This is my second go at making stitch markers.
Above is the first set of stitch markers I ever made.
They were for my
Winter Solstice Yoga Swap partner. I only made two, because the darn shrinky dinks kept warping. I wanted circles, but they wanted to be ovals. So after wasting 5 out of 6 sheets of shrinky dinks I finally gave up. I took the two best looking and gave them to my partner. Sumthin is better than nuthin right?
Over the weekend I tried again. This time I decided to ditch the shrinky dinks and just use beads. Using the instructions from
CJ's Knitting Basket as a guideline I made three sets.
The first set was made almost exactly as the instructions instructed (?¿?). The only difference is that I didn't make a
wrapped loop, I just don't like them (or I'm lazy). Instead I made a circle and cut the excess.
I used
chain nose pliers to make the loops. They didn't turn out as well as they would have with
round nose pliers, so I'm definately going to invest in some of those. Round nose pliers also would have made it a lot quicker too. With the chain nose pliers I had to make a lot of little bends the get a circular shape.
The second set I made with these fun skull beads. This is a combination of wood, plastic, and stone beads. I stumbled upon them in the store and thought they'd be really cute mixed together like this.
Instead of using a head pin for these I just made one loop out of the bead wire. Then I clamped below and above each bead with a
crimping bead (see the dark colored rings in the supplies picture). Once again (because I'm a cheapskate) I didn't have the right tool and used my chain nosed pliers instead, so the crimping beads are squished flat.
The third set is a gift and will be revealed later this weekend...
I got all my supplies at
Bead World1384 Broadway
btw. 37th & 38th St.
New York, NY 10018
212.302.1199
Hours
Mon - Fri 9:00am - 7:00pm
Sat & Sun 10:00am - 5:30pm
love your mixmatched skull markers, i look at skeletons in a fun way, it's a pretty much "buddhist" cool attitude i guess :-)
ReplyDeletei just don't understand why oval wouldn't so for your shrinky dinks, oMg all that money -and drawing wasted- (unless it's cheap in the US?)
Thanks I really like the skulls too :)
ReplyDeleteI guess I should have mentioned that I used the shrinky dinks that are for inkjet printers. I think the coating that allows the ink to stick to the plastic is what causes the warping.
If you look at a plain sheet of the shrinky dinks in the light you can see the strokes from the substance being brushed on. When melting the sheet shrinks more in that direction.