Every year, I promise myself that I’m going to have a chill week before faire. I promise myself that I’m not going to take on 900 new projects in the months and weeks leading up to it, that I’m not going to make myself into a ball of stress.

Well, at least this year I haven’t turned myself into a ball of stress because of faire I guess?

The past two years have seen me experimenting with a lot of new things. Last year it was some metal stamping, then in December it was mugs (which were a hit with the family for Christmas). I’ve also learned how to crochet hats, which has added to my growing repertoire of fiber skills. This year I’ve been much better about slowly building up inventory for faire but not quite to the point I’d love to be. Case in point: today I made 18 mugs. I decided I was going to bite the bullet and do mugs for faire about a month ago when the blanks were incredibly on sale at Michaels (and if you haven’t tried the Make Market sublimation sheets and blanks, I HIGHLY recommend them–they’ve got a great selection, they’re less expensive than the Cricut ones, and I find that they weed a bit better, too). After mentioning that I was planning on doing them last weekend, I finally dragged things out to actually make them today.

My back isn’t entirely happy with me, but the mugs turned out great. Please excuse my messy kitchen in some of these shots (I let them cool on a pad on my kitchen counter so the cats are less likely to investigate and hurt themselves).

I’ll have all of them with me at GVRen the first weekend in October.

Also with me will be a bunch of new crocheted items that I’ve been making for the last year (along with any crochet items that didn’t sell last year…which is unsurprising because the weather was pretty awful most of the weekend).

Of course, this is not an exhaustive gallery of what I’ve got, just the most recent pieces I’ve made in the last month and a half (the return of some TV shows that I follow and the return of football have been good for my crocheting).

Expect some kind of festival post…at some point. And probably more things to come.

Until then, I’ve got garb to make because I’ve got garb on my list of things that I’m selling and…realized that I sold through basically all the garb I’ve been toting around last year (not that I had much left). Three skirts made last night, but if I can get some shirts done (and maybe make something for myself?) that would be nice.

Until next time!

Doing a little experimenting with something new.

I’ve been eying Circut’s mug press for well over a year now and finally broke down and got one for myself with some funds left from last Christmas. I finally worked up the guts (after having it for a few days) to break it out and try it. For better or worse, I think the first few attempts turned out pretty good!

These are all the 12 oz. Cricut brand mugs. I have some 15 oz. mugs that I haven’t done anything with yet, but I’m liking the results so far! I’m excited to do some more experimentation.

Hardest part about the whole thing has been the cutting and weeding, really. There’s a little bit of ghosting on some of the mugs but for first attempts, I’m very pleased.

One thing any crafter knows is that space is always an issue–it doesn’t matter how much space you have, it’s always at a premium at any given time. The other thing any crafter knows is that collecting supplies and materials and actually making things are two separate, but complimentary, hobbies.

To some degree or another, along with a voracious reading habit and a tendency to collect writing supplies (though those are issues better dealt with over at Doc Says Rawr), I deal with both.

I also live in a 550-square foot apartment with two cats.

Let’s just say that there are some things (like my Cameo and my sewing machine) that are always out–though the Cameo has a designated home on a rolling cart where it lives, it just lives out, my sewing machine has a case that it never actually makes it back into, instead living on my probably too big for the space dining table that is both storage and workspace–and a spot where I rarely sit down to eat (though that has more to do with the size of my chairs than things being on the table, if I’m honest–all of them are from Ikea and match, but in hindsight the chairs might have been bigger than what I need).

Right now, the post-festival challenge is going to be reorganizing product and supplies and putting things away in such a way that what I need is easily accessible. Right now things are a bit of a mess because of the weather last weekend–we basically just unloaded everything into my apartment and I’ve been moving around boxes here and there ever since. Monday being the holiday allowed me time to begin physically recovering and get some laundry done, but not necessarily put a dent in sorting or putting things away.

The next challenge (concurrent challenge?) will be starting to work through supplies in my stash to create new, fun things and scale back the amount of new stuff I’m bringing in–but also keep in mind the above.

Case in point, I definitely just brought home some new quilting fabric (and a little bit of yarn and other odds and ends) from JoAnn’s this week.

I will admit that it can be fun to go through what’s in my stash and let myself start to get ideas of what to do with it. Of course, the matter after that is always what to do with it. Sometimes, that’s where the most fun projects come from, like a bunch of the earrings that I did for festival this year and a quilt top I swear I’m going to finish before the end of the year if it kills me (and it might–it really might).

That’s all for now. Refresh on the Etsy shop coming soon, I just have to figure out light boxes and fun things like that for better jewelry photos (always my bane) and how I’m going to photograph scarves. Wish me luck!

GVRen was my first show years ago and remains my favorite all these years later. The long-running joke among friends is that some of us alumni have been around the festival long enough that we’ve seen everything twice, and a weekend like this past one was no exception.

The weather was suboptimal on Saturday, but by no means the worst weather we’ve had. It was a bit chilly and gray, with winds just gusty enough to be truly annoying without being terribly dangerous to folks with experience handling their tents (many of ours are pop-pup style squares of varying weights) in windier conditions. Sunday was warmer, beautiful, with less wind and much more sunshine. Both days had fairly good traffic—much better than I would have expected with there being no home football game and no Homecoming or Family Weekend level events going on at the university. The students running festival did well and it was a lot of fun all the way around.

I tried out some new products this year and so did Jen, who finally debuted her business name (Funshine Designs) this year. Totally in love with her painted rocks. I did some embossed notebooks this year (lined, next time at Nora’s suggestion I’ll also be doing some unlined notebooks, possibly with a couple of colored pencils with them) and they did remarkably well. I also tried out some crochet goods this year and those did well, too—scarves and wraps. I sold out of the two wraps that I’d done in a box crochet pattern in the first few hours on Saturday and I’m sure I could have sold more if I’d had gotten to make them. Something to keep in mind.

This next year will be making some new goods with supplies I already have and building for the next round. Also need to break out the new light box for product photos and Etsy listings.

Going to be fun adventures with that, to say the least.

For now, coffee, probably some crochet, maybe a bit of writing, and letting my body recover from the weekend.

A few months ago, I let everyone know that I’d decided to finally replace the old court gown that I’d sewn back in 2004 for my last renaissance festival as an undergraduate at GVSU.  After spending a few months distracted by a dollhouse (that’s another story!) and working on a few other projects (including surprises for my fellow alumni — more to come on that as I continue to tweak things), I’ve turned my attention to getting things done with my court gown.

A few weeks ago, I finished off my new Spanish farthingale and decided that maybe I didn’t really want to make a new corset, since my old one was perfectly serviceable–it just needed another set of ties.  Over the course of intervening weekends, I cut out a muslin from extra denim for the bodice and sleeves of my new court gown and was pleased to find that my calculations were good and the muslin fit pretty perfectly on the first shot.  Last weekend, I cut out the velvet for the bodice and the upper sleeves, then spent some time sewing the lining and the shell of the bodice together.  Yesterday, I cut the lower sleeves and the sleeve contrast and decided to just finish off the bodice completely.

I started cutting sleeves and working on putting the sleeves together and finishing off the bodice around the time the Spartans kicked off against the Oregon Ducks.

I finished around 1AM, with various breaks (my mother and I were, of course, watching the football game, I needed to get my old Kenmore sewing machine to power through layers of velveteen and denim when my Brother decided that it was too many layers, etc.).

I’ll hopefully finish off the rest of the gown today.  Pictures to come!

Well, some of you may have seen this tweet of mine, announcing that I’m embarking on a new, somewhat daunting project–a new court gown to be completed in time for Grand Valley’s 20th annual renaissance faire this fall.  I was one of the original members of the duchess’s court at Grand Valley fifteen years ago and it only seems fitting to me (and to other alumni as well!) that my Irish-born countess returns to celebrate the twentieth year of the festival.  Of course, this means I need a new gown.

