Wishcasting Wednesday: Steps

Each week, Jamie Ridler Studios hosts Wishcasting Wednesday.

You can be a maker of magic and a tender of wishes. It’s easy. Answer the wish prompt on your blog and leave a direct link HERE. Support wishes by visiting other participants, leaving a comment saying “As (insert name) wishes for her/himself, so I wish for her/him also.” It’s that simple. There is great power in wishing together.

This week's prompt asks:

WHAT STEP DO YOU WISH TO TAKE?

My answer is easy-- I want to get out my clays and actually MAKE all of the new poly clay creations I have in my head-- instead of thinking about them, sketching them, dreaming about them when I'm asleep. I want them to become a physical reality!

Its easy to say I haven't done this yet because I've been back to working FT hours again, but now I have a week or so off until the next project starts, so that doesn't work as an excuse right now.

I want to move forward, but fear, that little niggling imp, is holding me back. Fear that my ideas won't look as good in reality as they do on paper or in my imagination. I told myself fear has no place in my creative world-- PLAY is the code and keyword I want to live by. Because even if my new ideas don't turn out the way I imagined, if I play with them, I may come up with something even better. But if I don't take the first step-- to get out my clays and start working-- nothing is going to happen with all these new ideas.

So I need to take the simple step of getting out my clays and getting to work.

What step do you wish to take?

Frog & Begin Again?

After finishing the tea cozy for my friend, I am sort of itching to do some more crocheting. I always get that feeling when the weather turns colder, too. So I'm thinking about frogging my Day to Night poncho which I started last year, frogged, restarted and *still* can't get to look right, and have finally abandoned. I've seen quite a few people on Ravelry who have made this poncho & theirs looks awesome, but I am just not happy with how mine looks.

I love the yarn-- especially the color scheme, and I really want to make something out of it, so now I'm thinking about crocheting the Kimono Jacket from my Homespun 7 Crochet Patterns for the Family booklet. It looks easy enough and I can *always* use another warm wrap for wearing at work-- I'm always so cold there!

So many projects in mind.... so little time...

Quilt Block Mosaic Box

My most recent mosaic lidded box is finished and has been listed in my ArtFire shop!

Funky Metallic Quilt Block Mosaic Box

I ended up making more tiles after my WIP post, because I wanted to get the pattern just right. I'm so pleased with how it turned out-- its like a quilt with a funky metallic twist. I started experimenting with adding glass tiles to my mosaics as well and I like the texture combination of stamped polymer & smooth glass. What do you think? Is the glass an interesting addition/texture to the design?

Cozy Complete

Remember this little project I started... about a year ago? *blush* It's finally done!

Rosy Cosy pattern by Megan Mills

I gave it to my friend at work today and she was absolutely thrilled with it. I've been apologizing to her profusely for the past 2 weeks for not getting it done before-- we lost touch after the spring project season this year and didn't run into each other again until this latest project at work. She's such a dear, she just laughed and said, "Don't worry about it, I don't really follow a linear timeline in my life anyways!" Still, I feel like such a heel.

This turned out to be such a cute tea cozy, I may have to make one for myself. The pattern was not hard to crochet, but my one critique is that the wording of the pattern sometimes made it very difficult to determine exactly what I was supposed to be doing. Also, there weren't any "summaries" of each row so that you would know if you had the right amount of stitches. If I did something wrong, I wouldn't find out until the next row because things weren't coming out right.

But now that I've made it once, I think it would be much easier the second time around. And, as a bonus, I learned how to do a new stitch-- the reverse single crochet, or crab stitch. This one has had me stumped for years because I'm a leftie. So the instructions for a reverse sc sounded just like doing what I do for a sc, because I crochet backwards. So I had figure out how to reverse the reverse sc. I finally found this incredibly helpful video for lefties, watched it a time or two, then followed along. The stitch came out just the way it was supposed to!

I love opportunities to expand my creative experience. This project was a great one.

Feline Friday: King of the Mountain

Moose loves to be King of the Bed; just give him room to sprawl and he'll be chillaxin' in no time...

But let him discover a big ol' pile of freshly washed bedding just waiting to be folded...

... and he turns into an dozing, furry King of the Mountain in 5 seconds flat.

WIP Wednesday

Sometimes I get working on a project that starts out great and then... goes nowhere. Its frustrating, but it happens.

For instance I got these fabulous rubber stamps, all different sizes of quilt blocks. Perfect for making mosaic tiles, and I made a whole bunch of them. But then my enthusiasm waned when I couldn't seem to arrange the tiles on my box lid in any way that made me happy. So I've been waiting for inspiration... for quite some time now.

The other afternoon I started playing around with the tiles again. And added some glass tiles along with the polymer clay ones. *Bing!* Suddenly every piece started to fall into place. Finally, I knew what I wanted to do. Above is the progress I've made. I need to make a couple more tiles to switch out, but I'm really pleased so far. I love it when inspiration strikes.