Lookie What I've Found From The Net

(Click to view larger photo)

Look!!! I found KnitPro 2.0 from a craft website, Microrevolt by using Stumble Upon. With KnitPro 2.0, it can quickly convert your photo to cross-stitch, needlepoint, crochet and knit patterns. I did it for my fishy purse with the largest grid size. It's easy as ABC, load your photo and click "submit", a .pdf document with your beautiful pattern will be generated in seconds.

Enjoy generating your own cross-stitch pattern by using KnitPro 2.0!!!! Please share with me if you found any other cool website with features to have more crafty fun with!!!

Click here if you don't have Adobe Acrobat to read .pdf file.

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My Blog And Crafts Reviewed By CraftGossip!"

Recently two of my craftworks were featured in CraftGossip in Sewing Craft -"Lookie what she made". I was so surprised and practically fell off my chair when I saw it there.

CraftGossip covers news written by craft people telling you about all the good stuff. They scour the net looking for the best craft ideas and projects and review them for you.
My 100% Recycled Material Tote is the first one they wrote. Here is what CraftGossip had to say about it.

Fishy Frame Clucth Purseis the second one they chose to write about!

Craft Gossip also covering topics ranging from knitting, crochet, bath and body, jewelry making, scrapbooking, sewing crafts, recycled crafts, needlework, edible crafts, indie crafts, stamping, lesson plans, glass art, quilting, polymer clay and felting.

You will find something to inspire you there, have fun!!!!

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Tote Bag Made From Recycled Material

See what I have made over the past few days.... a tote bag using all recycled material. This is what I called it TRULY Recycle bag!!!

Basically this tote is made from:
1. Fused Grocery Platic Bag which I have shown you on my previous few posts. See the red patch with "Esprit" on it, I like this the most :))
2. My old soft jeans
3. My old but seldom used curtain, blue fabric with diamond-shaped print on it
4. Rice sack, the brown colour fabric. You can use potato sack or peanut sack to replace it.

One.....

Two..... Three!!!!

Three designs in one bag!!!! You have the choice to choose which design to go with, be it a "branded bag" with "Esprit" (one of my favourite fashion boutiques), or as a baby bag with a baby drawing as a pocket, or just a plain blue diamond printing bag... it is your preference for the day :))

Look at the stripes above, they are the foot ends of my jeans.

And, this litte rolling reel is made from the side seams of my jeans. Just roll it up and bond it with fabric glue, sew it on the bag by making a few decorative stitches at the centre of this seam reel. I was inspired by Polka Dot Pineapple when Lettie shown us how to make a coaster out of the seams of the jeans.

The amazing Fused Grocery Plastic Sheet that I have made has turned into something stylish. I have changed it's life from being just "grocery plastic bag" :p

Guess where did I get this baby picture from? And the alphabet on top of it "KEA"?

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Mothercare and Ikea, got them right?

"This Tote Bag is specially dedicated to EARTH DAY, April 22....

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle please!!!!"

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Fabrics, Fabrics, Fabrics, I Love Fabrics

I love fabrics!!! The above 3 pieces of fabrics are my recent gifts.

Left - from sumay, my lovely editor for this blog. This fabric material is popular in making saree, a tradition garment for female in Indian subcontinent. I plan to make a nice and elegant frame clutch purse with it. I like the tassel-like dangly bits on it and will definitely retain it on the purse. May be I will add some beads on it to make it more classy and elegant.

Middle - from Lollychops. She saw my fish frame clutch purse and thinks that I could use this fabric to make a pear-shaped frame clutch to match the printed pears on the fabric. Her eyes are so sharp to spot the body of that fishy purse to resemble a pear, without the lip and tail of course :)

Right - a swap with Joanne of Ready.Set.Craft . I love the flower prints on it, I plan to make something denoting Springy season with it. Could be a tote bag, but I'm not sure yet :p

I love these fabrics so much so that I have to properly plan my work to ensure that I wouldn't ruin them with bad designs :)

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Orang Utan - The Endangered Species

There is an update from PlanetJune who made the cute little crochetted OrangUtan which I shared with you in my blog few days ago. Please click here to see the "behind the scene" making of her adorable OrangUtan. It is amazing when you see how this creature was created, it truely is a piece of art not a craft, as what PlanetJune described in her blog!!!!

