Pomegranate Week: Day 6, Necklace

I love pomegranates so much. No, that isn't supposed to be a segue to anything, I just wanted to say it. What I do want to say is this: thank you, mom! Without my awesomely crafty mother I would not have been able to make this pomegranate necklace.



I made the charm with sculpy, but after cooking and painting my mom was the one who was able to string it onto a necklace and put the closures on in under 10 minutes. She's really into jewelry making and can be quite speedy sometimes. She and my sister Laci have an etsy shop where they sell their creations.




This photo has also made me realize that I haven't been posting that many pictures of actual pomegranates, so I'd like to share a favorite of mine -


from the pomegranate group on flickr

Pomegranate Week: Day 5, Buttons

Thursday is always my long day (Right after work I leave for Orlando to go to class and don't usually get home until about 11pm, so I'm out of the house for more than 15+ hours) and because of that I never really get a chance to do anything. I decided that I wanted a quick, easy craft to represent Thursday, so I made buttons!



I love making buttons and they do have their own category in my etsy shop. If you'd like to buy buttons but don't know who to go to, I highly reccomend ofenjen. She makes lovely buttons and has several customized button listings.

And speaking of etsy, there are so many great pomegranate listings. I went through all 80 or so pages (because I'm a pomegranate fiend), and here are the items that I think are quite exceptional!

Pomegranate Week: Day 4, Mirror Etching

Today's craft is actually an item that has been redone in the past. For a bit of backstory - mid 2008 I was redoing my room. I got new floors and painted the walls grey. All of my furniture was a boring brown. Instead of paying out the ears to buy new things, my dad got some black spray paint and painted everything. I also had some black pleather/vinyl around the house, so the cushions for my hope chest and vanity chair were covered with that. [vanity before painting | vanity after]

I thought my vanity could be even more awesome with the addition of a mirror decoration. I made a stencil, cut the image into some masking tape, applied the tape onto my mirror, and then painted lots of Armor Etch onto the mirror (my mom uses armor etch to frost glass beads). After waiting about 30 minutes (much longer than the instructions call for), I had a lovely pomegranate design on my mirror (which is impossible to take pictures of)






Like Monday, I have a video of me peeling a pomegranate. This one is more recent though. It was uploaded to youtube exactly a year and a day ago!

Talk to me Tuesday: Pomegranate Week

Taking a chance to break away from pomegranate week by posting a ttmt about...uhh...pomegranate week. *sheepish laugh*

Things Mentioned:

• Pomegranate Week on my blog
  
• Teabagger info
  
• Primary inspiration
  
• Patterns on Mr X Stitch

Pomegranate Week: Day 3, Pomegranate Embroidery

Today is one item that I'm especially proud of! To do this item I needed to learn something new: how to frame an embroidered item in an embroidery hoop. Not a hard thing to learn, but something that was a bit of a mystery to me. I didn't do anything fancy, just made sure the piece was secure and called it good. After all, the pomegranate embroidery is for me to keep, so I don't mind if it looks horrible from the back.


hanging from a branch of the pomegranate tree outside my bedroom window

I love to have pomegranate artwork and imagery around because I love them so much. I have a piece that I bought from Michaels (craft store) a few years ago, and a canvas print of Persephone holding a pomegranate that I bought at Dragon*Con in 2007.


Persephone by Jasmine Becket-Griffith

Even if a person has never eaten or held a pomegranate in real life, they are usually familiar with Persephone and the story of the seasons. In the story she was the daughter of Demeter and Zeus. One day while Persephone was out in a field picking flowers she was abducted into the Underworld. While she was there she made the mistake of consuming a few pomegranate seeds. Because of this she is forced to live in the Underworld for a few months out of the year, which became known as the winter season.

When Demeter and her daughter were united, the Earth flourished with vegetation and color, but for some months each year, when Persephone returned to the underworld, the earth once again became a barren realm. This is an origin story to explain the seasons. (source)

Pomegranate Week: Day 2, Quilt Block

Welcome to day 2 of Pomegranate Week! Today I wanted to share a craft that I love and enjoy very much: paper piecing. Paper piecing, also known as foundation piecing, is a method of making quilt blocks. I first got into paper piecing because of Jennifer Ofenstein, who runs many amazing communities on LJ and is the genius behind Sewhooked.org.

I started paper piecing in 2008 and before I knew it, I was designing patterns. I even have a spot on the guest designer page at Sewhooked. I thought it would be fun (and really easy!!) to make a pomegranate paper piecing pattern.As I'm a big fan of free patterns, I did upload it here for anyone's personal use.



And as a bonus to this post, I thought I would share the very first video I uploaded to youtube! It is a video of me peeling a pomegranate my way. I made this video on December 26, 2006 and at the time we still had dial-up internet (it would be another 6 months until the cable company finally responded to my constant letters and phone calls about getting high speed internet where we lived). So yes, enjoy my blurry video!

Pomegranate Week: Day 1, Camera Case

Hello and welcome to the very first post of Pomegranate Week! I'm actually very excited for the next week of postings, and also the next month of postings! That's right, I am going to be doing NaBloPoMo on this blog. Last week I did crafts relating to my favorite fruit/food/thing on the entire planet: pomegranates. Each day I'll post a new craft and an additional link/video/story relating to pomegranates.

Today's craft is something I have had posted for about a week and is what inspired me to go ahead with the week of pomegranate crafting: my camera case. If you've watched my Talk to me Tuesday, you know the story. I won't bother to tell you again, but I do like showing off the picture!



The camera in the case for the picture above is my old camera. I had a lot of good times with that camera and it went a lot of places. It also took many wonderful pictures that I later messed with. Like the one below that I took a year ago; inspired by the Twilight book cover.



Stay tuned all this week for more pomegranate goodness!