Happy Labor Day/Back to School

This was my summer reading. I am just about done with this book and I highly recommend it! It is very fun and snarky.

I also wanted to share with you probably one of the coolest little promo items I picked up at the last American Book Expo. It is a book mark that holds a pen, neat hu?

Now onto my fellow Crafty Blogger Links for this week. This is your assignment if you choose to accept it. This blog posting will not self destruct , it is always here for your entertainment and enrichment!

About Family Crafts
Would you craft with elephant poop? Learn more about how you can...

About.com Cross Stitch
Going Down in Flames? How do you deal with stitching burnout?

Aileen's Musings
Check out Aileen's Mail Art from the heart tutorial and send your own surprise in the mail!

Crafty Princess Diaries
Stop the social networking insanity! Tammy gives you some tips on how to use them but not have them abuse your precious time.

Layers Upon Layers
Molly "Porkshanks" Friedrich is an assemblage and jewelry artist of extraordinary talent...with an extraordinary story to tell!

Craftside-A behind-the-scenes peek at a crafty world
Ho-ho, uh, ho? Yes, the holiday's have hit at Craftside with free downloads of templates and pattern paper for a dimensional ornament card, a how-to for sculpting a squirrel and acorns, and a beaded flower. There are pictures from The Modern Mark Making Release Party and a fun little survey that gets you entered to win any craft book you like from The Quayside Publishing Group. Let those opinions fly!

The Impatient Blogger
Sometimes it's about what we craft with our hands and sometimes it's about what we craft with our hearts. Margot talks about why our life is our most profound creation and why she's focused on crafting hope.

Leaf it to me Bead Ring

When I get into a zone, I just keep going. Over at Craftside today there is the "how-to" for the flower ring on the right.

But I thought I'd post here the leaf one I made. I'll tell you the back story of it's inspiration. I was in the bead store and there were these fabulous glass bead flowers and I was looking at them and I must have held it up to my hand to see if it would look good as a ring. The sales lady must have seen me and she said that she tried it and they broke right away. They were way too fragile. So was indulging in my green bead love that day and I picked up these cool two tone leaf beads, I think they were about $2.
I simply cut lengths of wire (26 gauge) and twisted the beads on with the wire to the backside of each leaf. I then wired the clusters onto the ring blank. How easy is that?

Oh and be sure to check out Craftside tomorrow, there will be a recycled hidden ring storage project that you'll be sure to want to make!

The Crafty Bloogers are whooopin' it up!

About Family Crafts
Did you know that September 7th is National Grandparents Day? Discover fun gifts you can start making today.

About.com Cross Stitch
Stitch this free Have a Spooky Halloween pattern to add to your Halloween decor.

Aileen's Musings
Meet Snaily the skateboarding snail, and check out the fairies in Aileen's gardens! Aileen has created free postcards for you to send to a friend!

Craftside- A behind-the-scenes peek at a crafty world
The glitter, fabric, fire and pens are flying this week at Craftside with cool lettering tutorials from Lisa Engelbrecht, lampwork beaded earrings, Modern quilt designs and patterns, knitting with fleece fabric and pictures of the Crafty Chica's Sparkle tour.

Crafty Princess Diaries
Tammy has a new free metal clay project posted. This one is for the ID Me bracelet.

Layers Upon Layers
Debe Friedhoff creates bottles of hope for those in need. "You can't sell hope!" Debe says. "You can only give it away!"

The Impatient Blogger
Margot shares a project from her book Sparkletastic with Ana and Megan Araujo on this episode of When Creativity Knocks.

Double sided cable scarf

I am a big fan of cables and scarves so this project combined both. But as you know generally cables don't look so hot from the back. The way to solve this is to knit them in a 1x1 rib stitch essentially. So below is the pattern but I want to write out the general concept.

Always knit the first and last 4 stitches of every row. This gives you garter stitch borders and it hangs nice and flat with no curling.

Now this scarf has a 10 stitch (5 and 5) center cable.

You knit the knits and purl the purls.

And every 5th row you do a cable always putting the first five stitches to the back, then knit the knits and purl the purls for 5 stitches, then put back the 5 stitches on the cable needle back on the left needle and knit the knits and purl the purls.

This concept will work with any number of stitches.

ROW1-4...... K4 / P1,K1,P1,K1,P1 / K1,P1,K1,P1,K1 / K4

ROW 5 K4 / SLIP 5 STITCHES TO CABLE NEEDLE TO BACK / P1,K1,P1,K1,P1, / THEN PUT THE 5 STITCHES BACK ON THE LEFT NEEDLE AND K1,P1,K1,P1,K1 / THEN K4

ROW 6-9........ K4 / K1,P1,K1,P1,K1 / P1,K1,P1,K1,P1 / K4

ROW 10 K4 / SLIP 5 STITCHES TO CABLE NEEDLE TO BACK / K1,P1,K1,P1,K1 / THEN PUT THE 5 STITCHES BACK ON THE LEFT NEEDLE AND P1,K1,P1,K1,P1, / THEN K4

I can't say I'm eager for cool weather but I certainly am ready!

