Saturday, September 19, 2009

Pink Beauty and 2 Little Pumpkins



Been busy felting and knitting. I try to make at least 1 scarf, a pair of booties and a beanie. Not always that easy but hey sometimes I can even sneak in a pair of earrings, a pincushion or some other new items. Here a sneak peak of what I made this week. Taking them to the barn tomorrow, if they don't sell tomorrow they will be in my Etsy shop so come and visit my PurplePlatypus shop on Etsy and have a look!

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Bonnets, spinning and some sassy booties





I've been making some bonnets lately, a bear one (which I sold on Etsy yesterday! Yeahhhh! Thank you to my customer.) and then I made this pink one but of course .... I had to change the pattern around ... turned out bigger ears and a ruffled edging compared to the bear one I had made. So now I don't think it looks like a bear, more like a cat I would say. Anyway, it still looks cute which is the important part. Hopefully somebody else thinks that way and will buy it.

My spinning adventure hasn't gotten much further then trying it out at the meeting the other day. I just haven't had the time to sit down, relax and try to spin some yarn. But ... I've promised myself during the coming winter months I will manage to spin some yarn, for now I just keep thinking about it, the doing part will have to wait a bit.

So how about those sassy baby booties! I again managed to change a pattern which means they turned out totally different looking then what the original pattern looked like. Good thing I remembered to write down what I changed on the pattern since I had to make a matching pair I figured I better do so.

I also finished felting another scarf. A pink one with some wild alpaca handspun yarns (not by me! ... yet!). I need to work on it some more before I take some pictures of it.

And ... I promised Sofie we'd start painting her room. I showed her how to patch up all the holes in the walls from where her posters used to be so she went to work earlier this evening and patched them up. We're waiting for it to dry so tomorrow I will show her how to sand it all down. She's already taped off the doors and windows in her reading nook which will be the first part that gets painted. She changed her colors from the original wanting to have Twilight colors (black and red!!!! Vampire style! Yikes!!!!!) to a totally different color scheme now purple, mint green and white .... sooooooo much prettier I must say.

Time to start felting some more so off I go.

Monday, September 14, 2009

Scarfs and more Felt Scarfs




Ok, I finally got some of my scarfs on Etsy. Everybody keeps asking me why I've never put any of my scarfs on Etsy so I finally did it. I think it's mostly because my Etsy shop is just ... well sitting there ... haven't sold but 1 thing that way. I have to keep adding things and taking them off a week later due to the fact I sold that item at the barn! But, I figured heck ... I'll give it a try since my scarfs are a bit more pricier then all the other stuff I make and sell (except for my figurines which I haven't had the chance to make more of lately), we'll see what happens having them in my Etsy shop. I guess I just need to get into gear and start advertising my Etsy shop especially with the barn closing down during the winter months I'll have more time to figure out how to get myself noticed more to the on-line world. Only problem is that everytime I find myself on-line I keep thinking of how much time goes into that and how much more felt I could create if I wasn't sitting in front of this darn computer!

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Ready for a new adventure



Yep, I'm finally going to do it! I'm going to learn how to spin! Might not be a very exciting thing for a lot of folks but for me it's a big deal. Ever since I was little (6 to be precise!) I wanted to learn how to spin my own yarn. Mostly because I was never happy with the plain old yarn anybody and everybody could purchase at the local yarn shops. So, it's only taking me half a century to finally being able to learn to spin yarn. While living in Alice Springs I had the opportunity to purchase an Ashford traditional wheel for a very good price. Since it included 2 huge bags of fleece (and I mean garbage size bags!) I couldn't go wrong buying it, heck I could always felt with all that fleece. I did use about 1/4 of the fleece for felting and left the rest of it behind at Central Craft when I moved back to the US. I even purchased the maintenance kit for the wheel, I figured I would need it if and when I learned how to use the darn thing. So time when by and I even went as far as putting my name on the waiting list for the next "learning how to spin" session at Central Craft. But ... it didn't happen. Either the class was cancelled and/or I had something else planned so my poor wheel sat there collecting dust.

But, tomorrow is the big day. Our neighbor came and asked me if I wanted to join her tomorrow at the Fiber Art Guild get together here in Warrenton. A couple of weeks ago we had a garage sale, that's when Jean (our neighbor) came by and we started to chat about arts and crafts and I'll be darn, I found out she's a spinner, besides a whole bunch of other things she's really good at. And the best thing is .... she has the exact same wheel as I do so it should be pretty easy for me to follow along as she will be teaching me how to spin. Heck, I already have tons of fleece (the kind I use for felting) and other fiber I can later incorporate into making some wacky yarns. Hopefully I won't get too bored having to learn to spin some good old fashion yarn before I can get into spinning up some crazy yarns. The kind with all kinds of things sticking out. See, once I get the spinning my own yarn down I can move on to yet another thing I've always wanted to learn how to do ... dyeing my own yarn. I've already experimented with dyeing my fleece in the microwave using food coloring as well as the kool aid powder but I want to get into using plants to do it. Of course my husband is afraid my next request will be having to move back into the country so I can finally have my own angora goats and rabbits, besides an Alpaca, a llama and some sheep. He really wouldn't mind since that's just a great excuse then for him to be able to get his manly tractor, snow plow (that's if we end up staying in Virginia of course) and we might just have to get another Australian Sheppard or Border Collie to keep that herd under control. And oh yes, how could I forget .... Sofie could finally have her horse .... a Curly hair horse of all things! Wonder why .... well in case you don't know, that's the only kind of horse hair that you can felt with!

Saturday, September 5, 2009

Cleaning out my closets!




Well I must say "thank you!" to all my customers from the market. Business is rolling along. Only problem with that is ... I have to make more stuff! Trust me, I really don't consider that a problem, I don't mind having to make more stuff, the only issue I face is finding the time to make them. Having a day job (32 hour work week outside of the house) and trying to run your own business is not the easiest thing to do. The most difficult part being coordinating getting all the rest of my to-do list done. So, these past 2 weeks I've been digging through my boxes of things I've made this past year or so and either wasn't happy with them or didn't completely finish it yet. I've re-vamped some of them such as the little bag in the picture. You will never believe what it started out as, I must say I like the way it's turned out now compared to what it was before. My 13 yr old begged me not to tell what it started out as ... I will say ... it was 1 of 2 pieces! Can you guess?

Anyway, the little wallet was a bit dull looking so I ended up embroidering it, looks much livelier now. I also finally made up the market bag from the material I've been hauling to and from the Sunday Market where I've been needle felting for weeks filling up the flower designs of a fake suede black fabric. It turned out really pretty, don't have a picture of it yet. Will try to take a picture on Monday to post it.

I've also been busy felting some lovely smelling soaps.

As you can see more new stuff for my stall at the barn so come and check it out. If you live to far away check my Etsy shop in the next couple of days where I will be posting these new items.