Happy Easter!

Happy Easter!

Three years ago we got our egg delivery via bunny post for the first time. This was the promo picture and we were sold right away. Who could resist such a sweet smile?
Actually, he's an old friend of mine.

This year, however, there's a new kid in town because Mr. Gnome is on Easter vacation - Floppy the Bunny who has moved in here not long ago (it was a sale and I blame my sister, this time because she gave him to me 😉), just in time to take over. You have to give young people a chance, don't you?

I just hope Floppy hasn't got overwhelmed ... it was a lot of work.

Mr. Gnome made by my lovely friend Jennifer ❤
Running bunny made by Steiff
Floppy by Steiff (actually his name is Hoppy, but he reminded me so much of the rabbit Bluey's sister Bingo has)
Chocolate by Lindt
Wire knit and bead eggs made by me

I'm not affiliated with Steiff or Lindt in any way.

Wire knit ornament - The twenty-second door

At the time of writing this post, I hadn't been working with wire a lot, thanks to recurring pain in my thumb joints which makes it hard to hold a piece when wire wrapping.
I felt I had to make at least one wire ornament for this calendar, though, and since wire knitting is the easiest on my hands, I decided to make something that had always been on my list, but kept being forgotten. So many things to try out!

I had put knitted wire into knitted wire before, in a bracelet, but I had never done it in 3D which was actually rather fun, so it's not off my list yet because there are so many possibilities with this!

It was not that easy to take a picture.
In this one you have to have a lot of imagination to notice the inner structure.

So I took a second one holding the ornament up against the wall, so you can see the inside.
As for the weird effect, that was just to remove the wallpaper and my hand. Unfortunately, the ornament cannot do this ray thing. A pity, really. That would look cool on the tree ;-)

Mini ring binders

"How about the miniature laptop, tablet, and cell phone, and maybe the books? Look at this desk, G. will make one like it." "Great idea! I could try to make a waste paper basket. And how about ring binders instead of books? I'll see if I can find something online."
This very shortened talk between my friend and me was about a gift that our department wants to give to a dear colleague who is leaving us. She works in IT and, inspired by a lantern with a fairy door and some accessories in it, my friend had the idea to put together a little office into a lantern.

So we all went to work, my friend went to get the lantern and some felt to match the carpeting at work, her husband made the desk, and I looked for ring binders.
The basket was first, though. I used brown wire, crocheted a disk for the bottom to make it sturdy and knitted the rest, so you can see what's in the basket, for example tiny paper balls and crumpled tissues, but that's for when it all gets put together.
I did find some ring binders online, but thought that I could probably make those myself. Spoiler alert, I could and only glued myself to one once!

My friend scanned a real ring binder and I printed the scan on labels. I stuck them on folded cardboard cut to a little less than one inch high, added handmade labels with keywords to the spines, and poked holes into them.
Unfortunately all of my jumprings were too big for the slits on the lids (that are hard to see on the lying binder), but after filling the binders with cardboard fanfolds - cardboard to give them some more weight, fanfolds because it was easier to glue those in - there wouldn't have been much space for rings, anyway. I think you get the idea.
The nice part was that I didn't even have to be too careful because the binders were supposed to have that look of having been used for a long time, just like some of our real binders at work.

Once everything is ready and put together, I will share a picture of that as well.
I hope our colleague will like it!

Stash tackler ornaments - The seventh door

Few of you will remember my very first wire crochet Christmas baubles. Unbreakable, unusual, some of them still available ;-) Since then I have made different kinds of decorations, but most of them were wire knitted which I only realized after a conversation with a co-worker the other day. Why had I never tried to crochet around a bauble?
Well, that could easy be changed. I had already strung some, okay, a lot of mixed color seed beads on a copper wire and I choose black baubles for the filling as the contrast would show the difference between the two techniques nicely.

After starting the wire crochet bauble, I knew why I prefer wire knitting for ornaments. To achieve the perfect shape for your bauble, you actually work on the bauble, at least I do. That's a lot easier to do if you knit because the wire structure isn't as dense, is much more forgiving when you press it against the bauble and easier to shape, and of course because the beads are between the stitches.
In wire crochet you usually work from the inside if you don't have a flat piece and the beads appear on the outside, but try to do that if there is already a bauble on the inside! So I turned it the wire structure around after a few rows, so the beads are on the inside now, but you can still see them peek through.
The other downside is that it takes even longer than knitting around a bauble, but it definitely has a very different look and also gave me two new ideas for later some time.

Now the wire knit bauble. You see all the beads perfectly well, the look is very airy and less "messy" as you have just one layer of wire whereas crocheting is more three-dimensional because you pull the extra wire through to make a stitch.

Here they are in one picture together, so you can compare them even better. Let me add that in the right light the wire crochet bauble sparkles more because the layers of wire and the texture capture the light better. I wonder which one would win the sparkle battle, though, if I had used only silver lined beads or maybe even crystals as the beads are so much more visible in the wire knit bauble.
I also feel the temptation to see which one breaks more easily when dropping them, but the crochet bauble just took too long for that.
In the end I guess it's just a matter of taste which one you like better (let's not forget these are quite unconventional colors for Christmas baubles, too ;-)).

