Month: January 2016

Just in time for Valentine’s day I decided to resurrect one of my first favorite crafts: Making sh*t with pipe cleaners. This craft project actually came from martha stewart’s tutorial for making pipe cleaner flower rights.  You can read the instructions over there or you can read my somewhat different instructions and see pictures of me doing it step-by-step here. I personally think my step-by-step (…day by day, lol…) instructions are much more fun.

So here is what you do. First you need to buy a whole bunch of pipe cleaners. The ones I get are .99 cents at Michael’s. I got 4 packs in red and 4 packs in green. If you want pink flowers or some other color (maybe a friendship flower if you want to remain bae-less) then get those – just be sure to get the green ones.

So step one: Take out six of the red ones and four of the green ones.

Step 2: Gather up the red ones and fold them in half. In the fold part insert two of the green ones so about half of them are on either side of the fold in the red ones (it’ll make more sense in the next few steps – read ahead if you need to).

Step 3: Twist the red ones around themselves and speed out so that they look like whiskers (just leave the green ones alone for right now)

Step 4: Start curling up the red pipe cleaners. Curl them in toward the center (as shown).

Step 5: Once it looks like the picture below, it’s time to shape it into a flower. There’s no real method for this, so just shift around the “petals” until they look like petals.

Step 6: Now you can fold those green ones in half. twist them around themselves to  make a “stem” … you’ll notice that you can still see some red… we will fix that in the last step

Step 7: Make leaves. Take one green pipe cleaner and wrap it tightly around the bottom of the flower then curl in the ends in the same way that you curled the rose petals. However you think they look good as leaves, go for it. Finally, to cover up the last bits of red take the last green pipe cleaner and wrap it tightly around to cover the red parts – you can then wind it down the stem to blend it in.

 

And that’s it folks. Now you know how to make some sh*t out of pipe cleaners. You can make a whole valentines day gift for someone for about $10 if you buy a mason jar…and about $12 if you buy fake pearls for the inside of the mason jar.

Tip: Pipe cleaners can be folded into anything you want them to be – there is no such thing as messing up with a pipe cleaner. Besides, it’s the thought that counts, right?

 

For a while now I had been wanting a work space for crafting. My apartment isn’t BIG  so I knew that figuring out a space for a work space would be complicated. I reflected on how I even had to take apart my table because it couldn’t fit (while also having two functional chairs under it). In the middle of this reflection I realized that there is space for exactly one chair under the table if the table is pushed under the god awful pass through window between the tiny baby kitchen and the living room that is now my bedroom because my bedroom is too small for my bed (can’t tell I’m unhappy with my apartment, can you?).

The table was the solution. I dug the table out of the closet and reassembled it. I got a few decorations from TJ Maxx to make the space look cute and then found a way to get all of my yarn under the table! All-and-all I came out of this experience only spending $20 on random decorations. Having my own workspace helps me separate crafting from school work. I craft at my work station and work at my desk. Overall, this work space has been a huge win.

 

 

Recently I decided to try out making an amigurumi doll. Let me tell you that this was one of the most difficult crafts that I have tried so far. I started off using LisaAuch’s free crochet pattern for the head and torso and then improvised my way through the legs and arms.

What made the amigurumi doll so hard was making it through the continuous rounds of the head/neck/torso. Once I got it down the next obstacle was the legs – I just didn’t like the idea of the continuous legs – I wanted my doll to look more cartoonish. For this, I made the legs separately and made them a bit longer. Then I put on button eyes – I was hoping for a more Coraline look but they ended up much less creepy than I intended.

I think I did pretty alright for a first try.