The Earbud Poppy Laundromat tutorial

I’ve posted before about my laundromat projects, but this time I thought I’d bring my camera along with and share a quick one perfect for your next trip to the laundromat. I was inspired by  Diana Eng’s book Fashion Geek available on Amazon. I made up my own pattern for my version, but feel free to check out the book (I saw it at my local library and there seem to be  a lot of cute projects in there.)

Step 1

First, get your laundry, your quarters, and your supplies and head off to the laundromat. I like to do my laundry at midnight at the 24 hour laundromat when it’s nice and quiet and empty, but that’s optional. The supplies you’ll need are few and easy to tote along with you.
-Felt in two colors, one for your petals and one for your center circle. Scraps are fine
-Scissors
-Needles, thread (I like to carry a mini sewing kit in a film canister)
-Your headphones / earbuds

-*- Optional -*- hot glue or tacky glue

Step 2

Cut your pieces out of felt. For the petals, cut a strip of felt about 2 inches tall. You don’t really need a pattern to cut the petals, they’re just rectangles with a rounded top. The curve of your thumb should make a perfect template. Trace your shape onto one end of the felt, cut it out, and use that as your guide to cut out 5 more petals for one flower ( 11 more if you want to make two flowers.  From here I’ll be describing how to make one flower), all the same size and shape.

Step 3

With your needle threaded you’re now going to stitch the six petals together.

Holding the bottom of the petal (the flat side opposite the curve) fold the flat side in half.  Then fold the edges up towards the fold. Push the needle through the four layers, near the edge of the flat side.

See the image below for a step by step.  Click the image if you need to see  it bigger.

It should look like this once you slide the petal onto the thread and release it:

String the next five petals onto the thread (If you’re making two flowers, string six petals on one thread and six petals on another thread)

Step 4

Time to check in on your laundry if you haven’t done it yet.

Yep, Spin cycle.  Once your laundry is in the dryer just tumbling away, we’ve got about 20 minutes to finish this up.

Step 5

Pull the ends of the thread to gather the petals together. Pull it nice and tight and tie a couple of knots to make your flower.

You could call this done if you like, and sew or glue this onto your earbuds now, but I’ve got a few more minutes to kill until folding time.

Cut a small felt circle of your second color of felt and stitch it to the center of the flower with a matching thread.  I used a simple blanket stitch.

I still had some extra time, so I added some french knots in a contrasting thread color for a little extra bit of detail.  On the other earbud I also added a little green leaf underneath the flower.

Step 6

Attach the flower to your earbuds.  I simply sewed around the earbud and through the petals a few times to hold it in place.  Alternately you could use glue, or a glue gun would work great.  I noticed some open outlets at the laundromat and realized I could’ve brought my hot glue for a quick and easy fix, but this worked just fine.

Step 7

Put on your headphones, turn up the tunes, and get that laundry folded!

Another Lucky Thrifting Find

I get some of the best luck thrifting, but I was still surprised to find this Brother knitting machine for just $8. wow. I had to get it despite the fact that I’m rubbish at knitting and had no clue how one of these were supposed to work. It actually was pretty easy to get the hang of! I looked online and was able to find a manual and get the machine set up pretty easily. I had almost everything I needed, but I was missing a piece that held up the tension thingie so I improvised with some dowel rod. With a little more luck, the machine worked perfectly (except for some learning curve and user error) and I was making up little swatches and stuff in just a couple of hours.

I thought I’d share some basic photos to share what a knitting machine looks like.

The machine consists of around 200 of these “needles” that are just like latch hooks and lay in channels along the “bed” of the machine.

The carriage sits on top of the machine and glides across it with the help of channels along the bed. Now I’ve read a bunch of explanations of how exactly the carriage makes the stitches, but I don’t know how to explain it so we’ll just call it magic. Basically, when you slide the carriage across from one side to the other it lays the yarn across the needles. The new yarn is simultaneously pulled through the loop already on each needle, dropping the first loop below and keeping the new yarn loop on the needle ready for the next row. (yeah, we’ll just call it magic)

This is what it looks like when there are a bunch of stitches on the needles. You can just go back and forth to create stocking stitch, or you can create lacey eyelets or chunky cables by manually moving stitches from one needle to another with the help of these little tools.

The machine is great for me because I have a really hard time keeping track of where I am in a pattern or how many stitches I’ve done. On the bed of the machine the needles are numbered every 5 needles, and on the back of the machine it’s got a row counter that automatically counts each time the carriage goes by.

