Remember the Smiley Sweater?

I've discovered that working on the embroidery and appliqué of the Smiley Sweater is really a kind of meditation. My friend Amanda told me about something called 'distraction therapy', and it hit me that a lot of what I do is just that. If I can lose myself in my work, I don't have the bandwidth to worry about things that I can't do anything about anyway. When I'm working on the Smiley Sweater, I just think about colour and design and composition. My mind stops whirring and spinning. The world gets quiet.

Here he is.  A smiling frog. And if you look closely, you'll see that the patch pocket has been replaced. Can't see it? Good. The pocket is now very, very close to the same colour as the sweater. Still have to give him a toothy smile, and there's some text to add as well. Who needs psychotherapy?

Ignore the pocket, please

I'm still waiting on the felt to replace the pockets. I'm very anxious to see the new colour in place. These pockets bug me more and more.

As you can see, I have been working away on the Smiley Sweater. The left front is filling up fast. I've been working on other things, too. Here are some cat face cookies I've got underway. I wanted to add some dimension to them before I paint them. I'm also experimenting to find an icing that balances good taste (as in, it tastes good!) with stability (as in, firm, but not tooth cracking hard).

Those slight divots in the eye mounds are usually considered a defect (craters), but they sort of work here, don't they?

I was wrong

It`s been a busy time around here with lots of cookie-ing. However, I haven`t forgotten my Smiley Sweater entirely. It`s just been slow-going.

Remember when I said there was no wrong way to go about it? Well. I was wrong. When I went to add the patch pockets, I didn't have the exact colour of felt that I wanted, so I thought I'd just go way out on a limb and use 2 drastically different colours. Sometimes that works. If you're off, you might as well be WAY off. I thought because I planned to embroider on the pockets, that it would all work out. Well, nuh-uh to that!

Ugly, right?

I have mailed a small swatch off to the Felt on the Fly lady, and she will send me the exact colour of felt I need. She's nice that way.

The rain has stopped

And that means I was able to move out onto the deck and take some better photos. Here's the Smiley Sweater with the happy worm. You can see (I think) some of the lyrics from the song. Any guesses as to which song it is exactly?

And here's something I've been resisting for some time. Yes, it's come to this. I'm dyeing my own wool to get the colours I want. This is because it's nice to embroider with laceweight wool, and that wool comes in very few colours, in VERY big hanks. I thought it would be hard. I thought it would be messy and.....dangerous, because I thought I'd have to buy special toxic dyes. Imagine how excited I was to realize I could dye wool with vinegar and regular food dyes??!!!

The example on the left is wool/nylon sock yarn in fingering weight. The bit that I dyed didn't have any red in it. I think the red might not have over-dyed so well. On the right, is some pale pink Alpaca which cooperated amazingly well. More experiments must follow!

A very small peek

For some reason this little addition to the Smiley Sweater is proving to be very hard to photograph. I'd take the whole shebang out on the deck to try there, but it's pouring rain. Suffice it to say, the words of the World War 1 song lyric are warbling their way around the right armhole, and for some reason, a soon-to-be smiley worm has found a little home there, too.

I'm linking up to a friend's stitchery link party. If you've found your way here from that link, let me say, "Welcome!".  A little bit of explanation might be in order, since the Smiley Sweater is a little bit out of the ordinary, I think. It all started way back last year when I got interested in embroidering with wool on woolen knitwear (mittens), and then I added wool felt appliqué. I started to look for other 'canvases' to embroider, and decided I'd embroider on a wool sweater, but rather than take the time to knit a full-size wool sweater, I shopped my local Goodwill store. This sweater/jacket is now in the process of being embellished in a rather haphazard way. Whatever takes my fancy at the moment goes into it, and the biggest rule is that there is no wrong way to go about it. Sez me. So, if you're so inclined, please feel free to scroll back through the first installments of the Smiley Sweater. Here is a composite picture to show what's been going on.

You can see there's still lots of room for more additions. And I have lots of drawings ready in my sketchbook. 

If you'd like to see more embroiderers at work, please check out Super Mom - No Cape!'s link party. You can find it here.

A smiley cat and a cheery song

And some song lyrics for the armhole/shoulder. Just started on that, so you'll have to wait a bit to see which song it is unless you have really good eyesight.

I've decided why this is so much fun. It's because there's no wrong way to do it.

Progress

Work continues (or should I say 'play'?) on the Smiley Sweater.

