Paula's Shawl

Value Village is my favorite thrift store, and every once in a while they have a massive 50% off sale of all clothing and bed and bath items.  Guess what category yarn is in!  I have gotten so many good deals on yarn there.  The best finds are bags with enough skeins for an entire project.  Without this wonderful store, I would not be able to afford my yarn addiction.  One lucky day, I got a bag of barely opened skeins of Caron Simply Soft yarn in these colors:

Simply Soft is a lovely yarn and actually lives up to its name, being very soft.  It's also great because it is fully washable and can be blocked by just throwing it in the washer and dryer (following the laundering directions on the package, of course).  I wanted to make something with it, but had no ideas.  These are beautiful colors, but don't really fit the palette of  my wardrobe (mostly black) or any of my kids (mostly darker colors).  Then it hit me that my cousin Paula likes this sort of colors.  I was a bit worried that they might be too pastel for her, and then one day during a visit she presented in an outfit with this exact range of colors, and I knew it was fate.  Lionbrand.com had recently featured a free pattern I thought she would like, the Mother of the Bride shawl.  It was my first intermediate difficulty pattern, but I felt up to it, especially with the diagram they provided.  I find it's so much easier to complete a pattern if I have the words AND the picture of what you're supposed to do!

Using a size I crochet hook, I had just about enough yarn to finish, though had to go buy some more Orchid (readily available at Joann's) and got some Violet to use for the border as a darker color to give it shape.  It took me almost a year, working on and off, but it was a great project to cart around and work on.  People were drawn to the sheen on the Simply Soft and wanted to touch it everywhere I brought it out.  It hung in my WIP (work in progress) spot on the yarn wall, and I finished just in time for Paula's next visit.

She loved it, and it does look spectacular on her, doesn't it?

Flames of Love in the World

This quote touches my heart and makes me wish that I could bring light into the lives of all those who are aching and despairing in the world.

It's a little late for Valentine words of wisdom, but here they are anyway.  Look around and find the love that is everywhere.  Are you feeling that there is none in your life?  The best way to find love is to bring it to someone else.  Show a random person a bit of kindness and watch the light dawn in their eyes... or maybe it won't, but there will be a little flame growing in your own.

Are you having trouble with the people whom you love in your life?  Do your best to keep loving them anyway, find the spark of light that lives in them and try to blow it into a flame!  See the love that they have for you and try to see what is shadowing that light, what it is that they need help with to find the way out of the dark.

When my kids get depressed, sometimes for no reason at all as that particular chemical imbalance runs in the family, I can only offer what sometimes works for me:  doing something, anything for someone else.  Sometimes nothing works and you just have to hang on until the black box opens up and lets you out, but trying to step outside of self and helping to bring the light to others can help to lighten your own darkness.

I have so much love in my life, such a loving family, so many friends, and still I struggle some days to find the light in the darkness of this vale of tears.  My heart cries for those who are fighting these battles on their own, and I hope I can be at least a little flicker to someone who needs it.

May you all be as flames of love in the world!

I'm Hung Up On Yarn

So here I had this wonderful yarn storage going, but it needed more.  I wanted something to fill the empty space above it and also add to the overall style of my office/craft space.  I thought about what I wanted to say (with help from my family) and decided on "I'm hung up on yarn."  This was the first time I had ever worked with letters with the removable vinyl.  Using Microsoft Word, I chose font Maiandra G and dialed the font size all the way up to 500, printing two letters per page.

"500??" you say, "Mine only goes up to 72."  A great tip for font sizes:  Select the number in the font size box and enter your own with a letter highlighted, and you can see how it will look.  Some fonts only go up to certain sizes.  (This works backwards, too, if you need a tiny font somewhere.)  I decided on my font size by printing different sizes on draft and holding them up on the wall.  When I was sure of the size, I printed one of each letter and just reused them to trace.

The back of the vinyl has lines on it for easy measuring.  I only printed one of each letter I needed and just reused them.  After choosing my font size, I measured the letters against the vinyl and cut strips from the big roll the right height for the letters.  I flattened my removable black vinyl (see this blog for more about where it came from) by cutting out the strips I wanted and leaving it under books overnight.  My roll is 2 feet wide, and my letters were 5-1/2 inches tall, so I cut 3 strips, 6 inches tall.   I traced the letters onto the back of the vinyl and found that, especially with the larger ones, it was much easier to use masking tape to hold them down.  It comes off easily from the vinyl backing, but best to not try to remove it from the paper.  Trace to the tape, skip, then trace after it.  When you're done, remove and join the lines!

I was going along very well, tracing away, and suddenly I realized I was in trouble.  Take a look at this picture, can you see where I went wrong?




Since I was tracing on the backside of the vinyl, the part that sticks to the wall, it's like drawing a sign on a window.  It has to be backwards!  So back I went with a red pen and made my corrections.  This is not the first (and I'm sure not the last) time that I got myself turned around with the vinyl.


I ran a string where I wanted my letters to be, leveling them with the edge of the wall and ceiling.  I am not a perfectionist and don't need everything to be perfectly aligned, so this was sufficient for me.  When you are applying large things with the vinyl, though, it's best to actually tape the entire thing up with masking tape and make light marks where you want it to go, measuring against ceilings and floors if you want it perfectly squared.



