*heather gets up and shakes bits of yarn off her lap, makes a big yawn and stretches*
wow i haven’t blogged in a while! it was a nice break from being online. i think i was blogging a little too much, and i must have run out of things to say. well… it was refreshing getting away.
but now i want to dust off this old blog and get her back up again. just needs a lick of paint and a little oil- but she’ll be good as new soon.
If you’re wondering why it’s so quiet here lately, I’ve been spending some time at WhipUp.net as a craft agony-aunt with a new column Whiptips! Please send in your questions!
Whiptips is an crafts advice column for readers to ask questions or offer advice by leaving your comments. View the Whiptips archive here. You can submit questions, to whiptips@gmail.com. Please include photos with your questions! And a link to your own blog
Writing for Whipup, which is a big group craft blog has been amazing. Behind the scenes, each writer puts alot of thought into every post. It’s a great resource. It has some of the most prolific crafters. I wish I was more prolific myself!
I suppose I need to do a little less surfing and a little more making!
this is for the aqua brown swap…
Originally uploaded by feather.
it’s hard to find brown and aqua things, and i’m worried my swap partner does not like brown… so i am getting some brown things that you can’t blame for being brown… and i’m painting some things brown and aqua. but i have to say i am finding it hard to mix aqua… i used cobalt blue and yellow and white. but it’s like the colors are bright enough.
i also painted the wrapping paper with branches and leaves. you can’t blame branches for being brown 
i was showing my mom some things i had made, and she saw the amigurumi monkey, mori. she loved it most of all and said to me: “just make monkeys!”
i wish i could just do one thing, but it seems i always have to be trying to do something i don’t know how to do. i like to learn new things. i forget that by doing something over and over, you can also learn new things. i lost the discipline i learned from my sculpture teacher. when i’d show him something i made, which usually involved some kind of serendipity or happy accident, he’d hand it back and say: “make 20 more”.
dig deep!
so i started to make some more monkeys. and i’m starting to come up with a body pattern that i like. it’s like the bunny… it has a butt, and the chest comes in leaving space for arms, and the upper back curves like an old teddy bear.
but i have to get some faces on these asap.
the “finish what i started” meme was inevitable! in may, i saw green bean baby post about the ‘unfinished project‘ and now i see via whip-up the “finish what i have” meme at turkey feathers.
in the spirit of these efforts, i am going to try and document all of my unfinished projects. how scary is that going to be? oh no, i don’t think i can. it will take days just to do that! anyway, i will try and set some goals for this week, and post up some things i hope to finish. like this doll.
the nina doll was a good pattern to learn from. but the doll i want to make is jointed like my sister’s old raggedy ann, and has a butt like my old cloth doll- so she can sit up on her own. and when she sits on the edge of a table, her legs dangle down.
so i started making paper patterns, and made one doll. she needs hair and a face tho, it looks kinda sad without one! what i really need to do is keep on trying to make a pattern that works. this one was a pain! i ended up stuffing her through the top of her head. i whip stitched it closed, but i’ll have to rip that before i can give her hair.
you really want to stuff through the back, but i was afraid of the weighted pellets coming out, so i *thought* i’d stuff her through the neck. that is a bad idea! it looks like a big part of developing the pattern is considering how easily it can be put together and the right order in which to do each step.
i loved the idea of simple sparrow’s “use what you have” month for april. great crafting blog meme!
however, in my case i didn’t “have” everything i needed in order to use what i have. i mean, i had to go buy more stuffing to fill stuffies… ok, i understand the idea that i should be ripping up rags or something… but i don’t even have that. when i arrived i didn’t have much is a stash or materials to play with. but i’m building one.
instead, i’m making May my “finish what i started month”. sometime in january, i told my boyfriend not to let me start one before i finished the other. this put him in an awkward position, because nothing was going to stop me from starting about 50, and leaving some poor biddies unjointed, unclothed, unstuffed.
mostly what stops me from finishing is a bloated ideal of perfection. when, halfway through, something is looking wrong and it’s not possible to undo it, i take a break, a two steps forward one step back kind of movement.
it would be one thing to simply document all the projects i haven’t finished. first of all, my little workspace is in serious need of organizing. this is what it looked like in March. some of these projects are completed! the purple fabric is now bedroom curtains. the plants are potted. that’s good!
but there is a bunch more fabric now, from my first swaps. i’ve just washed it yesterday, and before i dig into it, i really should finish up some other things.
i wanted to make a little friend for nina… with brown hair. but i made a mistake. the original pattern uses a yarn called “wool cute” sold apparently only in Hobbyra-Hoobyre stores. it’s a little expensive, but it’s very fine, and - now i can appreciate- it is very straight.
So I bought another kind of fine wool yarn, called Ski Yarn, which is great as it comes in alot of colours. What is not great is how wavy it is! I love my own wavy hair, but I don’t think it suits this dolll. It does not make for a nice fringe (bangs). And I was afraid of bald spots so I actually ironed her hair before I put it on! It was painstaking. This photo shows the left side which is part-way ironed and the right which is unironed.