Blue satin Tudor gown, c. 2004

About eleven years ago, I completed my first Tudor, a blue and green one with cream undersleeves and forepart.  It wasn’t bad for a first effort, but I made some poor fabric choices and the bodice and sleeves didn’t turn out quite the way I wanted them to.  The hat is a disaster (though it looks okay in pictures) and the overskirt was far too light and had a tendency to blow around quite a bit.  I’ve long since packed away this garb and forgotten where I’ve tucked it.  Still, I was pretty proud of the accomplishment–I’d made the gown and all the underpinnings, including the corset, shift, and farthingale.  In fact, the only thing I’m wearing in that picture that I didn’t make myself is the shawl that you can see looped around my elbows, which is the only piece of my garb that I’ve worn with every single iteration of my garb.  Seriously!  Everything I’ve ever done has this shawl with it.

The infamous shawl, purchased at Hollygrove in September 2000.

Last weekend, my mother and I headed out to one of our two local JoAnn’s–she on a mission for costuming supplies for the high school production of Disney’s Cinderella, me with the idle thought that maybe, just maybe, I’d finally pick up supplies to make a new Tudor gown, since I’d been talking about making a new court gown for at least the past five years (Jen, Kristie, Trish, or Diane might know exactly how long I’ve made noises about doing it). I grabbed some of my reusable shopping bags, threw one of my beautiful Son of Sandlar boots into it (so I could color-match the wine-colored leather that makes up the body of my boots), and headed out on my hunt for appropriate fabrics that would work for a new court gown and coordinate with these boots, because god knows that I spent enough money on the boots–I’m going to wear them with all of my garb, dammit!

I’ve always known that I wanted to do one of two things for a new court gown: either a subtle brocade gown, or a velvet gown–and if I was going velvet, it had to be cotton velvet, because there’s no way I’m dry cleaning this monster every time I wear it.  That would just be silly!  In fact, the ideal combination would be something I could machine wash from underpinnings on up to the overdress, but that can be super hard to find when you’re dealing with these things.

I had started out thinking that I wanted the overdress to be wine-colored, or primarily wine-colored, and then the underskirt with black and/or silver as its main color.  A bit of searching through the bolts at JoAnn’s and trying to color match the leather of my boots quickly showed that wasn’t going to happen.  Most of the wine-colored fabrics there are either a little too red or a little too purple and looked strange against the color of my boots.  “Okay,” I said to myself.  “Black velvet overdress it is!  Then I’ll just need to find something appropriate for the forepart and undersleeves and I’ll be good.”

In this, I completely lucked out–JoAnn’s had a full bolt (12 yards) of black velveteen on a roll and I had a 50% off one item coupon (which, by the way, stacked with my 20% off total purchase coupon).  Buying fabric for these types of gowns can be total sticker shock, so it’s not for the faint of heart, but I’d gone in knowing that this was something I wanted to do on this particular shopping trip, so I went ahead and did it.  I spent about $72 for the full bolt of velveteen.  When you’re getting ready to do something like this, make sure you buy as much fabric as you think you might need, since dye lots can be different between bolts and you don’t want to end up with different colors of black in your gown.

After picking the black, I poked around in the home decorating section before heading over to the brocade and sari apparel fabrics, which is where my mother found me.  She took one look at the bolt of velveteen and said “You’re finally doing it?”

She’s known about my desire to make a new court gown for a while, too.

Velvet, brocade, and my boot — the beginnings of my new court garb.

In the end, she helped me pick out some red and black brocade for the forepart and sleeves that read well with the velvet and with my boots.  I’ll just have to figure out what kinds of trims I’ll use for the whole thing, but that comes later–much later!

Of course, I’ll have to make new underpinnings, too.  My size has changed a bit since I made my initial corset, and my farthingale is a mess these days–Renaissance dancing will do that to you, especially when you’re all just learning to do it for the first time.  So yesterday, we went back to JoAnn’s (Mom needed more fabric for more costumes for Cinderella, and I needed fabric to make a new corset, the back part of my underskirt, and a new farthingale) and I got some denim on sale that should be the trick nicely (the canvas at JoAnn’s is ridiculous and the cotton duck wasn’t on sale–the cream and black denim yardage I got will work for what I need).  A trip to Lowe’s yesterday afternoon netted me the cable ties I needed for the corset boning and the tubing I need for my farthingale.

