I have a free ornament pattern for you!

Here is the treehugger ornament pattern in PDF format. It is made from recycled plastic bags. The green bags are from Barnes and Noble, and the yellow ones are from Super Saver in Nebraska. If you don’t have a Super Saver, Dollar Store bags work well too.

Here are instructions for making the recycled plastic yarn.

If you like this pattern, check out my other patterns for sale at juleej.etsy.com.

We here at Julee’s Sharing Needles Blog are proud to say we have been linked to by the Obama Craft Project.

They feature my crocheted Obama Ornament. I posted the pattern to the crochet/knitting site ravelry.com to share and get more exposure with other needleworkers.

On that site, Peppergrass was the first person to ever follow a pattern I wrote! It was such an inspiring moment for an aspiring pattern writer.

My latest project is a clear polyester resin cuff. From what I’ve seen on the internet, there are available molds for resin bangles. These two molds on etsy.com are only 3/4 and 5/8 inch deep. My cuff requires at least two inches of space in order to better display a piece of lacework or crochet. The bangle mold would be too klunky at that depth.

Since there are no commercial molds available for the shape I want to make, I had to make my own mold. The mold builder I used was Castin’ Craft Liquid Latex Rubber for resin or plaster casting.

Before you can build your mold, you have to have a three dimensional model of the item you want to create. For this portion, I used Creative Paperclay. I liked that this clay was inexpensive ($4.99 for 8 oz), dries hard, and can be sanded or whittled when dry. The worst part of this clay is that as it shrinks, it dries. This can be fixed by either making your object bigger than you need, and then whittling it down, OR by my favorite property of this clay. The property is that when it gets a little wet or moist, it gets slightly pliable.

For this cuff, I needed an opening of exactly 1 3/8 inches. When the cuff dried, the opening was down to 1 inch! Luckily, I made the cuff pretty thick, so I whittled out the middle with a boxcutter. The opening was also enlarged.

After that, the sanding, and more sanding, and more sanding. Encountered another roadblock when I sanded too hard and one side broke off. It all glued back together well, built it up with a little Modgepodge, and after drying, sanded down well also.

The mold builder requires porous surfaces to be sealed before application. In some cases Modgepodge is considered a sealant, but the mold builder required an acrylic sealant.

Ok, let’s look back here and count how many nights of dry time we are up to: one for the mold, 1/2 day for glue, 1/2 day for Modgepodge, one day for the acrylic sealant.

We’re finally to the mold building portion! I used a disposable brush that comes with resin mixing cups. The brush ends up very clumpy like the old brush inside of a rubber cement tin. The mold must be built up in very thin layers.

Every layer then must be cured with dry heat, as well as left to dry for 15 minutes. Bubbles can also form, and blow up when exposed to the dry heat. I popped one of these as I began the process, and I think the hole has been covered up enough.

I started painting on the layers yesterday morning before the football game, more after the game, and a few more layers this morning. I’m glad I started taking pictures yesterday, but I wish I would have taken more earlier on. This is after about four layers:

This is after about ten layers:

Today, after the last layer cures, I’m going to remove the clay cuff and toss the mold with a little talc. Soon, I’ll have some mold release spray for the inside, and I’ll attempt to actually pour a cuff.

Aside: Most crafty folk have some sort of OCD built into them. I first realized mine peeling glue off of my fingers in 2nd grade. What is great about mold building is that the latex dries on your fingers and then peels off in gigantic chunks. I’m sure it sounds really gross to most people, but I was fascinated by it.

I thought I would get more jewelry into the shop before the official opening, but the US Postal Service and our non-functional doorbell disagree.

My etsy shop has some jewelry, some finished change purses, and some knitting patterns. Click on the pictures to go to the store.

Here are the featured patterns:

This knitting pattern shows you how to make a rug out of recycled T-Shirts. I used some terrible looking T-Shirts from my brother Tom. I’m amazed that they turned out to be so pretty. The funny part about this pattern is that it evokes the Denver skyline in the team colors of the Denver Broncos.

This knitting pattern is the first one I ever wrote. Yes, it is a knitty.com reject, but mostly because ponchos just aren’t as popular as they used to be in the hipster knitting crowd.

Both patterns are $4, and are in PDF format, delivered by email.
Thanks to Ty for taking the pictures!

New pattern alert! If your name is Erin, stop reading this now and check your mail in a week.

Here is the pattern for the Granny Block Blankie. It was fun to sample the fishnet stitch. A few years ago, I made a blanket for a friend. She came back to me with all of this information about how breathable crochet is, and how all of the research she had read suggested using a handmade holey blanket to cover up babies when going outside.

The fishnet may be a little too holey, Erin will have to give it the old Pepsi Challenge.

Note: because of the fishnet stitch, this blanket would be inappropriate at my former place of work. Fishnet, even on infants, and even thought it may have been appropriate in the 1980s, is never appropriate in the present. This is especially true if the fishnet stitch is confused with patterned tights under a long skirt.

I’m in the middle of writing a really cool crochet pattern, I think I’ll unveil it sometime next week. There may be some sort of sale on etsy for all of my test tries. Still trying to figure out a good name for my etsy store. It will probably be something with “Julee” in it, but

In the mean time, here are a few words of wisdom from my mother-in-law, Diana, on the Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook oil-based pie crust:

You have to make sure the counter top is damp (so the waxed paper sticks to it) and place wax paper under the ball of dough and another piece ontop of the dough. That usually works fine. You can’t just roll it out- rolling pin against dough like normal.

Spent today writing one pattern, re-writing another.  I didn’t get any of the pictures taken.  Looks like Tyrone is going to  help me tomorrow.

I’m looking for places  to send these patterns off too.  The knitty.com deadline is March 15, and so is magknits.com.  I don’t know if my patterns are appropriate for either.

Tomorrow, I think I’m going to write something up for readymade.com, and another thing for instructables.com.

I’m also attracted to supernaturale.com.  They have a really cool article on crafting your wedding.  I think I have a bunch to add to to it, and maybe even some fun failures.  I tried to make a 1930s deco bias-cut gown, but apparently in the 1930s,  I have a size 6 chest and size 14 hips.  The dress was also backless, so there was no way to structurally engineer a way to rectify the dress.  It was a good learning process.

There is another project I’m working on where embroidery doesn’t quite cut it, so I have a nice little experiment with crewling coming up next week.  Here is a bit of embroidery I did with a kit my friend Sarah gave me:  

It is from Sublime Stitching.  Click on the picture to enlarge it!

Ty and I took a walk around Holmes Lake today.  It is so nice and warm.  I want to start cutting back grasses with the hedge trimmer already, but it is too wet.

I almost jumped out of bed this morning.  It just feels like I have so many things to do.  Last night I finished off my first simple pattern that I’m going to submit to an on-line knitting magazine.  That sends so many other things cascading into action.

Today was one of maybe 3 days where I have been out of bed before my husband.  I did some Rodney Yee yoga to try and focus, and then work on the main site.  In looking for pics for the site (and my husband’s site) I started uploading a backlog to flickr, realizing that I have an new gallery too.  So many things to track.

For tomorrow, I’ll probably tweak the site a bit, maybe work up another simple pattern from my backlog, work on a cool felted purse with my sewing machine, and possibly document how to make terrariums out of old clear lotion bottles for instructables.