My First Amigurumi

Hi, there, welcome back!

If you follow my blog at all, you may vaguely recall that back in September 2014 I learned to crochet.  From those first simple crocheted squares, I made several mug cosies, cowls (mine and Granny's) and some simple dish clothes for stocking stuffers.  I also had a go at crocheting a wine bottle tote but found it a bit too challenging at the time so decided to revisit that pattern at a later date once I'd had a little more experience under my belt.

However, if you want to do any of the really, really cool and cute stuff with crochet, you really have to learn to master crocheting in the round.  I mean, seriously, you have to.  And that's a bit daunting when you first start out, because it takes a lot of counting and a different level of spatial orientation ability.

Anyway, one weekend I was completely bored out of my gourd and I decided it was high time I tackled this crocheting in the round.  Primarily because I wanted to learn how to make those adorable amigurumi toys.  I mean, be honest, how could anyone not want to make these?  So I searched through my Pinterest crochet pins and found what I felt would be the absolute basics to get me started: baby monsters.

OMG, need to make these!

Now, my original pin took me to a very nice photo-assisted tutorial, but I still found it tricky to fully understand what I was doing and more importantly (especially as I'm a visual learner), to see where I should be hooking.  So, back to YouTube I went and to my great joy, I stumbled upon a video tutorial version of these exact baby monsters - yeah!  Want to make these yourself?  Here's the video I used:

The video is half an hour long and goes through making the monsters from start to finish, including adding the faces (safety eyes, stitching features), stuffing and closing.  I felt it was well explained throughout and the one or two times something wasn't directly shown, I was able to figure it out with minimal trial and error.  And after an afternoon of excited stitching, I had this little fellow completed:

My Squishie!

Isn't it adorable?  Squee!  I just can't help but squish it every time I see it.  I didn't have any safety eyes so I used small buttons, which incidentally were originally white and I coloured them black with a Sharpie marker.

Once you get the basic process down, these whip up super quickly and easily.  In fact, I thought they would be the perfect little end of school year treat for my students so now I'm busily crocheting 23 of them!  I'm also thinking I'll make a few extras for my classroom as fidgets for students that need to move while listening.

Picture Day 2007

Hello, hello!  Yesterday I enjoyed a fun crop day with my friend Anya.  Our last crop day was last summer so it's been a while.  So lovely to chat and craft away together.  And it seems that my stash is now rivaling boutique status, as every item she had forgotten or didn't have on hand and asked me about, I had (and then some).  Oh dear...  At least I can justify using it regularly.

I made two LOs yesterday; wrapping up another class photo.

 Picture Day 2007

I finally found some papers that helped to compensate for the green undertones on my last class photo - I off-set the green with some bold magenta and went with a monochromatic scheme to give it some bold impact, what with all of that drab grey back dropping.  The ledger paper is actually upside down and the black and white flowers I fussy cut with my awesome new Fiskars finger craft knife from the photo mat paper.

Embellishments included some Heidi Swapp primrose colour spray and stickers from Echo Park's Here and Now collection and Simple Stories' Vintage Bliss.

I love these Amy Tan Wish Thickers - they are so versatile and I've used them on so many projects.  I knew I wanted to put the class stats in the box at the bottom but that it wouldn't be enough to fill the space so I cut out some little cameras from one of the EP papers (in an ombre, even) and added some machine stitching to fill the gap.

Final embellishment shot with cute ampersand and glasses.

I'll be back tomorrow to share my second LO from the crop day - I was still tweaking it this morning and I want to make sure it's 'done' before releasing it upon the world.

Picture Day 2009

Hello and welcome back!  So it's Monday morning and I'm *not* at work - long live the sports break!  I've been enjoying my time off catching myself up on some embroidery work (I'll share that later in the week) and yesterday I finally dug into the *huge* tower of new photos and scrapbooking goodies so you can expect some regular updates and posts here throughout the week.

However, I've had this UFO from my series of class photos sitting on my scrapping board from around the end of November or start of December.  Now, you have to understand, when it comes to scrapbooking, I pretty much never leave a LO unfinished once started (completely the opposite of my quilting, it seems...)  So clearly, that needed attention first.

Picture Day 2009

In my last 2Peas order, I picked up Chic Tags' new paper line and absolutely fell in love with this bright, bold diagonal stripe paper.  I had been struggling with getting all the embellishments to work on the shelf design but with a fresh set of eyes, I decided to go in a slightly different direction and as is often the case, it worked much better.

The pinwheel I made myself and this LO features a wood veneer camera for the running camera motif in this series.  Some little leftover bits and bobs worked in here, too.

