sometimesalways.net | Up-Cycled & Recycled Gifts & Crochet

Been a While

November 19, 2011 by crystal | 0 comments

Eddie was in charge of making the candles

Mal approves.

Hang it up

It’s been a crafty bit of time for us lately, as it’s the holidays and we tend to make stuff more often than buy stuff. So we hit a couple of crafty places today, gathered some supplies, and sat down to make stuff this afternoon.

We made our first stop at the local Christmas Tree Shoppe, which has all manner of cheap crap that’s not necessarily Christmas-related. We picked up a few candles and some glassware that would be needed for some presents we’ll be making in a couple of weeks, and some mustard and hot sauces, because we like spicy foods.

Eddie was in charge of making the candles

I made some ornaments with some snowmen and trees inside.

In the same shopping plaza is an A. C. Moore craft store, so we went there and got what we’d need in there, namely some glue, some glitter, and a dozen glass ornaments. Total spent: about $60 between both shops.

Eddie baked a loaf of Guinness bread while I set up the ornament assembly line. I glitter-fied the tiny trees, glued the cotton down in the balls, and experimented with the best ways to get the figures inside without breaking the glass. Eddie finished fixing the bread and made the candles, which turned out very cool. We’re not awfully fond of the greenish-blue ones, but the white ones look like they’re made from snow. Everything turned out pretty well, I think. I made six balls with the snowmen and trees, and I’ll be attempting to put some origami into the others.

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August 9, 2011
by crystal
0 comments

Twinkle, twinkle

I’ve been holding back on mentioning this, because I was doing it as a gift and I didn’t want to ruin the surprise.

: I love this pattern.

: For reference, it’s stretched across our queen-sized bed.

: Oooooh….. pretty colors.

This is a blanket that I crocheted for my cousin’s impending baby. It’s not the pattern that I had initially been using, because I’ve come to the conclusion that while I love working with modular origami and building something large from a bunch of small things, I hate doing it with crochet. Plus, I love this pattern, and the untraditional-ness of it.

Now, you may be looking at it and thinking to yourself, “That blanket is nearly as big as a your bed. Exactly how big is this baby going to be, Crystal?” Well, you see, I am notoriously bad at simple math. When I was initially sizing things up after the first color bar was done, I estimated that every bar would be about 4″ wide, and that if I made seven bars, that would put the blanket at around 28″ wide. Unfortunately, this being a star-shaped blanket and not a typical blanket-shaped blanket, my mind was calculating this as the diameter of the blanket, not the radius, and thus the finished blanket ended up being about 5′ across.

But, it’s finished. It took me a couple of weeks of working at night, after work, and by the time I reached the last two colors I was using up over a skein of yarn. The ruffle was the worst part. I wanted to add the ruffle just to finish it off and tie it in with the center part. I tried one ruffle, and it was too feminine for a baby boy. I used a less-ruffly ruffle, and it just looked weird with the geometric lines of the rest of the blanket. I switched to a plain scalloped edge, and it looked fine.

And the new mom-to-be loved it, which makes me very happy.

August 8, 2011
by crystal
0 comments

Up for grabs… and more to come (hopefully)

Finally! A new product in the shop!

I’m finally getting around to posting this, although it’s been done for a week now. I took the last of the Red Stripe bottles we had and turned them into a 4-pack set and put them up for sale.

I’ve found that I really enjoy doing this sort of thing. It’s relaxing; I like being able to sit outside with my headphones on and do some repetitive work with my hands. Sanding, sanding, some grinding, a bit more sanding. I don’t need to really pay much attention to what I’m doing once I’ve gotten the basic grinding done and there’s no risk of slicing a finger off. I think that this might be my official summer craft and while I’d like to continue doing it throughout the year, I’ve got no place to do it during the colder parts of the year.

Sadly, I seem to have burnt out my fake-Dremel’s motor. Once I sell this set, I’ll be buying myself a new Dremel, a real one. Until then, I won’t be doing much.

I’ve got a huge pile of bottles that have been cut, but haven’t been touched otherwise. They range from Starbucks, Arizona Iced Teas, Lipton Iced Teas, generic beer bottles, and a couple of champagne bottles that I managed to snag from a baby shower I went to over the weekend. I may take those bottles and use my lack of a grinder to experiment with flame polishing. I don’t want to try it out on some of the fancier bottles I’ve been cutting. It’s expensive enough to spend $8 on a single bottle of beer (such as the Arrogant Bastard and Ruination, and the other four bottles that I’ve yet to finish and photograph), only to shatter the glass trying to polish it.

I’m also still looking for a way to seal labels onto the bottles. There’s a lot of bottles out there with great, creative labels, and I hate scraping them off.

July 18, 2011
by crystal
0 comments

Hooray Beer! (Red Stripe)

I spent the weekend working on some glasses made from Red Stripe beer bottles. Kudos to my wonderful husband for drinking half of them for me.

: A Nice Six-Pack – I cut seven, and managed to use six of them (the 7th split badly)

: A little bit closer now….

: Oh, look, I went all pretentious photographer and chose to selectively color this one. Hooray beer!

July 3, 2011
by crystal
1 Comment

Not too shabby (Stone Ruination IPA and Arrogant Bastard Ale)

The glasses meet the approval of both cats.

It appears as though I’m getting better at this sort of thing. I’m getting more comfortable scoring things. I’m getting better with my sanding techniques. Eddie had taken me out to get a cutting disk, which certainly has helped me immensely in doing some things.

Eddie went to the liquor store on Friday night with the intent of buying me a bottle of wine that I could cut up. I don’t drink wine, so he was going to get himself something that he’d enjoy, but not so expensive that I’d get incredibly pissed off if I cracked the bottle when cutting it. Unable to find anything with a nice bottle, he bought us two bottles of beer, a bottle each of Stone Ruination IPA and Arrogant Bastard Ale. These are big bottles, with nicely silk-screened labeling. The beer is tasty, and worth the price.

Arrogant Bastard Ale, and Stone Ruination IPA: Yum.

We had our beer with dinner and sat in the backyard finishing up the bottles. After a couple of hours, back inside, I carefully scored the bottles. I even more carefully cracked them on the line, and viola, no cracks in inappropriate places. Yesterday afternoon I had a chance to sand them down a bit, and ground down a few bits that weren’t as level as I’d have liked.

There’s still some finishing to be done, but they’re useable at the moment. The next set that I make will be up for grabs in the shop.

A Snapple-SoCo-Starbuck-o-Rama

June 29, 2011 by crystal | 4 Comments

Yesterday morning, before I left for work, I busted out a few bottles to cut so that I’d have something to do after work. I ended up with a couple of Starbucks glasses and a vase made from a large Southern Comfort bottle.

I really need to find a way to grind down the cut edges of the cut bottles. I use a Dremel to smooth the edges, but it doesn’t grind it down very well. Or perhaps I’m just too impatient and should just keep at it. Either way, I think that I need a different bit.

I’m also going to experiment with ways to keep the labels of some bottles intact. That could make some things interesting.

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Kusudama (alternate title: “My fingers hurt.”)

June 28, 2011 by crystal | 0 comments

Look, Mom, no glue!

The big kusudama that I was working on last week as a gift for a bridal shower

I spend the beginning part of last week working on finding a diagram for a kusudama to make for a bridal shower gift. Initially, I had wanted to make some bottle glasses/vases, but I was discouraged by my initial results and decided to make something that I was more familiar with. Of course, I had to pick a pattern that I wasn’t familiar with, because nothing that I do can ever be easy. My first attempts at that pattern sucked, and then putting them together sucked even more because the pieces wouldn’t stay together. I started gluing them to keep them in place, and had glued 75% of them in position when I figured out that I’d glued them all wrong.

By that point, it was Thursday morning, and I only had 2 days to make a new thing, so I found another pattern and made this one instead.

Materials:

30 sheets of 5.5″ white copy paper
30 sheets of 3″ white copy paper
red crochet thread for the hanging loop, threading, and tassel
3 random buttons to keep the kusudama from sliding down the thread

(my apologies to people who may have seen this already via Twitter and/or Facebook!)

