Temari

I made these temari a few years ago. The balls look a little worse for wear because I let them be used in the traditional sense (basically, I let my kids play with them).

I was learning to make these following tutorials from the excellent, but now sadly defunct, Temari 101 website. The site was great. The first ball featured overlapped diamonds (the small blue one). It took me two tries to get it right. The black, red and white ball was my first try.

The next tutorials featured a whole bunch of spindle balls. I made one (the pink one), then I had my first baby. Temari require marking with lots and lots of pins. Pins and babies don't mix, so I stopped for a while.

The kids are bigger now, so I ready to try some more. The black one is another spindle ball.

The yellow one is my mis-guided attempt to follow these excellent instructions. I'll have to try again some other time. I seem to do better with my second attempts.

The ball at the back is the Rainbow design from the Temari Traditions book.

These two are my latest. They are both attempts of the Triads design from Temari Traditions. The design is a fully covered ball (meaning that the entire surface off the ball is covered with stitching thread). Getting the effect requires precise marking, something I'm still working at. The purple ball looks pretty good though, so I'm happy.

More paper flowers

The thing with my son is that once he starts making something he won't stop. After the button flowers, he wanted more flowers. So I broke out my paper craft books.

We upgraded from pipe cleaners and scrap paper to proper floral wire and crepe paper. He cut and glued, and I assembled. We did the roses sort of like they did here, but much lazier, just drawing everything free hand.

The iris is from one of my old craft magazines. Now he's insisting he needs more than one purple flower.

Quick origami decorations

I was itching for a quick finish project, so I made these origami decorations. These are the first three balls from this book. They are made of six paper squares, folded, then glued together. The folding part comes together pretty quickly, and putting on the tassels is very satisfying.

I must have been feeling an urge to minimize when I made these. The first one is grape fruit sized. The second is orange size. The last one is lime sized.

Paper hearts

I did some crafting with my 4 1/2 year old today. We made the paper flowers from here. My little guy chose the paper. I drew the hearts. He cut them out, and we assembled them together.

The stems are pipe cleaners. I haven't played with pipe cleaners in years, forgot how much fun they are. Have to get more pipe cleaners...

Strappy dresses

I thought I'd start with some of my daughter's dresses. These are two strap tops I made for my lovely little lady recently. This first sunny dress was a real breeze to make.

It came together in a charmed three hour session during one of my daughter's rare naps. I even managed to get the heart-flowers embroidered before she woke up.

The second dress was the complete opposite. Here's the first version. That pink ribbon added a touch of colour, but it made the dress too stiff. The straps were too long and the whole thing just fit my little lady. Trust me, 'just fits' is not how you want to describe the dress of a growing two year old.

I decided to un-pick the side-seams, straps and skirt and fix the mistakes. In two days of seam ripping and re-sewing I managed to attach the back opening backwards and sew the skirt so that it was twisted like a pretzel.

It finally did come together though. She's worn it a few times, so now I feel better about all that un-picking.