i make stuff

the place where i host all the original things i make. there's no organising theme, because i don't work like that! my lovely brain creates in fireworks 🎆

[scooberella]

I made this vest to celebrate the launch of my debut novel, The Fool, and I'm so pleased with how it came out! It's the first pattern I've written entirely from scratch and I had so much fun making it. It was originally going to have sleeves but I ran out of time making the second one, but it's actually so cute as a vest that I'm not going to add the sleeves after all 😊

The design on the back is based off the tarot card of the fool, in which a funny little guy is about to walk off a cliff. His tunic shares the same pattern.

I might write the pattern up and pop it online because who knows maybe someone else will want this highly specific item of clothing!

[scooberella]

i made this skirt because i'm currently making a dress from a pattern (the first time i have made anything from a pattern) and i was getting grr aaaa frustrated with it so i needed to have a quick win

i got 2m of fabric from the discount end of spotlight, cut it in half, sewed the two halves on the long sides, hemmed it on both ends (is it hemming when it's the top?), folded over the top side to be a bit wider than the waistband and sewed that down except for like idk 5-6cm, then attached a safety pin to the waistband (cut to be relaxed around my waist plus a little bit to allow for sewing) and fed it through the folded bit until the skirt was bunched around it and both ends were sticking out. Sewed the waistband together (careful not to twist it) and sewed the folded bit shut, then also made the bunchings even around the skirt and sewed the waistband into the skirt on either side because i hate when my waistbands decide to do somersaults

i fucked up when i was sewing the folded bit shut and accidentally sewed it to the body of the skirt as well because i was nearly finished and therefore not being careful (though i don't think i was particularly careful at any point during this) so i had to unpick those stitches while i was waiting for some chicken to poach, which worked well because i had to watch for it to boil and obviously i needed something mildly engaging to do while that happened

and i didn't iron it or press it even once because i was SICK of doing that for my dress pattern, that was the whole point of making this skirt! super easy, still somehow took me like 3 hours (how???) and it felt like a big win

[scooberella]

i made this salt pig at a pottery class i went to with my mum

cooking salt now lives in there because nagi recipetineats says that you've got to use cooking salt when cooking, not table salt, and i trust her with all things food!

it's a beehive because when the pottery instructor was showing us how to do the coil method, i thought huh, that looks like a beehive 😂 i started out trying to make a more smoothed out salt pig and then i was like nah that's actually really hard and finicky and i really like the texture of the coils. i did smooth it out on the inside because i wanted it to be watertight, but i left the texture as is on the outside

my mum also made a salt pig, but hers looks like a pig ... supposedly. i'll put a pic under the cut, because i think it's an opt in kind of image (i love it so much)

[scooberella]

did i just upload 80% of my last 6 months of crafting projects in one go? yes, yes i did!

i've completed two knitted jumpers this year as well, but i never seem to remember to take pictures of them. both were intended for my husband but only one fits him, so the other one is now mine (and i love it so i'm not complaining)

[scooberella]

didn't like my new couch being so brown so i learnt how to crochet so i could make something to brighten it up!

this was my first project and you can absolutely tell which were my first squares because they're so teeny tiny due to me making them too tight, so the blanket has a somewhat wonky feel, but i love it anyway 😊

mufasa is the beautiful boy modelling the finished product and peggy is my lovely girl keeping me company as i crocheted

[scooberella]

some irish lace i was practicing until i got bored with it, because i was basically just seeing if i could do it and it turns out yes! it's just time consuming. i have no real use for this, but it's in my yarn drawer in case? i guess in case someone asks me what my crochet capabilities are

[scooberella]

oh these wings were also part of that fairy costume from my last post! i bent some old clothes hangers out of shape, got knee length stockings, dyed them purple, went nuts with some silver fabric paint and crocheted some roses

actually, a couple of the roses i had already crocheted when i was learning how to crochet flowers and then i decided that oh i could actually use them for something, which was wonderful because they were quite large for roses (the perils of using 8 ply yarn when the pattern says 4 ply)

also, it is not that easy to bend clothes hangers! i used the pliers i bought for snipping craft wire and i do not recommend doing it that way, we just didn't have any pinchy pliers and it basically kind of worked

