McCalls pattern for stuffed animals from 1936

Probably in the mid-70’s, when I was sewing many of my own clothes, I bought some vintage patterns, including this 1936 McCall’s pattern for stuffed animals:

McCalls printed pattern for stuffed animals, 1936

In all these years I never opened or examined this pattern, but I wanted to make some stuffed animals and thought these would work for my purposes. Upon opening the packet, I discovered that one piece had been carefully pinned to a pretty calico fabric, which is still crisp and colorful:

It gave me a little thrill, to connect with this hand from the past, but there is only one piece cut out, the “Under Body” of a giraffe. What happened? No other tissue pieces have been cut into, and no other fabric is in the envelope. It would be too early for a frustrated sewer to give up; there are no fabric scraps and not a single other tissue piece assembled. There is just one piece was folded up and tucked back away into the pattern envelope, that’s it.

pattern pinned to fabric

Stuffed animal, interrupted.

Mama Merit Badges

Mama merit badges: cute. What a great idea, I wish I’d thought of it.

Breastfeeding Female Merit Badge by Mary Yaeger

Actually, about a year ago I tried out commercially producing some other types of badges for moms and kids, like

A New Pea in the Pod! by Mary Yaeger

A badge for celebrating a new child, that can be customized with name and birth date.

2010 in review

Excellent, WordPress. Thanks!

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 6,400 times in 2010. That’s about 15 full 747s.

 

In 2010, there were 7 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 43 posts. There were 4 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 1mb.

The busiest day of the year was June 16th with 88 views. The most popular post that day was Recently Commissioned Merit Badges.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were maryyaeger.com, housewife.splinder.com, pintangle.com, iheartguts.wordpress.com, and animary.wordpress.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for crewel embroidery, merit badges, crewel, bead art, and merit badge.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Recently Commissioned Merit Badges September 2007
5 comments

2

Merit Badges at Gallery Hanahou January 2009
13 comments

3

Denise Perreault’s Fabulous Glass Tile Curtain May 2007
3 comments

4

Designs for Life: Uniting a Community Through Textile Art and Bioscience May 2007
3 comments

5

Before Breakfast: A Merit Badge Inspired by Lynda Barry May 2009

You Turkey

A Beaded Turkey Pin for Thanksgiving

New Patch: Foursquare Merit Badge

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, 2008
crewel embroidery on linen
8″x17″

After discussing Well-behaved Women Seldom Make History with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, I had the urge to create an embroidery about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. I decided to borrow heavily (should I say mashup?) from the William Morris Woodpecker Tapestry and Cranach the Elder’s Adam and Eve.

I visited the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow in 2007 to study the colors in the Woodpecker Tapestry.

Please note: tapestry, a weaving technique, should not be confused with embroidery or needlepoint, also known as canvaswork. There are a lot of needlepoint kits that reproduce William Morris designs, but few people have the skill and patience to learn tapestry weaving. I’m a big fan of tapestry weaving but not a practitioner.

To help you sort out the different textile techniques, this link may come in handy.

Beadwork Magazine Pattern Play Challenge 2009

Here’s the piece I designed as a dress yoke for the 2009 Beadwork Magazine Pattern Play Challenge

Dress Yoke Patter Play Challenge Beadwork Magazine

The entries are listed on Beadwork magazine’s Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=2540566&id=104045783137

Here’s the Fossil handbag that was my inspiration. I love how the printed patterns overlap, and the pretty sherbert colors

Fossile handbag with pastel flora print

Beadwork is running the contest again this year. The magazine says there’s a link somewhere in the contests section of beadingdaily, but I couldn’t find it so you’re on your own.

OrangePiel Custom Window Shades and Large Scale Canvas Prints

I love this concept, especially since we need some window coverings and don’t have any large scale art for the walls in our new house. I always go for multipurpose design.

Orange Piel

I can’t wait to try it out, playing with ideas for a fun border that shows when the rest of the shade is pulled up. Or whatever works.

I’m Ecstatic about Zazzle Stitch Player

I’ve been wanting to animate stitches. I know there are several animated embroideries out there, but I’m ecstatic to find Zazzle’s Stitch Player. It had to be digitized to look this cool. Try stitching out the vampire crest.

Open Source Embroidery at mocfa.org

Unfortunately I missed and probably would have anyway, but allow me to regret that Open Source Embroidery closed a few days ago at The Museum of Folk Art & Craft in San Francisco. Fortunately, not only do museums keep online archives, but they are now producing marvelous videos that help alleviate one’s disappointment.

This show was of particular interest to me because of Leah Buechley’s e-textile work, which includes the goal of promoting math and science education. I first learned of LB through an article in Volume 1 of Craft: that first appeared in 2006. I was living in Boulder, CO at the time, and was thrilled to discover that LB was in the CS doctoral program at the U of CO. I decided to track her down. I had worked in the women in engineering program (2001-2004; now BOLD) and environmental engineering (2004-2006), so I knew about the Discovery Learning Center and what an accessible place it is.

Leah was interested in meeting local weavers and textile artists and teaching them the basics of creating LED patterns on wearables. The Handweavers Guild of Boulder hosted a presentation and there was a great deal of interest from the group. Unfortunately the date/time didn’t come together for a workshop and Leah went on to an assistant professorship at MIT’s Media Lab. Before she left I did take the time to visit Leah at the Craft Technology Lab at CU and practice soldering a few of the LED “sequins” together so that I could try a few designs on my own. I’m sorry to say my experiments are still packed away at the moment.

A little later, Becky Stern published her  LilyPad Arduino embroidery on craftzine; her piece, “A Tribute to Leah Buechley” appeared in the Open Source Embroidery show. There are a number of places to visit if you would like to try the tech-nique/nology yourself:

straight to the source: http://web.media.mit.edu/~leah/grad_work/diy/diy_tank.html

a simpler project, with step-by-step video: http://sternlab.org/2009/11/ledsewing/

For lots more inspiration, visit the high low tech projects at MIT: http://hlt.media.mit.edu/projects.html