A Crafty Fourth of July

Notwithstanding the cloudy and often rainy weather, I had quite a good holiday weekend – basically three days of making things, and what could be more fun than that?! I started out with sewing, working my way through more of the projects and techniques in Alabama Stitch. I finished this “3-D appliqué” t-shirt:

Made myself this headband:

Then I started on another shirt, which still needs to have some leaves stenciled on and beaded, I think.

Along the way, I took a detour to make this needle book from Last Minute Patchwork & Quilted Gifts. I’d been wanting to make one since I saw it in the book, and was spurred to finally do it after struggling to pull some new hand-sewing needles out of their plastic packaging – I wanted to get them into an easier to use case. This was my first time using computer-printable fabric sheets – pretty cool, although the ink did bleed a little bit.


On Monday, I spent the day spinning. I had a number of partly-done spinning projects that I was beginning to feel guilty about, so before starting anything new, I finished up a big hank of tailspun kid mohair:

finished corespinning my “pixie meadowbrite” locks from HollyEQQ:

and finished off a bag of “drunken sailor” batts from hobbledehoy:

I still need to finish off my “neapolitan” roving and a bag of suri alpaca locks, but I decided to let myself start something new anyway … some English Leicester locks from HollyEQQ to corespin:

What a letdown having to go back to the day job (sigh).