I'm free!! Well... mostly.

This past week and a half has been an especially busy one for me, but now I feel like I can relax a bit more. Last night This morning, I folded my last origami lucky star for my clients, Simon & Becky. I have been folding 600-700 stars a day for the past 10 days to get them done asap, which meant staying up until the sun came up, sleeping for 5-6 hours, and starting up again (with a few breaks for eating, showering, and taking care of my dog, Wicket).

My 10lb shih tzu, Wicket, standing on the papason
chair with the 20,000 stars

The 20,000 stars took up a lot more room than I originally thought they would (I assumed they would fit in a Large Flat Rate Box from USPS), the 40 tightly-packed ziploc bags filled with 500 stars taking up 10"x19"x19". Fortunately, I found the nearest to perfect box I think I could find in our garage; It was 12"x19"x19" and I am so glad I happened to save it! This morning, 9lbs and 14oz of box & stars were picked up by my mail carrier and off they went. And for only $15! :)

I realize this isn't crochet related, so my apologies for that. But I am SO RELIEVED to be done with those! I have really been wanting to work on some designs for baby hats and such and I couldn't when I had that massive order to fill. I think it goes without saying that I won't be folding any origami lucky stars again for awhile, haha. It is fun that I can now say I've folded well over 40,000 stars in my lifetime though (I've previously had several "large" orders of 4,000-6,000, plus the 6,000+ stars I folded for my own wedding, plus the dozens of smaller 100-2,000 orders).

But there is no rest for the wicked, apparently. ;) I received an order for another Castle Crashers hat a couple of days ago (it's so fun to be global... my creations crossing the ocean is just too awesome!), and a friend of a friend wants a set of owl hats. And then I need to talk to my SIL about possibly selling hats through her business, which means making "stock" (plug for especially anybody in Austin, TX: The Wondercraft. They have a boutique run out of a fantastically renovated Airstream trailer. :) Oh, and SIL's direct shop: Paired Hearts. She is an awesome artist and is fantastically stylish!).

I also received a very generous gift of a sewing machine from my MIL, Sally, for my birthday! It arrived yesterday and I'm excited to play around with it (I've never owned a sewing machine myself, having just used my mom's when I was younger). Fun little anecdote about that: She saw that I had a sewing machine on my Amazon Wish List and wanted to get me one that was a bit nicer. Apparently, Grandma Bilodeau (Sally's MIL) gave Sally her sewing machine 30 years ago and so Sally wanted to go with tradition and give HER daughter-in-law a sewing machine. Cute, right? I'll definitely be keeping that tradition going, though I've got a few decades yet before I can, haha. :)

 Y'know, I think I've just decided I need to change this blog a bit. I am so much more crafty than just crochet. And I want a place to blog about ALL my craftiness without being OT.

More baby hats! Plus PATTERN: Bunny hat

I believe the last thing I was talking about making on here was the owl hat I was making for Kami. Well, I finished it! I was able to give it to her last week while at a friend's bridal shower.

Pretty sure I mentioned that it was inspired by another designer's hat, which is why I don't really feel right posting the pattern (I don't know how close it is to hers - I don't know what hers looks like - but I did look at photos of her design and try to create a pattern using it). There were some aspects of it that I really, really liked and will be mimicking in other hats, like the braids on the earflaps (made shorter for little ones just in case!) and the cute bits hanging off the ears.

Of course, it all helps that Kami is just so darn adorable. I mean, look at that little face! :)

I also made a little pink bunny hat with a face on it for my other friend's newborn daughter, Hannah, but didn't get a photo of it (yet? hehe). And... then I made another one, out of cotton this time, for my nephew, Orion. It's pretty simple, as one would expect a bunny hat to be, but I like how it turned out!

You can get the pattern at a discount if you like my facebook page and then click here (Regular Price is $1.30, Discount makes it $1):

Crochet Pattern Organization

I have no idea how everyone else organizes their patterns (maybe just on computers?), but I wanted to share my way. :)

For months (like, 12!), I was storing my favorite patterns on my kindle, mostly in PDF form. But the text of the PDFs was always too small, so I had to turn my kindle horizontal. Plus, at the time, the kindle didn't have their "collections"/folder option, so it was a PITA to organize them with all of my other ebooks. I also have a "Crochet Patterns" folder on my laptop where I have them saved into categories. And, of course, there is Ravelry.

But, and maybe I'm just old-school, I do enjoy having things like patterns in physical form. It's nice to be able to flip through my patterns and especially nice for when I don't have access to power (e.g. when the power went out last year while I was crocheting some play food and my laptop battery was crap and would die after 10 minutes without being plugged in and my kindle wasn't charged...).

So, how do I organize my patterns?
In this:

 

My crochet pattern binder!

It's a smaller 2" binder, measuring in at about 7" x 8" that I picked up at Office Depot for about $4. I'm still trying to figure out what type of cover I want for it, so excuse it's boring blue-ness! Inside, I have a bunch of those free patterns you can grab at Joann and Michael's and some 5"x7" and 5"x8" index cards where I print out or write out patterns.

Pocket has lined paper for notes & lists
(back pocket has free patterns that are for knitting - inspiration, mostly)

My "Home/Kitchen" section

My "Holiday" section, shown to show the design I use for the index cards

I only just today added the tabs! My binder was a mess before, but I hadn't found any dividers that would work all that well (A-Z is pretty useless). My index cards are the larger ones too, so I had to find something larger than them while small enough to fit my binder.

A project that I can't WAIT to finish so that it gives me more free time is an order I am fulfilling for 20,000 origami lucky stars. I'm about 8,000 stars in now, but I need to devote about 4 straight hours a day to folding them, minimum (that's about 500 stars a day). Why am I mentioning this here? Well, I ordered the paper from a printer (no way was I printing 500 sheets of paper here at home! WAY cheaper and faster to use a professional). And I had that paper pre-cut to be 5.5"x8.5". Ever 100 sheets of paper, there were cardboard sheets. Not only am I able to upcycle them, but they were just about the perfect size!

So I opened up photoshop and quickly made some colorful tabs with the sections I figured I'd need and printed them out onto an index card that hadn't printed correctly (yay for more recycling). Cut those out and taped them onto the dividers (glue would have likely been better, but I wasn't that patient). And voila!

That last one, Afghans, was one that I sort of forgot about when I was designing...
So it gets the handwritten treatment!

I want to do something with the blah brown-ness of the cardboard, but, like the blueness of the cover, it's got to wait until I decide what I want to do with it. I'll probably just cover the cardboard with scrapbook paper on the fronts.