Inspiration, only in reverse

Over the Fourth of July weekend, we traveled up north to the land of Kansas to spend the holiday with family. It was a good time with lots of rain and fireworks and food.

Monday we visited a museum with my mom. One of the displays they had was all on dinosaurs, including fossils. :) This immediately reminded me of my statosaurs and so I took some pictures to show the "similarities" between the actual factual fossils and my recreations of them (+ statistics).

They had a t-rex fossil (not a complete fossil, but about half was actual fossil).


You can probably see the similarities between that at my t-rex.


They also had a triceratops head. Wow, that baby was huge!


Again, note the similarities.

Esty and a Baby

Now that I have a child, things are definitely not the same. Things have gotten harder to balance and get done. Luckily, my husband and I have worked things out and decided I can stay home with our daughter, at least for the first few months. This is great for a lot of reasons, of which I'm not about to get into here. :)

The reason for this post is because I'm sitting her in my craft room (which I recently cleaned) with my daughter in her little bouncy seat. She's making the cutest sounds and faces to go with them and I get to still embroider and sew. Life is good.

The Land of Statosaurs

If you've been to my Etsy shop recently, you may have noticed two listings for onesies. I've been meaning to add them for quite some time (and 3 more are coming), but I haven't' had time until recently.

Machine embroidering one that thin and stretchy of knit fabric has been a challenge, a challenge I think I've beat. And during my trials, I've learned three things.

1. I've found that using more stabilizer is better than less. So now I use one layer of of sticky back and one layer of tear away. I don't use any solvy on top, but I may pick some up and give that a whirl.

2. Using a thicker fabric is good too. Gerber onesies are not as good as Circe and Carter body suits.

3. The other thing that helps is adjusting the embroidery pattern so that it does not stitch back over areas that have already stitched. This isn't always possible, but the more I can avoid it, the better.

For example:

The stegonormalus had the most problems because there are a lot of locations where my original pattern stitched zig-zag on top of zig-zag.


When I went through and changed this to only stitch there once, in this case just when outlining the curve/body, it helped immensely.

So now, working on the other 4, I could make this change from the beginning and had many less practice onesies. Although now my daughter has about 8 variations of statosaur onesies from my practicing. :)

Statosaurs and a Baby

It's been just about 1 month since my daughter joined us in the world. It's been a quick month with a steep learning curve. I love her and think she is the cutest, but she does take a lot of effort and time.

However, I did manage to get an embroidery pattern put together that works pretty good on knit fabrics. My intentions are to sell adorable baby onesies in my shop. Now that I have a model I don't have any excuses. :)

Cross Stitching a Sieve

Last Sunday my husband and sat in front of my old laptop (our only computer) and started a new cross-stitch pattern.

It's based on the Sieve of Eratosthenes which is a visual/tabular way to identify prime numbers. It's been modified a little bit. Instead of just identifying primes, it will also represent the factors of composite numbers by different colors.

The pattern looks quite complicated, but it doesn't have to be. We've made it in such a way that you can make it super-complicated, will of the factors for numbers up to 120 identified with different color. Or you can make it much more simple by deciding to just mark primes (the factors) up to a certain number.

I've started to make one for our baby's room. She was due last Sunday and still isn't here. It's in the colors of the nursery (lilac, sage, and tan). We have used 6 colors (aside from black and white, which will eventually show up).

2 = Darker purple
3 = Light green
5 = Darker green
7 = Light purple
11 = Darker tan
all other primes = Tan

Statosaurs

Recently, my husband and I have been working on getting some new embroidery designs ready to go. About 1 week ago I drew 5 new ones, and now we are vectorizing and digitizing them. We've completed 2 so far.

They are statistical distributions that have been turned into dinosaurs! I think they are wonderful.

Stegonormalus = Stegosaurus + Normal Distribution:


Chiceratops = Triceratops + Chi-Square Distribution:

Yarnia and Yarn Art

This is so cool! Such an awesome way to combine geometry, old-school-ness, and crafts.

I mean, I really like this. My husband and I are having a baby (due date is 1 month from today) and we still need to decorate the nursery. I think we will do this!

So, here is a link to Yarnia's original blog post about this yarn wall art. And here is a link to the actual store, Yarnia. They are located in Portland, not a place I live anywhere near. But if you do, you should probably go there and at least tell them how awesome it is for them to be supporting such cool and unique art.

p.s. Thanks to Craftzine for their post.