Rag Pets

Yummy craft loot!

I went to the Craft Fair today, and now my feet are aching, but I'm super happy! I really like this particular fair, there's always really great suppliers and crafters there and lots and lots of fabulous crafty goodies to splurge on.

I got some sorely needed air-erasable fabric markers, and I found brilliant big buttons! The biggest buttons are about 26 cm in circumference and I think they might become brooches and head-dresses in the future. The smaller ones will most likely end up as the same but for Rag Pets.

I found gorgeous, soft linen at the fair. I've been looking for linen like this for ages, and I'm so happy that I found a Finnish supplier with very reasonable prices. I had 10 meters of lovely un-dyed linen that I got from my gran (who got it in Tallinn), but I ran out of it some time back. I love working with linen, how it becomes soft when you handle it and even how pure, untreated linen smells.
I also got yummy printed quilting cottons from a shop I buy from every time I go to the craft fair.

New craft supplies always make me happy and inspired, and I already have lots of ideas for my new craft goodies. :)

Something different

I'm working on something new and it's all rather exhilarating! It's fun to get to stretch your creative muscles and to do something different every now and then. And what better time for new things than spring!

Spring always gets my energy up and sparkling. It's how everything is new again, and how there's so, so much more light than during the dark, drab winter. There's still snow on the ground here, but that doesn't matter since we had no snow last winter and this year winter actually feels like winter with snow and bitterly cold days and all. The snow makes the air sparkle during brilliant, cold days and it's a bit like living inside a giant crystal.
Still, I'm eager for spring to come. I've missed the sun during the winter (it would hardly rise at all before it already begun to set), and as I'm prone to come down with SAD in the dark months, it's like I'm now beginning to wake after a long sleep. I've come to the conclusion that I must be solar powered! :)

Any ways, I'm working on a new kind of Rag Pet, something a little different that I've taken to calling "Print Pets". I designed and drew and PhotoShopped all of yesterday and now I'm waiting for my test swatch to come from Spoonflower (if you're not familiar with them, it's a brilliant service that lets you design & print your own fabrics), eager to see how everything will turn out. It's nice to have a new project in the works! :)

WIP Wednesday

As you've probably guessed from the picture above, I'm expanding the rag-menagerie with a fox, and said fox is turning out super cute so far, even if I do say so myself. :)

I like coming up with new species of Rag Pets, drafting tails and ears, and trying out which type of nose will be best for each animal and so on. I think getting the ears right is my favourite part of the whole process, and I really like sewing & pressing them too. And it's not just different species that will be issuing forth from my sewing machine; I'm also designing different types of rag-cats from tabbies to siamese, and I'm planning different rag-dogs (I've only made the one rag-dog so far, so it's about time!) too.

The design of the Rag Pets has evolved a bit since the first ever rag-cat I made way back when. I swapped embroidered eyes for tiny little buttons when I found some at a local craft store (I should go back and stock up on them, really) and I changed the design of the nose from a tirangle to a much simpler Y, T or X shape -depending on the species- last summer. The Terrific Trio were the first Rag Pets to get tails, and since them, I've had great fun with rag-tails.
I'm sure the Rag Pets will continue to evolve a lot yet... I quite like to think of myself as a rag-Darwin! :)

And the winner is...

A big, gargantuan thank you to everyone for all your comments! I'm amazed, astonished and astounded by the amount of comments my Give-Away Day entry gathered; I was expecting to get about 20 or 30 comments at the most, and it ended up at over ten times that!

I'm sure you're all eager to know who Ginger will go home to, so with out further ado, the lucky winner is:

Number 171, MamáChanga!
Congratulations! I hope you have a super Christmas with your darling twins. :)

I'd also like to wish all of you having babies, spending your first Christmas as parents or grandparents, getting married, traveling around the world or staying at home, spending Christmas alone or with everyone you know, cooking and baking and decorating, and celebrating the festivities in your own way all the best for this holiday season. It really has been wonderful to read of all your amazing plans, it's hard to put into words how much I appreciate you all sharing with me. I've been moved to tears, laughed out loud and gotten all warm & fuzzy reading the comments. So thank you all again. :)

Give-Away Day!

