Hand to Hand

Everyone check this out!  I'll be there with lots of cool things for you to buy and teaching people how to knit! No experience necessary.  Mark your calendars!

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China Buttons

This week I had 5 exams.  Five.  That seems cruel.  After all that studying I was ready for some serious crafting.

I have been playing around with the buttons for a while now, but I'm still having problems drilling holes in them.  Even keeping the drill bit wet and using oil to increase the viscosity it's still a lengthy process.  Each hole can take up to 15 minutes to drill and sometimes you get to minute 14 and the button cracks in half.  So instead of going through all of this I have found button shanks.

I ordered them yesterday so we'll see how they turn out.  In the mean time I am busy preparing buttons to put on to the button shanks.

This is the plate I started with.  I use tile cutters to get smaller pieces.

As nice as the tile cutters are, it's pretty hit or miss. Certain pieces of china crumble more than others.  Luckily this plate is very thick and almost seemed like it wanted to be cut into a square.

The finished products.  I love the way the glaze created a border when I smoothed out the edges.  

In other news I got a haircut.  For a while now I have had what I assume can only be called a mullet.  I hadn't realized it had gotten so long.

So long in fact that I deemed it necessary to put it into a ponytail and then cut it.  I think it would make a wonderful Christmas ornament.  Or a terrifying Christmas ornament.  This is one for the scrapbook folks.

Ya'll have to keep me in check, I can't see back there!

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Tuna

Day 10: Use water as your inspiration today.

You can only make two things with water: ice and steam.

So instead I used this as an excuse to add yet another pet to our home.  Meet Tuna, full name Tuna F. Stick.  The F of course stands for Fish.

 He is a betta with a bit of an attitude problem.  

Tuna is the second try at owning a betta in the past week.  Apparently if it's too cold in the house, the fish's water will be too. Unfortunately, he died before he could be named.  We gave him back to the sea in a proper burial ceremony.  (We flushed the dude)

But now it's smooth sailing with Tuna and I.  He's got a tank heater, bamboo and all the fish food he could imagine. Not to mention I kept the receipt so if this one bites the bullet I'm getting my money back.

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The Crane Train

Last weeks phonebook origami has inspired a marathon of paper folding.  In other words, I have gone crane crazy folks.  My friend Tristin is an origami genius and was so kind to share some of her knowledge with me.  It resulted in this:

A crane mobile!

By the end of the evening we had made two of these beauties with about 10 cranes each.  They are currently hanging out by the window catching what little light is coming through on this cold, rainy day.

First time making origami? Try this site.  They have both a diagram and animated instructions which makes it much easier to see what is actually happening.  All you need is a square sheet of paper to make a crane, any size will do.  If you're going to get really fancy they have origami specific paper.  This is one of my favorite papers in my stash.

Is that correct origami lingo? Papers? Stash? Or are those terms just reserved for pot heads?

Have you ever made a crane?  What about the U.S.S Enterprise? Well if you have, I want to see it.  If it's your first time, I want to see it.  Show me the origami people!

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You Built What?

I've had a couple of people ask me why I chose the name I Built that for this blog.  It comes from an old joke that Amanda told me when we first met.  It goes like this.

A man is backpacking through Ireland.  He walks into a small town and decides to have a drink and rest his feet for a bit.  He goes into a bar and orders a whiskey.  As he is sipping his drink the bartender leans over and asks him "Hey did you walk into town on the that little brick road?".  The backpacker replies "Yes, I did".  The bartender says "I built that road. But do they call me Shannon the road builder? No."  Then the bartender asks the backpacker "did you walk across the stone bridge on your way into town?" "Yes I did" the backpacker says. The bartender then says "I built that bridge.  But do they call me Shannon the bridge builder? No."  Then the bartender asks the backpacker "did you see the big stone house next to the bar? I built that house but do they call me shannon the housebuilder? No. But you fuck one sheep..."