This post goes well with my other posts about the difference between techniques like wire crochet, wire knit, netting, and Viking knit, by the way. You can find them here, here and here.

Art Elements Design Challenge and Blog Hop - Seed Pods

Another month, another design challenge from Art Elements.

The topic "seed pods" chosen by Jen who shared great pictures and stories for inspiration is quite fascinating, but you may remember I'm not a gardener. I knew about the snapdragon heads that can look like little skulls (the plant is called "lion mouth" here, by the way) when the flower is dying, but it would probably have been just a bit lazy to take some carved howlite skulls and hang them on some kind of stem (on the other hand let me jot that down for the future, it might be worth a second thought).

What other kind of seed pods were there I could use for an idea?
Well, actually I had been given an idea five years ago. Back then a friend called my attention to Chinese lanterns or physalis. She said she could imagine me knitting some with wire, and so I did my best to figure it out with a prototype first, ordered some agate beads and made three of them. I plastered the picture all over the net, then put them down and forgot about them. Every, now and then I found them and tried to come up with an idea to put them on something like a branch - sound familiar? - and put them out in the hallway as decoration. I already knew I couldn't trust Ponder with them, they were too much like balls, but the wire I had used was too thin to take that risk and also too thin to use them in jewelry.

Now the idea was back. A few years ago I got lucky on a surprise destash parcel. It was a wild mix of some silver findings, crystals, glass beads, small faceted stone beads, a sterling silver chain with a flower pendant, WIPs (one of the earrings made a really sweet focal part for a necklace just the other day that I donated for a good cause). And there were four orange glass beads which had the perfect size for the pod "filling" (also, if anyone has an idea where I put the three leftover agate beads from the first project, let me know - they are probably in a very safe place).
So I grabbed my crochet hook, knitted four Chinese lanterns in different sizes and oxidized the copper for a more natural look. For my first three I had used a coated non-tarnish copper wire,and they always seemed a bit too shiny to me. After all this filigree look means the pods have dried up. Those skeleton pods are not always that greyish then, by the way, I have also seem in a brownish hue. It definitely is a beautiful look. Mother Nature is a true artist.

Now what to do with them?
I had several ideas. One was a necklace with pods hanging from something like a branch :-P Yes, I know, still the same idea. But hey, that's what they do in nature, too.
Maybe one of my wire crochet ropes would work. Spoiler alert - it didn't. Yes, I put some of the pods together with one I made with orange seed beads hoping it would remind of a dried up, but not skeletized pod - which didn't really convince me 100%, though - on two pieces of rope of different lengths. The pods should then be attached to different spots, but no matter how I tried to bring it all together, the look just didn't appeal to me. Was the rope too thick, were just the rope ends too thick, were there too many pods, I just didn't know.
So it was time for a break from it in which I made a pair of earrings instead which I liked better.

The break took longer than I had imagined. Not only got the heat and my cold in the way, I also had WIP procrastination. It's a disease highly dangerous for artists and artisans that keeps you from going back to a WIP you may have already messed up.
Symptoms are lack of creativity, small tantrums, phases of despair when noticing the due date is creeping nearer which usually brings on even worse creativity blocks with bouts of hesitation to even touch or look at the WIP.
If you are lucky, you are strong enough to break the vicious circle, hold the piece for a while without throwing it into a corner, breathe, and maybe the solution will come to you then.
For a short that seemed to be a twisted wire torque design, but nope, another fail *insert another tantrum here* ;-)

I almost thought this was it for the necklace until it did come to me today. I cut the two already attached pods from the rope, very carefully of course because there's no telling what I would have done, had I cut a wrong wire.
Then I put them on a chain, as simple as that. It was the best decision for the moment. I would have missed my mind if it had been lost completely. The signs were already there.
Voilà, one necklace.

Thank you for following me into my small world of madness and drama ;-)
Please have a look at the other participants' posts, too. It's something to look forward to!

Guests
 
Tammy - Raven - Alysen - Anita - Cat (aka me) - Kimberly - Rozantia - Sarajo - Divya - Caroline - Catherine - Kathy - Norma - Jill 

AE Team Members


Claire - Caroline - Lesley - Niky - Laney - Susan - Marsha - Jenny - Cathy - Jen

Spikes!

I know that this pendant is not cute and not elegant. The tumbled labradorite is not shiny and smooth and only shows some flashes of blue and yellow in some spots - more than in these pictures that I took at night, though - and it doesn't even have a regular shape.
Actually this lab was never meant to end up as a prominent focal. I had intended to use it as background for a wire wrapped tree.
I'm not sure what changed my mind after the wire knit bezel was finished. Often if I like a cab in its setting, I add stones or pearls to surround it in order to give it a vintage inspired or a romantic look. This cab however needed something more archaic.
This was the moment when I remembered the spikes.