This is Ginger the rag-gingerbread girl. She's been freshly baked out of gingerbread brown wool and she's stuffed with rags and organic cotton batting. She has little button eyes, an embroidered mouth and blushy cheeks. Her pretty bow is made from an old pillowcase and her buttons are all vintage. Ginger has white ric-rac icing on her arms and legs and she smells faintly of gingerbread.

To celebrate the spirit of Christmas and Give-Away Day, I'm giving Ginger the rag-gingerbread girl to one lucky person who leaves a comment about their Christmas plans on this entry between today and the 6^th of December (that's when we celebrate our Independence Day here in Finland). I'll assign every commenter a number so that the first to leave a comment is number 1 and the next person is number 2 and so on, and then on the 6^th I'll randomly draw a number to see who Ginger goes home to (I'm happy to ship internationally, so it doesn't matter where you're from). :)
Be sure to check out all the other crafters who are taking part in Give-Away Day too! There's a long, long list of all the participants over at the Sew, Mama, Sew blog.

My Christmas plans are pretty much the same as they are every year. I hung my Christmas lights up on Monday and today I baked gingerbread cookies. We're getting a real Christmas tree this year and I'm super excited about that! My old, small plastic tree is a bit pathetic and of course, it doesn't give a lovely Christmassy scent like a real tree does. I can even get a real star for the top now!
We'll be going over to my parents' for Christmas Eve to have dinner. We'll be getting our own Christmas ham too from J's parents and I'm going to bake some Christmas tarts later on as well.
I've been listening to Christmas songs all week and I'm in a jolly holiday mood despite the drab and wet weather and total lack of snow here. :)

Added on 6^th of December '08: Commenting is now closed and a winner has been picked. Thank you ever so much for making this such a wonderful event everyone! :)

This entry is brought to you by the letter T

Today is Thursday and also Thanks Giving in America. Even though Thanks Giving isn't celebrated here in Finland, I none the less want to give thanks to all the wonderful crafters I've gotten to know over the years. Thank you for the love, encouragement, knowledge and inspiration, I am ever so grateful for it all. You guys rock! :)

Speaking of inspiration, I was inspired by Two Cheese Please to do a post on my Tools of the Trade. So, here it is:

I decided to leave out the usual things like my sewing machine, scissors and pins and such, and instead tell about the more unusual bits and bobs.

- One of the things I couldn't do without is my lovely little tape roller that I got in Stockholm (it's made by Muji). It's the perfect size for cleaning up plushies before a photo and the glue on the tape is just the right stickyness; it gets out all the fluff and cat hair, without taking off the nap from velvet or mussing up the fluffiness of fake fur. It also has a little holder to keep it safe when it's not in use.
- The pliers are for pulling through needles when I'm hand sewing something a bit thicker and tougher, and it's hard to get a good grip of the needle or the strength of my fingers alone isn't enough to get the needle through.
- I love, love, love my Clover air erasable fabric marker! I can draw any markings I need where ever I want and not worry about the marks being visible, as they fade away with time. And if you're wanting to get rid of the marks right away, you can use the other end of the pen to erase them. Unfortunately my magical marker is running a bit dry now, and I'll have to see about finding a new one soon.
- The brown stick you see in the middle there is a perfectly ordinary chopstick, that performs extraordinary tasks; I use it for stuffing the stuffing into the Rag Pets and it's also very handy for turning long, thin pieces. The chopstick is one of my most favourite tools. :)
- The Copic airbrush & markers are what I use for giving the Rag Pets their blushy cheeks. I've had Copic markers for ages (I use them for colouring my drawings) and I got the airbrush system as a birthday present last year. Before that I'd been "drawing" the blush on by hand, which was slow and surprisingly hard to get nice. What's not pictured are the cans of air/generator that plug into the other end of the hose.

In addition to all the wonderful crafty folks out there, I'm also very thankful for my boyfriend, family, friends and of course my cat, BooBoo.
BooBoo loves to have her picture taken, and whatever it is that I'm taking a photo of, I usually get a photo of BooBoo too. Here she is helping me set up the photo of my bits and bobs. :)

Buttons & pins, my grandmother's things

My gran moved from assisted living into the nursing home proper last month. Due to the move, I inherited some of her craft and sewing things. It felt strange going through all of her old craft bits and bobs, since I like to think of her as she was: incredibly talented and endlessly creative and not as she is now, and I feel a little bad shifting through things that used to belong to her, picking out what's worth keeping and what to chuck. I still feel like these things do belong to her, even if she has no need or use for them now.

