Monkey boy

I don't make kid's items for my Etsy shop and my track record for making baby gifts is mixed. I'm terrible at guessing sizes so my things are usually too small. Now that I have three nephews and two nieces all under 3, I have more opportunities to try to get it right! Here's a preview of the Christmas presents for the 7 month old twin boys and the one-year old nephew on the other side of the family. Pretty cute, huh? I can't wait to see what these look like on!

Making the badges for the initials was a good warm up for the more complicated project ahead. The monkey applique is a new technique for me. I drew the monkey on my computer. Any real graphic designers would be horrified to know that I actually used MS Word to draw the ovals and circles. I saved it as a PDF then resized it when printing it. If I remembered how to use Adobe Illustrator, I'm sure I could have made a really cool vector graphic and done all kinds of neat things. As it is, I'm so proud that this worked at all! Once printed I cut out the main shape, taped it to my felt and cut that out. Then I trimmed the pattern down to the next interior shape, taped that to lighter brown felt and cut that out. I glued the two pieces of felt together and cut and glued the inside ear half moons. I stitched on the button eyes, white buttons with black buttons on top, and added the yarn smile and nose. I glued the whole thing on to the hat and then carefully did a running backstitch all the way around the monkey face. Finally, I added a stitch in the middle of the ear to tack down that tiny sliver of felt. Now all of the felt pieces are glued and sewn (the eyes, mouth and nose hold down the center felt piece).


These were fun projects. I'm looking forward to giving these as presents and maybe trying my hand at other animals in the future!

Autumnal

I just finished photographing my new hats for Fall. Here are three of the gazillion I've made recently. I can't seem to keep up with the listings. I'll work on it more today.

Meanwhile, I've just been featured on the Etsy Storque in an article on Fall Weddings! http://www.etsy.com//storque/spotlight/etsy-finds-fruitful-vows-5134/

Hoorah!

Oh, and I'm in the Gift Guide for Fall Weddings! http://www.etsy.com/gift-guides/168?page=1

Hats at Christmas time

Wow, it's so close to Christmas now! I'm sorting out what to give, what I still have to make, and what to put on Etsy. I just posted a bunch of new hats. Hats are easy and quick to make and good gifts. I started my Etsy adventure with hats in February of 2007 and have sold one on Etsy - though my two hoods did sell. At the EtsyDallas Jingle Bash in November I sold out of my hats except one! I think it helped that I was one of the few vendors with hats. Anyway, I'm going to give it a shot on Etsy again. If I can sell almost a dozen hats in one day maybe it's worth trying again.

P.S. The orange leaf hat featured above sold in about 3 hours. I guess it's a hit! I'll have to play with that form again.

Stack of crochet

So here's proof that I've been busy. I love all the colors and textures. I'm trying to build my inventory for my Etsy shop - which I should be reopening REALLY soon. My computer was out of commission last week so I had plenty of time to crochet, but no way to work on Etsy stuff.

I made two hats this weekend, but I gave them both away. One for my mom that I made in the car on the drive to Houston and one for my grandmother that I made on the spot when she asked for one. I also gave Mom one of the hyperbolic pseudospheres (a small red one) for her to try with her autistic kids at school. Maybe they will like playing with the shapes and tucking it in and pulling it out.