Pearl Bow Pin

Last Friday, I went "window-shopping" with a friend after we had lunch at the mall (I say "window-shopping" because I ended up buying a few things... which I really think are necessary by the way!). I saw this pearl-encrusted bow pin (sorry, wasn't able to take a photo) which I found really pretty but didn't want to buy it at that price because I felt I can make one myself. So I ended up buying pair of earrings from that store instead, and started planning the bow pin in my head.

It was a long weekend for us last weekend, no work yesterday (Monday) so I was able to finish it. Ta-dah!!

Pretty! It's about 3.5 inches wide. The original I saw at the store used pink ribbon at the center of the bow but no matter how many times I tried when I was making mine, I couldn't get it to look right so I decided to use an oval-shaped pearl bead instead.  Total time for me to make this was around 2 hours, spread across 3 days (that's how little free time I have... *sniff*).

Here's a simple how to:

You will need:

• Small pearl beads (I used what I had on hand... I have a lot of pearl beads left over from when I had my bead jewelry business a few years ago)
• Felt (use a color to match the color of the pearl beads you are using)
• Needle and thread (color to match the color of the felt you are using).
• 1 oval shaped bead (same color as your small pearl beads or a coordinating color).
• Brooch pin.
• A template for the bow, see below for the template I used.

STEP 1: Draw the shape of the bow you want your pin to look like. I free-handed mine, but I did a rough rendering and you can just download my template below.

To download the template, click on the image to enlarge. Copy and paste to a Word file. Resize to the size you want your pin to be, and then print.

Bow Template

STEP 2: Cut your drawing/printout and use as pattern to cut the felt. You will need 2 pieces of Part A and 1 piece of Part B.

STEP 3: Sew the small pearl beads into a piece of Part A. I started from center, then moving to the edges of one side of the bow. The illustration below shows how I filled out one side of the bow.

As you get to the center, make sure the beads look evenly spaced and there is no big empty spot. Repeat for the other side of the bow.

STEP 4: Sew the center bead or whatever you plan to use for the center of the ribbon.

STEP 5: Sew beads on to Part B.Sew below the dotted line (see illustration below).

STEP 6: Use glue to attach the part ABOVE the dotted line of Part B to the back of Part A.

STEP 7: Glue the 2nd piece of Part A to the back of the combined pieces of Parts A and B.

STEP 8: Glue the pin to the back. Cut a small piece of felt and glue it across the pin to secure it.

And you're done!

Mine ended up a little heavy... I don't know why. Maybe because it's a little big and the pearl beads I used are bigger than the ones I saw on the pin at the store. After I was done, I started thinking what to do with it. See, I'm not really the pin/brooch-wearing type. I initially wanted it for Andrea... but it's so pretty I want to use it!

(EDITED 12/1/2010)
Here's me wearing it to dress up my plain black shirt:

I think I can also use it on a purse, we'll see. If you decide to make one, I hope you can share it with me. Have fun with your pearl bow pin!

(Edited again! 12/2/2010)
and again and again :)

I joined the following link parties:

Tea Rose Home --> my first link party ever! :) | Get Your Brag On at Gluesticks | CraftOManiac  | Lovely Crafty Home | Along for the Ride | The Girl Creative | Not JUST a Housewife | Blue Cricket Design | Somewhat Simple | C.R.A.F.T. | Flamingo Toes |

100 Books

I saw this going around on Facebook. Not really sure where this came from but I found it interesting. So here's how I rate :)

-o-

Have you read more than six of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only six of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your Notes (told you got this in Facebook). Bold those books you've read in their entirety and italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (just the first book!)
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (watched the movie version...does that count?)
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell 
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
24. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
25. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
26. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
27. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll 
28. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
29. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
30. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
31. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (I read the complete set when I was 12.)
32. Emma - Jane Austen
33. Persuasion - Jane Austen
34. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis (why is this separate from #31?)
35. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
36. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
37. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
38. Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
39. Animal Farm - George Orwell 
40. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
41. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
42. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
43. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
44. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery 
45. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy 
46. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
47. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
48. Atonement - Ian McEwan
49. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
50. Dune - Frank Herbert 
51. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
52. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
53. Jurassic Park - Michael Crichton
54. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
55. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
56. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
57. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
58. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
59. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
60. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck 
61. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
62. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
63. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 
64. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
65. Fear of Flying - Erica Jong
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (watched the movie version)
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker 
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Inferno - Dante
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray 
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker (watched the movie version)
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White 
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