Ever since then it has been a running joke between us. "I built that" can apply to a variety of things.  Such as a particularly stinky fart, getting an A on a paper or making dinner.  But more often then not it applies to a handmade item that we are particularly proud of.  I wanted that to be the theme of this blog, something that I was proud of.  So far so good.

One thing that I am particularly proud of is this cowl.  It's the first thing I've ever sold.  It's made especially for a very special friend who lives in the very cold place of DC.

It has two of the first buttons I made.

Here are the other 4 in the set that I will be putting up on Etsy sometime this week.

These buttons are made from pieces of broken china that have had the Dremel taken to them to soften the edges a bit.  I'm hoping because these are"upcycled" and thats all the rage these days people will want to pay exorbitant amounts of money for these things.  But really, I think these buttons are awesome and would look great on some convertible mittens.

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Phonebook Origami

It seems like we get the phonebook every two months at my house.  For something so outdated why in the world am I receiving one all the time?  I never know what to do with the thing.  I'm sure as hell not going to look up a phone number in it when it would take me less time to look up 6 phone numbers on the internet. I just received another phonebook on my front porch and felt like I had to do something other than recycle it.

Day 8.  Take an old book and transform it into something new.  

How convenient that I received yet another phonebook on the same day.  So I did something I've never tried before.  Origami.  Folding paper should be pretty easy right?  If you will remember my last experience with paper didn't go very well so I was determined to make something remotely interesting this time.

My first try was this little paper box.  You can't open it once it's closed so I have no idea why anyone would actually make this box.

Because the phone book pages aren't square I cut each sheet into a 6 x 6 square and followed these instructions.

6 of these later and I started to get the hang of it.

Somehow they fit together like this, don't ask me how because I can't tell you.

Finished product!

I made some other cool stuff too.  Like this ninja star. 

This was of course after I had finished slicing up some bitches tryna steal my man.

So what have we learned today folks? The next time you receive this devastatingly huge waste of paper on your doorstep make something else completely useless out of it.  At least it will be cuter than a phonebook.

Also opt out of getting your phonebook completely and then you won't have a million tiny paper boxes floating around your house and you can save a tree or two.  If that's what you're in to.

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Mr. Busy

As a kid I probably spent a little too much time reading.  I can remember one of the first book series I actually read was BOB books.  Pretty typical "learn to read" stuff.  My world was turned around when someone got me a set of Mr. Men books.  These books are still hilarious to me.  Reading Mr. Rude, who has a French accent I might add, gets me rolling every time.

Lately I have been seeing lots of lame printed tee's with Mr. Grumpy or Little Miss Perfect on them.  There is nothing lamer than t shirts with things screen printed on them, yet it seems everyone loves these things.  I'm talking about the camouflage ones with the phrase "Hah! You Can't See Me Now!" on them.  Or a 4 year old wearing a pink t shirt that says "I <3 My BFF!!"  Somehow a whole generation of people have become so lazy that expressing themselves with their clothing style is out of the question.  Now we just print "clever" statements on t shirts and consider it self expression. Whatever happened to painting your finger nails black and putting on too much eyeliner?

Which brings me to today's project.  The prompt read: make a stencil and use it in your work today.  Having never made a stencil, seeing that I am neither an anarchist or a seventeen year old boy, this was all new to me and took quite a great deal of internet perusing.

Here are all the supplies that I used in the process.

An exacto knife, some plastic dividers and spray paint.

I found a new photo editing software, gimp.  It has features similar to Photoshop and it's free!  I used it to up the contrast on this image and make it black and white.
 From this:
 to this: 


After spending way too long doing that, I printed it out and stapled it on to a plastic divider.  I used an exacto knife to cut out the outline. It took me two times to get it right because I got a little knife happy.  It's harder than it looks! Those anarchist kids have some steady hands.

When I finally got it right it looked like this.

I tried it out on a piece of cardboard before abusing the sidewalks of Glenwood.

He is so busy.

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