I worked off of this pattern (with a few changes, leaving out the purl stitches and adding the lacey bit to the center)

and made a swatch that looked like this in about a half an hour

It’s a little strange, because the right side can’t be seen while you’re working, but that’s part of the fun, I think. It wasn’t until I’d bound off this piece that I could see the full pattern.

I really like this machine and I just know I’m going to have a good time getting to know more tips and tricks and how to make some nifty knitted goodies!

I strung some beads

I strung some beads this weekend as my “laundromat project”. I think time waiting for your washers and dryers is best spent with a little project to work on, and this week I made myself a simple necklace.

I quite like it. It’s long enough to slide over my head so it doesn’t have a clasp at the back, but it does have a clasp hanging from the center front to hold the pendant.

Now I can wear my scissors everywhere! They’ve already come in handy a couple of times!

Night Hoops

Last summer I heard about making your own hula hoops. I found out that hoops you find in the toy isle at the store just aren’t that great, and a bigger, heavier hoop can not only make hooping easier, but it’s a lot more fun, too! Since then I’ve spent many hours outside hooping it up, learning some tricks, and surprisingly getting a great workout (and the bruises and sore muscles that can come with it, ha!).
I’ve made quite a few hoops now. I’ve tried a bunch of different sizes and weights to see how they feel. Smaller, lighter ones are great for fast spinning. Bigger, slower hoops are perfect for a relaxing spin. I’ve made most of them out of cheap irrigation tubing I picked up at the Home Depot, but after seeing some cool LED hoops online (starting at $100!) I decided I wanted a glowing hoop, but for cheaper. The cheap tubing I was buying is black and opaque, so I set off again in search of a better tube. I found Pex tubing this week. It’s a white and more transparant kind of tubing intended for potable water. After visiting some home improvement stores for tubing and my friendly neighborhood dollar store to score some glow sticks I just had to wait until it was dark and start spinning light.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a picture of the hoops actually spinning, but you’ll just have to trust me, they look really cool.  The larger one is for me, and is about 13 feet of tubing and 7 glow necklaces. The smaller one is perfect for my favorite 8 year old and is 10 feet long and has 15 glow bracelets.  The glow sticks work great for one night, but I’m planning on running leds through them for more uses.

Here’s a classic tutorial for making your own hoops if you’re interested: http://www.jasonunbound.com/hoops.html

For Portlanders looking for supplies:

The black irrigation tubing for regular hoops I get at the home depot on SE 82nd ave in Clackamas.  They have it  in rolls of that make about 6-8 adult hoops for around $20.  I like the 3/4″ tubing and the grey connectors that fit at 28 cents apiece (you just need one per hoop) note: There’s also 1/2″ tubing that is a lot cheaper, but it just doesn’t work.  It’s worse than the cheapie kids’ hoops you’re trying to replace.

These glowing hoops were made from “Pex” tubing.  Besides their color difference from the other tubing, it’s also a little bit smaller (even though it’s also called 3/4″ tubing) so you’ll also need different connectors.  I found 10 foot lengths of pex at the Lowes out by milwaukee for about $3.50.  One of these is perfect for smaller people, but I like having 12-13 feet of length so I picked one up for the kiddo and kept looking.  They only had some big rolls of it for around $45, but I wasn’t sure yet how well it would work so I wasn’t ready to invest that much yet.  I looked again at the home depot, but in a different isle than my black tubing and found the pex there, too.  They had one piece that was cut at 3/4″, but it was only 5 feet long.  Luckily, I also found a roll of 25′ for $15.50, which is perfect to make two hoops my size!

Farewell, Paul

Last October I captured some photos of this large caterpillar building it’s cocoon on out back porch.  I photoblogged the image on my Aminus3 page http://laupre.aminus3.com/image/2008-10-03.html .  I started calling him paul after looking online at photos of moths and guessed he’d be a polyphemus because of his big green body.  Since then we’ve waited patiently for our little friend Paul to make an appearance.  It was a kind of running joke that he was a great roomate.  Never made a mess, was really quiet, that sort of thing.  It’d been so long we were starting to wonder if we’d ever see him (and if he did come out if we’d be lucky enough to see him before he flew off.)

Today we spotted him all big and mothy, having emergerd from his cocoon. check him out!

Each of his wings were about 3 inches long, giving him a pretty impressive 6 inch wingspan.

He hung around for a couple of hours and then disappeared, but won’t be forgotten.  Farewell, Paul!

My Little Lamb

Just wanted to share this little project I whipped up this weekend.  I brought the linen and some crewel wool with me to the laundrymat to keep me busy while I was waiting for the machines to do their thing.  I sketched it out and stitched up the trees and grass during the wash cycle, then decided it needed a little lamb while the dryers were running.

