A Very Merry UnBirthday!

My 28th birthday came and went last month. Despite my lack of chatter about it here, it was pretty well spent. I recieved some wonderful gifts, impecably chosen for me. My favorite new toy is my Speedball Screenprinting kit gifted to me by the Mister. Ah, he knows me so well! I’d been wanting to try screenprinting for a very long time and had experimented with some diy methods, but was never able to get the results that I had hoped for.

The kit comes with two basic methods for creating the screen. The first is the screen-filler method. You paint a plasticizing chemical onto all of the areas where you do not want the ink to transfer through the screen to the material. This is the simplest, easiest, quickest method to prepare your screen, but the second is much more fun. The second method is called photo-emulsion. With this method, you coat the screen with a light-sensitive chemical, then you place a graphic that has been printed or drawn onto acetate or tracing paper between the screen and a light source. All of the places where the light reaches the chemical on the screen (i.e. all of the places that aren’t blocked by the graphic) harden and become plasticky, the rest of the areas (the graphic) are washed out so that the ink penetrates the screen.

Okay, that’s a rushed and super-simplified explanation of the screen printing process. If anybody cares, I can do a more detailed post in the future, but there are already some great resources out there for those of you who are interested in doing this yourself, in particular this MAKE and this Threadbanger video.

All of that was just so that I could show off my first semi-success:

This is my Set of Numbers Matrioshki print. It’s a math joke. Let me explain: The font was a little bit too fine to print well, but you can sort of make it out. The smallest matrioshka is N, the set of natural numbers (0, 1, 2, 3…). The second smallest is Z, the integers (-1, 0, 1, 2…). Maybe you remember from math class that all natural numbers are integers. We say that the set Z contains the set N. Do you see the joke now? As we move further to the right we have the quotients, which contains the integers, the reals contain the quotients, and finally the complex numbers contain the reals. It’s nerdy, I know.

This image has been floating around in my head for years and I’m so excited to see it finally come to life. Even though the screen isn’t perfect, I think I’m going to make myself a t-shirt. I don’t think that I have the patience to try the same graphic twice. There are too many things to make and only so much time!

 

A Zig Here, A Zag There?

This is a smattering of the fabrics that I’ve been collecting recently. I’ve noticed that they go together rather well. So, I’m thinking that maybe they’ll become the queen-sized quilt for our master bedroom.

The question is: Which pattern should I use? At the moment, I’m leaning towards something like Anna Marie Horner’s Folk Dance pattern or, along the same lines, the Zig-Zag Quilt from The PurlBee. On the other hand, I’m really really drawn to the quilting on this one over at Red Pepper Quilts. Whichever I choose, I think I’m going to need to go fabric shopping. Oh darn.

 

Surprise!

We are having the most gorgeous summer-like weather here in Seattle. It’s fabulous! My little family has been running errands and finding excuses to be outside all day long and now we’re all pooped and ready to nap. I was pretty sure that the sun had zapped all of the energy out of me and then I checked the mail only to discover this little surprise awaiting me:

I won this embroidery kit from the lovely Jen over at IndieFixx. If you recall, Jen is the brains behind the Feed Your Soul project, which offers art free to download. (Seriously, the new one from Mara Girling is almost tailored to my livingroom’s decor!)

I’ll have some more things to post about this week. Just as soon as I finish my nap…

 

Are you feeling lucky?

Today is a totally lucky day for me. I mean, aside from my wonderful little family unit and the georgous late-spring weather, we knocked two items off our home’s wishlist.

First, we picked up this gorgeous mid-century chair for $10! That included the little Ikea footstool. The previous owner made some cute little slipcovers for the cushions in the same plaid fabric as the stool, but I really like the green, even though it’s a bit faded. I’ll eventually recover the cushions and stool and also maybe refinish it, since she had (*gasp*) painted over the teak. (They really didn’t know what they had.) For now, though, I’m going to be happy with my super little find. I’ve wanted one of these chairs for so long and we sort of stumbled over it today.

Our second great find today was at Ikea. They were having their rummage sale, which amounted to nothing of note really, but we did run through the as-is section while we were there. And, to my surprise, we found the rug that I have been dreaming about for our living room since I started dreaming about our living room. It was half price because of some tear on the back, which is a) easily repaired or b) easily ignored.

We’re going to finish off this wonderful day with dinner and drinks on our balcony. Hope your weekends are going as well!

 

Random Bullet Points

I’ve been sitting on a few things, so I’m going to do this in one long-winded post. Bear with me.

• First: I did not win the apron contest. (*awe*) But I did win a great consolation prize, a copy of Sew Darn Cute. (*yay!*)
• If you’ve visited the blog, beyond your feed reader, then you may have noticed that I am now an active Tweeter. I’m @Ahavajora, of course, so head on over and add me. Direct a tweet my way and I’ll add you back.
• I have added a new Pyrex casserole dish to my collection:

• I’ve been keeping a list of links. Let’s start with this adorable Smocking/Shirring tute over at Pretty Ditty.
• Lolly Chops has a ton of free downloads, including these embroidery patterns. They also have really great recipes. A wonderful resource!
• How wonderful is this frumpy-shirt-turned-chic-blouse at Jezze? The instructions are A+ too.
• I have the perfect place to hang one of these kusudama, via Folding Trees.
• The next time I head into the city, I must go over to Stitches. It looks like a very hip place.
• Last summer, in the thick of my eye issues, I was forced to wear an ugly wide-brimmed floppy hat. It was bad. If only I’d had this tutorial from Weekend Designer for a beautiful cloche hat.
• Do you love miniatures? Me too. Now you can make your landscape pics look like miniature villages and such with the TiltShiftMaker tool.
• I always love it when my world of math and world of crafts collide (which is happening more often these days, it seems), so of course I enjoyed this article over at Division by Zero.
• Finally, I was overjoyed to find some fold over elastic today at Pacific Fabrics. So of course, I had to re-visit this great video tutorial from Angry Chicken. How cute are those stick Amys?

Well, I hope that my links keep you entertained and busy. Now I’m off to get ready for the Grey’s Anatomy finale.