a departure and an arrival

Here's a last minute departure for New York. I worked on this little felty birdhouse all weekend for the upcoming show. I'm a little late sending it, but I think it was worth it. I really wanted to do something different than my usual cupcakes, etc. for this show. It is a departure, don't you think?

It's made mostly of recycled felted sweaters, of course, with some wool felt and print fabric details.
The little bird is needle felted. I got a few tips from the expert by watching her Martha performance.

Then I tried to get fancy with the photography using one of my favorite kids books as a background. The colors were perfect for it. Hmmm...not the best result. I think the house was too big for the book to really see it as a background. But speaking of books...

...and a very special arrival! As I was leaving for the post office to mail my little birdhouse, I found this waiting on my doorstep! An advance copy of my book! Wow. I tell ya, it's hard to absorb. My name on a book!

I'm loving the cover. It was changed from the original version, which you still see on Amazon. I helped choose the font, which is a big deal for an author! Most photography and book design details are up to the book designer that works for the publisher. (At least in my scenario) It's an interesting business, this publishing. I'm the author and the projects and writing are mine. But, obviously, sooo many other people with talents and expertise are involved in bringing a book to life. It can be a challenge for someone with control issues, like me! :) All in all I am happy with the book and thankful for all of the people involved in it. I can't wait to share it...just over a month to go!

rainy fall day

Dreary! This is one of those days I just want to curl up and nap! I wish I was a kitty. But alas, no nap for me. This was not a good day to photograph my work, with such blue-gray light. Regardless, I posted some items in the shop. And yes, a few acorn leaf ornaments!

Luv-able and Hug-able Plush Show

If you are in the New York area, I hope you’ll come to the opening of an awesome plush show, Luv-able and Hug-able at gallery hanahou! Their sister gallery, gallery LELE in Tokyo, invited me to participate in their plush show last year. Now I'm honored to have been asked again...this time in the good ol' US of A.

Luv-able and Hug-able includes an impressive list of well-known plush artists contributing, as well plushes by nine Japanese artists, who are enormously popular in Japan, but rarely seen outside of their home country.

Amazing new work by:
Angel Oloshove, Anna Chambers, Anna Hrachovec (Mochimochi), Betz White (me!), Christina Gordon (jamfancy), Corinne Dean (Not Too Pink), Eloole, Heide Murray (All Good Wishes), Heidi Kenney (My Paper Crane), Hello Brute, I Heart Guts, Kup Kup Land, Lexi Franks (Orangefishy Plush), littleoddforest, Lisa Grue, Lizette Greco + Grecolaborativo, Marcus Oakley, Matt Campbell, Rosa Pomar, Sewn by Blythe, CHiCHiTOHTOH, Chino Akiyoshi, Katsutoshi Otsuka (ToyField), Keiko Miyata, Michiru, Miyoko Ito, Risa Tanikawa, Saki Yamashita, and Yuriko Sera

The opening party is November 8th, 6-9 pm, and the show will continue through December 21st.

gallery hanahou
611 Broadway, Suite 730, NYC
(NW corner of Broadway and Houston, 7th floor of the Cable Building)
Mon-Fri 12-7 pm
Sat 1-6 pm (closed Thanksgiving Weekend)

hand-me-up!

This week my kindergartener put on his favorite Old Navy Halloween shirt from 2 years ago. Yup, it was looking a little shrimpy on him. Three-quarter length sleeves don't really work for boys. I let him wear it once and then decided to do a little wardrobe refashion on it.

That's it on the right, a size 4T. The shirt on the left is a different brand, but also a 4T and close to the same fit. I decided to sacrifice the also-outgrown Batman shirt to save the Halloween shirt. (Shhh...don't tell my oldest!) My plan was to make a mock layered look by combining the two shirts.

First I used a short sleeved shirt as a guide for cutting the sleeve off. I wanted a reference for not only length, but for angle of the cut. I aligned the armholes then cut off the green sleeve, adding about an inch extra for seaming and hemming.

Then I placed the cut off sleeve on top of the other sleeve as a a reference and cut the second sleeve off to match.

I placed the green Halloween shirt and the cut off sleeve on top of the gray shirt. I knew from the last wearing , that the new sleeves need to be at least 2 inches longer. I lined up the cuffs and eyeballed the space: 2 inches of gray sleeve length, plus 1 inch for seaming and hemming. Fortunately the width of the grey sleeve is about the same width as the the green shirt. I cut the gray sleeve off following the edge of the the new short sleeve. Then I copied the length to cut off the second gray sleeve.