Alex, I'll take "Places you normally don't see graffiti, for 100, please"

About Family Crafts
Now is the time to start sharing your Halloween ideas and, more importantly, photos of your home-made costumes, jack-o-lanterns, and haunted decorations.

About.com Cross Stitch
A Pattern-A-Day in August '08 continues. Don't miss the new free patterns!

Aileen's Musings
Meet Fleurita the Flower Nymph, she's quite the fashionista! Learn how to create your very own flower nymph and enter her in OTM's Art Muse Contest.

Craftside- A behind-the-scenes peek at a crafty world
Gear up for fall crafting with a chance to win a Crafty Chica Bobble head and her book along with her tour schedule, touching quilt stories, a free Halloween raven template with a paper and jewelry tutorial, a fashion illustration guideline for sketching your new fall fashions and how to sew a book cover just in time for back to school.

Crafty Princess Diaries
Links are still hot! And so it metal clay. Tammy offers some ideas for making metal clay links and then incorporating them into an easy earring design.

Layers Upon Layers
Come meet Angela Mabray, the Crafty Goat, as she shares her recyled art inspirations!

The Impatient Blogger
The Impatient Crafter Margot Potter has a special guest in her new craftertaining video sampling! Jenny Harada comes to the little school house to share how to make your very own fuzzy monster!

Simply because I love the "rock"

Check out this project over at http://www.cutoutandkeep.net//projects/rock_buddy
and
I just learned what a hoodoo is because of a cool comment left-you have to check these out!
These are from a photographer named Barnchaser
http://entertainment.webshots.com/photo/2712505190030894601LEtjzi
I think I am going to do this in my back yard, I have tons of rock from when I broke down a rock wall. Don't believe me??
Here is the lovely wall before:
Here is the other side about half way through digging up the dirt (done by me):
Here is the wall about half way down and yes that's the tools I used a small pick and hammer, very zen!
I then built up some upper body strength and graduated to the sledge hammer. It was really ironic one day when Peter Gabriel's song "Sledgehammer" came on the radio while I was working, I totally giggled. And yes those are safety glasses, little chips of rock were flying all over the place!

I have to say it was very cathartic and satisfying. Everyone should break a wall down. Be sure to put it on your "to-do" list!

So anyway there is the proof that I have a ton of rocks and I will be re-purposing these babies into some hoodoos soon! And maybe I will draw eyes on them........

How to build a shelf-Hu?

OK so normally (hu me using the word "normal") talk about irony, I would have some cute craft I made here but today's project is a bit more on the practical side. It is important to have good storage for your craft supplies so time must be taken to organize sometimes. I hope you like it anyway, maybe you will give it a shot????

Back to today's tutorial (3 "T's) good one. Always a fan of the alliteration.

How to build shelves with freecycled wood specifically to hold freecycled copy paper boxes.

1. Roughly lay out what you have to work with, always good when working with freecycled stuff.
2. Measure the boxes you want to put on the shelves.
Note: I should also mention here that you want to measure the space where the shelves will be going so you don't build them too big. In this case they are going in Superfly and under a window so I had a maximum height measurement to consider.

3. Cut side panels down to height measurement and screw in lateral boards at designated intervals for maximum number of shelves to accommodate the boxes you are storing on the shelves.

4. Screw on a backing support so that the shelves can't sway sideways. I don't remember the name of this structural property but it has something to do with x,y,x axis stuff.
5. Place shelf in it's location and fill.
Just in case you were wondering- I get my copy paper boxes from my local shop, they generally order paper at the beginning of the month and have a huge stash that they are more than willing to give away. I do find the more standardized you can make your storage the more efficient it is.

Crafty Blogger links and a "swimmingly" good time at Church of Craft

Here is my favorite project that was being worked on at yesterday's Church of Craft meeting-a knitted mermaid outfit for a Barbie! The COC attendee (which shamefully I can't remember but was a very unique and pretty name) was drafting the pattern as she designed it. We both commiserated that when when we were kids neither of us had Barbies but had the "Sunshine Family" We both revelled in the fact that now we have both rectified that as adults.

This is why traffic in Los Angeles can be a nightmare. Can you believe this????If I didn't take the picture myself I probably wouldn't.
This is the view when you are not the one in the traffic, you thank the freeway gods that it isn't you when you look across the median at all the poor souls stuck moving at snail's pace when it isn't your turn to be in it. By the way that is my Etsy.com sticker that says "My other car is a sewing machine" I love it!
But this is why we do live here. Beautiful sunsets with a beautiful skyline. Incidentally, it is illegal to now drive and talk on a cell phone but no one said anything about taking pictures while driving!

About Family Crafts
There comes a time every summer when our thoughts must turn to going back to school... You can make it fun!

About.com Cross Stitch
Get your creative juices flowing with these ideas for Cross Stitch Projects.

