Dear Readers,

2010 is ending and I would like to take a moment and thank you all for following this blog through this year.
I hope you will have an interesting, crafty and successful year 2011.

Watercolor Wednesday: Red onion

Crochet Cowl Scarf

The weather outside is frightful, so better get your crochet hooks out and make a cowl scarf. This one I made to try out a V stitch patter. I liked how the colors came out.

Watercolor Wednesday: Flowers

Disclaimer: The here depicted exercises are based on tutorials in Water Color Painting for Dummies.

The tiny squares baby quilt

This is a new quilt I finished in a period of 3 weeks. The dimensions are 120x80cm. The middle contains 5x5cm squares bordered by 7,5cm wide white border. 

The back is a uniform green fabric with white dots.

Watercolor Wednesday: I'm on a boat!

This painting exercise shows a sailboat.

Disclaimer: The here depicted exercise was based on a tutorial in Water Color Painting for Dummies.

Pimp your mouse pad!

The black fabric of my mouse pad started peeling off, so I removed it.

To get a new nice mouse pad I took some glue and a piece of fabric.

Spreading glue on the pad (Achtung! Don't use too much glue, it will penetrate the fabric.), just glue the fabric to the pad. After drying, cut the fabric off and "Voila!" you have a nice mouse pad.

Watercolor Wednesday: A winter landscape

Feast your eyes on this excercise.

Disclaimer: The here depicted exercise was based on a tutorial in Water Color Painting for Dummies.

Laptop sleeve

So, I got a netbook for work and entertainment, but it didn't come with a laptop sleeve to carry it around. Do I go to buy one? No, I make one myself.

Basically, I made a wrap-around sleeve. First I cut out fabric, lining and padding. The sandwich was then sewn together, leaving an opening for turning.

The sewn part was turned inside out and the border sewn with a small allowance.

After sewing velcro to the flaps, the finished sleeve looks like this.

The top flap can be opened easily and the laptop taken out.

To show you the whole thing, I will unfold it

Watercolor Wednesday: More trees!

This weeks exercise contains a few autumn trees.

Disclaimer: The here depicted exercise was based on a tutorial in Water Color Painting for Dummies.

The return of the (wannabe) graphics designer

Now that I have some horn rimmed glasses, it's time to do more graphic design stuff. I was asked to do a flyer/poster/web banner thingy by the folks of BagesLindy. So, this is the final design:

If you happen to be around Manresa at the 19th of December you might drop by for music, films and dances from the 30s and 40s. There will be food, too (yummy). Everyone is invited!

See you at the "Peixera"!

Fabric covered notebook

As a recycling project I made a notebook. The cover and back is made of cereal cardboard box covered with fabric.

The elastic band is secured by two metal grommets.

The paper in the notebook is standard 80g weight.

Watercolor Wednesday: A Monster!

This is a freehand monster (bigfoot-esque) I painted.

Watercolor Wednesday: Leaves

A new painting exercise! Here I practiced to paint a leaf. 

Disclaimer: This exercise was conducted using the tutorial "How to paint leaves".

Paper engineering: A pop-up house

Lately I got interested in paper engineering. It seems to be impossible that from a folded card a 3D object can pop out by unfolding. Just to give a short insight, here I show you a pop-up house prototype I made.

If you want to see a real professional paper engineer, see Robert Sabuda's webpage (and get some interesting tutorials).

Watercolor Wednesday: Birdhouses

Using the experience from the birch tree exercise, I added a bit of simple geometry to make some birdhouses.

Here is a close-up of one birdhouse:

Watercolor Wednesday: Trees

Trying to make a tree I came up with this:

Disclaimer: The here depicted exercise was based on a tutorial in Water Color Painting for Dummies.

Alice: A pop-up story book

Lately I was working on pop-up book prototypes, but found myself in a creative cul-de-sac. So I made a quick and fun project. Using a printer, I printed out pages for a story book, which I then colored by hand with watercolor. The finished 4 page book can be seen here:

Here are the single pages of the book:

Watercolor Wednesday: Three Birch Stems

This is the next exercise on Watercolor Wednesday. What was really interesting was that the "white" birch stems are really colored.

Disclaimer: The here show exercise was based on a tutorial of Peter Humeniuk.

The making of the 10 year anniversary rings

So for our 10th anniversary I decided to get us some rings. To make the whole thing more interesting I decided to design the rings and get them made by laser sintering (LASERS, yeah!). This is more or less how I did it:

10 year anniversary rings

To celebrate our ten year anniversary I got two rings laser sintered. In a few days I show you how I designed the rings in detail.

Watercolor Wednesday: Bananas and Apple

Coming back to fruits, I made this painting with bananas and a red apple.

Disclaimer: The exercise conducted here was based on the tutorial on Yong Chen.

Watercolor Wednesday: A Feather

I found a feather a few days ago. Trying to paint it with watercolors, I ended up with this:

Sorry for the  waves in the paper, I really should stretch the paper before painting (BTW I used 140g paper, but I have a 200g pad waiting for me in the cupboard)

Mini patchwork name tag

For the first birthday celebration for our niece, I made a mini patchwork name tag for her room. First I cut out hexagons out of paper and fabric and pieced these together.

Meanwhile my assistant cut out the letters for her name, which I then embroidered.

Once the hexagon patchwork was cut to size, I fixated it with a ruler on our cutting mat. I then proceeded to glue the letters to the fabric.

After the glue was dry, the work was framed and was ready for giving away.