(Aware: the following is nothing about craft but Orang Utans!!! )

(Photo courtesy of OrangUtan Outreach)

OrangUtan, the endangered species found mainly in the wild of Borneo, Malaysia and neighbouring country Sumatra, Indonesia, has been threatened to near-extinction caused by relentless devastation of their habitat to clear land for palm oil production and logging. I feel ashamed that this is happening here, and I am going to do something about it. I found this, an organisation to rescue and raise the awareness of the endangered OrangUtan, Orangutan Outreach. Orangutan Outreach is an affiliate of BOS International, with the main purpose to save and conserve OrangUtan in their native habitat, please click here to read more.

(photo from courtesy of OrangUtan Outreach)

Recently, there is a malaria outbreak in their Nyaru Menteng rehabilitation Center. It is very common occurence especially amongst the youngsters. This poor little toddler OrangUtan, "Angely" shown in the picture above is one of the victims who died recently. I was saddened reading this :(

Orangutan Outreach is calling out to the public for an emergency appeal for medicine for the OrangUtan in Nyaru Menteng rehabilitation Center. They need lots of money to get medicine to save and cure the infected OrangUtan. I plead you, my dearest readers to donate to the foundation. I did it and I hope that you could do the same to save the OrangUtan. I also proposed to PlanetJune that she makes some of the OrangUtans for sale to raise funds for it. I will buy from her if she does. Money collected from the donation will be used for medicine, food, equipment, rescue operations, cages and hundreds of other items that are necessary to rehabilitate the orangutans and keep the projects going.

This piece of news was published a couple of days ago of about 200 newly discovered Orangutan "nests" in Kalimantan:

Monday 13 April 2009

Up to 5,000 orangutans from an endangered species could be living in Borneo, scientists say, after the discovery of over 200 orangutan "nests" on the island. The news raises hope for the survival of what was thought to be a nearly extinct species.

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Recycle Your Grocery Plastic Bag

Do you have the habit of keeping your grocery plastic bags? I do, and have plenty of them in my carbinet. I know that I will find good use for them one day instead of throwing them away into the dustbin and loading the landfill.
I emptied them out on the weekends as there were too many to keep. Looking at them and noticing that some plastic bags are so beautifully designed, it seems like such a wastes, so I made this!!! Fused plastic sheet for various crafts, you can even sew on them. At this point of time the outlook of the plastic sheet doesn't seems appealing to you but it will be a great art when you put them together with other material. I am going to use them to make a recycled tote bag!!! Let me bring you to the tutorial on how to make these fused plastic sheets. I will keep the recycled tote bag for another post in few days time, so please come back and check for the updates.

Material

1. a pair of scissors,
2. 2 sheets of blank white paper,
3. a thick towel,
4. iron,
5. plenty of thin grocery plastic bags, and
6. a well ventilated room

Method
Cut the grocery plastic bags into flat rectangle sheet, i.e cut away the handles, the bottom and side seams. Stack 6-8 pieces of equal size together. The most top and bottom plastic sheet must be white and blank.

Sandwich 2 pieces of plain white paper in between the plastic pile. The paper must be bigger than the plastic so you won't iron and melt your plastic and stick on it.

Set the iron to medium heat and stroke across the plastic pile slowly and evenly. The heat from the iron will fuse the plastic sheets underneath. Remove the iron and press against the pile with a thick towel to let it cool down slowly. Please don't touch it as it is quite hot for your bare hand to handle it. As it cools, the plastic pile will harden and shrink a little, you will hear some creepping sound. If you skipped this step, your plastic pile will shrink and roll up while it cools, as a result, you won't get a flat plastic sheet.Take a closer look of how it looks after the fusing. See, they are bonded together!!!

You need to try out a few times to get the right temperature. The photo shown below was my failed trial. The reason being was that I set my iron temperature too high and the plastics were melted and formed holes. If you find that you plastics are not fusing, that means your iron is not hot enough, increase the temperature or stroke it longer.

If you have any questions, please do leave comments below and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

Good luck.

UPDATE *** I have used this fused plastic sheet combined with other material to make a tote bag.

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Little Girl Vintage Crocheted Dress

My friend, Sumay went to her friend's house and found these to share. Below are the photos she snapped to show, two well preserved and nicely handicrafted crochet dress by her friend's mum 33 years ago.

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Hello this is Sumay here, Joanne's friend and a big fan of her blog. I was at my friend's house when I was telling her about Joanne's blog. Puan Rashidah took out her creations that she made for my friend, Effie, 33 years ago! Puan Rashidah at that time was a housewife residing in England so to kill time and of course dress up her cute daughter, she would crochet these wonderful little dresses that have withstood the test of time!!! From my observation, Puan Rashidah must have been the most patient crafter as I did not see any mistakes in them!!!

Thank you, Aunty for sharing this with us!!!

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Crocheted Stripe Coin Purse

Since I have some left over yarn from the daisy I made for my tote bag, I made a coin purse to go with it. This is my first trial in making a frame-clutch coin purse with crocheted yarn. Not bad huh!

I am going to make more of this as I find it not as difficult as I thought, except the sewing part to attach the metal frame clutch onto the purse.

Recently I was struggling with this issue: "should I make some crafts for sale?".... You know, economy is bad and my hobby has become a luxury expenditure in the household. I know I have to do something to get my hobby going without burdening the family. One thing I can think of is to sell some of my handmade creations and generate some income to fund my next project and so on.... But, it saddens me that I am commercialising my craftwork. What do you think, should I?

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Happy Easter

Happy Easter to all of you, my superb readers and followers!!!!!

My daughter and I painted our very first Easter eggs, not bad huh~ :p

I prepared 6 eggs but only 3 of them were made it to the showcase. What about the rest of the 3 eggs? Ha ha ha good question, they were broken during the making. We were so clumpsy while handling the eggs that they fell and broke. A good experience to learn and we shell do better next year!!!

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Cool Blog To Share

Thought this one done by me right? I wish it could have been me but it is way too advanced for me to create without a pattern to follow!

Planet June is a professional amigurumi pattern designer residing in Ontario, Canada. She created this real-looking baby Orang Utan. From the detailing, you can see she has put her heart and soul into it. You should read her insight story on her painstaking process to what you see now, this cute little creature created.

Please do leave her a comment on what you think about her latest creation, tell her that Craftpassion showed it to you, yay!

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My Melody Sling Purse

Easter is approaching... I made this for my 6 year-old daughter. She chose this "My Melody" bunny and asked me to make it into a purse for her, what a coincidence!!!

I addded a pot of lovely flowers beside "My Melody" and she requested that I put more lace flowers on top of them. Together we made this sling purse, especially to my princess...


To go with the sling purse, I will let her wear this on Easter day, a smock dress made by my amazingly skilled sister. Everybody will be drooling to see her wear these handmade garments and envy her so much. Most importantly, she is happy and hope she will keep all handmades in good conditions :)

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Appliques - Baby Pyjamas

I did some appliques on my baby new footed-pyjamas after being inspired by Lollychops and her lovely bunny templates. I downloaded this, this and this from her blog where she gave us free for hobby use. Thanks Lolly, they are so adorable!!!

I was working on them over the weekend and thought that I should finish them very fast. I was wrong, absolutely wrong in my estimation. I ended up spending 4 days to get them done, part-time, 4 hours a day, total 16 man-hours (or woman in my case :-).... Getting the picture appliques done is quite fast, slightly more than a day will do. I thought that they were too plain as a baby pyjamas as I always like to think that baby garments should be colourful and cheerful. So I thought to add things around them.

I started off with the Bunny pyjamas, thinking of adding a few embroidery alpahbets will be great. I began to embroider "baby bunny" onto it, ohhhh... it is so hard to do. First , I can't put an embroidery hoop onto the pyjamas to stretch out the material. Without the hoop, it is difficult to get the precise sewing point. Then, the material of pyjamas is problematic as the tension has to be right. I have to redo it a few times. I told myself that it is a good experience and no more embroidery done on stretchy textile.

I moved on to the Bird pyjamas and this time no more embroidery, instead I did alpahbet appliques on it. "Tweet Tweet" was the first words in my mind and some melody notes jingling around will be lovely as well. This particular one was the most time-consuming among the appliqueing on the pyjamas. Look at the perimeter along the alphabets I have to work on..... It really is no joke that we need to exercise a lot of patience when come to craft, and it can easily lead toproject abandoncy :p

The outcome was favourable to what was on my mind, the time and patience spent was worth it. I love the look of the Bird Pyjamas than Bunny Pyjamas as it is more colourful and joyful though it took a little longer to finish it.

I did the same to my Mushroom Pyjamas. I love the two butterflies flying around the colourful mushrooms. I got them together with the mushroom templates downloaded from Lollychops's blog.

I bought the pyjamas in slightly bigger size. Now, all I have to do is wait until my baby is big enough to put them on :) Weekend is approaching again!!!! Sigh, time is really flying fast!!! My baby is 6 month-old and is about to taste his first solid food.

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