Kumihimo

The kits came with "weave wheels" those weave wheels let you do kumihimo. Kumihimo makes a rope like bracelet and you can do some really cool things with them. The picture shows my in progress one that has a cupcake design on it. Now the weave wheels that came with the kits have designs printed on them but you can use them to do any design you want really. The cardboard ones do fall apart eventually and I personally had a hard time getting the string in and out of the slits. If you don't like the cardboard ones or want one without designs you can get blank ones like in the picture. I found them at Hobby Lobby near the plastic lanyard lace. You can buy them either in a set of 4 or as a kit of one and some lanyard lace. I bought the pack of 4 because I have now use for the lanyard lace.

The essentials for making a bracelet are string, a ruler, scissors and some way to anchor the bracelet down. I have a few things that I find helpful when making my bracelets, these include a clipboard, small scissors, an ID clip, binder clips in various sizes, a ruler, tape, and coil less safety pins. Now you don't need all this to make bracelets but it is all useful in different ways.

I use coil less safety pins to undo knots if I have made a mistake or to pin the bracelet to my jeans to work on. The reason yo want coil less ones is so that the threads of the bracelets don't get stuck in the coil. If you don't want to pin it to your jeans thats where a clipboard comes in. You can use the safety pin and clip it to the bar on the clipboard or just hole it down with the bar. My bar is bent in the middle so I have to clip it to the bar. I like to use ID clips to clip it to the bar personally but a safety pin will also work. 

Binder clips are handy for if you make your own clip board out of cardboard and duct tape. They act as the bar on a regular clip board. For beginners a homemade clip board would actually be best because yo can cut slits in the bottom to put the strings in so they stay in the right order and you don't get confused. You could even mark off inches on the clipboard so you always have a ruler with you.

Heres a few awesome videos for people who are beginners at making friendship bracelets. This first video shows the four basic knots you need to know to make any and all bracelets. Knowing these four knots is all you need to make any pattern.

The second video shows you how to make the most basic of bracelets, the candy stripe. To make this you only need to know the first knot shown in the first video.

Beyond Bracelets makes fantastic videos and she explains things really well. I hope her videos help you and believe me she has tons more to watch. 

Current Workings

Sweety Turtle

Well I am still working on friendship bracelets as hard as that may be to believe. But of course I can't work on just one bracelet at a time. I have ADD and while my medicine helps its not one hundred percent under control. Here are some pictures of what I am currently working on. I won't bother to show you the alpha pattern one I am working on as its just green for now and very boring. I will however include the most adorable little turtle that I made following a tutorial. I will admit that I had some trouble understanding the tutorial but with help from the comments on the tutorial I made my way through it, although my first one didn't turn out as good as the one in the picture.

The cupcake bracelet has a little red speck on the top but it doesn't show up very well at all. My favorite one I am doing is the rainbow one. I love bright colors and this has them all in my own personal rainbow and the black really makes the colors pop.

Friendship Bracelets

Another craft I enjoy doing is making embroidery floss bracelets. They can be as simple as diagonal lines to pictures and names. When I first started making them there wasn't the wealth of info about them that there is now. I think I saw then made on some PBS show went to the website and got the instructions, which weren't all that clear to me at the time and didn't include photos or videos.  After figuring the instructions out I was hooked.

One fantastic site for friendship bracelets and tutorials is friendship-bracelets.net. As far as I am concerned they have everything you could ever want to know on that site and its all FREE!!! Stop on by and check it out if your interested.  Once you get the hang of making the bracelets you can even design your own on the sites generators and post them for others.

Another site that has some basic patterns for free is myfbm.com but they give the directions a little different. They sell this and the embroidery floss inside actually comes with it. Its not a lot but enough to get you started. Each slot is numbered and they tell you how to tie the knots according to slot number. However if you don't feel like buying their product (because you don't really need it) use a piece of cardboard and make and number the slots. Tada you now have your own bracelet maker.

 Now you can buy a book to teach you how to do this but I'm serious all you need can be found at friendship-bracelets.net and pleas let me repeat its all FREE!!! So whether you want to make them yourself or do it with a younger family member to teach them its actually a lot of fun and really simple to get started.

Heres a bracelet I am currently working on. Its from myfbm.com  but if you look the same pattern can also be found at friendship-bracelet.net.  Sorry for the bad pictures D:

 One other thing is that you don't have to use embroidery floss only for these. You could use yarn or craft thread etc. Yarn would be a great way to make one fast.



I hope you find this info helpful and have fun crafting!

Happy Easter

Happy Easter! Today I have two more pictures and some of my favorite sites for you.  The pictures are of a Gypsy Romance Tote I made. The pattern is free and can be found here. I opted to not put on the pom-pons. I think it came out pretty good since I've only sewn a few other things.

As far as sites go spritestitch.com is a great video game cross stitch site. If you click on the link you're taken to the blog which posts all sorts of awesome video game crafts. The forum has great tutorials and friendly people. Even if you don't cross stitch check out the blog. The forums also have pearler bead crafts too.

Intatters.com is where I have been spending a lot of time lately. I have taken up tatting again. For those of you who don't know tatting is where you use either a special needle or a shuttle to make lace with knots. They have different sized thread you can use and it comes in tons of colors, both solid and variegated.  The picture to the right is a picture of a tatting shuttle. I prefer the clover ones like this. I bought a metal Boye one and the sides were sharp and slit my thumb open. The one thing I do like about the Boye shuttle is that it takes interchangeable bobbins so if I need the shuttle for a new project i just pop out the old bobbin and then pop in a new one.

Currently I am attempting to tat a beautiful doily pattern I found online. I saw the doily on pinterest and did some hunting for the pattern. I am using different colors but I love the ones in the picture. The pattern for this doily can be found here. Its not actually written out and it doesn't give much info like where to start so I am just going to wing it as I haven't really followed a diagram like this before. I will post some progress shots when I get the middle flower done. I swear I've done the middle like four times now but I always mess the end up when I try to do the magic thread trick.

Hello World

Today I am starting this blog. I don't know how often I will update it or how long this will last but for now it seems a good idea. The reason I called it "The Crafting Adventures of Shaina" is because I do many many crafts. I scrapbook, knit, crochet, shuttle and needle tat, spin, cross stitch, embroider and sew. I tend to do one craft at a time and jump randomly between them. Sometimes I finish things sometimes I don't. Here are a couple pictures of things I have done. There would be a few more but I always forget to take pictures and right now my camera has to charge.