Stegosaurus Pillow

About a month ago, I was over at my boyfriend's place. His roommate was hosting a movie night. One of the movies we watched was Labyrinth. I had never seen it before and decided it was weird and strange and wasn't really sure how I felt about it. Everyone there obsessed over David Bowie. By the end of the movie, I decided it was amusing enough.

Anyway, in one of the scenes, the main character flopped onto her bed and my boyfriend's roommate noticed she had a stegosaurus shaped PILLOW. He yelled at my boyfriend, "That's what we need! One of those!" They decided then and there that they needed something like it for their living room. I told them I could try to find a way to get them one... somehow.

After much searching online, I finally gave up and decided to make my own pillow for them.

I drew a large stegosaurus on paper and cut it out. Then, I took two pieces of  blue felt and pinned the paper on the felt. I cut about 1-2 cm around the paper, leaving room to sew later. I also cut out some circles for decoration and sewed the circles onto the felt. I took the two pieces of stegosaurus shaped felt with circles and stacked the together circle side in and sewed about 1 cm around, leaving a little. Then I flipped it right side out (through the bit that was left -- it was difficult) and stuffed it. The last bit of sewing was done by hand. All in all, it took me 4 hours: between 11 pm and 3 am. :D

Here is a picture of the stegosaurus on a couch:

And a picture of my boyfriend's roommate and his sister. She's pretending to bite him. He's ignoring her to hug the pillow. :D I'm not sure what he's looking at. o.O;

I am proud.

<3
Hao

Paper Crane Earrings

Since senior year of college, when my friend dragged me to get my ears pierced, I've been collecting earrings. I have blue ones (3 different pairs in 3 different shades), green ones, purple ones, and more. They all tend to dangle (with the exception of the squishy spikey studs I have) and I love them all. Oddly, I never seemed to find the perfect pair of red earrings.

March 2009, I was dating a boy from Portland and when I visited his city, I came across some paper crane earrings. They were 20-30 dollars -- way out of my price range. Since then, I've coveted paper crane earrings.

Last summer, my friend "Gator" and I went to the St Louis open studios. I saw some jewelry made from bike chains and other interesting mechanical pieces. Like the paper cranes, I decided they were too expensive.

Recently, a friend dragged me to JoAnn Fabric to help him pick out buttons for a pouch. There, I saw an earring kit, and on a whim, bought it and some pliers.

After much trial and error, I made my long-coveted red, bike chain, paper crane earrings:

<3
Hao

Cthulhu Blanket

Last year, one of my best friends graduated college. I decided I wanted to get him something for graduation. After much thinking, I thought it would be best if I made him a blanket.

Originally, I had wanted to make a pacman blanket because it would be a wonderfully nerdy thing to do. I got a bunch of felt and even drew out a design when I realized it was too daunting of a task to tackle as a first major sewing project. I didn't know if I could cut out pacman shaped pieces well enough or even properly sew all the pieces onto cloth. Thus, I decided to try something simpler. With much thought, I decided on a making a cute Cthulhu because I thought the Cthulhu I drew here was really cute and fairly reasonable for a intro sewing project: 

With the image in mind, I began making the blanket.

Reverb10 (27) and Home Made Settlers

December 27 – Ordinary Joy
Our most profound joy is often experienced during ordinary moments. What was one of your most joyful ordinary moments this year?
(Author: Brené Brown)

I sincerely believe this prompt has been covered already. Food creates some of the best ordinary moments. I also talked about little things that make me feel happy in my post about body integration. In my discussion of parties and moments, there were also descriptions of ordinary things that make me happy. So, I'm opting out of today's Reverb for the sake of something better: What I did for Christmas.

So, what did I do for Christmas? My parents hosted a party with lots of family friends (there were 5 other families in addition to my own). While 4 of the five invited families had children my age (early to mid 20s), one was out of town and the other was studying for Step 2s. The other two who showed up and I had lunch with the parents, watched a movie (during which I took a nap and they couldn't make out a thing the characters said), and were promptly bored out of our minds.

Somehow, in our boredom, we decided we wanted to play Settlers of Catan. I own the game, thanks to my roommate, but it was in St. Louis. So, we made our own.

For efficiency sake, we didn't make things overly artsy but we did use a bit of creativity and had some fun. The best part? We did end up playing it. 2 games with the normal board, then we made the expansion board and were almost going to play, but some other people (friends of one of the people my age) came over and brought real settlers (HUZZAH!). All in all, it was a good night.

The basic Settlers tiles (I'm really bad at making hexagons, they didn't fit together very well):

iPod Case

So I have a sewing machine. I've had a sewing machine for a number of years now but I never bothered to learn how to sew. Why? because I'm lazy and busy and it didn't start living with me until this year. Anyway, I decided to learn how to use the thing and what better way to learn than to do a project?

So, I cleared out my painting space and turned it into a sewing station. I think my next few projects will involve sewing, so it was important I get some space for it.

This is what the space looks like right now: