Little things

Just chugging away this week. Not much time for any serious crafting, but I did figure out that you can use knitting patterns for pearler bead patterns - success!

I've obviously been trying out a bunch of Scandinavian knitting patterns with the pearler beads. This little crayfish was from the crayfish hot pad pattern I knit a couple months back. 

So here's to enjoying the cheap thrills in life. Happy Wednesday!

An oldie but a goodie...

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone!

If you're looking for a free, fun Valentine's Day craft, try out the homemade paper heart tutorial!

Ryan and I celebrated the ol' holiday by going to the Walt Disney Concert Hall here in downtown LA to see the LA Philharmonic perform, live with a Swedish singer, Camilla Tilling! It was wonderful. Plus, there was a dessert buffet afterwards. Those are two words I always love to hear, especially when combined: dessert + buffet. It was delicious.

I am very thankful for this guy this Valentine's Day.

I hope you all have a very lovely weekend!

Scandinavian Christmas: Day 9

Day 9! Today you are all in for a treat, my best friend Jessica is sharing today! Jessica is actually the one who introduced me to the art of sewing! Not only can this girl sew, knit, bake, and cook, but she has even been known to do a metal art project or two! She is seriously talented and I'm so glad that we're friends. And I'm counting down the days until I can see her in real life again (only 5 more days!!). I'm thrilled she is participating this year and I know you'll enjoy her adorable, crafty tutorial!

Hello! My name is Jessica, and I am so pleased to be doing a guest post on The Pickled Herring! I love the Scandinavian Christmas series that Kathryn does, and am honored to be a part of it this year!

A little bit about myself: I am Kathryn's BFF!! We have been pals since our time in the womb! Our mothers are friends, and we have been besties since birth. We were even called Siamese twins by one of our grade school teachers. My family celebrates our Swedish heritage every Christmas by having a Smorgasbord at Christmastime. We bust out the herring, rice pudding, and korv. We even have one of the girls dress up as Lucia and serve cookies.

Kathryn is coming home to Michigan for Christmas (yay!!!) and we love to fika. So I decided to make Christmas Cozys! I'm so excited for her to see my new house and my new baby, and to catch up over a cozy cup of coffee! I have actually been working on one of those felt embroidered stockings, kind of like this, and it inspired me to add a little pizzazz with sequins.

Here's what you need: green, red and white felt, green, red and white floss, sequins, seed beads, a little bit of stuffing, and a button. (Ignore the velcro in this picture - I ended up not using it!)

So what I did first was make a template. Use a piece of paper for this. 

Once you have the template made, cut out 2 of those guys from the green felt. 

 Next, you are going to make the Scandinavian heart. To do this, you take a square and add a semicircle to one side. Then cut out a white one, and a red one of these. Then cut the square part into thirds.

Then you basically weave the strips of felt to make a cute little heart!

Embroider the heart onto one of the green felt pieces, adding some stuffing beneath the heart to give it some dimension. Then add some sequins by tacking them on with seed beads. 

Next, place the other green felt piece behind the one you've just embroidered, and use a running stitch and the white floss, embroider around the edges. After you've done this, you can clean up the edges by cutting away the excess (I suppose you could avoid this step by making sure the green pieces are exactly the same size, but I'm no perfectionist). 

Then all you have to do is add a cute little button and cut a buttonhole!

And here is your Christmas Cozy! Now, just make sure you have 2 for when your best friend comes home for Christmas!!

Oh, and here's my Christmas baby!

Thank you, Jessica!!! I can't wait to fika it up with you in just a few short days! Come back tomorrow to hear from another good friend, Kate!

Five dollar fun

After a little trip to IKEA this past weekend, I re-ignited my childhood love of fuse beads. I loved these things as a kid...and know I know why: they're awesome.

What's not to love? Tiny plastic beads on a spiked board, then ironed together?! Fun designs are bound to be born:

This is my fuse bead rendition of Fika:

It's easy for me to get caught up in only making crafts that I will use or that are "cool". But there's something just delightful about creating something you won't use (at least I won't...), just for crafting's sake. Just to create something. Sometimes I forget that creativity doesn't always have to produce something practical, or even cute. It's fun just to create.

I'm so glad I bought the fuse beads at IKEA on a whim, they didn't disappoint. 

Happy Tuesday!

Pacifier clips

A few of the pacifier clips I've been cranking out...my favorite are the vikings. It's from ByBora Designs...isn't it adorable!?

 

I'm selling these this weekend at the Kingsburg Festival.

 

I will probably be off the bloggin bandwagon until next week. We leave Friday right after work to head to the fair.

 

Have a great weekend!

Headbands

Just wanted to pop in and show you all how the headbands are coming along!

 

Here are some of the headband designs I have made so far:

All of my ribbon for the headbands I either been bought on Etsy or my mom has found at various Scandinavian stores over the years (thanks, Mom!). I backed them with a solid color ribbon and add elastic to loop them together.

