magpiecrafts

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In this cut-throat competition, each team has 3 hours to shear a sheep, card the wool, spin it into yarn — and then turn that yarn into an award-winning shawl. 🐑 via @npr

[magpiecrafts]

fiber arts tutorial links!

I’ve gotten quite a few asks about spinning, fiber prep, and dyeing, and since I’m utterly incapable of answering a question without writing an essay, they often turn into tutorials. I’ve compiled them here for easy perusal ! More will be added as I find and/or write them.

SPINNING

The basics of getting into drop spindles

How to get your yarn off your spindle

How and why to block handspun yarn before using it

How to tell if your handspun yarn is over or undertwisted

Moving from park and draft spinning to suspended spinning

Debugging: roving twists and knots around the edges while spinning

Debugging: compressed roving

The visuals of 2 ply vs. 3 ply

FIBER PREP AND/OR DYEING

What prep to dye in

20 questions of natural dyeing

Dyeing with onion skin

How to clean a blending board

All about mordants

KNITTING

Knitting with chronic pain (more advice from others in notes)

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A c.1950s Mary Maxim "Roller Skates" cardigan pattern. The pattern is multisized and intended to fit 32-26" full chest/bust.

[magpiecrafts]

a collection of motivational insights regarding content creation and creative hobbies

and of course the classic

[magpiecrafts]

Crochet a Hershey's Kiss Amigurumi, Get the Free Pattern! 👉 https://buff.ly/2M6OxRd

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Guys look at this GIANT millipede!! Free pattern from Projectarian! 🐛✨

Definitely want to make one myself!

[magpiecrafts]

could you tell me more about spoonflower? i'm interested in uploading my own designs, but i'm not entirely sure how it works or how much it pays. thank you!

Sure! When you first upload your design, it'll look like this.

The standard DPI for printing on all the fabric sites I've seen is 150, and since I made this pattern at 200 DPI that means Spoonflower will print it bigger than I want it unless I change it here. So I click on the "change DPI" thing, type in "200" and click "change". Sometimes I find it doesn't save, so I always go back later to check and make sure it did save the right DPI.

(You can avoid this by just changing your image to the right DPI before uploading, but sometimes I want the option to make it a bit bigger, just in case.)

If you want to make multiple sizes of the same pattern available you'll have to upload a different version for each one and change the size individually. For example, I drew my Bathroom Dinosaurs pattern pretty large and at 150 DPI, and left that as is for the big version.

But I wanted a small version too, so for that one I changed it to 670 pixels per inch so it'd print much smaller.

You write in the title, tags, and description, and you can put any links to other pages or references in the "Additional Details" section.

(Leaving links isn't usually necessary, but sometimes it is, like how I wanted to leave a link to the original 1760's teapot for my crinoid fossil pattern.)

At this point, you can order things printed with your design, but nobody else can yet. You have the option to show the design publicly, but I like to keep it private until I've ordered my proofs and can sell it.

Now, to order proofs! DO NOT GET THE CUT SWATCHES!!! They are SO much more expensive than getting a fill-a-yard, because cutting and packaging all the little pieces is a lot of extra labour. Wether you have a few designs, or a lot, just get a fill-a-yard.

To make a fill-a-yard you first need to make a collection. Collections can be either public or private, so I keep a private collection called "new designs to proof", and I put all my new designs in there until I've ordered them. You can also add other people's patterns to a collection, so if you have extra space to fill up or you want little bits of a bunch of other people's patterns for a quilt or something, add whatever you want to your collection.

On the collections page when you hover your mouse over one you'll see a little patchwork symbol show up in the middle along the bottom edge, and you click on that.

That'll take you here, and you choose a layout and a fabric.

For some reason the fabric options here are a bit limited and vary depending on the layout. I like to get either the 1 yard/42 designs in cotton poplin, or the 2 yards/48 designs in cotton sateen, but there are plenty more you could try.

I'll click the latter for this example. (The squares in this one are the perfect size for pleated face masks, and I have a few made from mine and my friend's fabrics.)

Then you just click on a design and click on however many squares/rectangles you want it to fill. It usually takes a few seconds for them to show up.

You can have just one little sample of each, or you could make half the fabric be one design and fill up the rest with little samples. (That's what I did for my brown monster waistcoat - I printed juuuust enough of a fill-a-yard to cut out a waistcoat from, and the rest was other samples.)

You can change it around if you want. Once you're happy with it, put it in the cart and buy it!

I'm not going to order this one since it's an example with designs I've already proofed, but here's what my monster patterns looked like when they arrived.

