belated halloween post

ahoy pirates! hope you all had a nice halloween. I've been meaning to post some photos of the costumes I made for my nephews. my sister-in-law came up with the idea of dressing them as sushi - ingenius, right? I googled "baby sushi costume" for some ideas, and apparently this is something people do a lot, because there were about a million hits. 

anyway, I sewed these stuffed salmon and shrimp pieces:

and here's the final product - salmon noah:

and shrimp aaron:

sweaterific laptop bags!

After seeing Lan's iPad case and making my own laptop sleeve, I decided to make netbook cases for my brother and sister-in-law for christmas. I used some cool material from thrift store sweaters, and added a zipper pocket on the outside of the cases (I followed this tutorial). Also, my own laptop case ended up really floppy, which makes it hard to get my computer in and out. So for these bags I lined the fabric with interfacing to make it stiffer.

The first one didn't come out as well as I had hoped. I really liked this striped sweater as the lining, but it was a bit tricky to work with. I ended up with bits of teal fluff coming out everywhere, and because of the way I attached the zipper, the edge of the sweater kindof gets in the way of zipping. I might try to do something to fix that. 

(since I don't actually have a netbook to demonstrate with, I used a regular book for effect)

I'm much happier with the second one. Having learned from my zipper mistake, I attached this one so that there is no raw edge facing the zipper, meaning it zips niiice and smoothly. The lining came from a thrift store dress.

Lan is back, and crocheting lots!

After a hiatus from our beloved Craft Pirates, I'm back! In an effort to participate more I've made it my goal to post at least once a month. Luckily this blogger app on my phone makes this easy. So, no excuses this time :)

For now I'll leave you with this lovely new crochet stitch that I learned called the crocodile. Cute, huh? I'm making a scarf, but due to my impatience, we'll see how far I get.

In the mean time, happy crafting and pirating <3