Aileen's Musings
Come take a peek at MMCA Marketplace's Grand Opening! Peruse the talented artists' shops to see some fresh, new and exciting works of art! You will find jewelry, collage, purses, hand turned bowls, prints, fabric collages, assemblage and more. Also find out more details and enter Aileen's 2fer Blog Giveaway!

Art Bead Scene
Have you got something to say? Enter the Art Bead Scene's monthly creativity challenge to win some awesome prizes!

Crafty Princess Diaries
That little voice inside of you has something important to say. Listen to it no matter if it has to do with crafts or your life in general.

Layers Upon Layers
Would you like to stretch your collage muscles to include more abstracts?

Craftside-A behind-the-scenes peek at a crafty world
The paper and fabric are flying this week with origami napkin rings, T-shirt jewelry, inchies set in hot wax, free envelope and Japanese paper downloads and even a recipe thrown in for good taste!

The Impatient Blogger
The Impatient Crafter Presents: Summer CHA Fabulous Crafty Rockstars! Join Margot as she schmoozes with some of the craft industries biggest celebs in this fun YouTube video!

Sweater Surgery Flower with a little Help from Sherri Haab's New Book- Felt, Fabric, and Fiber Jewelry

Hot off the press:Felt, Fabric, and Fiber Jewelry: 20 Beautiful Projects to Bead, Stitch, Knot, and Braid

From Amazon:
More exciting ideas from crafting diva Sherri Haab
* Twenty gallery-quality jewelry projects--necklaces, earrings, more
* Simple introductions to fabric crafting
* Top-selling author!

Sherri Haab knows jewelry. Sherri Haab knows fiber and fabric. Sherri Haab knows crafting. Is there anything Sherri Haab can’t do? Frankly, no. She’s the Superwoman of crafting books! Now she shows her readers how to make stunning gallery-quality jewelry by combining fabric, ribbon, thread, cord, beads, buttons, and other materials with a variety of needlework techniques, all engagingly explained. Each chapter of Felt, Fabric, and Fiber Jewelry spotlights a different technique: embroidery, felting, crochet, tatting, braiding, and macramé. Then there are stunning necklaces, pendants, bracelets, and rings to make, all in a fresh, appealing style.

Twenty projects mean great looks and great gifts for any occasion. We can’t all be Sherri Haab...but we can do crafts the way Sherri Haab does them!

About the Author
Sherri Haab is the best-selling author of The Art of Metal Clay and many other crafting titles. She has more than 2.5 million books in print worldwide. She lives in Springville, Utah.

From me:
I "heart" Sherri! I have met her at trade shows and have several of her books, let's just say I am slightly short of being a stalker of her designs.

So when I got a copy of Felt, Fabric, and Fiber Jewelry: 20 Beautiful Projects to Bead, Stitch, Knot, and Braid I savored it emidiatly!

And of course I had to make something from it right away and I decided to start with the cover piece. But I don't craft directly from books I like to take my inspiration from them and put my spin on it. And being that this is Sweater Surgery, well you know. These flowers are made from wool felt in the book so it really isn't so much of a stretch to make them out of recycled felted wool sweaters.

I used the included patterns from the book.
And I followed the directions and stiffened them up a bit with-what else Stiffy! from Plaid. I also let them dry over a tiny bowls I covered with foil.
I popped a tiny black pom pom in the middle and glued the flower on a ring blank. I really like biiiiigggg rings right now!
I can't wait to make more projects from this book-they all are so good! Thanks Sherri!

Cat-tastic Crafty Blogger links

So, this is Daisy, the neighbor's cat who loves to hang out in our yard, now under the Airstream, Superfly, a lot! And she also loves hangin' out on the Miata. This is the view outside of my window closest to my desk. I could hear her bell on her collar jingling away as she did her morning scratch-a-thon. So I snapped a few pictures. They aren't the best because I am shooting through a screen.

About Family Crafts

Gather together all the kids you know and follow these directions to show them how to make a variety of fancy craft foam visors with little effort and a few common craft supplies.

About.com Cross Stitch
Practice your stitching skills with these patterns that use basic stitches.

Aileen's Musings
Creativity comes in all forms. Follow Aileen's sons Olympic adventure as he sets off for China! He'll be performing with the Olympic Orchestra as one of 2008 musicians from all over the world. Aileen is challenging you to create an American Cheer for our Olympic athletes and post it!

Crafty Princess Diaries
Have a book idea or even a few book ideas but not sure what to do next? Which one do you devote your time to? The Crafty Princess has some answers or actually some questions for you.

Layers Upon Layers
An artist profile with the fabulous June Campbell, one of the most generous women in the mixed media art world!

Craftside-A behind-the-scenes peek at a crafty world
Tons of free patterns and how-to's for mixed-media and beaded jewelry, a crochet sweater, a doll name tag, a vinyl tote bag and a chance to win a free copy of any Quayside Publishing Group Book, Crafter's choice!

The Impatient Blogger
Margot wants to know what you think. Please take a moment to answer her crafty survey.