Punch Embroidery: The Lost Art

Not many people out there know about punch embroidery.  To tell the truth, I’d never heard of it until I met my mother-in-law – she makes beautiful punch embroidery pillows, with the help of my father-in-law.  (Kathy does the punch embroidery, and Mike sews the pillows.)  When Kathy found out I could sew, I was pulled in to help sew the pillows – but I was way more interested in learning how to punch embroider.  So, during the first Thanksgiving I spent with Bryan’s family, she taught me how to punch embroider – my first punch embroidery work was Frosty the Snowman, but I quickly came up with ideas I could use to nerd up the craft, so to speak.

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It’s actually surprisingly easy to do punch-embroidery.  Finding the tools are hard, and the yarn is even harder to find, but once you get the hang of it, it’s addicting and projects can be finished up pretty quickly.  It involves simple cotton muslin fabric, thin yarn, an embroidery hoop, and a punch needle – it’s relatively inexpensive to get started with.  One of the really neat characteristics of punch embroidery is the neat 3D texture and feel you can get on your projects – the punch needle can be adjusted to different lengths, which makes your design really stand out.   You can make almost anything into a punch embroidery image, but coloring book images and line drawings are a lot easier to do, as are cartoon images.  Which is where my ideas came in – I started out with making some Sailor Moon pillows, back in 2008.

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The Sailor Moon pillows were pretty popular on the Sailor Moon community on Livejournal – I made quite a few of them for people there!  I also had some Sailor Moon fabric, too, and that probably made them even more popular, haha.  It was lots of fun finding images to turn into pillows, and I loved seeing how things came together as I punched my way to pretty pictures.  I also did some Christmas stockings, and some patches for jackets, and even some designs for bags as well.  From there, I went and did other nerdy things – including a Doctor Who design (which I’ve been working on for years, haha), and a couple of My Little Pony designs.

If you’ve ever wanted to do punch embroidery, it’s not too hard to pick up – you can purchase materials online, and I plan on making a tutorial video sometime soon – until then, you can check out the following links for supplies and tutorials:

Supplies

Tutorials

If you want to see more of the projects I’ve done with punch embroidery, check out the gallery below!

Comics! My Little Pony and Adventure Time

I’ve only very recently gotten back into the swing of collecting comic books again – when I was a kid, I used to collect Simpsons Comics pretty religiously, and collected stuff that Mixxzine/Tokyopop put out when I was a teenager.  However, when I was in college, I sort of fell out of the collecting habit – I’d pick up a few comics here and there, like assorted Pokemon comics and the occasional manga, but not with any sort of regularity.

Then the Sailor Moon manga started being re-released, sometime last year, and I realized that I HAD to get them.  I mean, they were re-translated, presented in their original right-to-left format, and published in a sturdier format than the Mixxzine/Tokyopop editions that would fall apart after one or two reads.  And then from there, I was lost, haha.  Especially when My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic started releasing a comic series.  (For those that don’t know me, I am a HUGE My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fan.  I mean, come on, I’m sitting here writing this while wearing a Pinkie Pie hoodie and mismatched Twilight Sparkle and Derpy Hooves socks!)  Of course I had to start collecting those.  And in the process, I started picking up some Adventure Time comics, too.

Oh, so many comics - issues one and two of gender-bending Adventure Time, and a whole ton of ponies.

Oh, so many comics – issues one and two of gender-bending Adventure Time, and a whole ton of ponies. (Plus a bag!  Because one can never have too many pony-bedecked project bags, haha.)

When it comes to the MLP:FiM comics, I knew I was going to get those right from the start, as soon as they were announced.  I wasn’t sure if they’d be good or not, but hey, if they weren’t, I could at least hang onto the first issue as some sort of collector’s item, right?  I read the first issue as soon as I left the comic book shop, and it was good.  I mean, really good.  It picked up where season 2 left off with one of the villains from the series, Chrysalis (queen of the Changelings), and what she got herself up to in Equestria after our heroines last encountered her.  I won’t talk too much about the content of these comics, especially for those who haven’t read them yet and want to – all I will say is that if you enjoy MLP:FiM at all, and enjoy comics, you’ll love the pony comics.  And if you’re a comic collector, there are so very many alternate covers out there for each issue – I’ve only been collecting the covers from Hot Topic, but there are far more covers available.  Issue one alone has 19 different covers, and issue two has 13!  So, yeah.  Definitely plenty of reasons to pick up some pony comics.

