Brush Embroidery Cake

If the question of whether or not you can do brush embroidery work on Italian Meringue Buttercream has been keeping you up at night, I'm here to tell you its possible (names have been smudged to protect the innocent):

Well, my recipe is really a combination of IMBC with "regular" buttercream to make it a little easier to work with, but still. Its not as clean looking as it probably is on crusting buttercream but its pretty and a bit out of the ordinary, so I'm glad I tried it.

It was somewhat time consuming and I don't recommend that you drink a lot of caffeine beforehand as it does require a steady hand with the brush.

I was aiming for clusters of hydrangeas, but I think I missed the mark.

Its hard out here for a squirrel

There are no acorns on our trees this year. None. Someone told me that acorns are biennial, which would explain the problem but I'm not sure if that's true or not. If that's so you'd think the trees would talk it over and decide to how to stagger their vacations so we aren't left hanging.
This is annoying for me since I had planned to enjoy some acorn craftiness, both the grown-up kind and with my girls.

But I imagine the poor squirrel has that same sick feeling I get when I check my bank account balance.

Pumpkin

If you have ever referred to me as "crafty" and I scoffed at the idea, I would like to submit this as evidence to back my claim:


I was actually thinking ours wasn't too bad until I saw this. Sweet Mercy! Now THAT'S a paper mache pumpkin. Blowing the balloon up in the strings? Genius.
Okay, I did have a 5 year old helping me with this one.
If you don't know me in 'real life', then you wouldn't know yet that I lost my mind and started homeschooling our daughter this year. So this was a school project leading up to our trip to the pumpkin patch. I had the grand idea that we could talk about basic pumpkin anatomy and maybe find a coloring page to go with that. I couldn't find anything close to what I had in mind other than this, so we went 3-D. After the paper dried and we popped the balloon, I cut away part of the side so we could give our pumpkin some seeds and pulp.


I'm seriously thinking of making another this week just to try the string idea. It would be a solo project though, Buggy's squeamishness about all things sticky trumps her desire to make a huge mess.

Pettiskirt

I found it! My sewing mojo, that is. It was buried under the heap of half-finished projects on my desk.
Just in time too, since I have a couple of projects to make that have an actual dead-line. I'm making flower girl dresses and wanted to make a pettiskirt for each girl. I used KitschyCoo's tutorial, except I made only two layers of tulle since these are intended to be worn under a dress rather than as a stand-alone skirt. I used a rather wide elastic so that it can be worn with other dresses that aren't quite as long by rolling the elastic over to shorten the length.
I wanted a little bit of poof, not a bell-like skirt. See? Little poof:

This dress isn't hemmed, its a practice before I suck it up and slice into my cotton sateen, of which I have juuuuust enough to make the skirts. *gulp*

I went for a walk today

past the squirrels scolding me from the tree tops.
Up hill and down, past the wildflowers in bloom.
Past the field where a coyote stopped being sneaky to watch me pass and the Herefords, who seemed unconcerned about the coyote, stopped munching to stare at me like I was nuts.
Past the Killdeer running in the road and calling to distract me from their nest.
Right up to the home of the German Shepherd, with his deep bark and shedding hair that stands out in crazy clumps and patches.
Then I turned around and went home.

It ain't easy being cool

I'm honestly trying to get my assigned garment done by the sew-along deadline this time.

I guess first I should explain what happened to the skirt I made. No, I did not set it on fire. What I did was rip the whole thing apart and take it in a little at the side seams. It didn't fit as smoothly after that, but it was doable. Then, a short time later, I bent over to pick something up off the floor and ripped the pants I was wearing.
Goo fell out.
Not good.
So...I cut back on the Oreo cookies and other things that make life worth living and managed to lose a few pounds. Now the skirt fits loose again. I need to just start over. bleh.

So on to the t-shirt. My upper body measurements have not changed since age 14 (stupid Titty Fairy), so I figured it would be a safe project to tackle.
Things were going great until I slipped it on and realized I'd done something waaay wrong when I measured my shoulders:

Yeah, those aren't sleeves, that's over-hang.

So, I can pretend I did it on purpose and call them kimono-flutter sleeves or I can hack off the excess and see what happens when I attach the sleeves. But wait! I drafted the sleeves to fit into the original armhole. gaaa!

So should I unpick it and try to fix my jacked up pieces? Something tells me that unpicking knit material is not fun.

Or scrap the whole thing, redo my shoulder measurements, and go see what other kinds of knits Joann has on the clearance rack?

I think I'll go hit the Oreo's.

Crochet Necklaces

Crocheting wire is at once easier and harder than I thought it would be. I wasn't expecting that linking together tiny loops of wire would be easy, and its not, but I wasn't prepared for how sore my poor fingers would get. There is definitely a knack to it that I haven't learned yet.
But I did give myself a little pep talk so I wouldn't get too depressed when my first few attempts weren't fit to wear into public. But, honestly, this method is really forgiving. Here is the first necklace I made:

Its made with rose quartz and a simple chain "stitch", without any blank loops between the stones. You can see that I didn't attach a chain and just started adding stones once I had a couple inches of chain stitches:

I like it but I fiddle with it a lot because of where it sits on my neck. I wish I had made it just a little longer, I probably won't wear it much for the same reason I don't wear turtlenecks.

I like my second necklace better because of the color and how it sits on my neck:

I added some chain to this one to make it a little more flexible. This necklace has round beads on chain stitches and teardrop shaped beads attached with a half double crochet so they sit a little lower than the round beads:
These are loads of fun to make. I can't wait to get my mitts on some more beads so I can try some different designs I have in mind. When I get the hang of this, I'll do a tutorial so you all can make some too.