June 27, 2011
by crystal
5 Comments

Well now, that’s better.

It’s amazing what you can do when you read the directions that come with a kit instead of just relying on Youtube videos.

A pair of Corona tumblers

The manual that came with the bottle cutting kit I bought last week said to use the included candle to heat the line scored around the bottle, and the heat would make the bottle crack along the line. The videos I had watched showed people cracking the score line using a hot water/cold water method of shocking the glass into cracking. When I did it this way, it resulted in very uneven cracks that would deviate off the scored line, but it seemed to work quickest and seemed to be the most popular way to do it. I made a few little vases this way, but their rims were all uneven. They were pretty in an abstract sort of way, but not something that I could really use for a glass.

I figured that it was something that I just needed more practice with. My boss gave me a paper bag full of bottles to practice on, and this afternoon I took them out and decided that I’d try the candle method. It was a decision based on pure laziness – it’s a pain in the ass to boil the water, pour it on the bottle, avoid burning my fingers, and then cool the bottle with the cold water. Then, if it doesn’t work, I’ve got to boil more water and do it all over again. At the same time, it’s not cracking the way that I want it to, so even if the score cracked along the line at some point, it was guaranteed that it would end up cracking off the line the rest of the way. Sometimes I’d end up with a wavy rim, but more often than not I’d get a crack down the side of the glass. With the candle, there’s no wasting water, and the results were much faster.

A vase made from a root beer bottle

The verdict?

The candle method worked exactly the way that it was supposed to work. No sooner did I hold the glass into the flame when I could hear it cracking along the line. Within a minute or so the bottle was cracked in a nearly perfect line along the scored line. I was so surprised when it worked that well that I actually exclaimed “holy shit!” and Eddie came running into the kitchen thinking that I’d hurt myself. Within about 20 minutes, I had 7 bottles scored and cut. Out of the seven bottles that I worked on this afternoon, four came out with nearly flawless cracks along the score. The other three had issues, which I think were probably problems due to a combination of uneven scoring and bad placement of the score in the first place.

Now, the only probalem that I’m forseeing is the fact that I don’t use anything that really comes in a bottle. I drink a Starbucks coffee drink once a day, but we don’t drink wine or beer all that often. We stopped drinking soda, so we’re not drinking any of the booze that we’d normally mix with Coke.

*sigh*

I need to become friends with a bartender.

June 19, 2011
by crystal
1 Comment

Ugh.

I spent some cash this week and bought myself a glass bottle cutter. It’s a nice one, vintage 1970′s, made out of metal instead of plastic, and it’s sturdy as hell. Good, right?

Well, sort of good. The problem is that the cutting disk isn’t the greatest. It doesn’t score the glass very well, it doesn’t do it very evenly, and the cutter moves out of position a bit too easily. The only reason that the cutter slips out of position is because the disk is a bit on the dull side and I really need to push against it to get a proper score.

*sigh*

I’ve seen a few tutorials talking about using a Dremel and a diamond wheel, so I may give that a shot this weekend.

June 16, 2011
by crystal
0 comments

I’m up! I’m up!

I’m selling things again.

Unlike before, however, I’m not dealing with a specific theme with this shop. I’m not selling strictly crochet, or only sock monkeys this time. I’m always playing with one craft or another, so it’s impractical for me to have multiple sites to sell multiple types of things.

Also, because I just don’t want to deal with the headache involved with it, I’m not setting up Paypal here. The “Buy Now” links redirect you to Etsy. It’s much easier to let them deal with all the bullshit. If I start to get popular enough to worry about losing money through fees involved with Etsy, then I’ll consider switching, but for now, this will just be a crafty blog with a semi-shop. Eventually, I’ll be offering up custom items and will use Paypal for those.

You dig?

At the moment, all I’ve got up for grabs are a handful of record bowls and a crocheted cat. I’ll be photographing some of the origami boxes and flowers I’ve worked up, and I’ll get those up shortly.