[scooberella]

made this lace top out of op shop curtains for my book week costume

i mostly based it off a princess costume i already had by laying the curtain on top of the dress and cutting it just a bit bigger for seam allowance. i'm still so new at sewing so i'm really pleased how it came out! i expected the curtain to be MUCH harder to work with than it was. it did however take me a million billion years, mostly the cutting out part, especially because my scissors badly needed loosening and i didn't realise that was a thing you could do

[scooberella]

i've been working on a thing lately 🧶

patterns by hookokcrochet (they're also on instagram and i highly rec following them)

[scooberella]

i've made my own picture patterns before but this is the first time i've gone completely from scratch (as opposed to based on another jumper's design) on something so big. i made this jumper/dress based on my nana's dog and i'm going to send it over to her with my mum when she goes to visit soon. it goes a bit longer than this but it looked like i wasn't wearing pants and it was like 30c at 10pm at the time of photographing so i was not putting on anything longer 😂

it didn't take as long as my previous jumpers, possibly because the actual pattern is a lot smaller than my previous designs and it's only on the front, so a lot of it was just knitting green. i started it in mid/late january and i had to take a break for the red wool to come back in stock. i used paintbox super chunky and the photo is pretty true to life in terms of colour, it's really lovely. it's also very soft to touch, machine washable and super affordable, which is why it's my go to!

i need to stop making jumpers for other people because it's so hard to give them away when i'm done! hopefully the weather cools off enough for me to sneak in a couple of wears before i send it to nana!

[scooberella]

okay so i think i'm getting better at this jumper thing. i've decided i have a favourite pattern from my book of aussie jumpers because the sleeves are SO easy and you can't go past that. i used the picture pattern from a different vest in the book and adapted it to the jumper pattern instead because i don't wear vests and neither does my aunty, who this was originally intended for. i would have given it to her, but i just couldn't imagine her wearing it and i DO wear it all the time. i'll make her something else soon

i used paintbox simply chunky yarn and it came out longer and wider than my previous jumper using this pattern, so i've made some alterations for next time. i actually quite like that it's longer than most jumpers so i haven't messed with that too much, but i'd prefer it to be more snug. i considered making the emu's eye red, but i thought it was cuter blue (which it was in the pattern, i didn't come up with that myself)

[scooberella]

Misc pets given as gifts

These are just some little felted creatures I made for friends as presents. I think I've done a pretty good job of getting the markings right and I'm keeping my style rather than going full realism because my skills aren't quite at the level of those talented people on Etsy yet.

For the last couple I've been experimenting with carding colours together using a couple of cat brushes, which has been working surprisingly well.

[scooberella]

Ember the Echidna, Fernando the Frog and Guinevere the Goose

Ember snuffles for their dinner Fernando leaps for joy Guinevere honks mischievously

I was supposed to publish these separately, but I was getting stuck on my echidna acrostic, so you get a 3 for 1! With bonus Peggy playing with Fernando (he was not harmed by this)

[scooberella]

Deefer Dog

Deefer waits ready Observes the badger's approach Go! He's bred for this

I had to do a dachshund for "d", because my rarely seen uncle has a couple and it was my late grandfather's joy to tell me stories about them. Pa loved animals of all kinds, even my cannonball of a kelpie (also pictured, he is the dog that is not purple and his name is Logan) who was way too cannonballish for a man in his 80s to handle--which did not at all stop Pa from revving him up.

That would be reason enough for Pa to talk about my uncle's dogs, but the thing is, he didn't know how to pronounce dachshund. Not in the way that most people say "dash-end", but in a much more wonderful way.

Pa pronounced it "douche-hound".

Now, this prompted some debate within my immediate family. Did Pa know what he was saying? Did he bring up Rodney's dogs so often so that he had the opportunity to say it more? Was it all a dare for us to say something? It's worth mentioning that while Pa loved a joke, I never heard him swear or refer to anything ... of this variety. We will sadly never know, but I think even if he had've lived to 100 we also would never have known.

Deefer is named as such after my great uncle's dog, who was not a douchehound. He also had a cat called ceefer. And a parrot and a huge snake, but I don't remember their names. He was a pretty cool guy.

