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PAX Crafter Round-Up

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Awesome artwork for our panel – For the Love of Crafting II: The Wrath of Yarn – by panelist Sarah Mendiola

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I was approved to run a crafting panel at PAX again this year, hopefully making this the beginning of a new PAX tradition. I felt this year’s panel was a huge success and that there’s great interest in continuing to have this sort of craft-related creative discussion and meeting place at PAX, and probably at other gaming conventions as well. The audience was hugely enthusiastic. People asked many great questions, and shared many great ideas and projects as well. I wish we’d had more time to continue the conversation!

One of our panelists and a couple audience members did film the panel, and I’ll be sure to let everyone know when those videos have been edited and posted online.

During the panel, a question was asked about how to get in touch and chat and share ideas with other people at the panel. Panelist Tara Theoharis of geekyhostess.com came up with the idea of making a hashtag. Panel attendees could tweet about their creative works (perhaps with links) using the hashtag, and she would then search the hashtag to find and compile all those tweets on her site. I am reposting her list here as well, as one more place for those interested to find it.

Many thanks to Tara for coming up with this idea on the fly and for compiling this list! If you haven’t yet, do go check out her very cool website, and then take some time to look at the sites and work of the other panelists and attendees.

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R2D2 dress and hat

 

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I made another dress! I’m sure you’re all shocked. Every PAX I find myself scrambling with some awesome project that I only thought of at the last minute but am desperate to have done in time. This year it was all those felt pins I posted about the other day, and an R2D2 outfit.

Unlike Star Trek, which I had to wait till adulthood to enjoy, I grew up with Star Wars. The first time I saw the films, we watched them as a family over the course of three nights. I remember very vividly how I slept in my brother’s room that first night, after watching A New Hope, because besides being scared of the dark I was now sure that Darth Vader lurking in it somewhere too.

And the next night, after watching The Empire Strikes Back, I wailed at my mom about how worried I was for poor Han Solo, frozen in carbonite – he couldn’t be dead, could he? I could barely stand waiting a whole day to learn his fate. “Mom, how did you guys wait whole years to find out what happens?!?” I cried, incredulous.

Those are some of my happiest memories of a childhood initiation into the big important things of the world…

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felt pins for PAX… and the PAX crafting panel!

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It’s that time of year again, the time when my friends and I all run around the internets screaming “PAX is coming, PAX is coming” at the top of our online lungs. And this year, inspired by the new and burgeoning Pinny Arcade pin trading phenomenon, I decided to bring some very special pins of my own to PAX.

In addition to another round of TallysTreasury buttons featuring four of the past year’s plushie projects (which I intend to hand out like candy), I’ve made about 30 pins from wool felt, cut out and machine sewn in tiny 1-2 inch detail, and featuring a variety of imagery from well-loved video games, tv shows, movies and more. And a few darling one-eyed monsters of my own creation, because as you know, I have a deep fondness for derpy monster-making.

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30th birthday scavenger hunt

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As you might have guessed from all my wedding talk and my rather sporadic posting schedule, it’s been a very busy summer. However, my husband figured that graduating, securing a good job and getting married just weren’t enough milestones for a three-month span. So last week he decided to go and turn 30 as well. Just for good measure. Although it’s been super busy around here and I didn’t have much time to spare for party planning, I couldn’t let his 30th go by without some kind of special celebration. So we gathered a number of our friends together last weekend for a scavenger hunt. Everyone seemed to have a lot of fun with it, and some of the folks who saw pictures of the shenanigans on Twitter have asked to see the full hunt. So I will oblige! Read the full post »

flat-bottomed drawstring bags (treat bags, dice bags, etc.)

Last week I promised an extra blog post this week, to make up for that one that got missed entirely a couple weeks ago. And here it is! Another handy method of bag/pouch making.

I’m a particular fan of this tutorial for a couple reasons. This project can easily incorporate last week’s lesson on making and using your own stencils, which is quite a lot of fun. This tutorial will also demonstrate a super easy, super handy way of giving a bag a flat bottom. And that same technique can be used on plushies, as well. It is, for example, how I did the flat bases of the Creepy Doll plushies back in 2010 and, more recently, the Pineapple Maki plushies. It’s a useful little technique. And did I mention it’s really easy?

And finally, it shows you the also very simple way of doing a double drawstring bag, which is easier to open and close than a single drawstring, and if you’re making a bag with an image on the front, it keeps the drawstrings from dangling down in front of your pretty picture.

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make your own stencils

As much as I enjoy doing detailed felt appliqué work, sometimes you need a faster, or just a flatter method for putting a simple image onto cards, or bags, or whatever. That’s when stencilling comes in really handy. Stencilling is, of course, when you use a reusable template of a shape/word/design to lay down a consistent image on a surface.

Ugh, remind me to avoid dictionary-style definitions from now on. Here, it’s doing this:

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crafting caddy for the car

It’s road trip time! I am doing some in-a-van travelling with friends this week, piggybacking on their work trip to visit friends and family in the prairies. I’ve done lots of crafting on the road before, but it’s usually a bit of a pain trying to keep your small seat space tidy when you need to switch between scissors, pins, needle, thread, scissors again, etc. It would be nice to have a way to keep all those things easily at hand, but avoid having them spill all over the seat or get lost in car crevices or accidentally stab your seat neighbour.

I decided this is possible, you just need a sort of wall of pockets hanging beside you, where all your little crafting tools and supplies are right at hand and nicely secured. And probably the easiest way to do this is to hang it off the back of the seat in front of you.

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