In this one, you can see where I intend to place pockets, because in my humble opinion, pockets are non-negotiable. And, for once, the pockets are going to be in the right place!

Play-Doh for adults

Sometimes I am slow on the up-take. I admit that freely. The subject of today's post is one of those times. I just discovered fondant which is really just Adult Play-Doh.  More than that, I just discovered that you can make your own marshmallow fondant that is pretty darned tasty. And furthermore, if you discover that your Play-Doh modeling skills are a little rusty, you can just melt those marshmallow fondant sculptures in a nice hot cup of cocoa.

Never mind that it's HOT here in the Kingdom today, with very high humidity. Not really hot cocoa weather, but I tried to ignore the heat by sitting in the breeze from the fan and playing with the fondant, with no one to scold me if I blended the colours.

Cats!! I left the teaspoon in the photo, so you could get an idea of the scale. These cats are intended for the tops of cupcakes. I was going to bake some, but that would involve more heat in the kitchen, and I don't really need the calories anyway.

In the end, I decided anybody who reads this blog probably has a pretty good imagination. Just imagine these on a cupcake. Except maybe for the extra big one. He was the first one, and he got a little out of hand. Imagine him on a cake. His very own cake.

As for the Smiley Sweater..... I've added beads to the 'Say, "Cheese!" ' text and I'm continuing with the mouse. Hot and humid is not really a great combination for a wool sweater, but it's hard to put down.

Watercolour cookies and a smiley sweater update

I spent a few minutes this afternoon painting cookies. I've never taken to watercolour painting. It just doesn't come naturally to me. However, the idea of painting on cookies is one that won't let me go, so every so often, I get out my food dyes and my special food-only brushes, and have a go at it. Maybe I'll get better at it, but even if I don't, it's still fun, and the cookies taste just as good.

On the Smiley Sweater front, here's where we are:

It occurs to me that this is much the same process as getting a tattoo might be....especially those full sleeve tattoos. I'm adding bits and pieces of images and text that appeal to me, in a sort of collage. A wearable collage. The only difference, I suppose, is that I can remove my 'tattoo' any time I want.

First up on the Smiley Sweater

Here's to fresh starts

News flash! From the desk of our intrepid reporter, I give you ... the new project!!

Remember all last winter when I was knitting mittens? I was trying to find some flat space to embellish with wool embroidery and wool appliqué.....and it had to be practical, ie, useful, because I'm a practical girl. Mittens seemed like a good choice. More recently, the baby blanket served the same purpose. Somewhere along the line, I began to think that knitting the mittens (or the baby blanket squares) was kinda the price to pay for having something to embellish. After the first pair, knitting mittens over and over again is not the funnest thing to do. That's when I got my fabulous new idea. If I could find something already knitted and waiting, I could eliminate the not-so-fun part. So, I made a quick trip to the Goodwill store. What I wanted was pretty specific, so I wasn't sure I'd find it on the first outing. I got lucky! I found a beautiful 100% wool sweater, plain as all get out (good thing). 100% wool is fairly common at Goodwill, mostly I think because people buy those sweaters and then realize they can't be machine washed and it's expensive to have them dry-cleaned. Of course, some of the sweaters at the Goodwill HAVE been machine washed (unfortunately), and they're shrunken and fulled as proof. This particular sweater had not been fulled. It has a full length zipper down the front which would have buckled if the sweater had been fulled. It's still perfect. 

And the colour!!! SO perfect! 

Of course, there's always a fly in every jar of ointment, right? See those sleeves? Does any human own arms that long? I think not. Maybe it was a fashion statement to have turned back cuffs, but for this project, the sweater fits me well, and I don't want another sweater with clumsy cuffs. The solution? Well, it's not for the faint of heart, but I've done it before. I removed the sleeves from the body of the sweater, and took out 3-1/4 inches in length from each sleeve, and then re-set them into the armhole openings. Again, this was only possible because the sweater was well-constructed. The seams were not overcast, and came apart quite easily. Replacing the sleeves allowed me to remove a little of the shoulder cap as well, which was poofing in a sort of out-dated way, and you know Grandma Coco is all about being fashionable. :) From the excess sleeve cap that I removed, I was able to unravel a good-sized ball of yarn which will probably come in handy somewhere in the project. Bonus!

Unlike the baby blanket, this project is going to start out with a moniker. The Smiley Sweater. The name will explain itself fairly soon, but for now, I just had to settle on a colour palette. This is what I came up with.

New beginnings are so exciting! There's so much promise and I haven't messed anything up yet.