Pickled Octopus!!!!!!!!!!!!

I found a use for all those empty peanut butter jars I've been saving.  Well, in the past I filled them with fake catnip pickles, yes (Sweet Gerkins For Sour Pusses) but I wanted something new for the Pennsic War crowd.  That's a medieval event that runs 11 days out in Pennsylvania in August.

With all the great fall sales 50% off on polar fleece I picked up a quarter yard of mottled purple, mottled dark navy and mottled medium blue and spent the day cutting out small octopus shapes.  They go three to a bottle, one of each color, and are super simple to make.

Start with cutting 2 rectangles 3" wide by 7" long.  Put right sides together, go up 3" from the bottom and start sewing up the side, rounding the top and coming back down the other side, stopping 3" from the bottom. You want the bottom area left open.

Turn, stuff the body with fiberfill and catnip, then machine sew across the bottom starting at the area that was stitched, sort of folding it accordian style with your fingers as you go to narrow that area. You could forego the machine sewing and instead just hand stitch a running stitch across that area and pull tight. This gives you a stuffed body and loose bottom area.  Cut the bottom area into 8 'tentacles' with your scissors.  

10mm black beads are then hand sewn onto the lower part of the body/head.  I pinch the fabric around them to sew a sort of furrowed brow above the eye as well, to give character.  

They fit three to a bottle, face them with eyes looking out.  Screw the lid down on the jar and tape a fancy label to the front.  They look great.

First Fox, Then Wolf, Then Snow Leopard - Now Dragon!

Time to make more animal scarves for the fall!  I've been stocking up on leopard print fleece and white fleece (the belly area on the scarves) and saw the other week at JoAnn Fabrics in the anti-pill fleece section a very nice birch tree print. There's no leaves on the trees, or side branches, it's all vertical lines with dots and smudges making up the tree markings. I immediately thought of Snow Dragons!

 

Today I cut and sewed 8 of them, with various colored eyes (mint green and gold the best choices), and gave them gold horns.  The tail ends on three were done in white fleece, on the other 5 they're in chocolate brown.  Each face got a chocolate brown design up the nose and across the forehead.  They can, of course, be done in mottled greens as well, or blues, but the white birch tree print caught my eye and I had to use it. 

 

I may hold out a few to be sent to Pennsic War next August, but primarily I wanted to have these pretty much go to Midwest FurFest in December down in Chicago.

 

They're VERY warm, not exactly something to sell at high summer in August at the SCA event.

Finding Lost 'Treasures'

I cleaned out some old paperwork stacked in the craft room, finding a ton of old sketches for soft sculpture toys, ideas, even pattern pieces done on scratch paper, and you know, sometimes you run across stuff you have to stop and look at and think 'what was I THINKING!???', with no clue where some idea came from or that it was sketched out.

 

Found a few this way, today.  Rat sketches in odd poses, with the words 'special rat mail delivery' and a sketched logo..... ???????WTF????????? Shuffling through the stack a few more pages down I found a sketched out pigeon toy.  OH!  Light dawned!  I had been trying to come up with ideas for 'mail delivery' at the Ren Faire of Pennsic War.  I'd had multiple people ask about something they could tie a message to and toss into people's camp to have a 'carrier pigeon' deliver a party invite by.  Being Medieval, a rat would be a good second choice.

 

Frankly it never got past the sketch phase, but it's a cool idea. The pigeons (or rats) would have to have ties sewn to them to hold the messages, and be sold in pairs possibly, for delivery and a reply back.  Well, that was the idea, basically. I don't know that I'll ever take that one forward, but it brought back memories from maybe 6 or 8 years ago.

 

One page further under that was a sketch of a frog toy.  Nothing special, but written next to it was the words NINJA POISON THROWING FROGS. 

 

Ok, now THAT one I can use!!!!!  Something designed to give kids glee that they can officially throw these things at each other.  THAT I can work with!  Something to probably see now at next year's Bristol Renaissance Festival in Wisconsin.  Look for it!  Bast's Garden Menagerie will be carrying them.