Despite the sadness of knowing why these things came to me, they do bring back a lot of happy childhood memories too. I remember playing with gran's buttons, sorting them into different piles or just admiring the pretty ones. I remember many a glorious summer sitting in gran's craft room sewing up toys and clothes for my dolls. And most of all, I remember watching my gran do all of these amazing things and thinking that that's what I want to do, that I want to create such wonderful things too.
Gran did so much when she was younger. She sewed most of her own clothes and a lot of ours as well, wove on her loom that I rarely remember being without a warp on it ready and waiting, painted glass and porcelain, made jewelry, dyed wool with natural dyes in a big cauldron by the lake (she also taught this) and tended her gorgeous lakeside garden meticulously. She was very particular about her appearance and was always perfectly styled and coiffed. She wasn't vainglorious, but she did take a quiet pride in the things she did, knowing they were done well. I am still in awe of her creativity and she's one of the biggest inspirations in my life.

Tag, you're it!

I designed and made hang tags for the rag pets today.
I already had one tag design that I had used for the very first rag pets, but I thought it'd be time for a re-design, what with Plush You coming and all.
The new tags have the same talkative birdie that graces the header of this blog on the front and on the back there's the rag pet's name and a little bit about their story too. The old tags had a different bird on the front and just a "Thank you for adopting me" on the back and I thought it'd be nicer to have some information about the rag pet her- or himself there instead. I also used passer par tout card instead of Bristol board like I used to use. The card is thicker and it works well with pencil, and it has an altogether more organic feel to it, which is what I'm after with the rag pets in general too.

And yes, I do have a bright pink utility knife! I got it from my dad when I asked him to change the blade of my old knife, and got a whole new knife instead! :)

Say cheese!

I had the wonderful chance to have the Plush You Trio professionally photographed today. J's friend is a super cool photographer (check out her work: here, she's very talented) and she lent me her talents for the day. I was a little nervous going to the studio, since the closest I've been to a professional photography studio is the kind where you go to have your passport photo taken.

Needless to say, I had a grand time! Not only is Jenni really nice and super talented, the studio was an experience in itself too. There were so many neat machines and things there to ogle; even the camera stand looked more like a tree! It was wonderful to see how it's really done, and I'm happy to have such high quality photos of the Terrific Trio.

I finally settled on names for the trio today. I've had a handful of names floating about my head ever since I drew the first design sketches, and I've been whittling it down during this process, picking the perfect name for each one.

I'm going to tackle editing the CD full of photos we got tomorrow, I'm much too tired to get stuck into it now and it's coming to midnight/my bedtime besides that.

The first step is admitting you have a problem

Hi!
My name is Eerika and I'm addicted to fabric.

My regular fabric store just moved to a bigger new location and they had a grand re-opening a few days back. I popped by the sparkly new store today and spent a mildly indecent amount of money. But I am rather proud of myself that I managed to curb my spending a little bit, seeing as with the big new shop came a big new selection of fabrics. I nabbed some of lovely soft wool -since it's a seasonal fabric and I've learned to get while the getting is good-, some pretty flowery cotton, soft plaid cotton flannel and Armani (yes, I know!) velvet. I still need to go back for some really yummy nummy flocked polka dot jersey and I also want some trouser fabric for myself. And I didn't even get to the quilting cotton prints today, since I was going out to lunch with J. and he had to go hungry while I was sating my addiction.

A sales girl I recognized from the old shop asked me where I went to school because I looked familiar and she thought we might have gone to the same school... and was a little embarrassed to hear that the reason I look so familiar is that I go to that shop a lot! I was a little more embarrassed by it though, seeing as my addiction has now gotten to the level that my "dealers" now know me by name. And this isn't a little mom & pop shop, but a big, huge chain store!

I can't wait to get the rag pet shop up and running so I'll have money to splurge on fabric! I just bumped into Cicada Studio and Aunty Cookie on Etsy and I fell in love with the gorgeous hand printed fabrics! Then there's Kitty Craft and Umbrella Prints and of course the staggering amount of delicious vintage fabrics to be had on Etsy and eBay.

Oh fabric, I wish I could quit you.