I’ve been fascinated with making beaded trees lately. Unfortunately they take me forever cause I have some tendonitis in my right arm. But here’s one I recently finished 🙂 I’ve also done some basic trees, and a larger sakura tree.
Gold colored copper wire, and many glass beads!
Sorry sweet strangelings, I’ve been away for a long time 😦 Well, a lot has been happening here, first there were the holidays, and then my grandma fell ill and died. So, the next month or two I may still be rather preoccupied, as we have yet to hold her memorial service or settle her estate.
On a far brighter note, I have add several of the totes that I made to my Etsy shop… I made these bags back in October/November. I was heart broken that no one bought one at either of the holiday craft fairs I attended, but hopefully they’ll catch someone’s eye online.
Several bags available in my Etsy store Kurolace
Hi there! Well, it’s been a while again… Lately life hasn’t been too much fun. Just a lot of stuff isn’t the way I’d like it to be and I often have trouble imagining that I’ll ever be free to live my own life….  Well, to escape from all that drama, I usually make stuff. Lately I discovered a Chinese book on handbags which all have fairy tale themes. I don’t read Chinese, but I was able to combine the images with my own sewing know-how to make a very cute Alice in Wonderland themed bag. My mom wanted to know how much I’d sell it for, but this first one I’ll probably keep (its not as professionally finished as I’d like it to be). If I do make another to sell, I think it would be in the $50 range. Does that seem too expensive? Keep in mind, all the applique has to be done by hand!
There wasn’t a pattern for the actual bag, so I had to make it up myself, and I’ve never sewn in-the-round like this before. I had to do the bag twice actually, because the first time I somehow messed up my circumference measurements.
The bag is 10.5″ in diameter, made from faux suede with interfacing (to stiffen it) and a cotton lining. The strap is long enough to be worn cross the body (my preferred arrangement), or can be adjusted to be shorter. The applique are done with a lovely 60% wool, 40% rayon felt (a Japanese brand). There’s gold colored beads, key-chain rings, and gold embroidery thread for the charm-bracelet design.
There are a few things I’ll fix for next time. I meant for the tabs which attach the D-rings to the bag to be in the seam, not sewn on the outside of the bag, but I forgot to do it, and then having done the bag twice, I got lazy and just put them on the outside. The strap could stand to be about 3 inches longer, really. And on the applique I think that I’ll do the embroidered chain (on the watch) for the top chain part of the charms bracelet (the little row of beads leading towards the upper corner of the bag).
I wanted to add a fur ball pom pom key-chain (they show it with one in the design book), but I’ve been frustrated by the fact that I can only find real-fur ones, not faux ones. Idk… I’m not strictly against fur, but since I used faux-suede, I think adding a real-fur accessory would be rather odd.
What do you think?
I posted this in the previous post, with other drawings from last summer, but I thought it deserves its own post. 🙂
Nearly 3 feet by 2 feet, it took 12 hours to get the it right…and in the end i rushed the vine. The shoe took 3 hours on its own….lol. I’m not sure the photo does it justice.
12 hours of charcoal… massive drawing…someone in my class wanted me to give it to them…lol, obviously i said no
Yeah, so I took a drawing class last summer… I wanted to post the pictures up here, but then got in a hurry to get ready to go to Poland…. so here they are, a year later. I haven’t decided whether or not to take a class this summer.. sorta need to decide, lol. I do need the motivation, because left on my own, I hardly ever draw complete things (just little squiggles and sketches).
In December I visited Wroclaw for Christmas. I decided to pay a visit to the Jewish Cemetery, because it is old, grand, and in ruins. After the events of the Holocaust there was no-one to take care of the Cemetery, and it fell into ruin. Today it is a museum and you can pay a small fee to go in and walk around, take pictures, etc. It receives only minimum maintenance – as the derelict state of the cemetery is considered to be part of the memorial to the Jews of Wroclaw. I went two days after Christmas… it was cloudy, cold, and nearly empty – I only had to share the large cemetery with a British couple (they still managed to get in the way of some of my photos, however). Many of the fancy tombs are falling apart, and some areas are so overgrown that you can’t even see the stones, just lumps under the ivy.
I’ve seen them described as dwarves, and as gnomes…one thing is sure: WrocÅ‚aw, Poland, has a lot of them! Oh, and the city’s name is pronounced “Rots-wahv”. Previous known as Breslau, when it was part of pre-ww2 Germany. I spent 5 days at Christmas there, and since most everything was closed for 3 of those days, I did a lot of Gnome hunting. These are a few of the pictures I took during my trip. (Wroclaw has at least 100 gnomes, some reports even say 250)
All Saints Day (Nov. 1) varies from country to country. Here businesses close and everyone goes to the cemetery and spends much of the day visiting graves, tidying the grave, and placing flowers and candles for the departed. All the Catholic cemeteries, which are much much bigger, are a bus ride away, so I found a smaller, “Evangelical” (historically Lutheran) one only a few walking minutes from our home, and made my flatmates take me there on their way to a bar that night. At first we couldn’t figure out where the entrance was, then we finally got inside and walked around a bit. All of the graves were lite, except the very old historical section. It was very lovely and of course a bit creepy. 🙂
Recent graves are most abundantly decorated.
Reminds me of the Wind in the Willow
These are large figures perched on the top of a door frame of a very unusual, but very cool building tucked away in Bielsko. I’m not sure whats in the building, other than the Chinese restaurant on the first floor (ground floor for all you Europeans).
Kurolace 