knit berry hat baby gift

Remember this?

click here if you don’t remember, want a refresher, or love it so much you just can’t get enough.

Anyway, I always had bigger plans for this little knit hat. I just had to find the time to finish its counterparts! I wasn’t able to go to a baby shower for my good friend from undergrad back in October, but still wanted to get her something for her new baby.  I knitted these hats with her in mind from the get go.

On positive side, being fashionably late with this gift allowed me to wait until I knew the baby’s name. Last weekend my mom and I completed the gift with some more personalized additions. So here is the completed knit berry hat gift:

How adorable is that!? The baby’s name, by the way, is Abigail, so the A’s are more than appropriate.

My mom has a fancy schmancy embroidery machine (I can talk about that more in a later post) which made the applique pretty easy to do. I basically said “I like that A, this fabric, with this thread” and watched the machine do its magic.

Same for the strawberries:

The burp cloth is my mom’s specialty. She gets all the credit for this. Like with the embroidery machine I said, “I like this A and this fabric” and she did her magic. Thanks, Mom!

They’re made from cloth diapers. She’s made these before and even has her own label for all of her fun creations.

This all makes for one happy, stylish baby!

Fox in Sox on Knox on Box

Oh Dr Suess, Who knew some twenty years later I would use you to title a blog post?

Music Monday this week is fox themed. Let’s cut to the chase and start with the music and move on to more fox fun.

Cue Fleet Foxes, an Indie folk band from Seattle. A friend told me about them this past week and turns out I’ve heard some of their songs before.  Have a listen for yourself and see what you think.

Now onto the foxy goodness! My final studio in grad school was “fur themed” where we investigated different types of fur and figured out different ways of representing and drawing fur in a technical sense. A requirement for the studio (which we didn’t know going into it) was to acquire an animal hide so we could study the fur qualities and manipulate it hands on.

I chose a fox. For some reason I was interested in the fur’s “poofiness” and the fox was one of the poofiest hides I could find.  We had a whole slew of animals in the studio ranging from a muskrat to a springbok to an elk, it was quite a sight.

I’m not going to get into all the tiny details of this project, because that’s not really what this blog is about, but I will show some of the drawings and the final “model” that was produced.

Architecture school can be so weird, right?! This was by far the most outlandish thing I did in school. I not only left that studio with an interesting conversation piece to have on my end table, but also a slight bias toward the fox.

We can move out of the fox-in-architecture-school-realm and move into the fox-in-craftiness-realm. Since that studio, I have been very aware of all of the fox paraphernalia that exists out there and have seen tons of fun foxy things. Here’s some highlights I found on Etsy. (the images link to the sources, so if you find something you simply cannot live without, go check it out!)

adorable mini felted fox 

peta-friendly fox collar knit pattern

origami fox stationary

fantastic little fox coat

vintage fox necklace

awesome fox t-shirt

Who knew music monday would lead to all this foxiness! Thanks for stopping by and have a good week!

Sunny Saturday

Enjoy your Saturday, Lucy is sure enjoying hers!

Headbanding

Here’s a little something I played around with this past weekend. I saw these cute headbands on various blogs and thought they were pretty cute. Then during a routine visit to the fabric store I noticed lots of knits on the half-off bargain rack… who could resist? I caved and promptly purchased some knits to make some of my own!

I had plans to do a whole how-to spiel on making one of these, but I haven’t quite nailed down how to finish the back yet. The current method isn’t that great, and I’m determined to master a better way. And now, since I have my new toy with me I can get right on that and whip up a tutorial for you in no time! (well, let’s hope that’s how it goes…)

In the mean time, here are some views of the headbands on…no commissioned models this time…bear with me and my poor modeling skillz:

p.s. I’m slowly learning how to actually code some things on this blog. I made cute little pinterest and twitter buttons on the sidebar. Check ’em out and follow me!

my (sort of) new toy

Besides coming back from the T.O.L. with tons of fun creations, I also brought this lovely machine home with me!

My mom got a new sewing machine which bumped the others down a spot in the line and this one became mine! It’s the machine I’ve really learned how to sew on, so I’m already familiar with it. It’s been waiting for me for a while now, I was just reluctant to bring it back to Columbus with me because I really don’t have a ton of room for sewing here. But I’ve decided to suck it up and figure out how to make do with little available space I have.

Now to figure out where to put it…

What in [Steph’s] World?!

My sibs and I used to get National Geographic’s kid-version magazine, “World,” remember it?

from wikipedia.com

Anyway, I remember at the back of every issue there would be a page called “What in the World?!” (I can’t guarantee that the punctuation was really like that, but you get the idea) where they would take close up pictures of a frog’s skin, a Popsicle, broken glass, etc and you would have to guess what it was.

I went to Toledo this weekend and had a craft extravaganza with my mom working on several different projects that I had been thinking about/in progress/wanted to start. We got a TON done. I mean, it’s almost ridiculous as to how much craftiness went down this weekend.

Unfortunately I can’t blog about it all right now; some of the things are gifts that I have yet to give and I can’t ruin the surprise on here! Until I get to blogging about all of the awesome creations, I’m going to give you your own dose of “what in the world?!” with little snippets of projects that I worked on this weekend.

Stumped? Super excited? It will all be revealed in good time, so make sure to come back and find out!

If you’re really stoked about all the great stuff to come and haven’t already subscribed, go ahead and click on the link to the right and subscribe to the blog! I’m also on bloglovin’ so you could do it that way, too (there’s a link on the sidebar) Thanks so much!

music monday: foster the people

Happy Monday! This post is going to be short because there is another one coming in just a few short hours! But I said I was going to stick with Music Monday, so I’m going to keep my word.

Brandon is really into Foster the People right now. He likes every single song on their album, Torches, which is really rare, (there’s more to them than just “Pumped Up Kicks” and “Don’t Stop” which were the two songs I originally thought of when he started talking about them)  In light of his enthusiasm for the band, this week I picked one of their songs. Enjoy!

Man, that’s a lot of knit scarves

I think that maybe, just maybe, my scarf/cowl knit craze is starting to wind down. In case you missed any of them, check out recently knit scarves such as the chunky cowl, the simple scrap scarf, and the shimmery cowl. There’s patterns of all of these on my diy page, too! (Is that enough links for you?)

Now that you’re all caught up on scarves of knits’ past, here is the latest addition:

That’s right, look at that title pic! I remembered that I have tons of white board from my days as a student, and I should use it to my advantage rather than  have it collect dust in the closet. (plus I fear those sunny fence pictures are gone for the season)

These are actually second generation scarves. I made two others back before Christmas. I even commissioned some fabulous models to pose in them:

(but then I took their picture with my phone camera…)

very nice ladies!

That’s all for today, thanks for stopping by!

Music Monday: Awolnation

Happy Monday! I hope everyone had a great weekend!

Today’s music choice is Awolnation…slightly different than Ingrid from last week. Just so you know, I have a  w  i  d  e  range when it comes to taste in music, so please don’t expect consistency in these music posts.

I first heard Awolnation through a youtube video of an extreme base jumper in a wingsuit flying down the Swiss Alps (or some huge mountain range). Upon further investigation, turns out that Awolnation is signed with Red Bull Records (yeah, they have a record company, who knew?) which then makes sense why they would be the background music of a very extreme sport. But anyway, I proceeded to make an Awolnation station on Pandora and found this lovely song…it even has karaoke-style lyrics in the video so you can sing along!

Lucy the Snow Plow

Lucy loves playing in the snow

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