Glammed up the title with some gorgeous turquoise glitter Thickers - I just love these and their larger size works really well with photo enlargements.  I didn't have any letter 'u's left so I snipped apart a 'w', which worked for both the 'u' and the 'r' - how awesome is that?!  Love that little OA 'look' brad, too.

And speaking of brads, I decided it was high time to really start using up some stash and used a whole bunch of OA Travel Girl and MME Notable brads, mixing and matching them together with the clusters.

So with this LO completed, I'm close to being finished this school photo series.  I have one more class photo from years ago, for which I'm struggling to find a good paper combination as despite being a professional job and printing, the colour levels aren't great and there's a slight green weight dulling them and making them look 'bleh'.  Then I need to rescan this academic year's class photo, as I didn't seem to email it to myself and now haven't a clue where I've saved it.  I've also been thinking I should see if I can find a copy of my first class photo from work when I started out as a personal teaching assistant - might have to call in the colleague cavalry for that one.  Still debating on the staff photos...

In any event, I'll be switching things up for a bit as I get to work scrapping Christmas photos from 2013 and I even have a touching Valentine's historical LO I'm piecing together in my head and may actually get done later today.

Stay tuned!

Picture Day 2010

Hello again, everyone!  So this afternoon at work was field trip day - two hours of skating at the local arena, reliving my youth spent figure skating and coaching 7 and 8-year-olds how to skate.  We had a blast but boy did we come back tuckered out.  I can safely say that I will be curling up extra early in bed tonight once this post is published!  And of course I will need to snag some of the photos the parents took today to scrap later on.

But today we're back to my current series of class photos through the years.  This time it's my class from three years ago, covering academic year 2010-2011.

Picture Day 2010

I decided to return to the Fancy Pants Down by the Shore collection for my background paper; a yellowish/green, blue and white stripe.  I really like how bright and cheery the tropical papers in this collection are and they work really well for children's-themed LOs.  I added in some MME Oxford Lane paper for a photo matte and a Carta Bella Hello Again journaling card and that cute paper chain people border.  Carrying on the camera motif, I decided to use this awesome camera washi tape from Webster's Pages.

I decided to stack up all of the different borders I had pulled, which gave me space to layer the journaling card on the bottom of the page - a nice change from putting it on top again.  I also decided to take advantage of all that white space at the top of the photo and put the title there and bring the embellishment cluster down into the photo - keeping things tight helps to maintain the focus on the photo and leave some breathing room around the sides.

Also related to the camera motif, I added in some View Master reels.  This embellishment cluster combines some washi tape, stickers, spray mist and a scrap of yellow paper I didn't use on a preview project (don't you just love when that happens?).  I also used one of the Hello Again papers - the black sheet with the funky white text.  I cut out some of the words that I felt related to school and sprinkled them in with the embellishments.

And here is my journaling card with stats.  Some more sprinkled words and View Master Slide, washi tape, spray mist and coloured paper clips.  Having recently watched one of Corrie Jones' videos where she used feather accents on a LO, I was inspired to do likewise so I pulled these out from my Studio Calico Sundrifter pack and I really like the effect - a bit elegant but still having a playful element.

This week I also finally got around to scanning my current year's class photo and also the staff photo so I'll be adding those to my next photo order to round out the series.

Picture Day 2008

So you may remember that over the summer my LSS hosted a scrapbook LO contest.  I entered three of my pages but sadly I was the only contestant!  The up-side, of course, was that I also turned out to be the winner, albeit by default.  Anyway, it's taken me about two months - perhaps more - but I finally managed to get down to the shop to pick up my prize pack:

A mini-kit called 'Paris' by a small (unknown to me) manufacturer name Vive Gade (I think).  The black, white and grey-themed kit contained:

• 6 double-sided papers
• 2 washi tapes (one is Christmas-themed)
• 3 designer ribbons
• 3 wooden heart embellishments

While not all of the designs are really my style, I definitely do need more black, white and grey paper in particular so this worked out well.

So as you would expect, I thought I should use some of these new goodies and make something!  I decided that I would continue to scrap my series of class photos.  The darkest black patterned paper caught my eye, as it has that chalkboard blackness to it and in white there are maths equations written all over it.  Seemed like a good choice for a school-themed page.  I also thought the numbered washi tape would work well on a school LO, too.

