Pom Poms and Murder

Good morning, Beautiful Dynamos!!

The Pinterest app on my phone is probably my most-used app right now.  I seem to go in phases.  Before Pinterest it was The Simpson's: Tapped Out game.  Before that it was Candy Crush Saga.  At least with Pinterest it's making my actual real life better.  LOL!!!

I found a pin linking to Mr. Printable's animal pom poms.  OMG how cute are they? So cute!  Of course Mims and I had to try making some.

I clearly don't have much pom pom trimming and shaping experience, but I thought my little bear turned out pretty cute.   I saw another pin that suggested using handmade pom poms as bookmarks...

LOL!  The little bear head makes a very funky bookmark...

I also tried making a couple of the flower pom poms. They look a little thistle-ey to me.  

Mine also look like they could have come straight out of a '70s craft book. I think they might look better if I was better at trimming them.

Okay, so I've been having a ball making soap, but tried a technique a couple of days that just didn't turn out right.  I was trying to make smooth perfect stripes in the soap, and instead it separated on me, leaking oil for hours.  It was slimy and gross and smelled terrible.  I needed to rebatch it if I wanted to save it.  So I grated it up and dumped it into a crockpot and let it cook for a couple hours before I added some fresh fragrance oil and put it back into its mold.

It had a Strawberry scent.  But I could still smell the weird smell from before underneath the soap too.  The extra funky smell made the soap smell like Strawberry and Foul Deeds...

It didn't help that the soap looked like it was chunks of a murder victim.   It looks so Halloween scary.  I would pass it along to my Halloween Cousin, but it smells too awful.  It's destined for the garbage, but I thought it was just too funny not to share.

On a much happier note, this soap smells like freshly cut grass.

Jake and I agree that it smells more like freshly cut wheatgrass, rather than front lawn, but it still is fun. 

I hope you're day is wonderful, Dynamos!  

xoxo

ps - you can follow me on Pinterest by clicking the link over there in the right hand side bar so you can see all the other awesome ideas that I'm hoarding for a rainy craft day...

Jake's Slippers

Jake hates wearing shoes.  He'd rather go barefoot, or wear flip flops, or wear slippers.  Unfortunately for him, he has size 16 feet, which makes the finding of flip flops and slippers pretty difficult, and (no shock here) really expensive.  No discount shoe shopping for him!

So recently I've become enthralled with the slipper patterns at Mamachee.  While making my Mom a pair of the slingbacks, I discovered that my gauge is slightly larger than recommended for her patterns.  It wasn't a problem on Mom's slippers, I just made them a size smaller, but it gave me hope that the Opa Slippers (which are sized up to a Men's 12/13) might actually be a 15/16 in my looser gauge.  It was totally worth a try... (and even if the pattern didn't work for him, Mims and I would both rock the little grandpa slippers!!)

Lucky for me, the slippers were the perfect size!  They're HUGE!!!  LOL!!!

The finished slippers turned out so cool!!!  They are pretty slippery on the bottom so I think I'm going to make him some jute soles and maybe add some lines of silicone for extra grip.  I'd hate for him to break something falling down the stairs in these things... LOL!!  Best and worst gift ever?!

I also made some manly soap this week.  I used the cylinder pour method from Soap Crafting to make my Mountain Man soap...  I scraped the outer edge of the soap with a fork to make it look like tree bark.

My brother-in-law's birthday is coming up.  I crocheted a jute basket to hold some of the soaps.  I love the rustic look of the jute.  The natural look is so great with the soap.

I also experimented with the Mantra Swirl technique from Soap Crafting this week.  I got a little crazy and made a rainbow mantra swirl.   And then I flung a bunch of cosmetic grade soap glitter on it.  Unicorn soap?!

This last soap was completely inspired by Kyme at Alamo Candelaria.  I watched a bunch of her YouTube videos and had to try making her soap poppies.  It was so much fun!!  I ended up making 3 different colors of poppies to make my soap look like a big poppy field...

If you'd like to try them yourself, here's the video that inspired me!

xoxo

Working on presents...

My Mom's birthday was last week.  She wanted to wait to open her presents until we could have a family party, but since my niece got sick at daycare, and my grandma is pretty fragile right now and shouldn't be exposed to any more germs than necessary, it seems like a party is not going to happen for at least another week.  It's kind of a bummer, but hey, it's what Mom wants so who am I to argue? 

