Give Handmade | The gift of Giving

Don't forget to enter the contest 

of this blog's first ever giveaway of my "favorite things!!!" 
It ends TONIGHT at midnight EST so I can announce the winner TOMORROW on the blog!!!!

REMEMBER: You have to leave your comments on the original blog post that announced the contest found HERE VIA THIS LINK (click this to access it!!) in order to be officially entered and considered in the final count to be randomly chosen for the prize package. Don't forget that there are (2) ways to be entered in the giveaway and the cut off time/date is TONIGHT - Tuesday, Sept. 25th at midnight EST!!

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******* Warning: This is a photo heavy posting not about classroom art education!!!*******

Something I really enjoy doing (but rarely get to do) is crocheting amigurumi. I fell into the artform when I was a new mother to my now four year old daughter and I needed something to do to pass the time and occupy my hands while I would wait for my little girl to wake up from naps to nurse in her infancy. (I have a hard time with NOT having something to occupy my hands at any given time)

I taught myself to crochet (after four years of my childhood best friend trying to teach me) in two weeks of watching youtube videos and reading online tutorials on other peoples' blogs because I was so enamored by amigurumi. (They are so charming!! How could anyone NOT fall in love with them.) I joined a social networking site that is purely meant to connect crafters of knitting and crochet called Ravelry.com.

My time when I was really into crocheting was before I was able to be an art teacher so I think doing such work fed my need to create. I started off with patterns but eventually learned that creating my own original works inspired by real objects was a lot more fulfilling for me. My first major undertaking ever without a pattern to guide me was this Thomas the Tank Engine for my daughter's first ever friend as a going away gift since he was leaving the daycare she attended when she was a baby.

The above took me so many hours and so much trial and error that I felt like a total champ when I was done and I become that much more inspired to try my hand at free-form soft sculpting more amigurumi toys. I naturally have an issue with following patterns/directions and so free-forming it really worked well for me. I would look at pictures of things online and then take what I like from multiple versions of an amigurumi idea and then try and make my own version of it. Below are some of my free-formed crocheting adventures.

Little girl elephant

Baby Harp Seal

Maryland girl crab

Baby Lamb doll

Little Girl giraffe without spots

"Sherman" the gnome (made this right around the time Gnomeo and Juliet came out in theaters)

A baby chick

I also made fun and silly hats (for novelty and amusement of my own) for my daughter. I have always been a HUGE fan of the Tom Arma babies in the face of what Anne Geddes was trying to do (Because come on! The Tom Arma ones are both hilarious and adorable all at the same time!!!) and making silly hats was my way of drawing inspiration from him. I have made hats for babies in the family but mostly I just make at least one hat for my daughter every year. It all started with the baby viking hat for me that I made for her around Easter.

And then it just took off from there. My personal rule for crochet has become that I don't do anything that can be functional (like sweaters or scarves or afghans) but I will do a hat if it can also be a little bit of silly art. My dream is to (at some point) crochet a yoda hat. Until then, this is all I have done so far. I have free-form crocheted all of the below.

Koala with red bow from two Christmases ago for my daughter

 

 

Blue monkey hat with flaps for my daughter's cousin two Christmases ago

Aviator style hat with flaps and goggles in heart-shaped (to make it more "girly")

20s style clochette hat with a flower for a cousin's little girl

Pink pig hat made from variegated pink and orange chenille yarn 

I was making toys and hats long before my daughter learned to appreciate them and the other day (in her mess of a toy room) she came upon a little turtle I made for her long ago in one of my very first every amigurumi endeavours. It looked like this:

This was made with a pattern found HERE from when I was first learning to crochet

My daughter had no clue I made it and when I told her I did she was blown away!! And she she promptly asked me if I would make her a pink shelled turtle who could be the "mama" because the above is teeny-tiny and handheld. I could not say no to her sweet request and last night I finished this up for her just in time for her to take it to show-n-tell today at playschool.

Much larger than the original and went along with the idea of the original but it was free-formed really.

I cannot tell you just how delighted my daughter was when she woke up (EARLY at that!) to her new turtle. She, of course, didn't hesitate to ask me to make a purple one that could be the "daddy" turtle. I... well... I would like to make her another one but I don't know when it will happen. *shrug* I get bored with doing the same animal over again (especially when it immediately follows one I just did) and I might be more inclined to try my hand at making her an Olivia piglet doll instead seeing as how that is her latest obsession and I am very charmed with Olivia myself.

Anyway, I guess all of this is nothing more than me tripping myself down memory lane (so to speak) with all of my random crocheting adventures but I thought I would share it just the same since it's the latest in my effort to give handmade this year. I have actually tried to teach students to crochet to try and get a little bit of a fellowship group going at both schools I have taught at (in my career) but many of them don't seem to have the patience it takes to learn the craft and then perfect it in order to be able to make (especially free-form) any of the things I have shown you above. I do have one student who graduated last year and is bound and determined to learn eventually but mostly? I am on my own with my quiet obsession and adoration for crocheting purely for my own amusement and novelty. If you are into it though? You just consider joining ravelry!!!! (My username on there is stuffshemakes if you want to connect with me) in addition to leaving me a comment on this posting so that we can connect and maybe be "accountability partners" in our crocheting endeavors. It is the one thing that is such a great stress reliever for me and I know that I probably should do more of if I can help it. Perhaps it works that way for you as well and if we are both doing it together? Well, there are two less stressed people in the world.

"In dreams, we enter a world that is entirely our own."

 ***If you don't care for "crafting" and/or things related to Harry Potter, you might not like this posting and just wanted to forewarn you about it.***

In keeping with my goal to live "a life more creative," I present to you my next creative endeavor/crafted project in my efforts for gifting of the handmade sort.

My new favorite thing is to dream up packaged gift sets that stretch a cohesive theme to its absolute limits. I will come up with one element of the gift and then just spin that and stretch it in as many different directions as I possibly can. For this gift idea, I took inspiration from the amazing collective that is the Harry Potter series.

This gift is for another individual very close to me (and I am hoping they don't stumble upon this before I am finally able to deliver it to them) and this person is one seriously diehard Harry Potter fan. I started with the idea to crochet them a baby hat - amigurumi-style - in the likeness of Hedwig (Harry's owl).  I free-form crocheted it complete with ear flaps and long ties for under the chin. I stylized it a little by making ears that were adorned with cute black bows (do owls even have ears? Whatever. Like I said - I stylized it.) I could probably make it again if I wanted to but since I don't have a pattern, the hat is probably very much an original in and of itself for the most part. I added another crocheted piece - a scarf in the colors of Gryffindor house - and sized it for specifically for a baby in their first year. I readily expect that it won't probably be used/worn and I don't care since this whole set is mostly for novelty and gifty-ness anyway. The third item of the set is a child-sized wand made to resemble Hermione's wand. It was sculpted out of Sculpey clay with an aluminum knitting needle core and it's a little bit longer than a pencil. The fourth (and final) part of the set is something I didn't make and "outsourced" by way of Etsy only because I calculated out the cost of making it and figured it was cheaper to just buy it - a teeny-tiny Hogwarts acceptance letter!! The design is that for an American Girl-type doll but I also felt like it would be just the right size for a (novelty version) Hogwarts acceptance letter.

The final part of the gift set was something I really mulled over for a while. I wanted to package it up in a way that continued to play upon the Harry Potter theme but I just wasn't sure how/what I could do exactly that wouldn't make it too big to ship via regular postal snail mail. I liked the idea of putting it in a mini suitcase (of sorts) or trunk - like the idea that it could be carried right onto the Hogwarts Express or something and ultimately act as a conversation and functional storage element that could be kept around. When I did research on that option though I discovered it would be quite costly - both to purchase it (because I didn't want to deal with making it) and to ship it.

I must have walked around art and craft stores for upwards of 8-10 hours (that's what I do when I am brainstorming hardcore and trying to get a part of a creative venture right). Literally, I walked the aisles and brainstormed. Eventually I stumbled upon the idea of a book safe/hollow book and thought, "Hmm... I could do a faux spell book or textbook that otherwise could be a Hogwarts required text..." I sort of liked the idea but kind of hated it because of a myriad of reasons but was mostly centered around my own discomfort (even if it was just for novelty) of giving someone a spell book and not a Bible - I strongly adhere myself to a life inspired of and by scripture as much as possible.

Eventually, I was able to brainstorm my way to doing the fake book idea but using the inspiration of the fictional story within the Harry Potter books themselves of "The Tales of Beedle the Bard." It seemed exactly the perfect way to take things and I loved that it was not something of divination or magic and also something that specifically connected with Hermione. I looked up pictures of what the book looked like in the movie, etc. etc. etc. and then set to work trying to make it. Long story even longer? I totally had a craft fail moment that I don't even want to gratify with a picture. Just trust me. It was BAD.

I ended up having to buy a second hollow book and walked the aisles of Michaels and AC Moore (yet again!) until I found myself in the scrapbooking aisles (a department of art stores I generally hate to deal with because they never cease to overwhelm me with options). I brainstormed materials that seemed like they would make sense for creating the different elements of the book and then looked very specifically for them and also aimed to keep them within a strict color palette that I originally didn't even consider so that this time around it would match the child's nursery where everything might end up being displayed. After finding individual decorative scrapbook pages and some pre-fab stickers, I was finally able to get it all together enough to create the Harry Potter-inspired book safe you see below. I'm pretty content with how it came out and can only complain about how hasty I ended up being toward the end which will require me to fix it a little bit before I can actually send it up because I got a little sloppy toward the end of the assembly of all of the elements.

Was able to find corrugated paper that really imitated/suggest that their were real pages! Cool, eh?

The lettering is from a letter decal set and the tree is actually a low-profile three dimensional tree sticker/embellishment intended for scrapbooking in some way. I think it works well despite the fact that the movie version of the book is actually supposed to be a stump rather than a full tree.

So, that's that!!! I really like this gift set and though I don't know that I would ever recreate it for someone else, I did enjoy (for the most part) the challenge of both culling together the ideas that made it all come together as well as making them. Yay for being two for two in my endeavor to live and GIVE more creatively.