I wasn't able to find my original photo from my first ever class all on my own.  I think I may have given it to my parents; my step-father finds the whole international schooling concept amazing - he calls it my 'UN class' and every year I have to show the class photo and go through all of the nationalities present.  It's sweet, really.  Luckily, however, a friend had a copy, which she scanned and emailed to me (thanks, Anya!).  My photo developer doesn't print the same size as the school photography company but I enlarged it a little to a 6x8 size, which let me play with a different layout design, which was a nice change of pace.

Picture Day 2008

Here you can see I've layered the black maths paper and a light blue EP paper under the photo and I've run the numbered washi tape like a border across the page.  The background paper is one that my friend Anya gave me a few years ago and I've been saving it for a LO such as this - it even has a very subtle tone-on-tone print of children's game names in the red section at the top; if you look really, really carefully you can just make it out in the photo.

I used the Kensei chipboard Thickers that I've been crushing on lately - it's just such a fun font.  I have, however, taken to gluing them down with a little touch of Crackle Accents by Ranger, since I find chipboard Thickers are notorious for popping off.  As you'll see in the next photo, I'm continuing my trend of including some sort of camera motif on all of these photos and I re-inforced this with a CP slide frame, which I stamped with little potty people to mimic the class photo.  Cute, right?

The journaling card is from Carta Bella's Hello Again collection - the blues just worked really well with the blues already used in the rest of the LO and I thought the 'Let me tell you...' line was a good lead in to the class stats I've been recording.  The little eye glasses and 'looking back' is from the same stamp set as the potty people and the chipboard camera is from CP's The Pier collection.

Picture Day 2011

Today I'm sharing another layout in my recent series of class photo scrapping.  I have to say, I really enjoyed making these two layouts.  I think part of the reason is because it's easy to use a simple sketch design and then just rinse and repeat, as it were; and since the photos are always a year apart, there's no real fear that anyone is going to be comparing them side-by-side (and honestly, I wouldn't really care if they did).  I also think I've enjoyed these LOs because I often like scrapping photo enlargements - they're a nice change of pace from 4x6" and they really make a great impact on a page.

So, here is my class from two years ago now...

Picture Day 2011

I really liked how the giant polka dots from the 2012 LO had a fun and colourful child-like feel and I wanted to repeat that with the background paper again.  This time I pulled out Echo Park's Here & Now collection, which I've been dipping in and out of but haven't really made a dent into - yet.  The diagonal stripes brought in a lot of colour without being too over-powering.  I also decided to work in some corrugated cardstock - the navy colour helped pull out the navy in the stripes and somehow I think corrugated card reminds me of school supplies.

I decided to go big and bold with the camera motif this time around and included this banner strip across the top.  And since I was using a lot of pink with the matting paper, it seemed fitting to pull out all the stops and go seriously pink (and glittery!) for the title, too.

All those straight horizontal were feeling very harsh by this point, however, so I added in the twirl of embroidery floss to help break up the lines and give some softness to the page.  And I'm totally loving those chunky cork arrows.  I haven't added banners to my pages recently and I love banners so popped a few of the ones from the Here & Now sticker sheet onto the top edge - staples, bling and done!

Finally, a little journaling card - this one is from the Studio Calico Sundrifter die-cut pack - with the class stats and a little hint of chalkboard with another camera, some extra bling and a fun star paper clip and I called the LO complete.

Now I'm (im)patiently awaiting this year's class photo to finally arrive - I plan to use more chalkboard themed supplies for it.  In the meantime, I still have another handful of years of class photos left to work on but I may have to put those on hold, as the photos for a very special project arrived today - expect a sneak peak soon!

Oh, and to those of you who have left comments that these pages have helped to give you some ideas and inspiration for scrapping your child(ren)'s class photos - that's great to hear and thank you for sharing that with me.  :)

Picture Day 2012

I guess having taken in my scrapbooking albums to school (work) recently got me thinking about school photos so I decided to start scrapbooking my annual class photos.  We still haven't received this year's photo but I've collected up most of the previous years', although I'm still trying to hunt down the class photo from my first year teaching PYP 3.  I might have to see if the office at work still has old school catalogues that I can scan or perhaps my parents still have one...

Anyway, I started with last year's class.

Picture Day 2012

I used this fun giant polka dot paper from Fancy Pants' Down by the Shore collection and I love how you would never know it was from a nautical/tropical collection.  I decided I would include camera motifs into all of these pages and many of them will also probably include apples - such as this cute apple paper clip I found at the local TGR.

For the journaling, I decided it would be interesting to record some statistics about each class.  I liked Kirsty Neal's "My Month in Numbers" inspiration and have been thinking about different ways to try to work numbers into my pages more and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to start.

Stay tuned for more up-coming class photos...