Book Review- I Felt Awesome

I Felt Awesome by Moxie is a needle felting book that absolutely lives up to it's title.
In the middle of the holiday rush to get projects done in time, this book is very distracting. The projects are whimsical and delightfully unexpected. There is a lot of gorgeous sculpting in the needle felting community. This book has amazing projects that will make you laugh out loud and really inspire you to felt.
It starts with a tools list that explains the various tools. Including the fact that if you're needle felting, you need adhesive bandages. And safety tips so hopefully you won't need them as often. Materials list, and 25 pages on the techniques of needle felting so even absolute beginners can start with this book.
First chapter is wearables. May the laughter begin. Starting with a martini inspired necklace of olives with pimentos*, it just gets even more fun from there. Imagine a soft sculptured spiked wrist band. The juxtaposition of soft and spikey just thrills me.The perfect accessory for the crafty punk. I could really do this all day, describing all my favorite projects, but that will be a really really long review.So I'm going to try and narrow it down a lot.
The Fat Head barrettes are a great starter project or a project for an evening of crafting with friends. It starts with commercial felt with added embellishments.
The Playables are incredibly clever. The author uses magnets to create a soft sculpted Potato Head doll and if that's not cute enough, a Katamari Damacy ball that can pick up paper clips and such from your desk. Desk bowling and the cutest little emo doll I've ever seen are my other favorites from this chapter.
In Form Not Function, it gets to more of what I've come to expect from needle felting. Sculpture just for it's own sake. A faux neon sign, a cute houseplant with a hot dog hanging from it, an adorable mobile based on warning labels.
If you have had an interest in needle felting, I recommend this book happily. It has inspired me to pull my fiber back out, and it's inspired my daughter to try needle felting. She's only wet felted  in the past.
You can get the book by clicking the Amazon.com link above, or directly from the publisher at MyCraftivityStore.com

Amazon.com affiliate links help support this site and my book habit.
*about those kinds of olives- when I was a kid, my brother and I called them the "Olives with the red poop" so every time I see them now, that's what goes through my mind. 

Fun iron on patches

Recently I got some Avery brand printable fabric*. At 3 dollars a sheet, it's less expensive to do iron on transfers or iron fabric to freezer paper and print it that way for a lot of uses. What it IS good for isn't really one of the project ideas listed on the package.
Iron on patches. This stuff has iron on adhesive on the back, is fairly stiff, and can be punched with craft punches. You can make cool band patches, or peace symbols or other things. Save it for stuff you'll hand wash. I'm not sure how it will hold up in the washer.
This is actually what I'll use it for. My 62 year old dad would rather have me repair a small hole in a jacket than replace the jacket, but he's terribly picky about patches. He wants either patches that match the fabric, or he wants something cool. I was spending a couple dollars each on little skulls and such for his jackets when I found some that were the right size. With this, and a one inch circle punch, I can make a bunch of little circle patches that he'll like.
So to test it, I printed a sheet of well, fairly random things. Some of it is meant for other projects, but the sheet included a bunch of 1 inch and 2 inch circle designs like the one above. That's one of my compass rose designs .
Then I punched it using my handy dandy 2 inch circle punch, and ironed it on to my son's messenger bag. As you can see, it punched very cleanly and seems strongly adhered.
Anyway, all that to say.. here's the designs I used for some of the patches. I didn't format them to print on a full sheet, but you can get 12 2 inch circles from one 8.5x11 inch sheet of paper. Click on the images for the full sized 300 ppi PNG images. You don't have to use these for iron-ons, they can be used as stickers for scrapbooks or whatever crafty use you have in mind.

* Amazon.com affiliate links help pay for this site and support my book addiction.

Cold November Morning- card

On Black Friday, as we were coming back from the mall at 9:30 am, which happens to be about sunrise right now in Anchorage, I snapped this picture for my beadwork newsletter subscribers.

That's taken fairly close to my house. When I took it, I remember thinking "I hope that pretty pink shows well." 

I also recently got a suite of applications that included one called Paint It (affiliate link). Fairly inexpensive as a standalone product, just over 20 dollars from Amazon. It is a program I thought my daughter would like. It only does one thing, but it does that one thing fairly well. It creates painting effects of your photos. Running this photo through the application turned out pretty, and also fairly well got rid of that street lamp in the background without me fussing with it. It has 10 different effects and I like all of them except the pen drawing. That one doesn't pick up enough detail. The first image below using the detailed watercolor effect, the second uses my favorite effect, illustration. 

I thought the first one looked like a pretty card image, so I put it on a card! 

300 ppi, click the images to download the full sized versions.

The card measures 3.5 wide by 5 inches tall. The envelope is just over 5 inches wide and 3.5 inches tall, which makes it an okay size for mailing.Print the envelope on paper, and the card on card stock. Here's the blank templates to design your own. Gif format, so you'll have to increase color depth, the envelope is horizontally oriented for designing, so print on landscape settings or rotate it 90 degrees to print. Pixel drawn, 300 ppi. 

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Snowflake Ornament Pattern- Beading

This is the ornament pattern that I've been using as my user pic on Facebook. I hope you enjoy it.
Click on the images for the full sized versions. These are the patterns that inspired the snowflake set of printables a few days ago.  Don't forget that until Friday Dec. 3 you can use the coupon code Thanks2010 at my Etsy shop for 20% off. Earring patterns and blank box templates.