Three Slices o’ Strawberry

Posted onAugust 18, 2011September 30, 2013

I’m close to the end of “House of Odd”, and the tones for part 2 is all done. But before that day arrives, I’ll be showing another one of my little arts-and-crafts, a strawberry cream cake (strawberries appear to be super popular in the world of felt cakes).

Step 1: Again, bought off Rakuten.co.jp. It's one in a series of similar kits.

Step 2: Check that everything's there. With Japanese kits, they usually are. Pre-cut pieces too, which saves a lot of time.

Step 3: Sew the base up, which in this case, is a teeny weeny little cylinder.

Step 4: Sew up the little half-strawberry pieces. I've done this a lot on many similar projects... strawberries are the most common things I get to sew in relation to felt cakes.

Step 5: Sew the strawberries onto the cylindrical base. Getting them located right is the hard part, but I manage.

Step 6: Sew the little swab of cream and mint leaves onto the top.

Step 7: Chop up the last piece of felt, and then glue the little triangular chestnut pieces onto the botton of the cake. Not as messy as I thought it would be.

Now, for the final product – little felt cake with three slices of strawberry:

3-Strawberry

Toy Poodle

Posted onAugust 4, 2011September 30, 2013

I’m going to Melbourne next Sunday to Tuesday, to do a two-day series of workshops at Scotch College! Haven’t been back to Melbourne for over a year!

Internet Explorer Woes: I’ve been looking at my new blog with Internet Explorer (instead of with Firefox, which is what I normally use), and I have noticed that Internet Explorer is crazy in the way it displays my blog. If you have Internet Explorer 9 it seems to be okay, but it you have version 8, it has a weird tendency to center all the text on the page. Worse still, if you have IE version 7 or less, the blog posts I have actually overlap the side bar on the right hand side of the page.

So, I’ve been going through my old posts and manually aligning the paragraphs to the left, which is the only thing I can do to get my Internet Explorer 8 to show the page properly.

If anyone knows how to fix this issue, please let me know. I have heard from other programmers that Internet Explorer is a broken-down piece of software that no one wants to program in, but Google Analytics tell me that 52% of visitors to this site use IE. So if you’re one of those people who’s looking at a messed-up blog, I’m truly sorry. I have no clue why this is so! Not yet anyway.

Wool Felt Toy Poodle: This wool felt toy poodle ended up about 8cm tall, and it was quite difficult to do! It seems I jumped into the deep end of wool felting, without checking the difficulty level of this toy poodle kit. As a result, I’ve shredded and pricked the fingers of my left hand a fair bit while making this. I now have to wear band-aids on my poor non-drawing hand.

For this reason, wool-felting has lost a bit of its glow for me. I’ve never, in my whole life, ever pricked a finger while sewing. But while wool felting, I’ve managed to riddle my left hand full of holes. From now on, I shall only wool felt in moderation… or with an insurance policy.

Step 1: Here's the kit. Once again, from Rakuten.co.jp, the Japanese shopping site that wonderfully caters to international folks at a reasonable shipping rate.

Step 2: Open it all up and have a look. Once again, no wool felting needle included, so I used my old one.

Step 3: Stabbed the body, head and snout into shape. This was hard, and took a long. The shape of the body was truly difficult to shape properly.

Step 4: There was extra fluffy material to stab onto the dog as fur, while the ears, arms and legs, and tail took a while to make. They were small and kind of hard to get compact... and harder to get the fur on too.

Step 5: Attached all the arms, legs, ears and tail. Added some of that excess fur to "bulk" the dog up a bit more. Only the face left!

Finally, the face. The end product looks a bit odd, because the snout is too big. But at least it looks sorta like the cover of the kit:

Toy Poodle

Little Felt Lamb

Posted onJuly 14, 2011September 30, 2013

SMASH!: Hi folks! I’ll be appearing at SMASH! Convention this Saturday (16th July) as a panellist on several panels. The first one is an industry panel where I’ll probably get to discuss the demise of TOKYOPOP, and if I have time I’ll be going onto the next 2 panels about Character Design and Sequential Art. So here are the details:

When: Saturday, 16th July

Where: Sydney Convention Center

What: Art Room Stage

Industry Panel – 11:00am
Create-A-Cast – 12:00pm
Sequential Panel – 2:00pm (Maybe)

See you all there! Tickets are $25 if registered, $30 at the door.

Felt Sheep: Here’s one more felt charm I made a while back – that of a little lamb. Since I’m such a sucker for cute felt sheep toys, and the kit was only $3.50, here’s some photos of the sewing of the lamb.

: Step 1: Bought this kit on Chinatown for $3.50. It’s a Chinese kit.

: Step 2: Chinese kits rarely have pre-cut pieces, so here I get to cut out the paper cut-outs, trace them onto the felt, and cut them out on my own.

: Step 3: Here’s me doing the tracing and cutting out of the felt pieces for form the lamb.

: Step 4: This is what sometimes irk me about Chinese kits. What you get on the front cover may not be what you actually get inside the kit. Most of it’s there, but the photo on the packaging sure looks like a photoshop eye job. The real lamb has teeny tiny eyes. It happens, errgh.

: Step 5: Nevertheless, I glue the eyes and nose on, and sew the front part of the lamb together.

: Step 6: Sewing the front and back together. I sewed all the front pieces together first before I drew the outline for and cut out the back piece. Otherwise, the backpiece may not have fitted on.

And for the final felt sheep charm:

Twin Lollipops

Posted onJune 30, 2011September 30, 20132 Comments

While waiting for feedback for the last batch of House of Odd pencils, I finally got my new website up and running! It took me a while to get things sorted out, and parts of the site is still under construction, but at least my registered domain name finally pointed to the site it was supposed to point. It actually took a bit of wrangling, due to issues over transferring a domain name. At least that’s over… for now.

I celebrate by showing another batch of felt toys I made. This time, it’s a pair of lollipops! I’m not into candy-type felting because I find the results too small and not very delicate, but this was too cute to pass up, and they’re the right size for a key ring or a hanging decoration.

: Step 1: I bought this Chinese kit in Chinatown for $3.50.

: Step 2: None of the pieces you see here are pre-cut – I had to cut the paper drawings out, trace the outlines onto the pieces of felt, then cut them out. Luckily, it was a very simple design, so it was quick and easy. Most Chinese kits are not pre-cut, so I expected the extra work.