May the Craft be with You! // Secret Santa - Nerd Edition //

Last year I started a Facebook Group: May the Craft be with You where people could share their geeky and nerdy crafts with others. There are more than 100 fellow crafters in the group by now and for Christmas we came up with a Secret Santa - Nerd Style! And it was awesome!
Above you can see what I received as a gift and I couldn't have been more happy about it. My gift was Game of Thrones themed with a Wine Goblet decorated with Tyrion Lannisters famous words "That's what I do. I drink and I know things", a dragon egg candle and most awesomly a pair of dragon scale fingerless gloves; all packaged in a Stark Family Box.

The way we organized the Secret Santa was as follows. Everyone who wanted to participate answered a the questions: What are your favorite fandoms and what are your favorite characters? Then they had to state whether they would be able to craft anything and if they would like to receive something crafted so everyone could participate, even if they weren't comfortable with their crafting abilities :)

My partner was a big Doctor Who fan, so I made this practical Tardis cherry pit warming pillow:

Let's look at all the other cool crafts that everyone made and received:

I can't believe all of the awesome thing that were made and gifted! Some of them really outdid themeselves. I hope this year will be as sucessful as last year and if YOU want to participate you should check out my group: 
Facebook.com/groups/maythecraftbewithyou/

Merry Nerdmas!

        

DIY Workshops at Elbenwald Festival in August

                  
I'm very happy to announce that I get to host two DIY workshops at Elbenwald Festival. Together with the dear Helen and Lisa we will be turning chopsticks into magical wands and melting beads into geeky pixelart accessoires.
The wandmaking workshop is actually already sold out, but you can still get tickets for the Pixelart workshop here: Pixelart Workshop Tickets

I've already hosted the Pixelart Workshop at the Long Night of DIY by Dawanda (RIP) two years ago, you can see my blogpost about it here. I also have a Pinterest Board full of fantastic patterns. Here's some of the Pixelart that can be made during the workshop:







If you're going to the Elbenwald Festival I would be thrilled if you come to my workshop! Get your tickets here: Pixelart Workshop Tickets

And then here's some impressions of what the wandmaking workshop results would look like. Thanks to Helen and Lisa for the awesome pictures!
          

          

          

Franken-Bat-Sweater ~ DIY Hoodie Recycling

        
I've been meaning to make a sweater for myself with the tutorial I got from the Partywoods Sweater Workshop and a couple of months ago I finally found a fabric that was awesome enough for me. Bats! I love bats! Even got a tattoo of a bat on my back.
To make the sweater I recycled a merch hoodie that I got for free at my work. I took it apart and was able to use the arms as a whole and I pieced together some of the reast for the top and bottom hem.
Now to the technical stuff:

Since the hoodie that I recycled had normal arms and the sweater tutorial I had was for a raglan sweater I had to figure out how to alter the pattern to make a functional sweater.

I decided to make the neckline a lot more wide than the original sweater which I used as a template to make my new design. Also the sleeves were much more baggy than the original ones, so I turned them into a slight bat wing sleeves. I thought that was fitting for the fabric.
        
Since the sleeves were more wide I made the body a little wider as well and also longer, just cause I like to cover my butt.
        
After I cut out all of the right pieces I put it together with sewing pins and tried it on before sewing to see if it would fit. Sewing pins are so much easier to handle, I've poked myself a bunch when putting it together with needles. Luckily it fit great, so I sewed it all up and added the hems top and bottom.

And this is how it turned out:





Thankfully Anne from Partywoods helped me with these fantastic photos. We met on Tempelhofer Feld and had so much fun together doing this silly photoshoot.
        
<3 <3 <3 This lady is so creative. Everything she's wearing is handmade!

I've always admired her fantastic outdoor photography. Especially whe she's climbing on basically everything she comes across. So I tried my luck and climbed this birch tree.




        


It was scary as shit! I don't know how she does it :P

Here's some more pictures from the urban gardening part of Tempelhofer Feld.

        

        




Haha, that was it. We had loads of fun doing this shoot and I think the results are fairly awesome when you consider I could barely keep a straight face and not laugh the entire time.

So that's why there were a ton of outtakes, here are some of my favorite ones: