01 January 2016

And Hello To 2016

I can guarantee the next check I write I will write 2015 for the date.

Here we are sixteen years into the 21st century! Blows the mind, it does!

One of the good things to come about for we 21st century dwellers is YouTube. I have John Cougar Mellencamp up as loud as I can get those rinky dink speakers to go. Listening to songs I haven't heard in a very long time! I watched/listened to a Bee Gees concert before John Fogerty sang for an hour and a half. 
At any rate, time's a ticking! 
I will have to convince this yellow cat sitting on my mouse to leave before I can upload any pictures into this post. He wasn't impressed with our photo shoot earlier. I put the snake you're going to see around his neck and tried to take his picture. I had to chase him down to retrieve my snake and I didn't get a picture of him wearing it.

Took some convincing but Tommy finally got his back end off my mouse! We'll get back to him and the snake in a bit. Right now we are going to talk about pickles.
I sent three of them off in the mail a few days ago. I seriously considered sending one of them naked but I chickened out at the last minute and put all three of them in envelopes.
If you are in the pickle swap over at AFA be forewarned if you continue you will see your pickle and if that isn't good for you cause your pickle hasn't arrived yet, you might want to close your eyes and scroll down a bit.

 This is Super Girl Pickle. I didn't know about Super Pickle when I crocheted this lovely little green girl with her big red smile and cape. Her hair is different kinds of green strings, yarn and such. I crocheted her with acrylic yarn and stuffed her with green fiber filling. Her arms and legs are crocheted green silk fabric. The pin at her throat (do pickles have throats?) is a girl scout pin.
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Her cape is satin material that was the lining of a green leather jacket. I don't know what the girl scout badge on the cape is awarded for but it has garden flowers embroidered on it. Super Girl Pickle is about a foot tall. Somewhere around there. She's headed to Sunny California.
 This is Grandpa Gherkin and Baby Dill. Baby Dill looks like a hairy growth on Grandpa's side, but he looks like a little hairy pickle when you see him in hand. Grandpa is about 5 inches tall not counting his hat or his legs. His mustache is black felt glued to chipboard, sewn to his face. He started out with hair but my grand daughter said he looked like he had a turd on his head and we started calling him poop head. On a shopping spree to Hobby Lobby I found the straw hat on clearance. 71 cents for three of them. It solved his rather embarrassing problem. He's crocheted out of cotton yarn. His arms and legs are crochet cotton thread. Baby Dill is eyelash yarn crocheted. Both are stuffed with green fiber filling.
 This is Darla Dill and her little one Baby Dill. (Yes, another Baby Dill.) Darla and Baby are both crocheted out of acrylic yarn in camo. Their arms and legs are cotton yarn braided, knotted and attached. They have mother of pearl eyes and felt mouths. Mama is about a foot tall not counting her eyelash yarn hair nor her legs. Darla is the one I seriously considered sending naked. I worried about little Dill getting lost on the journey. He is sewn to his mama but the postal system can be brutal!

 This is Pete. He's about nine inches tall. He's crocheted with acrylic yarn and embroidered with light green cotton yarn. He has lots of acrylic yarn french knots too. I like doing french knots. I'll be keeping this little fella. He already resides atop the headboard with the rest of my stuffed menagerie of elephants, rabbits, a black bear and a monster or two.
I think these two will reappear in the future with a bit more character than they possess at the moment. The biggest one is about six inches. Both are crocheted out of eyelash yarn, stuffed with green fiber fill. 
All of the pickles were done while I was away on my kidnapping.


A whole peck of pickles!

And one more pickle, along with Miss Lola whose keeping her eye on Tommy cause she doesn't trust him. That little pickle is crocheted from some ribbon yarn. It didn't start out to be a pickle. I was trying to make some horns for a fish I'd crocheted. That didn't work out quite like I had hoped so I sewed the two together and they sure look like a pickle! I gave this pickle to the cats to play with. They don't seem too interested in it as of yet, but I'm pretty sure it will move from room to room with help of a feline sooner or later.

I wish I could say I have a picture of the fish I had planned to put horns on. I don't though. Not even sure just where that pink whale/shark, not to be confused with a whale shark, is at at the moment. It didn't get any horns. Not yet anyway. That's still an idea.

I had a great time making all these pickles but I'm glad to be over that phase!
 
