April RiotArt Haul

Cross-stitch Evil Eye and Greek Key French Hair barrettes

One of the issues of having perma-straight hair is that you can’t do much with it in terms of styling without using enough hair products to mohawk a horse. Because of this, I’ve developed a taste for wearing French hair barrettes. My fascination with the variety of these that I can wear for any occasion also led me to being rather enthusiastic in making my own.

Due to my love of classical history, I couldn’t resist creating these from my cross stitch kit, pieces of felt, and my trusty hot glue gun. As usual, I used a little nail varnish on the backs to make the threads stay in place. The felt was cut as 2 identical pieces that were glued together as it makes them stiffer in order to make a decent barrette back/base. All these were then glued on top of the metal French barrette base.

I thought it would be pretty nice to try a Greek-key design, but in black instead of the traditional blue….

Ever since I was little, I’ve always been fascinated by the design of the evil eye, when I saw my neighbor wearing one on a pin that she had gotten on a family holiday to turkey. This led into my experimentation with all the ways that you could use this design as a decorative symbol…

no-sew Mr Cthulhu plushie (regular)

Being on something of a plushie-making kick lately, I decided to make another Mr Cthulhu plushie for my friend overseas. However, instead of using my usual method of stitching, I decided to see if I could do it faster and at less effort by making the whole thing using hot glue.

It turned out pretty well overall. 

The catch? Well, sticking any bits of fabric together using glue results in stiffness…so the edges are a tad stiff. The other part is that hot glue can be a tad messy, so there are glue drips that are difficult to remove…also some parts have turned out a tad lumpy due to me not pressing the edges tightly together in time – or have bits of glue seeping out of the edges.