Next, I turned the green shirt inside out and put the cut off gray long sleeve inside, right sides together. I lined up the underarm seams and pinned the sleeve edges together distributing the fabric evenly around.

I sewed them together then pulled the sleeve out and pressed the seam allowance (1/4") up toward the green part of the sleeve.

Here's the sleeve right side out. Look, ma, longer sleeves! Ok, now to create the mock layered part.

I folded the gray part back inside the green sleeve and pinned it in place. Then I stitched twice around the opening, about a half inch from the fold, to give it the look of a hem.

I pulled the sleeve back out and pressed.

Now for the shirt tail extension. I placed the green shirt on top of the gray one and flipped the hem up out of the way. Again, I eyeballed about a 2 inch-plus extension and cut the bottom off the gray shirt.

Here is the green shirt inside out with the gray strip/tube/hem around it, wrong sides together. I aligned the edge of the gray part with the original hem stitching on the green shirt and sewed them together right on top of it to hide my stitching.

I flipped the new shirt tail hem down and turned the shirt right side out. Ta da! The 4T grew to a size 6!

Now, my guy is happy to wear his fave shirt again! However, I'm told I "shoulda made a hood". There would probably be enough fabric from the body of the gray shirt, except for negotiating around that batman logo. I was also concerned about restricting the stretch of the neckline when sewing the hood on, thereby making the neck opening too tight. Nothing worse that losing a few ears when you pull your shirt off. (although I suppose it would add to the Halloween theme. eeew, sorry...) Not the best pose here for showing off the sleeves...oh well! :)

For other fun refashioning looks, check out wardrobe refashion and the etsy shop dress me.

mama earth

Today is the first ever Blog Action Day, and what a great first topic for mass blog participation: the environment.

Recently I was speaking to someone who's career is heavily involved in promoting environmental causes. She was telling me how she sometimes grows weary of quoting the statistics about various topics, for example "25% of the world's pesticides are used to produce conventional cotton". Giving lecture after lecture, such facts have become ingrained in her. Yet, it's easy to be so immersed in one's cause that one can forget that a lot of people are not immersed. A good chunk of the world does not know statistics like that and many do not care.

Repetition. The conversation about the environment is not just a trendy one. It's on a lot of our minds with good reason. The more we talk about it and beat it silly, it will hopefully become ingrained in all of us. We all can do our own part in our own way.

Have a great day and love your mama earth.

how it's made

Have you ever watched that show on the Science Channel called, How it's Made? It's fascinating...in a weird science sort of way. I've always loved looking behind the scenes. (I'm a sucker for those "the making of" special features on movie DVD's) When I was a kid, my dad worked in the steel industry. We got to visit a steel plant and wear hard hats while we toured the plant. Molten metal, giant machinery...I loved it. In my early fashion design career I attended many a "strike-off" to approve prints at the fabric mills. It's just mind blowing to see the journey, the process, that something dug from the earth or picked from a plant travels to become an everyday object. A bolt. A t-shirt. Man, that Industrial Revolution was some crazy stuff.


We went to Krispy Kreme this morning for the first time. I had had their doughnuts before, but had never been in one. We loved the observation window where we could watch the naked little dough rings dive into the hot oil. They bobbed about before draining, then moved on to the shower of glaze. Wow. Mind-blowing on so many levels. We watched. We ate. We had a good time.

It got me thinking about my own little production line seeing that little army of doughnuts bobbing along. The stuff I make...the stuff I sell. It's hard to keep up. Sometimes I feel like Lucy in the candy factory with the conveyor belt gone wild. There's a certain sense to it, to batching your tasks, to finding efficiency in numbers. Part of me likes thinking that way...about the process. What I really enjoy though, is the creative process. Finding the spark, digging something up, pushing it along, seeing what it becomes.

I'm not sure where I'm really going with this post. Seems the sugar/grease/caffeine combo has made me philosophical today! It's easy to get stressed about work and goals and life in general. It's hard not to focus on the end, but the process is where it's at. I guess I'm just realizing that life is a journey and since most of the time I don't know where the heck I'm going with it, I'd best enjoy the ride.

