Enough of my rambling for now Here is the bag:

And to think she called it ugly…

There’s a match box in it to get an idea of its size. I’m using it to keep my lipsticks and small cosmetics in one place.

The side and base is quite wide, about 4 inches and I’m thinking about making a fabric interior so pencils don’t start dropping out of it when I’m on the street

In other news, my second sewing attempt was very close to being a failure. I have one mismatched coaster to show for it, and two almost-bags, but I’m hoping after lots of time and many pieces of ruined fabric, I’ll be able to make something passable. I’m glad that at least my fingers are intact and my grandma’s sewing machine is still in one piece.

And to finish this with something good: I won a tote bag! I was incredibly happy when i saw that and I have to admit I’m listening to hear if the postman brought something new. All i had so far are two bills, but I’m waiting

My first project is a bag, which has the sides completed:

and now I’m working on the bottom, sides and strap (which will be one long crocheted band). After that’s done, I’ll take care of the hanging bits of yarn, put these together and look for a fabric to sew as an interior for this.

And to give you an idea of what I’ll be doing next, or rather what I’ll be using, here’s a picture I took while I put my supplies in order:

That’s my rug, bought a year ago. Notice the green and orange almost-dots. And there are more green and orange dots. These little mats were bought separately and the colors almost match

The reason for these is that I wanted green walls, and the only rug i could find had the orange bits. So the color theme for my room is orange and green, and all the decorative things i bought since then match that.

Then my mother showed me this scarf hanger she saw at Ikea

and I had an idea. I closed all but one of the chains, getting four loops and then put them through the fifth chain. Each loop served as one scarf hanger, and the fifth one was used to hang the whole thing.

Here are some pictures to make up for my poor explaining skills (I apologize for the lightning, my room doesn’t have good natural light and it was too late to go outside and take the photos).

These are the loops

I had three winter scarfs there, which are quite heavy, to see if it would hold, and it did. Each loop was made of ch-s, and you can adapt the size to the type of scarfs you want to use. This is a close-up of mine:

This took me about 20 minutes to make, and the biggest problem was that the yarn I used was one of those pre-woven yarns and my crochet got stuck. I think with the proper yarn, it can be done in 5 minutes

Hope this was useful. if you have any suggestions, comments or complaints, I’d love to hear them

Another interesting thing I saw in her blog was the Hawaiian model which I might try at some point.

So… I’m off to raid my supplies boxes. Will return with pictures soon

The first thing we need to do is creat the little shape that is repeated along the contour.

1. Create a new circle and set the fill to black (or any color you want). Right now you have this:

2. Go to Object -> Path -> Add anchor points. You should have this:

3. To give it the flowery border go to: Effect -> Distort & Transform -> Pucker & Bloat. A message box will appear where you can edit the settings. Here is what i used:

4. Create a new circle and fill it (I chose white) and then mover it over the shape. To make sure it’s perfectly aligned, select both shapes and click the Horizontal Align Center and Vertical Align Center buttons: and . If you can’t see the buttons, go to Window and check the Control toolbar. Now you should have:

5. Next we’ll convert the shape into a brush. Before doing that, I suggest resizing the shapes (hold the Shift key down while resizing so it keeps the original proportions). After that is done, bring up the Brushes toolbar (F5) and click on the options menu -> New Brush:

Select New Pattern Brush in the dialog that appears:

and then ok in the following dialog box. (you can play with the settings there, but for now the default ones are good).

6. Draw and oval and for Brush select the brush you just made. Here is how it looks for me:

The result is:

That doesn’t look too good, and it’s not what we wanted to have, so I selected the smallest Stroke value that’s possible (0.25) and this is what I have:

This is where you can see the effects of the resize we did before the New brush step. If I would have made it smaller here, the shapes would be smaller (as in the preview image).

And this concludes the tutorial. You can use this as a border for tabs, notebook pages, anything you think would look good with this. I suggest experimenting with the shapes, sizes and colors, you’ll probably end up with far more interesting things

Orange and green pattern by everyday icons

I won’t settle for this layout’s graphics, though (what does blue have to do with orange and green, I ask) and the first step is to create an appropriate header. The first thing I thought about was using a nice pattern and for that purpose, I looked for interesting patterns. I found lots of them and below is a list of places where you can see them.

Everyday icons playground – this is one of the most interesting sites I’ve seen lately, and the patterns (lower left corner) are wonderful. The pattern in this post’s image was made by them.

400+ High Quality Patterns – a list of links to different pattern sets. There are many and varied types of patterns there, and you might find some interesting and unusual patterns to use.

BgPatterns – make your own pattern using one of the predefined shapes. You can set the colors, the type of canvas and image size.

Tartan maker – you can create a tartan (kilt) pattern, electing size, type and colors.

Patterns List – a collection of links to pattern sets (31 links).

Pixel patterns – many many pixel patterns.

If you want to see how others have used patterns, here is a smashing magazine article showcasing some of the best designs and if you want to make your own patterns, you could try this tutorial for pixel patterns or Veerle‘s tutorials: for geometric patterns in illustrator, seamless patterns in Illustrator and create patterns in PS2 (requires Illustrator).

I hope this post was useful. If you know of any great patterns sites, please let me know