All in all, I’m super excited.  It’s been a while since I’ve embarked on a project this ambitious, but I think it’s going to be great.

Now if I could only stop being distracted by the dollhouse I’m building (though that’s another post for another time)…

Anna’s Quilt – made by Erin M. Klitzke

It’s official.

I’ve caught the quilting bug, and I’ve caught it pretty bad.

Now, making patchwork quilts has been a thing that I’ve really wanted to do since I was a kid and it’s something that I’ve dabbled in since I was pretty young.  I have tons of half-started projects laying around the house, tucked into bins or shoved in drawers.  I have a stash of fat quarters and yardage of quilter’s cottons and calicos that’s a shame to waste (we’re talking a few bins worth of fabric here–probably as much or more fabric than I have laying around for costuming projects).  That fabric and those projects have been sitting idle, quietly waiting for me to get around to making use of them.

Anna’s quilt before I put the binding on. The binding is in the same red fabric as the squares.

Before my niece was born, I started working on a strip quilt for her.  I’d finished the top by the time she was born, but the hand quilting and finishing took me until her first birthday–and made me vow to never hand quilt anything again!  Still, I managed to finish it, and for my first quilt brought to completion, I happen to think it’s wonderful (and my family and my sister-in-law’s family agreed!).

Immediately after finishing that quilt, I started digging around in my sewing area and found some nine-patch blocks for a quilt I’d started a long time ago for my younger sister, Kendall.  I realized that I was short a few nine-patch blocks, so I made some more over the course of the intervening days, watched a little too much of Fons and Porters’ Love of Quilting (yes, the series from PBS–I have some DVDs laying around because I am really that kind of geek), and spent a Saturday morning cutting background squares before bringing it up to the family room to test layouts.

Experimenting with layouts for Kendall’s quilt last weekend–this is actually the layout I ended up going with.

As my mother and I stared at the first test layout, she suggested doing the blocks on point rather than as straight strips–and it was the on point layout that I ended up going with.  I was joking that my sister might not even want the quilt anymore, at which point I’d figure out something else to do with it–but one text message with a picture of the test layout later, and I knew that she still wanted the gift I started making her five years ago.

Over the course of that weekend and the following week, I finished sewing the blocks into strips–this weekend, I’m looking to possibly finish off the quilt top and maybe even finish the whole quilt–it depends on how ambitious I get.

The terrible part is that I’m already trying to figure out what the next quilt will be.

I’m hooked and I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing, either.

Detail of a strip from Kendall’s quilt.  She plays upright string bass.  The treble cleft and sheet music fabrics I chose for her and she chose the black and white cross-hatched.

So I found out on Sunday that I have a slot in the annual Athens Band Boosters Craft Show at Athens High School in Troy, MI on Saturday December 13, 2014.  I will be setting up there at about 6:45 in the morning for a show that starts at 9 and runs until 4.  I’ll have jewelry and papercrafts with me to sell.

The last few times I did this show, I didn’t do very well–I’m hoping for a better year this time around!

Well, it’s that time of year again — the time of year when I start panicking in twelve directions because there’s so much crafting and writing to do and so little time to do it in!  The Grand Valley State University Renaissance Festival is in exactly six weeks and I should really think about inventorying stock and making some new things, including perhaps a cloak or two, as I’m seriously lacking that department.  Then again, it took about three years to sell the last cloak I made, so maybe I shouldn’t worry about it!

Color spread on my brighter array of pinwheel and ornament tags, which I’ll be debuting at GVRen this year. Prototype cream-colored tags are currently available on Etsy.

Last year’s festival was a mixed bag for me.  I had to buy a brand spanking new tent in the hours before faire opened on Saturday last year because the weight of rain on the roof destroyed my old tent–total bummer, that, right?  On a brighter note, when I got the new tent it was much, much nicer than my old tent–right down to having dome lights built into it!  I’ll need to make a canvas cover for it at some point to help disguise how…modern…it is, but there are worse problems to have to be sure.  It’s a solid tent and I’m glad to have picked it up despite the circumstances.

