Jennifer, in the house

Collaborations

For the first time ever, I'm doing a collab with a couple of other Collage ladies -- it has been so much fun to put together!  Great because it took the pressure off to come up with a complete ~something~ on my own (at a pretty busy time of the academic year), and because these other ladies make such beautiful and nifty things, and it gets the creative juices flowing again --

Annette is a fabulous knitter and felter and doll maker, and we put together my amigurumi pals with her adorable pouch--

And Julie is another fabulous knitter who often works with vintage textiles.  She did this beautiful stocking with some lovely lavendar wands and crocheted face scrubbies, and I added my soaps, bath salts and sachet.  The fabric for this sachet precipitated the 'help! there's fabric stuck in my printer" post some time ago :)

    We all had a grand time last night trickortreating with Ellie, Ollie and friends!  Their street is friendly and people really go in for spectacular displays.  When Eve was offered the opportunity to wear her chicken costume to tonight's All Saints service, she said "yeah!  go get candy!"  so clearly she has sussed out the trickortreat protocol.  There was no nursery so I set the kids up in the "Choir Corral" (the choir area by the organ) with a picnic.  Needless to say, it was wild, and the kids were really very good, but this was asking alot of them... past bedtimes and everything.  While I was directing the (anglican chant) psalm, I tried to shush the kids, and the basses thought I was shushing them -- eeek!  Multitasking can backfire, you know!  So now we're home and little ones are in bed, and I'm glad we have an extra hour tonight.

*Yawn*

Bok, bok and kazoo

So when I was hunting around on the internet for interesting crochet, and I saw this (follow link and scroll down a bit -- see the chicken towel!) how could I resist trying to come up with my own pattern for the little chickens?

Here they are -- little bok is worked in filet crochet thread on a size E hook, while big bok is made of thin mercerized cotton (Patons "Grace") double-stranded with some fluffy white yarn (Patons "allure").  The baby section of the yarn department at our local craft chain is a great place to find interesting, machine-washable, fuzzy yarns for animal-making experiments.  I used red embroidery thread for little bok's comb, and red satin ribbon for big bok's.  Their beaks are orange felt, and their eyes are french knots in brown embroidery thread.

Aren't they silly and fun?!

Bunnies

More items for the Bottle Tree Craft Bazaar (first weekend in December) and eventually for my hyenacart (more on that later...)

The bunnies represent my first foray into seamless amigurumi crochet - what fun!  They are based on a free pattern (only slightly modified to the yarn I decided to use) and I've made them with 100% cotton Sugar&Cream yarn, because I wanted them to be soft, durable, and washable.

Eve wants one of these bunnies SO badly... I know what I'm making her for Christmas :)