There are different ways to cut vinyl:  Many people like to use Exacto blades when working with vinyl, but my only one is old and didn't work out when I was making the tree, so I cut out all my letters with some good sharp scissors, bending it a bit to nip out holes to cut shapes inside shapes.  There are some wonderful machines out there called "Silhouettes" that will cut any shape into your vinyl straight from your computer, but while they look like they are Easy, they don't fall into the category of Cheap.  Rolled masking tape stuck to the back of the letters put them up under the string where I wanted them to go.  Even though this stuff is so easy to move, it's always better to make sure you know where you want it before you peel the backing off and start applying, especially things like letters with long skinny pieces that are easy to tangle.  The rolled masked tape worked pretty well, but they did tend to fall off if left up too long.  Next time, I'm going to just use the masking tape across the front of the vinyl as I think that will hold it better.

 
It looked great, but I was really glad I had taped it up first because as I started to get to the end of the sentence, it became very clear that it was going to be too long for one line over the bags.  Luckily, it looked pretty awesome when broken into two lines.  My mother's voice came to me from the past, "Measure twice, cut once."  I should have taken the time to work out the WIDTH of my sentence as well as the HEIGHT of my letters!  Moving the string up the height of one the letters made a good level for both lines. 

After I had taped them all up, I was ready to apply.  This project was somewhat different from what I had done with the tree before because I was working with letters.  I had similar problems with leaves and small branches though.  It is not a thick material, so when you are working with long skinny pieces, they will twist and stick to each other.  It can be very difficult to get vinyl unstuck from itself, and I've had my share of just having to throw a shape or letter away and start over.  What I do to avoid this is to peel the edges at the top of the shape and stick them to the surface first, leaving the rest of the backing on, as with this "H."  This way you are in control of the shape and can peel the backing away slowly while sticking it down.  Get started with peeling the backing off can be tricky, but I just an the edge down a bit and pop it off that way.  The vinyl may get a little bent, but if you are gentle, it won't crease and will lie flat when placed on the surface.  You can buy "applicators" in many places for vinyl, but I made one with my old AAA card, a piece of vinyl covering the old number and making sure I didn't get it confused with the new one, and that works very well.  When you have your shape or letter where you want it on your surface and you've pressed it down with your fingers, run the edge of the applicator flat down the front of this.  If you have bumpy paint on your plaster (as you can see with the H), the vinyl will make some crackling and popping sounds while you're doing this.  The goal is to make sure there is as little air under the vinyl as possible.

So here it is, the finished project:

As far as the "cheap" part of this DIY, how much did it cost? The roll I bought was 10 yards by 2 feet, making it 720 sq ft.  The pieces I cut were 36 sq ft.  Total cost of roll with shipping $32, $0.4 per sq ft, so total cost of my letters:  $1.44.  The coolest thing about this, and I learned this with making the tree, you can save every little scrap of the vinyl from those letters and use them for other projects.  So that $1.44 is going to go into a lot more projects than just this one!

My Yarn Hangup

Yarn is beautiful and soft and makes me want to form it into things that are beautiful and soft.  As many of us do, I have too much of it, and I can't seem to stop buying it!  Luckily for my budget, I'm a thrift shop hound, a garage sale fanatic, a half-price hunter, so I don't end up bankrupting myself with my habit.  Unfortunately I do find my office/craft space full of the stuff.

When you are in the habit of buying "used" yarn, it usually comes in less than whole skeins.  Of course, the best find is a bunch of full skeins in the same color and dye lot, but that's the jackpot!  Most of the time, I have bits and pieces from these kinds of purchases.  I have learned to hand roll them into balls (have yet to try a winder) and put a rubber band around them to keep them from unrolling.  It works very well for storing them in bags.

My original yarn "organization."

We could have a long discussion on the advisability and environmental and social impacts of shopping at the The Dollar Tree, but really there are some things you can only find at these stores for a halfway decent price.  One of those things is giant Ziploc bags from "The Home Store" which is a Dollar Tree brand and made in, you guessed it, China.  Let's put the social discussion aside for now and concentrate on how I was getting my yarn organized with these wonderfully cheap things. 

It worked fine for a while... until I got tired of moving them around on the floor of my office/craft space and having to dig through them to find that yarn I KNEW I had somewhere.  I wanted a system where I could see my yarn, it would add something to the style of the room, and it wouldn't look a mess.


I looked at a lot of storage systems, cruised Pinterest, and was very inspired.  The ones that display yarn in beautiful artwork-like wall systems blew me away, but I kept coming back to these issues:  "How do they keep it dust-free??  And what happens when you take one of those skeins out?"

Also, I wanted a solution for storing balls and WIPs (works in progress). Those just do not fit in nice framed storage systems. Of course, it had to be CHEAP AND EASY 'cause that's how I roll.



So I looked around and noticed I had this wall where I had just been sticking up artwork that was given to me, stuff created by my Children's Class or by me, and gifts from the past.  I had another wall I could move all that stuff to, and it gave me a chance to make it much more organized and pretty.  I also moved some of my many plastic storage drawers to under my worktable.  Now I had a blank wall with lots of space.  I also had a value pack of 3M Command Damage-Free Hanging hooks that could hold 5 pounds each.   I had purchased them for a project in the bathroom that didn't work out.  These are amazing things and wonderful for renters.  You stick them on, and they have a tag so you can remove them without scarring the wall or door or whatever you put them on.  It is important to follow the directions, especially about getting the wall clean before applying them.  I hung them in 2 lines of 3.

 To make sure that none of my yarn bags were over 5 pounds, I stepped on the scale with the bag and without the bag, and I was surprised to find none of them were over 3 pounds!  Then I hung them up.  This was much better than the bags on the floor, and all that yarn made me want to jump into new projects, but the bottom right is my current work in progress, and I need to whip myself into finishing it as it's a present for someone who is coming to visit soon!!

I loved the new system, but something just felt off.  Then I realized all that empty space above the yarn was too blank.  It needed something.  Another removable vinyl project is now in the works.  Check back to see where it's going!