Be my BFF

This is a special Wednesday.  I am about to reveal a new layer of geekery and the ultimate mediocre craft.

Before cross-stitching, embroidery floss played a special role in many many hours of my adolescence, which was mostly spent alone.

When I wasn’t alone, I was torturing my sister, teaching her the wrong meanings for words or convincing her she was adopted.  Alternatively, I was with my only high-school friend, painting my nails a different colour each week.  Hence the irony of the craft I am about to discuss.

I spent hours pouring over new designs and colour combinations and worked my way up from six to twelve strands of floss.  Then, when my latest masterpiece was complete, I showed my sister (who had usually forgiven/forgotten my evil ways by that time) and put it away in an old pencil case.

If you haven’t guessed by now, I was making, hilariously, friendship bracelets.

That’s right.  After giving one to my sister and one to my only high-school friend, I didn’t really have any reason to make them anymore.  In fact, I didn’t even wear them myself because I was afraid someone would ask who gave it to me.  Alone in their box, they sat, dozens of them, sorted by size.

And when I moved 4000 km away this summer, my mother phoned to see if I wanted them.

YES!  I said, and send along all that other crappy craft stuff!  Little did I know I would be blogging about all that s**t. (Plus I have friends (plural) now.. maybe they want to wear a friendship bracelet to work?)

Want to learn to make one?  I’ll give you the quick version.  Here’s a half finished one I found in my box of abandoned dreams:

That one’s a bit complicated for a beginner, which, to your reputation’s credit, I will assume you are.

For a simple one, pick three colours.  Embroidery floss comes with six strands wound together.  For each colour, cut one piece of floss (all six strands).  The length of the piece should be from your wrist to your shoulder and back again.  Make them a bit extra long, just in case.  Take all three strands, find the middle and fold them in half, put the halfway point over your finger and tie them in a double or triple knot around your finger so that you have a loop at the top. (You can take the loop off of your finger now…)

Safety pin the knot to your jeans, or to a cushion if you are feeling precious.  Decide how you want the strands to pattern.  For example, this is my first-ever bracelet:

It goes pink, blue, yellow.  Spread the strands out so that they go “pink blue yellow pink blue yellow” or whatever.  Take the first strand on the left and cross it over the second strand on the left while pulling a bit of the first strand out to make a 4 shape:

See the 4?  Then tie a knot by putting the first strand under the still-vertical thread and through the triangle shape you just created:

Pull tight, keeping the first strand visible.  You shouldn’t see any of the second strand’s colour showing through.  Do another knot, exactly the same, with the first strand on the second strand.  Then take the first strand, which should end up on the right side of the second strand, and do the same thing on the third strand.  Continue till the first strand has made double knots on all five other strands, then go back to the left.  The second strand has now become the first strand on the left, so do the same thing with that one, ending by doing two knots on the former first strand.  You should get diagonal lines of colour emerging, like you see on my first ever bracelet, above.

When you only have a few inches of thread left, or you think it is long enough to go comfortably around your wrist, weave the last few inches of the threads into two braids and tie the end of each braid.  By tying the braids to the loop, you should be able to wear your bracelet everyday for the rest of your life.

Want to be my friend?  I’ll make you a bracelet.

Let me know.

 

Creative, or just creating?

Let’s begin with something my mother frequently tells me:

Just because a person loves the theatre, that does not mean they have to be an actor.  A play needs an audience.  Maybe you were born to be an appreciator of the arts, rather than a participant.

I’m paraphrasing, but you get the idea.

Over the years I have started (and sometimes finished) numerous “crafty” projects, from spool knitting to a hand sewn quilt, scrapbooking and paper beading, friendship bracelets to sock monkeys, embroidery, cross-stitching and baking. I am truly a fountain of enthusiasm for quasi-artistic endeavours.  An outdated misshapen second-rate mall, barely-even-any-pennies kind of fountain, but a fountain nonetheless, industriously churning out a pool of mediocre projects.

It never really occurred to me that this mediocre crafting was a way of life until today, when my friend N and I sat down to embroider some vegetables.  Yes, vegetables.  My sister requested an embroidered beet for Christmas using a pattern she found on etsy. I didn’t have any embroidery experience at the time of the request, but I obliged, and the beet found its way to my sister’s wall.

Now that I have the pattern, there is really no reason to stop embroidering vegetables.  So, seeking a quick craft for a Sunday afternoon, N chose an onion and I chose an elongated red vegetable I am going to call a tomato.  Let’s pretend my husband didn’t think it was an eggplant when it was all done.

In my limited vegetable embroidery experience, this craft is really brainless.  I’m sure other patterns require more complex skills, but this particular task is pretty low on the craft-meltdown Richter scale.  Pretty much a zero–  probably because the entire project is nearly free, meaning mistakes are also nearly free.

Here is what you need:

• the pattern (the one above is $4 in PDF format, meaning endless vegetable embroideries!)
• some cotton fabric (about 20 cm x 20 cm is all you need)
• some embroidery floss
• a needle
• scissors
• tape
• fabric pencil
• embroidery hoop (optional)

I had most of these items at my house already.. the fabric and fabric pencil were left over from an abandoned sewing project, the embroidery from ongoing cross-stitching projects, and the embroidery hoop from my first forays into the cross-stitching world.

Here’s what you do:

First, you print out the pattern and tape the pattern to the window.  Cut out a square of fabric if your fabric is too big.  Don’t measure it, just make sure it is quite a bit bigger than the vegetable you want to sew.

Hold the fabric against the pattern on the window and trace the vegetable onto the fabric using a fabric pencil.  I think another kind of pencil would do, but I had a fabric one, so that is what I used.  Here you can see why lumpy or thick material is inappropriate for this project.  I tried to trace onto thick lumpy material during my early beet experiences, but reverted to cotton.

Put the fabric in the hoop, if you have one.  Sew over the lines on the fabric using three strands of embroidery floss. We used a backstitch.

Change colours for the stem.  And the face.

Voila!  Our result, as N said, is “only moderately deformed” vegetables.