Plastic Bag Clothing

It's a confusing relationship but the mother of my brother-in-law (Lori) has a best friend who is very creative.  I don't know where this creative friend got the idea (if she came up with it herself or from someone else) but she made Lori a jacket out of plastic grocery bags.  I thought it was so neat and decided I could do this myself!

Unfortunately I wasn't thinking and didn't take any pictures of the process.  It's very simple (yet time consuming) though.
1. Cut up plastic grocery bags into rectangles
2. Place them between newspaper - I liked three layers of plastic, two seemed a bit flimsy and four was hard to get them all to melt together properly
3. Iron the layers together (put iron on the newspaper) - start with iron on low and increase heat if need be.  Definitely practice on scraps first to get the feel for it.
4. Iron pieces together to make fabric pieces the proper size for whatever pattern pieces you are working with.

I had a pattern for a women's jacket and decided to it for make my cousin who is a student at the University of Oregon.  I used 2 layers of plain white bags and 1 layer of bright yellow from the Canned Food Outlet.

The decals can be ironed on as well, just cut out anything from other plastic bags.  My aunt happened to have a UofO bag that she gave me.  I made this a few years ago and am pleased with how it turned out, especially since this was my first (and so far, only) attempt.

Ewok Sweater for Baby

My best friend is pregnant with her first, and being the sci-fi obsessed people they are I knew I wanted to make them something unique.  They are also doing a woodland creatures theme in Baby's room.  When you combine 'woodland creature' with 'sci-fi' what do you get?  And ewok of course!

I scoured the net for charts of ewoks and found one that is really big - perfect, if it were smaller.  So I thought to myself "I bet I could just take the basic idea and make it a bit smaller!"  So I did.

I drew it out on graph paper in a 20X30 rectangle and used lots of half-stitches as I went along to make things seem a bit smoother (easy to do when duplicate stitching).  Fiddle around with this as you wish, by all means.

The poorly drawn lines are about where I went over it with two strands of some black yarn to define the hands.  I also used two colors of orange in mine like in the original because I had two similar colors and I liked the way it looked.  I just randomly did some (while noting the original design) in one color and then filled in with the other.  You may also note that I haven't put in the gray tip of the spear yet.  I didn't happen to have any gray with me and my friend who was bringing me some forgot it.  When that happens I'll replace the picture.

Oh!  The sweater pattern I used was this one but I made a bunch of modifications to it (I tend to think of patterns as ideas which one can use to jump-start one's own creativity).  Basically the changes I made were:
1. Ribbed the bottom instead of leaving it in stockinette,
2. ribbed the ends of the sleeves,
3. didn't put in stripes,
4. ribbed at the base of the hood for 3 rows to gather it a bit
5. grafted the hood together instead of mattress stitch, and then
6. went around the outside of the hood and collar picking up stitches (I didn't count how many, but made sure it was even for the ribbing) and knitted 3-4 rows of ribbing to give it a more finished look.

And as I said I put the ewok on using duplicate stitch.  It was my first project doing anything with knitting charts as well as duplicate stitch and I'm fairly pleased with how it turned out!