Steampunk Jewelry

I must apologize for the quick and unpolished post this week. With Halloween coming up on Saturday, my creative efforts have been focused on preparing for this most magical or days. With any luck, I will have several completed Halloween projects to show you next week. For now, I hope you will enjoy a sneak peak of my costume in the form of some steampunk style jewelry that I have made. It includes earrings, an ear cuff, a ring, and a choker.

This ring is made from a cool old-looking button from Joann's (so it's not actually old). 

I can't wait for all the fun Halloween festivities this weekend! My sweetie and I have started watching  scary movies to prepare and our office is having a Halloween potluck tomorrow. 

Are you doing anything fun for Halloween?

-Assunta

Bake Shop Purse

 A while back I received a purse kit for my birthday with two sets of colorful fabric strips rolled up to look like sweet rolls. The title of the kit was "Bake Shop." I finally got one of these pretty purses completed this week:

It's just the perfect size for a ball of yarn and crochet hook or pair of knitting needles for a small project! I'm still working on the other one, which is about halfway done. 

I only have this short post for now, but I'll have some more fun Halloween stuff for next week.

See you then!

-Assunta

A Very Hawaiian Halloween

A while back my aunt in Hawaii asked me to make her a zombie hula girl and surfer boy. I had made some creepy-cute amigurumi already, so this was a perfect unique variation on that theme. These little guys are are very quick to make and almost too cute to be scary! The best part is, they like spam masubi even bettern than brains so they make better dinner guests than your average zombies.

The reason I am bringing up this project now (besides that October has me thinking more about zombies than usual) is that I just posted the pattern to my Ravelry and Etsy shops. They are so simple, there is definitely time to make a couple in time for Halloween!

Have a spooktacular week, and try not to get eaten.

-Assunta

New Toys and the Vista Fiber Arts Festival

A few weeks ago I bought this cute little drop spindle of Etsy to try my hand at making my own yarn!  I've practiced a little bit with it and it's a lot of fun, although it's very tricky to try and keep the weight of the yarn even. I remember when I first learned to crochet, though. It took me a long time to get my stitches even back then, so after enough practice I should be able to get my yarn even too.

This weekend I went to the Vista Fiber Arts Festival with a couple friends. I saw many wonderful things, including this beautiful spinning wheel which I had to resist buying:

...and these adorable baby alpacas:

I ended up buying some gorgeous hand-dyed wool. The booth was called Blarney Yarn, and it was so hard to choose between all of the amazing colors, but this is the one I bought. I love this blend of rich purples and sunny yellow.

My other new toy is this tiny scale. It's meant for weighing small amounts of yarn to see if you have enough to finish your project. It's also perfect for calculating shipping prices for tiny Etsy items. My previous method of holding something in my hand and thinking "Yep, that's definitely less than a pound." wasn't quite cutting it. 

Well, that was my weekend, how was yours? 

-Assunta