My Mom is a pretty challenging to shop for, so I just picked out things that I would want myself.  LOL!!  I made her her some slingback slippers.  Love the Mamachee pattern!

I made her a rose bath scrubby to go with a bunch of handmade soap.  I'm super happy with how my latest batches have turned out.

I'm loving the ombre soap action I got with this batch.  It's got a fresh laundry fragrance and it makes me think of the beach.  

This is one of the techniques from Soap Crafting.  I'm still on a mission to go through all of the recipes in the book. This is the linear swirl. I used a Blackberry Amber fragrance oil in it.  It smells divine!

This is another of of the Soap Crafting techniques, a Pumpkin ITP swirl.  It's got pumpkin puree in it, and it smells like pumpkin pie.  My sis-in-law is getting married next month, and pumpkin is her favorite, so I'm planning to give her a bunch of these as part of her wedding present.

xoxo

A quick heads up!

Hey, just a quick heads up that Tara over at Mamachee * Crochet Makes Me Happy has a whole facebook fan thing going on right now.  16 days of contests, giveaways, and freebies.  If you're on facebook anyway, you should go check it out.

* Today's a free-gift-with-purchase! Buy any footwear pattern and she'll send you her jute sole pattern.  Rad!  I got a pattern to make Jake some slippers for his birthday.  I'm super excited because the jute soles will make them good for indoor/outdoor use.  Score!

**I've used her patterns before and she's awesome!  I highly recommend her stuff!!

*** I wasn't paid to say any of that.  Didn't get anything free (except my gift-with-purchase, which I haven't actually gotten yet, but I'm sure it's coming...)

**** I like the asterisks

***** I like my fans too.  Leave a comment if you've got an idea for a good giveaway over here.  I am stumped. I keep thinking another free book day... Love free book days, everyone wins!

Oh, and I've joined the world of Instagram!  I'm crochet_dynamite if you want to follow...

xoxo Jaime

Old Fashioned Muslin Bags

My mom's birthday is this month, and I wanted a cute way to give her a bunch of my soap.  I have obsessively poured over Pinterest looking for the cutest packaging I could find (do you do that too?  I've gotten to the point where anytime I make anything fun my family asks 'Oh, did you see it on Pinterest?" Sheesh, but, um, yes...).  I really felt myself drawn to the soaps individually packaged in little muslin bags.  I priced out the bags on Amazon and a couple of my soap supply sites, but the cost was pretty prohibitive.  I had to either buy in inappropriately huge quantities, or pay way too much for just a few.  Either way I was spending more money than I wanted to for something that was going to get thrown in the trash anyway.

Clearly my only option was to make my own! I used this YouTube vid to make up a bunch of bags, but I added a twist to them.  I had read somewhere that if you use your sewing machine to zig-zag over the edge of fabric you could crochet into the stitches instead of having to go through the tedious marking/awl-punching/fighting-to-crochet-into-fabric edges I've done before. (I read it probably a year ago, and now I can't for the life of me find the place I read it.  I really would like to give credit to the brilliant mind that shoved me in this direction, since I totes would have never thought of it on my own.) I set the stitch width on my machine to 5 and my stitch length to 4 and zig-zagged over the top edge of the bags before I sewed the sides and bottom together (like in the YouTube vid).

That gave me awesome sewn loops to crochet into.  I used a C hook and #5 crochet thread to add an edging to the top of the bags.  I love the way they turned out.  They look like the vintage linens that my grandma got from her mother and grandmother.  It was pretty quick and easy once I got the hang of it.

If you want to try it out yourself, I've got some hints to help you figure it out faster than I did:

1. Make sure the zig-zag goes OVER the edge of your fabric.  It will make little mountain peaks (or v's) instead of the zigs and zags. 

2. Only crochet into the "down" side of your mountains.  If you go into both sides the crochet starts to ruffle, which sounds good, but looks bad. 

3. Crochet a 3 row edging so that you start and end on the front of your piece.  The zig-zag edge is all but invisible if you start on the front.

I wanted a shell edge for my bag tops, so this is what I did:

SHELL EDGING (crocheting into a machine stitched edging)

R1: attach yarn and sc in first zig-zag loop, sc in each "down" loop to end

R2: ch 1, sc in each st across to end

R3: ch 1, sc in first st, skip st (5 dc in next st, skip st, sc, skip st) repeat to end

Fasten off, weave in ends.

