Category Archives for Crafting

Punch Embroidery: The Lost Art

Not many people out there know about punch embroidery.  To tell the truth, I’d never heard of it until I met my mother-in-law – she makes beautiful punch embroidery pillows, with the help of my father-in-law.  (Kathy does the punch embroidery, and Mike sews the pillows.)  When Kathy found out I could sew, I was pulled in to help sew the pillows – but I was way more interested in learning how to punch embroider.  So, during the first Thanksgiving I spent with Bryan’s family, she taught me how to punch embroider – my first punch embroidery work was Frosty the Snowman, but I quickly came up with ideas I could use to nerd up the craft, so to speak.

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It’s actually surprisingly easy to do punch-embroidery.  Finding the tools are hard, and the yarn is even harder to find, but once you get the hang of it, it’s addicting and projects can be finished up pretty quickly.  It involves simple cotton muslin fabric, thin yarn, an embroidery hoop, and a punch needle – it’s relatively inexpensive to get started with.  One of the really neat characteristics of punch embroidery is the neat 3D texture and feel you can get on your projects – the punch needle can be adjusted to different lengths, which makes your design really stand out.   You can make almost anything into a punch embroidery image, but coloring book images and line drawings are a lot easier to do, as are cartoon images.  Which is where my ideas came in – I started out with making some Sailor Moon pillows, back in 2008.

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The Sailor Moon pillows were pretty popular on the Sailor Moon community on Livejournal – I made quite a few of them for people there!  I also had some Sailor Moon fabric, too, and that probably made them even more popular, haha.  It was lots of fun finding images to turn into pillows, and I loved seeing how things came together as I punched my way to pretty pictures.  I also did some Christmas stockings, and some patches for jackets, and even some designs for bags as well.  From there, I went and did other nerdy things – including a Doctor Who design (which I’ve been working on for years, haha), and a couple of My Little Pony designs.

If you’ve ever wanted to do punch embroidery, it’s not too hard to pick up – you can purchase materials online, and I plan on making a tutorial video sometime soon – until then, you can check out the following links for supplies and tutorials:

Supplies

Tutorials

If you want to see more of the projects I’ve done with punch embroidery, check out the gallery below!

Printable Valentines – Wreck-it Ralph Style!

Since Valentine’s Day is about a week away, I thought it might be a good idea to make my own valentines for the special people in my life!  (I mean, I do have a stash of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic valentines… but those are collector’s items!  I can’t use those!) And it came to me – why not make some Wreck-it Ralph valentines?  There aren’t any currently out there on the web anywhere, and Wreck-It Ralph is such an awesome movie – so why not make some Wreck-it Ralph inspired valentines?

These are all about 5 inches square, or 5 by 6 inches for the bigger one, and should print out really nicely on cardstock!  There are tiny little watermarks in the images, but hopefully they’re not too obtrusive.  I did draw the images used for these cards, in case you were curious! 😀

I hope everyone enjoys them – and if you use them, leave me a comment and tell me how you used them! 😀  I’d love to see how everyone likes my valentines!

Classy crafting

Little Lovely Shawl

I know this isn’t in the classroom, but still – made a lot of progress!

I’ve noticed a new trend in some of my Information Science classes, and I’m taking part in it as well – there are a lot of students working on knitting and crocheting projects during class!  I brought in my Little Lovely Shawl to work on during Human Computer Interaction yesterday, and while we had wonderful conversations about cognition and how the brain works in relation to computers and technology, as well as trying to assemble a mental model of how an ATM works, my shawl grew by leaps and bounds.

Another classy-craft - this one's a scarf for Bryan

Another classy-craft – this one’s a scarf for Bryan

Another of my classmates was working on a mobius cowl – I might see if I can get a picture of it on Thursday – and one of Bryan’s classmates in his Informatics class was knitting a scarf!  I’m not sure exactly how it works so well, but doing something with my hands helps keep my mind focused on what the instructor is talking about.  Not to mention I get quite a bit of knitting or crocheting done when I have something else to focus on – if it’s just me and the yarn, I tend to get bored pretty quickly.  So, it’s a win-win situation!  I’ll keep posting pictures of the awesome things I make (or work on) in class.  It definitely helped in last night’s Organizational Informatics class – not only did I soak up what was going on, I managed to knit quite a bit of scarf.  And there was the added bonus of knitting keeping me a little more alert than usual – my Tuesdays are the longest day of my week, with class going until 8:30 pm at night – so having something to do with my hands kept me a little more awake.

Speaking of projects to work on in class, I’m thinking of starting a mobius cowl of my own to work on – I’ve got some beautiful purple and brown yarn I want to use up, and I’ve found quite a few interesting patterns on Ravelry.  Ahh, Ravelry – you keep me busy finding good ways to use up all my yarn, hahaha.  Of course, it doesn’t help when yarn stores have good sales on pretty yarn – I spent entirely too much money on yarn this weekend!

To my readers – do any of you knit or crochet in class?  Tell me in the comments, and feel free to share pictures of what you’ve made!