-o-

That's 20 out of 100 for me! Not bad... made me miss reading. I used to read a lot. Come to think of it, I used to do a lot of stuff. Used to. Oh well :)

Felt Pucca "Doll"

My baby loves Pucca. But their time slot on the Disney Channel jumps from time to time so we don't really know when to tune in. One night last week, Andrea and I chanced upon Pucca while channel hopping on TV. When she saw Pucca appear, she broke into a big smile and yelled "Pucca!" (Andrea's first words are usually the names of her favorite cartoon characters). And a light bulb went off in my head... IDEA!

I made her a Pucca "doll"!

I'm saying "doll" with quote marks because I still keep trying to convince myself that it's a doll. It's a little flat, see... but Andrea likes it so all's good. I initially just wanted to make her a Pucca patch to sew on one of her shirts. After finishing the face, I can't find shirt to attach it to so I decided to make it into a doll instead.

Here's a simple how-to (this should work for other cartoon characters, as long as the parts are simple and not too complicated to cut):


You will need:

• 2 copies of a template: search for an image online, resize, and print 2 copies
• Different colored felt: red, black and cream for this one
• Sewing needle
• Matching thread: red, black and cream
• Marker
• Polyester stuffing

STEP 1: Find a template and print 2 copies. I used this one for mine:

STEP 2: Pin the template on the cream felt and cut. This will be the overall shape of your doll. Cut 2 pieces for the front and back.
STEP 3: Cut up the other printout into the different parts of the doll to use as pattern. Pin on corresponding color felt and cut. Here's a summary of "parts" for my Pucca doll (each "part" is labeled with a letter):

• Part A - 2 pieces
• Part B - 1 piece
• Part C - 1 piece
• Part D - 2 pieces
• Part E - 2 pieces
• Part F - 2 pieces
• Part G - 2 pieces

STEP 4: Put the front together. Using black thread, attach Part B, E and F to the first piece Part A. I used back stitch, sewing across all the edges of Parts B, E and F.
STEP 5: Attach the red shirt to the front using black thread. Using back stitch, I traced along the edges of the red shirt. I also sewed lines from the "shoulder" to the "hem" of the shirt to copy the original black lines of Pucca's shirt on my template.
STEP 6: Draw the face. I actually sewed thin strips of black felt for the eyes and brows and just drew the mouth. But looking back, I think you can just draw the whole face and it won't make much difference.
STEP 7: Repeat steps 4 and 5 for the back, this time, using Parts C and the 2nd piece of Part A.
STEP 8: Sew the front and back pieces together, I used blanket stitch for mine and I used the same color thread for the color of felt that it will be sewn on. Start with the left bun.
STEP 9: After stitching around the bun, stuff with polyester stuffing, then attach Part G using back stitch, sewing through front and back parts:

STEP 10: Repeat the process for the right bun.
STEP 11: Finish attaching the front and back parts of the head using blanket stitch and fill head with polyester stuffing. The reason my "doll" is flat because I couldn't stuff too much. It bulges when I do.
STEP 12: Close off the head part using back stitch, stitching between Parts B and D on the front:

STEP 13: Sew along the edges of the shirt and pants using blanket stitch to close. Remember to stuff the body with polyester as well before closing off all edges.

And that's a wrap!

Front of the "doll".

Back of the "doll".

I actually don't get why Andrea likes her. I guess because of the red shirt? My finished product kinda looks like a voodoo doll to me, but Andrea's face lit up when I showed it to her. Anyway, I plan to make her another one of a much cuter character next time.