[scooberella]

Calypso the Cassowary

Cassowary is a pretty long word Acrostic was maybe a shitty choice Something tells me X will be a challenge So anyway, this here is Calypso Oh, very good and frightening lady Well capable of defending herself And can run 50 k’s per hour (really) Really doesn’t care about eggs or chicks You know, she’s just really fucking scary

The very first animal I thought of doing for this challenge was the cassowary, and it was actually because of this thought that I settled on animals as my subject. Why? Who can say!

I love Australian animals, even the terrifying ones. And legit, I'd take a taipan over a cassowary any day. But cassowaries are very cool to look at. I had a lot of fun mixing together her feather-felt and I don't think any other googly eyes have given me this much joy to adhere.

A quote from the Wikipedia page on cassowaries:

As for eating the cassowary, it is supposed to be quite tough. Australian administrative officers stationed in New Guinea were advised that it "should be cooked with a stone in the pot: when the stone is ready to eat, so is the cassowary".

Calypso was created as part of Struthless' alphabet superset challenge, where you create and share something beginning with each letter of the alphabet each week. I'm a few days behind on this one, but that was always going to happen. The beauty of this project is that I'm so looking forward to the later letters that my missing the deadline hasn't discouraged me at all!

[scooberella]

Barnaby the Bee

Bumbling around all fuzzy and busy Every day Barnaby is awesome Essential to plants of all kinds, world round

Barnaby is my second creation for Struthless's alphabet superset challenge. I love bees, possibly to my detriment. As I discovered a couple of years ago, a bee will climb onto your finger no problem. The hard part is getting them to leave.

See, I found a bee who was clearly exhausted, and I'd read somewhere that if you give them sugar water that can really perk them up. So i got a little saucer with some sugar water on it and carried it to the bee. A sensible person would have carefully poured it next to where the bee was lying, but I genuinely didn't think of this. I'd successfully picked up and released a bumblebee in England a few years prior, so I thought I'd do the same and transfer the bee to the plate.

The bee didn't want to get off my finger. I decided that it might fly away if it revived itself a little, so i used my other hand to carefully drip the water next to the bee. I did this for at least 20 minutes, until I had reached my capacity for ridiculous endeavours and tried to encourage the bee onto the plate again.

It didn't want to leave. The previous bee I'd made friends with had politely walked from my finger back onto a plant with no prompting, but this bee wasn't about that. It had been well behaved so far, so I risked being a little more insistent.

It stung me. I (perhaps dramatically) flung the bee off, swearing and squeaking. It was the first time I'd been stung by a bee and it hurt like hell and was sensitive for days after.

I have not picked up a bee since. But I still plant flowers I think they might like in my garden.

[fortify-countrye]

Lies I told you to give it sugar water The next message I received was tha it stung you 😂

[scooberella]

Fact checked 😂 Technically that is still reading it somewhere!

[scooberella]

Barnaby the Bee

Bumbling around all fuzzy and busy Every day Barnaby is awesome Essential to plants of all kinds, world round

Barnaby is my second creation for Struthless's alphabet superset challenge. I love bees, possibly to my detriment. As I discovered a couple of years ago, a bee will climb onto your finger no problem. The hard part is getting them to leave.

See, I found a bee who was clearly exhausted, and I'd read somewhere that if you give them sugar water that can really perk them up. So i got a little saucer with some sugar water on it and carried it to the bee. A sensible person would have carefully poured it next to where the bee was lying, but I genuinely didn't think of this. I'd successfully picked up and released a bumblebee in England a few years prior, so I thought I'd do the same and transfer the bee to the plate.

The bee didn't want to get off my finger. I decided that it might fly away if it revived itself a little, so i used my other hand to carefully drip the water next to the bee. I did this for at least 20 minutes, until I had reached my capacity for ridiculous endeavours and tried to encourage the bee onto the plate again.

It didn't want to leave. The previous bee I'd made friends with had politely walked from my finger back onto a plant with no prompting, but this bee wasn't about that. It had been well behaved so far, so I risked being a little more insistent.

It stung me. I (perhaps dramatically) flung the bee off, swearing and squeaking. It was the first time I'd been stung by a bee and it hurt like hell and was sensitive for days after.

I have not picked up a bee since. But I still plant flowers I think they might like in my garden.