Let this be a note to self: use the right stuff for the right job.
Let this be another note to self: If you have to iron yarn, please do it when it is still wrapped around the cardboard before cutting! It would have been alot easier!
She’ll be finished soon…
These are pictures from the nina chan book. Isbn4072498866
She seems obviously inspired by Madeleine. Here she is at a metro station!
The clothes are sweet. And some are quite Japanese. Of course Nina needs slippers!
You can see I’ve started scribbling into the book! Terrible, I am! I will be making notes over in my japanese notebook, since it seems more appropriate. I’ll be learning Japanese as I make her.
I spoke with the organisers of Concert on the Rock today, got info on set-up and installation for the show in June. This is where my friends, Danny and Tom, and I will ply our wares this summer. OK, it’s only a short event, but we’re really excited about it.
Of what I’ve seen, this website has a good checklist of things to follow about preparing for a show.
The space has a tent over it, and a table that is 1.5 x 5 feet. Sounds narrow. But we can bring other tables and things to display with. Tom is well-experienced in boot sales (fleamarkets) and I grew up in an antique show. So we can plan some display options.
Danny and I met and looked at things we are making. She’s making collaged postcards, and was considering selling her original paintings… but I’m not sure it’s such a great idea. It’s hard to know how to price things. I made two kitties, thinking that ‘yeah, i’ll amigurumi circles around this’… but they take alot longer than I expected. I need to be able to price things reasonably, since it’s not a craft-fair, it’s a market at a weekend long concert. People aren’t there to shop! But they will probably make impulse purchases when they see all of the lovely unique goodies.
The same site linked above has basic info about pricing your work.
Cost and value based pricing
Cost-based pricing means working out the exact cost of making something and adding a proportion or ‘mark-up’ to that. It is important for high-volume production and where buying decisions are made mostly on price.
Value-based pricing means setting prices according to the value of the product to the customer. It is useful in particular for low-volume, high value products, and where decisions are made on a number of factors, of which price is only one.
Posie gets cosy generously offers advice to would-be store sellers. I’m not capable of shop-selling yet, but it’s a great article to read, in terms of developing your work for sale.
I read somewhere a blog post about not pricing work too cheap, since it degrades the market, but I don’t know where this article is! Bah, in my delicious bookmarks hiding somewhere probably.
This isn’t it exactly, but this post from the SuperNaturale forum is helpful. The poster, Alisha, explains that craftspeople starting out (first couple of years), are buying materials at full cost. The wholesale prie includes “supplies, overhead (lighting, rent, etc), PAYING YOURSELF, and adding a profit cushion that goes back into growing your business. Your retail markup pays for shows, marketing and sales, and your time spent trying to retail your work (separate from creating the pieces)”
It’s complex, but a business afterall. I have ben keeping my receipts, but not very good notes.
I’m glad I’m starting small.
Introducing Nina, my learning Japanese partner!
I fully believe in the contructivist learning theory that we learn best by doing, and making things. So, I’m going to attempt to ‘read’ a Japanese craft book, and learn the words in the book, as I make something.
When I first signed up to Japanese class, my sensei 先生 (teacher) asked me what my goals were. I listed:
Since then, she has cleverly convinced me to go for the JLPT level 1 Japanese test. I still want to know how to read Japanese patterns. Now that i have some basics under my belt, I’ve asked her if we can bring in some crafts into my lessons.
I’ve chosen to make Nina-chan Ninaちゃん. Nina-chan will help me learn Japanese!
Ninaちゃん (Nina-chan) is a cloth doll, and the book comes with patterns for different clothes. She is 35cm (Almost 14cm). The book and pattern is sold by the very chic-chic Hobbyra-Hobbyre, which tends to be a bit expensive in the fabric department. The kit to make her is *gulp* 25,000円 which is €135 or $211USD. Needless to say, I won’t be using the kit.
Ninaちゃん has yarn hair, which I adore. Oh so lovely. I had a hadmade cloth doll when I was little, with brown yarn hair. She was very nice. She was big though, and Ninaちゃん is small.
She rather reminds me of the stuffed Madeliene dolls.
Warning: Looking for the “Nina doll” in English turns up some unsavoury results, but looking for Ninaちゃん brings up some blogs (ブログ is blog) of Japanese crafters who have used the pattern. ちゃん sounds like’ chan’, and is a diminutive to make a name cute. Like Kittyちゃん for Hello-Kitty.
Hapimama made her Ninaちゃん from a kit and is very pleased. She does say that the clothes are very small and thus, hard to make. ” お人形の服って、小さすぎてタイヘン！”
wonderBABY* made a few of them. So they have friends. A commenter on her site remarked on the nice color of the hair.
I’ll get some pics from the book when it’s light out tomorrow!
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