My favorites are the Dala horses on blue and the red hearts with blue flowers and green vines. After all of the craft fair craziness I will post a tutorial on how to make them!

Hope you're enjoying your weekend!

Knit this, crochet that

There's something about cold weather that makes me itch to knit. I have a lot of odds and ends of yarn, half a skein of this and half a skein of that. So I decided to use it up! I'm making a scarf knitted the long way on circular needles, you only need a little amount of yarn. It's a great project to do when you have 10 or 20 minutes without any plans.

And...I finally did it, I taught myself to crochet! You can learn just about anything online. The world wide web is pretty amazing in that regard. I can only single and double crochet, but it's a start.

I clearly had some trouble in the beginning as you can see. It's way harder to control the tension when you crochet than it is when you knit. I'm still working on that. But after a while I started to get the hang of it and switched back and forth between single and double crochet.

It's coming along but I still have a long way to go! I was amazed at how quick crocheting is. I mean, it takes days if not weeks to knit a scarf, but you could crochet a scarf in a few hours! Crazy.

My goal is to be able to crochet Scandinavian heart ornaments for next Christmas.

source

This requires having way more crochet skills than I currently have so it will take a lot of practice before I can accomplish that, but it's exciting to learn something new!

Funny Valentine

After making the tutorial about repurposing old newspapers into your own homemade paper I go this idea to do a little decoupage on them.

The cut out letters reminded me of a ransom note so I put "Be mine, or else" on the first one. Then just "love" on the next one. I think it would be cute to do conversation heart words on them like "You're sweet" and then write your own message on the back for a very personal (and dirt cheap) Valentine!

Happy Valentine's Day, again! :)

Paper Hearts from Newspapers Tutorial

I've been wanting to try my hand at making my own paper for a while so I finally just did it. I used some flyers that came in the mail and recycled them into heart-shaped pieces of paper.

It's quick, cheap, easy and pretty darn fun!

First, round up your materials. You'll need: a tray, hot water in a bowl, newspaper or any type of paper you have laying around, tulle (or anything mesh-like would work in a pinch), and some paper towels.

Tear up your paper into thin, small pieces and dump them into the hot water bowl.

Push the pieces down into the water.

Mix it around and knead the paper together with your hands. Kids would especially love this step! After about 1 minute it should look like this:

Continue to mix and knead the paper together until the pieces start to disintegrate and are sticking together. It takes just a few minutes more. It should look like this:

Prepare your tray. Cut a rectangular piece of your tulle and lay it down on the tray, leave about 6 inches hanging off of the tray...You'll need this to fold over your wet paper. Also add a piece of paper towel underneath your tulle, I forgot to add it for this pic, oops!

Make sure your paper is ready to form into shapes. Test a piece by squeeze a small amount of the paper to get rid of any excess water, if it holds it shape it's ready! If not, continue to stir and mix your paper.

Lift out enough of the paper and squeeze it out. Leave some water in so you can shape it.

Set your glob of paper on the tulle/tray and shape. You could even use a cookie cutter if you wanted to make more elaborate shapes!

Fold tulle over and gently press to remove all excess water.

Check to see if enough water has been removed, gently peel pack the tulle and if it easily comes off it's ready! If not, continue to press out more water.

Set on a paper towel to dry.

Let dry completely, about 12-24 hours, before writing on them.

I added a grommet and made a Valentine's gift tag.

Use your homemade paper hearts for a Valentine's gift tag, card, ornament or just a decoration!

Happy Valentine's Day!

A happy little tree

In an attempt to cheer up my apartment with Christmas spirit, I whipped up this happy little Christmas tree. My apartment already seems cheerier. :)

It was super easy and fast to make and I'm creating a tutorial for it that should be ready in a few days!

I also made this little needle-felted heart ornament last week. It's actually doubling as a gift tag for my mom's Christmas gift. I wrote her name on it after I took this picture. It looks simple to make but it was surprisingly time consuming.

In other news, I'm just about packed and ready to go home for Christmas even though I don't leave for another 2 weeks. I'm that excited.

T minus 14 days!

Another garland

After reading Astrid's post about hearts (also check out her super-cute ideas for chalkboard paint!), I got out my felting needle and went to town. I had a bunch of leftover twine from the chili pepper garland project and thought it would work perfectly to make a garland with the felted hearst. It did.

I needle felted 6 hearts in 6 colors then hot glued them (thanks Mr. G) right onto the twine. I should have made 2 hearts of each color because now you can see the big glob of glue on the back of the hearts. I guess as long as I have them hanging against a wall of some kind it should be fine.

I hung them up on my full-length mirror and love how it brightens it up!

Sticking with the garland theme, I made this card last week. I used Japanese washi tape and cut triangles then sewed across the card stock to make the bunting look. I like the overall look of it, but wish I hadn't done it on the blue card stock. I think cream or black would have been better. Oh well, next time!