I debuted my papercrafts at last year’s festival and I did surprisingly well with them.  I’ll be bringing an array of my gift tags for sale this year in addition to my other paper fare that debuted last year.  There will be, of course, my usual array of jewelry as well, and the new square overskirts that I debuted last year as well.  I may do some experimentation with odds and ends for this year’s faire, since I did get the new embroidery machine and it seems a shame not to do some playing around with it for festival, just to add a touch of something different to the same old things.

That will come after inventory, though.  Once I know what I’ve got, I’ll know what I need more of and how much time I’ll have to devote to adding stock.  I’m more ahead of the curve this year than I usually am, though, which is a good thing because I seem to have less and less free time every year in the weeks leading up to faire.

Tomorrow’s my annual trip to Holly, so we’ll see if I come up with anything awesome while I’m wandering around those environs, too.  I’m in the market for some Son of Sandlar boots myself–after doing this for fourteen years, it’s time I invest in an excellent pair of boots.  I priced them out (almost ordered a pair, actually) when I paid a visit to the Great Lakes Medieval Faire and Market a few weeks back and it’s time.  I’ve got them all picked out and it’ll be super hard to wait for them to be made (I have huge calves, so they’re a custom job instead of try and buy), but I should have them in time for the 2015 season.  I’m also in the market for a new bodice and I know a couple of places where I’ll be having a good, hard look (the gents at Crimson Chain typically get my business–they’re the folks from whom I purchased my current green leather) for something pleasing.

Stay tuned for more pictures and updates as faire approaches.  Folks looking for information on the books I’ll be bringing along can hit my personal site at www.embklitzke.com, but as it stands right now, I’l have paperback copies of Epsilon: Broken Stars, UNSETIC Files: Between Fang and Claw, UNSETIC Files: The Measure of Dreams, Awakenings: Book One, and What Angels Fear.  I was hoping to have The Last Colony, Awakenings: War Drums, and even Epsilon: Redeemer ready for this faire, but something tells me it’s not going to happen.  I’m hoping for Redeemer to release sometime around Christmas…but we’ll see what the next few months bring.  (If you’re a fan and have been hoping, though, shoot me an email and I’ll make sure to bring you a hardcopy of the current draft to tide you over until it’s done!)

Until next time…

A few weeks back was my sister-in-law’s baby shower, organized by her mother, aunt, sister, sister’s best friend, and my sister-in-law and brother’s best friend.  Fairly early on, my sister-in-law and brother’s best friend knew that she wasn’t going to be able to make the shower (she had another family obligation the same weekend), but she had an awesome idea for a craft for the shower.  I happened to be in the Grand Rapids area for the Grand Valley State University Renaissance Festival that weekend and she got in touch with me via Facebook to see if I could handle the craft.

The craft: Custom onesies made with quilting fabric and heat and bond

Supplies needed: Plain cotton onesies in various sizes, 100% cotton quilting fabric in various colors and patterns, fusible webbing (light/medium weight – we used heat’n’bond), stencils appropriate for baby garments (I also brought my Fiskars Fuse and some dies to cut some of them), scissors, pencils, iron and surface to iron on, fabric markers (optional)

My mother and I did some testing the week before the event to see what kind of fusible we wanted to use for the project.  On the day of the shower, we showed up with the onesies and all of our supplies and set up for the craft.

The color array

It was a total hit.  The onesies that people made for my niece were beautiful and according to my sister-in-law’s mom, everyone enjoyed making them, too.  The craft station was the very last thing we packed up at the end of the event because people were still making their onesies up until they kicked us out of the room.

Some onesies!

Even the servers who came through were impressed by what they saw us doing.  One told me she’d seen similar things done at other showers, but none of them were as pretty or as nice as what we accomplished.

More Onesies!

We’ve still got some onesies to make because we didn’t use all of them.  However, we hadn’t brought pink and purple fabric to the shower on purpose because until the shower, we didn’t know the gender of the baby.  Now that we do, my mother, sister, and I will be able to make some adorable pink and purple onesies once my sister comes home from college.