I made my bags in two sizes, the small ones are 5" x 6" and will hold a bar of soap and a crochet soap dish doily.  The big bags are approximately 10" x 12" and will hold a bunch of bars of soap, or slippers, or anything else I can think of!  I can't wait to make some cute pillowcases for Mims using this technique!

I've been having so much fun lately practicing my soap making techniques.  I picked up a copy of Soap Crafting by Anne-Marie Faiola (the Soap Queen!), and I'm now going through it, Julie & Julia style, trying to make every recipe/design in the book.  She's got a Pinterest/Instagram contest going on until September 23rd, which I'm going to add my pictures to, but I think just having a reason to practice all the new techniques makes me a winner already.

This is the Raspberry & Cream Column Pour soap I made:

And here is my version of her Psychedelic Green Tea soap (mine is Lime Margarita scented!):

And then these are two soaps that I was just fooling around with:

This is my Planetary Explorer soap that I made for Jake.  His birthday is this month too.

And this is my Queen Bee soap.  I used a Milk & Honey fragrance with it, and I made it because we had a small hive of bees that were living near the house.  I liked watching them, and they were used to us, but my brother-in-law is severely allergic to bee stings, and we just couldn't risk his safety.  I had hoped they could be saved and given to a local bee keeper, but it turns out that they were just barely surviving, so when the bee people came to get them the bees became very aggressive and had to be destroyed.  Broke my heart.  I would have planted more flowers if I had known.  

Okay, on that super depressing note, I'm going to go.  Have a great holiday weekend!!!

xoxo 

Crochet Soap Doily

I have recently come to realize that soap dishes are the exact opposite of coasters.  Coasters are best when they are absorbent and hold on to all of the water that gets dripped on them so that they can protect the surface they rest on.  Soap dishes are good when they allow all liquids to run straight through them, and are best when they sit above the water as it puddles on the sink counter (allowing airflow and evaporation).

As part of my new soap making endeavor, I have been on the hunt for some cheap, but good looking, soap dishes.  I used to work at a little soap shop before my daughter was born, and good soap dishes were the key to our sales (No one wants to buy fancy (pricey!) soap for it to melt away in a week and a half.  Plus, if you add a soap dish to a fancy soap it looks like a good (pricey!) gift.).   The problem that I had was the price for the soap dishes that met my good-soap-dish criteria, the cheapest I could find was 3 wooden soap dishes for $12.  I suppose if I was only planning to give my soap away to my mom and sister that would be a great price, but I need WAY more soap dishes than that.  Everyone on my Christmas card list this year is getting soap! (Um, I've got to unload about 50 pounds of the stuff!)

So I looked for DIY soap dishes.  Immediately the kids-crafting popsicle stick dish projects were out (um, no thank you), and the mosaic tiles/terracotta pot base dishes were out (not enough drainage for handmade soap, it would sit in the water and melt too fast).  Neither my husband or I are handy enough with wood working projects to consider any of the build-your-own dish projects I found, and besides, the cost per dish would be more than $4 (which became my standard I held all the other dishes against: Can I buy it cheaper on Amazon?!). While I did find some gorgeous crochet soap dishes, they were really soap coasters, which (like I said earlier) is the exact opposite of what I was looking for.  And the soap saver bags I found were adorable (homemade soap-on-a-rope, yo!) but if I am going to the time/energy/effort to make beautiful soap, I don't want to cover it up with a baggie (although I'm not opposed to it if the soap turns out ugly! Go HERE for an example).

But that left me high and dry (or really, low and soggy!) for good soap dish options.  I got to thinking (always dangerous!) about yarn.  I didn't want to use any yarn that might be absorbent.  But #18 nylon thread would hold its shape even if it got wet, it wouldn't absorb any of the water it came into contact with, and if it got covered in slimy soap film it could be rinsed off and would look as good as new.

But it still needed to drain well.  I wanted a pattern with lots of open space for lots of good airflow.  Doilies have lots of open spaces, and they're beautiful too!  Okay, two of my criteria were already met, but I thought I could even make something better...

**A brief note: I found the most awesome diy soap dish tutorial that used window screen and glass decorator marbles and grommets.  It was amazing and it looked like exactly what I wanted, except when I started pricing it out, it didn't meet my Amazon criteria.  But I LOVED the idea of the soap being held up above the counter by glass marbles, so it would have LOTS of space for air to flow beneath it.  I was going to link the project (you know, instead of this ridiculously long description) but I can't find it again.  I have google searched for nearly 40 minutes using every keyword I can think of, and it's just not there.  So, mystery tute, I salute you!**

So, armed with the awesome knowledge that glass (flat-backed) decorator marbles make every project better, I set about making a soap doily.  It took a few tries (massive crochet fails) to get it perfect, but I am so happy with them!  And they're WAY cheaper than Amazon!

