks ago, my stupendously awesome and wonderful Granddad passed away. One of those things that turns your life upside down. So in the middle of moving house - in fact, the very same week - I was in an entirely different county helping sort things in the house and organise the funeral and such. The Lovely Amanda and my Mr had to do all the moving themselves (which I still feel a bit guilty about).

Anyway, that's where I've been - hope it's been a bit less fraught for you lot *peers out of the screen*.

A while back I coralled all my partially done projects into a box and posted them here. The ones at the end of the list - but funnily enough with the highest priority - were a couple of sci-fi themed hats for my good friend Limlight (who has a home on Blogger here), in exchange for some of her beautiful artwork. She created two pieces for me, based on my Harry Potter fanfiction, Dreams and False Alarms: this one, of Hermione and my OC Amelia being all cousinly, and this one of Amelia, Lupin and Snape, upon whom she has something of an impact. You'll have to read it to find out what impact, of course *grins evilly*.

Right, the first of the two hats was based on the hat the formiddable Ma Cobb sends Jayne in the (amazing) sci-fi series Firefly - and if you havem't seen it, I'd highly recommend it. My Mr made himself one of these hats a few years back in slightly more muted colours (a picture can be seen in the WIP post above), and that turned out pretty well, so I knew it would be a blast. Limlight provided the pattern, which was created by Emisanboo over on Craftster, and it was really straightforward to follow.

The yarn (Alafoss Lopi), which I eventually tracked down here, initially felt quite scratchy for a hat, but it was surprisingly soft when I knitted it up. I used one skein of each of the following: Gold, Rust Red and Orange; Lopi are delightfully uninventive with their colourway naming, which was something of a relief after trying to hunt down some obscurely spelled laceweight, I can tell you. It knitted up beautifully, and showed off the stitches nicely without looking too neat - the idea being to match the rustic style of Ma Cobb. It was also fairly quick to work since the yarn was giant (well, giant considering I'm mostly using sock yarn at the moment).

The pompom proved tricky (which is why there's no image of the completed hat), mostly because pompoms are one area of craft that I have absolutely no clue about (I know they're supposed to be easy, everyone keeps telling me - I think I must have a pompom shaped mental block somewhere in my brain). Fortunately my Mr came to the rescue in flying colours - here he is, crafting said pompom and looking surprisingly gollum-like...

If you're a massive geek like me you'll love this hat - and it's such a satisfying make!

Pictures: Hat body: achieved!; Alafoss Lopi - I love this stuff!; My preciousssss pompomsssss.