The Adventure Time with Fionna and Cake comics, those were something of a bonus.  The comic shop I visit, Vintage Phoenix, tends to keep their MLP comics on the same rack as they do the Adventure Time comics.  When I went in January to pick up my monthly dose of pony, Fionna and Cake were there on the next shelf down – and I love Adventure Time (not nearly as much as I love MLP, though), and figured, what the heck, I’ll give it a shot.  I absolutely love the gender-bending story line, and seeing all the opposite-gender counterparts to characters like Princess Bubblegum and Marceline (Prince Gumball and Marshall Lee, respectively) made me giggle.  So, when I came in to pick up my comics this month, I added Adventure Time with Fionna and Cake to the pile!

I might do a monthly post about my comic book haul – depends on how many comics I end up getting, whether or not I add manga to the mix (after all, I am still getting those Sailor Moon volumes every other month!), and so on – we’ll see how stuff pans out!

Printable Valentines – Wreck-it Ralph Style!

Since Valentine’s Day is about a week away, I thought it might be a good idea to make my own valentines for the special people in my life!  (I mean, I do have a stash of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic valentines… but those are collector’s items!  I can’t use those!) And it came to me – why not make some Wreck-it Ralph valentines?  There aren’t any currently out there on the web anywhere, and Wreck-It Ralph is such an awesome movie – so why not make some Wreck-it Ralph inspired valentines?

These are all about 5 inches square, or 5 by 6 inches for the bigger one, and should print out really nicely on cardstock!  There are tiny little watermarks in the images, but hopefully they’re not too obtrusive.  I did draw the images used for these cards, in case you were curious! 😀

I hope everyone enjoys them – and if you use them, leave me a comment and tell me how you used them! 😀  I’d love to see how everyone likes my valentines!

Classy crafting

Little Lovely Shawl

I know this isn’t in the classroom, but still – made a lot of progress!

I’ve noticed a new trend in some of my Information Science classes, and I’m taking part in it as well – there are a lot of students working on knitting and crocheting projects during class!  I brought in my Little Lovely Shawl to work on during Human Computer Interaction yesterday, and while we had wonderful conversations about cognition and how the brain works in relation to computers and technology, as well as trying to assemble a mental model of how an ATM works, my shawl grew by leaps and bounds.

Another classy-craft - this one's a scarf for Bryan

Another classy-craft – this one’s a scarf for Bryan

Another of my classmates was working on a mobius cowl – I might see if I can get a picture of it on Thursday – and one of Bryan’s classmates in his Informatics class was knitting a scarf!  I’m not sure exactly how it works so well, but doing something with my hands helps keep my mind focused on what the instructor is talking about.  Not to mention I get quite a bit of knitting or crocheting done when I have something else to focus on – if it’s just me and the yarn, I tend to get bored pretty quickly.  So, it’s a win-win situation!  I’ll keep posting pictures of the awesome things I make (or work on) in class.  It definitely helped in last night’s Organizational Informatics class – not only did I soak up what was going on, I managed to knit quite a bit of scarf.  And there was the added bonus of knitting keeping me a little more alert than usual – my Tuesdays are the longest day of my week, with class going until 8:30 pm at night – so having something to do with my hands kept me a little more awake.

Speaking of projects to work on in class, I’m thinking of starting a mobius cowl of my own to work on – I’ve got some beautiful purple and brown yarn I want to use up, and I’ve found quite a few interesting patterns on Ravelry.  Ahh, Ravelry – you keep me busy finding good ways to use up all my yarn, hahaha.  Of course, it doesn’t help when yarn stores have good sales on pretty yarn – I spent entirely too much money on yarn this weekend!

To my readers – do any of you knit or crochet in class?  Tell me in the comments, and feel free to share pictures of what you’ve made!

Enter the crafty nerd.

Well, here goes nothing.

I’m going to make a legitimate try at doing a real blog!  With a focus!  This should be… interesting.

After following Jen at EPBOT for quite some time now, I thought to myself, “Hey, how come I don’t run a blog similar to hers?” And some of you may say, why the heck should you do a blog like hers?  She’s already done it!  Well, while we both do nerdy and crafty things (and often combine the two), our nerddoms don’t exactly overlap.  She’s huge into steampunk, for example, while I’m really big into My Little Ponies.  She does a lot of big DIY projects, while I make a lot of little plushies and knit projects.  So, that’s my reasoning for doing a nerdy crafting blog – because it’ll be a unique nerdy crafting blog.   It’ll be MY nerdy crafting blog.  With a little bit of random life stuff tossed in here and there.

So, welcome!  I’m going to try to post once a week, if not more – and I’d love it if people would comment, stir up some activity, stuff like that.  I might host the occasional contest, I might post some free goodies, who knows.  I really do love blogging, and I want to share all the awesome stuff I make with the world, and inspire someone to make their own awesome stuff, or maybe even blog – just like Jen inspired me to do!