Also, I want to point out that you could VERY easily make some really fun pride flags using the fill-a-yard! You might have to have it be only part of the fabric, depending on the number of stripes, but you could make it be any texture or pattern you want. Here's a quick example I did with other people's patterns by searching "(colour) marble texture".

With only 4 stripes I'd have to fill the rest of the space in with something else and cut it off, but it would still be pretty big! (The edge of that purple stripe looks jagged in the preview, but they print perfectly straight.)

I have not done this, but someone should! Just wash it, trim the blank edges off, hem it, and you've got a flag!

(Don't do this with the 2 yards/4 designs option though, it looks like nice stripes in the thumbnail but it's made for infinity scarves and there's a gap and dotted line down the middle for cutting. Bleh.)

Anyways, once your samples arrive you can make the designs available for sale! If you have any changes you'd like to make, to the size it prints at or the pattern itself, you can make them now.

I found the small version of the Bathroom Dinosaurs print was too small when I first got my proofs, so I just reduced the DPI a bit.

And you can replace the image with a new, edited version by clicking "upload revision".

So when my brown coffin pattern printed really washed out and grey, I replaced it with a more saturated version and was good to go, no need to order another proof.

Down at the bottom of the design editing page you can now click on the options to list it publicly, and to sell it on fabric and/or wallpaper. I make all of them available on fabric, and some on wallpaper if I deem them to be appropriately large.

They'll pay you 10% of the sales price of the fabric, or slightly more if you sell over a certain amount in a month. There's a whole page of questions and answers about it.

You also get a 10% discount if you order fabrics with your own designs. (Although, personally, if I'm ordering my own designs on fabrics for me then I'd prefer to get them from somewhere like ArtFabrics, since they use reactive dyes instead of inks, so their blacks actually print black and don't make the fabric stiffer like Spoonflower's do. And also because they're here in Canada so there's less shipping cost. Sadly they don't have an option to sell your designs though.)

Spoonflower also has weekly design contests which are announced a few weeks in advance and have pretty big store credit prizes (the first place one is 200 USD), and I've entered a few times, but I don't vote often because Spoonflower is such a huge site that there are frequently over a thousand entries and it's really time consuming to scroll through them all.

Ok, that's everything I can think of! I also put all my patterns on sone things on Redbubble, since they have options for repeating patterns on some things.

[magpiecrafts]

i don't want a career, i want to do crafts

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Learn How To Make Holes In Your Knitting - Download This FREE Stable Hole Construction Pattern: 👉 https://buff.ly/39vDNDM

[magpiecrafts]

Genuinely the most gorgeous dress ever LINK

I saw this randomly on Twitter and I just had to share! OP is soooo talented and hardworking.

[magpiecrafts]

Folklore garden knitting colourwork fairisle booklet by  HagstoneArt

[magpiecrafts]

Cool Sweater Alert: Knit a Penguin TriBand Classic Paperback Featuring 1984 ... Or Any Book You Like: 👉 https://buff.ly/3roCnUp 🐧📚

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I learned to knit first from a wikihow article on the family laptop. It is the mid 2000's.

I won't learn about ravlery for at least another five years and won't do more than simple squares or hats for nearly a dozen more.

I had found thin gray yarn and US size 4 needles. The stitches were too dark and too small to see but I trudged on. My tension was tight and moving the stitches off the needle was a hassle.

After a trip to my grandma’s house, a quick 10 hour drive away I would pull out the beginnings of a small scarf and try to knit while my siblings and I watched tv. When I showed her, she pointed out the fact I hadn’t noticed, that this wasn’t a great start. We would go into my grandpa’s old room and pull out larger straight wooden needles and a bright yellow skein of red heart super saver.

She would sit us on the couch and teach us the long tail cast on and to keep our stitches loose enough you could pull the needle out of the back with no effort. She taught us the same way she had learned decades ago when she was nine. 

For the afternoon, we would knit stitch after stitch and show grandma if we thought we had hit a problem. She would show us the mistakes we might have made and would help us rip it out to fix. 

By the end of the week my sister and I had finished our scarves, a mix of garter stitch and seed stitch in garish clashing colors. At least one still sits in our closet at home. 

After that summer I would be the only one to pick up the knitting needles regularly. I still do, nearly a decade later. 

[magpiecrafts]

'Oh Xmas Tree' ... Gorgeous Free Crochet Pattern Designed By Ana Morais Soares: 👉 https://buff.ly/3FmHMSY 🎄🧶

[magpiecrafts]

𝑉𝑎𝑙𝑎𝑖𝑠 𝐵𝑙𝑎𝑐𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑠𝑒 𝑆ℎ𝑒𝑒𝑝 🐑 / (via)

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2021 Steady Thread SAL by arzelena