And a couple of detail shots:

At first, I made the sheep’s body with a double layer of satin stitch, but it just didn’t look right.  I think the french knot curls lood adorable, and since I layered the french knots on top of two layers of satin stitch it really stands out and has a great texture.

Now I just need to know what to do with it!  I’s about 4″x6″, so maybe a little pouch? a pin cushion? I don’t know do you have any suggestions?

Let’s Pink!

When I saw this little machine in the thrift store I was immediately intrigued.

I thought it was beautiful.  It is all metal, except for the wooden handle, and is pretty small, at a little under 6 inches tall. (on my monitor, the photo is just a little bit smaller than the real thing)  I wasn’t sure what it was at first, but as I played with it I started to get an idea of what it was for.  When you turn the handle, the wavy blade turns as well as the metal disk below the table.  I thought it had to be for pinking fabric!  I brought it home, not really caring if it would work or not because I loved it.

Just look at those neat gears on the back! You can see here that it was made by Singer.  I started looking around online after I got it home and found out that it’s a little hand pinking machine that Singer made during the first half of the 1930’s.  I was even able to download a PDF of the instruction manual.  The manual promised that the blade will “never need sharpening”!  I thought I’d better give it a try.  The little machine clamps down onto the edge of a table for security. I clamped it down, fed some sweet Kokka Japanese linen through it, and it worked like a charm! perfectly!

I wonder if Singer knew when they wrote their manual that it would really still work perfectly 70 years later.  It’s so nice because the machine feeds the fabric through as you turn the handle, all you have to do is guide it to keep it straight.  It is so much easier to use than pinking shears (scissors), because you never have to worry about lining up the zags and zigs every time you reopen the scissors to cut the next part.  You just get one long continuous line of perfect pinking!

I pinked the edges of a couple of rectangles of the linen and paired it with some lime green linen to make a pouch.  I made the pinked edges a part of the design since it was so fabulous.

And look, the machine fits right inside.  Cute, no?

LauPre Spring Summer Preview

Want a peek at the items that will be popping up in my Etsy Shop this spring and summer?  I’ve been working on a handful of fun tops, skirts, and dresses that will all be posted soon, and I’ll be making new items all summer long.

Let’s take a look at tops first:

So far I’ve been working with mostly a palette of blues and greens in my tops, because I just love these colors for summer ‘09.  I’ve been playing around with contrasts, and pairing solids with prints.

Blues and greens aren’t the only colors I’m interested in, though.  Take a look at this fab dress in red, yellow, black, and white.  The print fabric on the bottom of the dress and edging on the top is some reclaimed vintage stretch that I just had to give a new life to.  A row of bright red buttons decorate the deep cut back yoke. This dress is so lightweight and breezy it would be perfect for even the hottest of summer days.

Here’s another dress with a warm, fiery hue.  This one features crossing straps at the waistline and a tie in the back.  The bust detail is decorated with layers of overlapping printed knit fabric.

This dress brings us back to the greens, but with some fun details.  Allover stitched lines give this strapless dress a geometric and architectural quality.  A bow ties in the back for cuteness and fit.

And finally let’s take a look at skirts.  I’ve just gotten started working on these, but I’m excited to bring as many fun new ideas as I can for the new season!

Thanks for looking, and be sure to keep an eye out as I add all new items often!

Out With The Old

Welcome Spring!

I’ve been doing some spring cleaning this week.  Clearing out closests, sweeping, dusting, polishing, and organizing.  Now I’m going to do the same for my Etsy shop.  I’m marking down almost everything in stock up to 90% off.  All coats, jackets, and capes are marked down.  Also take  a look at the accessories and long sleeve shirts that are now at all new low prices.  If you want them you’d better grab them quick!

Take a look on my etsy page’s Clearance section to see what’s on sale!

Needlework: Crewel Maneki Neko Sewing

I like to embroider from time to time.   I don’t think I’m too skilled at it, but it’s good practice for making nice, even stitches for those times when I have to take needle in hand. I recently came across a thrifting treasure of old crewel wool, so after checking a stack of books out of the library and trying out a bunch of stitches I decided to try to finish a crewel project. This is a design that I actually drew up myself of the Maneki Neko holding a sewing needle and thread.  His little tail wraps around a cute little pin cushion.  cute, right?

Want to look a little closer?

red stitching in ears

Neko’s pincushion and french knot pins

Neko’s thread.  I used some lovely green yarn for this and couched it down with some of the crewel wool.

The entire piece measures about 8 inches wide, and I think I’ll stitch this onto one of my reusable shopping totes so I can carry it around with me.  I enjoyed this project, so I think I’m going to try and so some more crewel embroidery from now on.