 This is the little felt snake Tommy just didn't appreciate at all. No pattern to make it. You draw a spiral on paper. Pin it to your two pieces of fabric and cut it out so you end up with a snake. Then you sew up the inside seam and start stuffing the little devil as you sew the outside seam closed. You can wind him around posts, handles, ect. This one is orange on the other side. He's about five inches across. His eyes are french knots. I made him while away on my kidnapping.
 I showed you all two pink bags in the last post. This is just a pouch. It's about five inches across the bottom and maybe six inches tall. I wire wrapped a quartz bead to use as a closure.
This too was made while away from home.
I've been home from my kidnapping for almost a month and I just this evening unpacked all the stuff I brought home with me. I will have to clean my bed of the bags still sitting there before I can climb between the sheets.
I did a lot of crocheting when I was away on my kidnapping. I still haven't finished Annie's blanket since I came home. I've put about a dozen stitches in it but nothing more. An hour of crocheting and I'd have it completely done!
Instead I am on a book making kick...
 I apologize for the terrible picture. This one is a cake box covered in painted newspaper. About 5x7 inches. It has notebook paper pages. Seven signatures of five sheets each. Sewn with crochet cotton in the lazy long stitch. the leather button is purely decorative.
 This one started out as a pudding box. I covered it with painted newspaper before filling it with notebook paper. Five signatures of ten pages each. It's sewn with embroidery thread in the long stitch. I'm uncertain how I accomplished those criss crosses in the stitching but I replicated it in the next pudding box book also.
 Another pudding box book. This one is covered in a drawing on a book page. The drawing is of an old barn and a windmill. The yellow packing tape along the spine says something about caution gorgeous or something like that. It too has five signatures of ten sheets of notebook paper. It has a plastic button closure with a glass bead on a string.
 This is the back side. These two books are 2.75x3.25 inches.
 Another horrible picture. This one is 4x 5.5 inches. The covers are plastic that was once a sign that went in a holder by the front of a convenience store. It was an advertisement for Red Bull Energy Drink. This particular book has copy paper pages. There are 18 signatures of five sheets each. It's sewn with waxed embroidery thread in the copic stitch. 
This sheet of plastic is white on the backside but I thought using fragments of the advertisement would be cool for a book cover. The sheet of plastic is about the thickness of a notebook cover and was about four feet long and two feet wide.

 Here's another Red Bull book. This one is 5x7 inches. It has three signatures of 10 sheets copy paper each. It's sewn with red waxed embroidery thread. The back of this one is the red color along the right hand edge of the front of the book.
 This one is made from the Red Bull sign as well. It is 4x4 inches. It has 12 signatures of 6 sheets of notebook paper. It's sewn in the copic stitch with waxed embroidery thread.
 Another box book. This one is 3.5x2.5 inches. Test strips came in the box originally. I covered the box with painted newspaper. It's sewn in two shades of red embroidery thread in the long stitch. It has six signatures of 12 sheets of notebook paper each. The closure is a clear plastic button with a glass bead on a string.
 
And to end the art part of this post we have a little notebook with copy paper pages sewn in the pamphlet stitch. The cover is wall paper, a double thickness of wall paper. I folded the edges over and hand sewed them in a running stitch to secure them. The button is plastic as is the little yellow apple bead. This one measures 2x3.5 or so. It has about 20 pages.
On top of the heap beside me are three more books ready to be sewn together. One of them has all its holes punched too. The other ones still need measuring and holes punched. There are two different kinds of binding between those three books.

My stash of paper ends is getting out of hand so some little little book making will be in the near future for sure. 
My intentions for the new year are to 

make at least three fish pictures
make at least one book a week
finish Annie's kitty book before January is finished
crochet for half an hour every day
make one mug rug every week
 
We'll see how that all works out for me!
 
Here is one of those books I have to sew together in the next couple days. This one started out life as a cake box. I covered it with the graphics from a bag of Deli Cat cat food. The v3 are metal sticky back letters. I tried three different projects with cat food bags and this is the first one successful enough to merit showing off so I figured it needed a bit of bling when I ran across a pile of those metal sticky back letters and numbers when I was putting things away earlier today. They really jazzed up the cover. You all will get to see the cat book next post.

It's 3 a.m so I probably better think about getting to bed. 
Thanks for hanging in till the end.
May the new year bring you happiness beyond your wildest dreams.

Remember...
Be good to one another!
It matters!
Peace
831



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