That's it. I'm having another doughnut.

Bucket House

I am glad I'm not the only one in the family that collects piles of used stuff. I come from a long line of recyclers...and artsy crafty types. Take my brother, Roger. He's an artist living in Jersey City and just one of those people that is always finding cool stuff. I don't mean scoring at a yard sale, although he's pretty good at that, I'm talking about trash. Really amazing stuff on the street waiting for the sanitation department to take it away. It's funny because I sometimes get the feeling that he is in his own world not paying attention, when in reality, he is tuned in.

Anyway, Roger recently exercised his finely honed trash picking skills to create some pretty cool artwork I wanted to share with you. He is part of an exhibition of the A.M. Richard Fine Art Gallery called Pre-packaged Perspectives.

Here is an excerpt from the gallery's description of his piece:

Concerned with the consequences of environmental disasters, cost-effective and durable habitat as well as the immediacy of recycling inorganic materials, ROGER SAYRE presents BUCKET HOUSE, an urban log cabin built of large industrial plastic pails.

Based on the idea of children's toy Lincoln Log wooden construction sets, Mr. Sayre conceived a shelter as easy to built as to dismantle. The unit of construction, plastic buckets, compact and stackable - makes the house easy to transport, light weight, sturdy and impermeable to the elements. The house's footprint can be as small or as large as one's restricted or allotted space of construction. Scale is limited to one's accumulation of discarded plastic buckets. The construction of BUCKET HOUSE will evolve over the time period of the exhibition (September 6th-October 14th.) The contemporary architectural prototype is presently being built in the rear garden of a 1910 row house located in the South side of Williamsburg (Brooklyn).

I love it! Leave it to my brother to base his artwork on Lincoln Logs. He has such an affinity for symbols of his childhood. Must be because he grew up with such great siblings. :)

Here is another piece of his from the same exhibition:
And the gallery blurb:

Mr. Sayre is also presenting NEW ORLEANS, a site specific installation conceived of hundreds of vintage Bingo game cards. The cards are suspended on the gallery walls in a continuous composition of a swirling mass modeled after satellite images of hurricane Katrina.

Ahhh, I love my creative wacky siblings. And speaking of siblings and family, I just added a family link list in my right hand sidebar. Don't want to play favorites or anything...

Does this ever happen to you?

Often times when I am working on a project, I'll stand back and notice that I am wearing something similar to what I am making. I'm either matching the color palette, texture or pattern...does that ever happen to you? I seem to remember Susan doing this once.

Here's a beautiful print on organic cotton from Harmony Art. I'm using it for a project for book two and I just noticed how lovely it looks with my adorable new shoes! I know, I shouldn't step on the fabric, but the shoes haven't even been outside yet. (Zappos, how do I love thee? Let me count the free shipping both ways...) Besides, since the fabric is organic, I am leaving a smaller footprint. HA! Get it? Organic fabric, smaller footprint? Oh, I kill me. See this is what happens when you work at home alone all day. You talk to yourself and think up corny jokes to sneak into your blog posts...*sigh*.

Ok, let's move forward...Ready for another sneaky peek of a project from Warm Fuzzies? Just two months to go until it's debut! That little turtle up there is needle felted onto something baby sweet...

And what's this? Looks fiber rich, doesn't it? I better stop now and put an end to this line of humor...if you could call it that.

DIY Autumn

Last weekend lied to me. (sometimes weekends are like that) It's not Fall here in Maryland. High 80's is not Fall. I will have to take matters into my own hands. I will do it myself. I will make my own Autumn.


I've been sprinkling the felted acorns all around the house to see where they might bring us a little autumnal cheer.


A little here, a little there....

Now for some foliage. I dug out some felted sweater scraps and free handed some oak leaves.
I was thinking along the lines of a garland with leaves and acorns hanging from it. Blair did one last year and it was so pretty. I strung a few leaves onto some hemp cord. I thought it had a nice stem look going on. Hmmm...then I had another idea.

I got out the drill. It's hard to see in this photo, but I drilled two tiny holes in the acorn cap on either side of the stem.

I laced the cord down through the cap from the top, back up, then tied a half knot by the stem. Then using a tapestry needle I re-threaded the leaves back onto the cord and knotted the ends together.

A little glue, a few felt balls...viola!

Now...if I could only make enough to rake up and jump in! :)