$6.49 for 197 yards of #18 nylon cord will make 8 soap doilies
1 bag of decorator marbles at the Dollar Tree will fill 12 doilies
Size F hook - cost nothing, I already had it - and it will make infinity + 1 doilies
Which works out to 89 CENTS per soap dish!  Woo!!  (and did I mention, they look gorgeous too?!)

SOAP DOILY
approximately 4" across

Supplies:
25 yards of #18 nylon thread (I think the colors from the Artiste line at Hobby Lobby are gorgeous, but the Red Heart cord feels the best to work with, for what it's worth)
Size F crochet hook
3 large flat back decorator marbles

Doily Center
(make 2)
ch 6, sl st to first ch to form a ring
R1: ch 2, 14 dc into the ring, sl st to first dc stitch to close round (14 st)
R2: ch 3 (counts as a dc + a ch 1), (3 dc in next st, ch 1, skip 1 stitch) 6 times, 2 dc in next st, sl st to 2nd ch to close round (28 st)
Note about Round 2 **I don't know the proper way to explain this, but close the round by crocheting into the 2nd of the chain stitches you made when you started the round.  I have wasted too much time trying to figure out how to word this so that no one will be confused. This will end the round with 7 clusters of 3 stitches, and will line you up for the next row. Thank you. **
R3: ch 2, 4 dc in ch 1 sp, (5 dc in next ch 1 sp) 6 times, sl st to 2nd ch to close round (35 st)
Fasten off.  Weave in ends.

Outer Edging
Holding the two doily centers together with wrong sides facing to the center, attach thread to any stitch.
R1: ch 1, 28 sc (making sure to go through the stitches on both doily centers to crochet them together), add the three large decorator marbles to the pouch you've created, 7 sc (to close up the pouch), sl st to first sc to close round (35 st)
R2: ch 1, (5 dc in next st, skip 1 st, sc, skip 1 st) 8 times, 5 dc in next st, skip 1, sc (54 st)
Fasten off.  Weave in ends.

Once I got the patten memorized (it's so easy!!) I was able to crank a bunch of these out in about 25 minutes each, so really, there's no excuse to NOT make a bunch of them!!

We've been using a couple at the various sinks around the house and they work great!  The soap dries beautifully between uses, which, honestly, is what it's all about.

xoxo

Chopstick Holder

When I was in my early twenties I had a friend that carried a set of chopsticks around with him everywhere, just in case he might get to eat chinese food.  He didn't like the splintery disposable take-out chopsticks, and he despised using a fork.  He was also quasi-homeless, walked a cat on a leash, and had an opinion about every movie that had ever been made.  He was totally weird, and yes, he was in our wedding.  Ah, the things you find charming when you're young...

I picked up a big package of chopsticks to use for swirling techniques in my soapmaking, and it made me think of my friend Josh.  I was completely inspired to pull two pairs out of the bag and make some chopstick holders.  I like that they're going to keep my chopsticks clean in my purse and they work as a chopstick rest while I'm eating.  Because, now as a full-fledged grownup, I finally get it.  The splintery take-out chopsticks really do suck, and you really never know when you might get chinese...

CHOPSTICK HOLDER
to hold 2 chopsticks

Small amount of worsted weight yarn - I made mine in two colors, but they would look great in a single solid color as well (I used Patons Classic Wool in Mercury and Aran)
Size F crochet hook

(I switched color every row, carrying the other color across as I went, but for ease of instructions, I have not added the color changes into the pattern)
ch 12
R1: sc in 3rd ch from hook, sc in each ch across (10 st)
R2-20: ch 2, sc in each st across (10 st)
Fasten off.  Weave in ends.

Fold piece together lengthwise (hotdog style).  Attach yarn in the corner of the piece to crochet the edges together.
ch 1, 30 sc along the long side (making sure to catch both edges in your stitches), 3 sc in the corner, 5 sc along the short end.
Fasten off.  Weave in end.  Add your chopsticks!

I think these could make your table look really sharp for a party, and would make a cool favor for your guests to take home.  Just a thought...

xoxo