My Month in Instagram!

   Wow, this month flew by fast! And mine was great, I hope ya'll had a great beginning to the year as well. I spent a great deal of it knitting (mostly knitting gifts for a Secret Valentine that I am running out of time for! Oh no!

   But I finished my first knitting project, a pair of socks, then my second, then third, and I have a few works in progress as well.

   I am really, really looking forward to February, even though I currently have no plans for the month. Just hard not to look forward to it when this month so far has been so great!

   So here are some photos of my past month! Hope you like them! You can follow me on Instagram as well, it's linked in my sidebar.

 

   Happy Holidays from my cat family to yours!

A Couple Little Crochet Things

   I've made a couple little crochet things so far this month! The first was just a free-handed bag for my crochet hooks, I didn't have anything to store them in and they tended to wind up everywhere! The bag is nothing special but it keeps them all in one place so I'm happy with it. :)

   It's actually kind of ugly, haha. But it does it's job and that's all it needs to do.

   The second project turned out much prettier! (At least I think so. ;D) It's a quick bow scarf pattern I found to try and use up my Hometown USA yarn. I had two skeins and now just have less than half a skein left, I have no idea what to do with the remainder though!

   Here's the scarf!

   These are kind of unflattering photos, so just ignore that please, haha.

   I found the pattern for the scarf on Ravelry. It worked up in about two hours, and was really very simple. (Of course, my little helpers helped me take my time.)

   I definitely recommend it for a quick, cute project, here's a link to it!

  

Self Portraits Part 3~

Hope no one is getting bored of these! Here are the latest of my self portrait project. I have been feeling sick lately, can you tell? :(

Spoonflower Swatches!

   I ordered a set of swatches from Spoonflower not that long ago and I am just thrilled with these ones! :D The kitties are Lucifurr and Patch. I don't think I need to point out who is who, do I? ;P

   The roses was just me being bored with my wacom tablet, I also made one like that in coral but haven't ordered a swatch for it yet.

   I am super happy with how these turned out! Can't wait to get some fabric of these! I think the fabric of Patch with the balls of yarn would make a cute little dress, what about you? ;P

   I made the rose patterns with a skirt in mind, but I may wait until warmer weather to make little rosey skirts, haha.

My -BIG- Project of the Month and Other Recent Happenings

   At the start of every month, I write out a little list of small to medium sized goals to complete within the month. Sometimes I don't make all of them, but having that sort of reminder of what I want/need to do and the time in which I need to get it done has helped me a lot of with my depression and lack of motivation, both of which are not constant problems anymore. More of fleeting moments, but I'm not ready to retire my monthly goals list.

   This month, one of them was to take a self portrait every single day of November. Photography has been a fairly large part of my life for a while now, but my passion for it dwindled for a bit there. Self portraits were always what I was the worst at as far as photography goes, and it would be nice to improve to have nice photos of myself as well as building the skill to take good self portraits for this blog and it's posts.

   So, so far I'm on day six and have taken seven photo-of-the-day-s, haha. Here they are:

November 1st, 2013

November 3rd, 2013

November 3rd, 2013

November 4th, 2013

November 5th, 2013

November 6th, 2013

   And here's the photo from Day 2, which wasn't included above because it contains artistic nudity. So instead of making it automatically visible, I thought I'd give ya'll the choice to view it if you want to.

   I'm really happy with how my self portrait project is turning out so far, and may just post the results on a weekly basis, if anyone is interested. But for now, my set for my self portrait project is here, and this is my whole photostream. :) BTW, little mini blogs are posted in the caption of each self portrait of my project and the other self portraits that I didn't choose as 'photo of the day'.

   Besides taking probably too many photos of myself, I've been crocheting a slouchy colour block beanie, which is my third crochet project (and third hat, since all my crochet projects have been hats :D). I plan on making a matching scarf and mittens for this, wish me luck as I haven't even tried to make either yet!

   I've also been practicing my banjo every day. I got a banjo for my 22nd birthday in September, and I haven't really started practicing it until recently. I am a complete, complete beginner! After sharing the photo I took today of me and my banjo, someone shared with me that my finger picks were on backwards, so when I say complete beginner, I mean it! I've wanted to learn to play one for a long time though and I'm so happy to have one to try and learn on.

   And speaking of banjo, today on Spoonflower I made my first sell on a pattern I designed! It was My First Banjo! Woo hoo! The order was for a fat quarter of the fabric and I made almost two bucks on it. ;P I'm really excited to have sold some fabric though and it will be nice to use that towards buying myself some more fabric of my own!

   Well, I guess that's all I have to say before I go back to crocheting. I hadn't blogged in a week or so, so I wanted to share what I had been up to. Have a wonderful, crafty day!

Einstein Dress!

   I'm super excited to share what I sewed up last night! It ended up way better than expected, though I had to alter the pattern a little to get it the way I wanted it.

   This dress's pattern is McCall's 6754, the black fabric I used on the sleeves and bodice is some lightweight jersey knit fabric I found on eBay for $4.50, and the bottom half is of some fabric I designed myself!
  

   When I first joined Spoonflower, the first design I uploaded was this vectorized image of Einstein. And seeing and working with the fabric in person, I can say it totally turned out better than expected! The background on the fabric (which is the organic cotton knit) was supposed to be black, but it turned out dark grey. That's my only complaint about it, and shortly after my fabric was shipped, Spoonflower actually started making the organic knit with "blacker blacks and brighter brights". My luck, right?

   I unfortunately didn't take any process shots of making the dress. I finished it in an hour or two, and I kind of really got focused on sewing. Sorry!

   So the only alterations I made were to shorten the skirt of the dress, because I can be my own worst critic and decided only to order a yard of the Einstein fabric just in case I somehow totally messed it up! So I shortened just as much as I had to to get all the pattern pieces I needed cut from it.

   I also made a little 'belt' out of the black jersey knit because how the skirt and bodice joined bugged me a bit since the colours did not match. It's a little hard to see in the photos, but it's just a strip of fabric that I sewed on to lay over the seam.

   The last thing I did was decided not to add the elastic strip to the dress. I felt the dress looked good enough without this and it would probably be more comfortable without a piece of elastic over the widest part of my stomach, haha.

   So that's it! That's my dress! And I love it! Here's a few more pictures to share. ;P

   So, what do you think? Pretty spiffy, right?

   What type of fabric do you think I should design next? ;D

   P.S. I posted a ton of photos of Einstein and my other little kittles, in case you are a cat fanatic like me and would like to see. :)