crafts – Sanae Ishida

April 30, 2022

Creativebug Classes!

Hello my lovely friends! A while back, I mentioned that I filmed some classes for Creativebug, and hooray hooray! A couple of them are now up and available on the site. More will be added over the next few months.

The newly added is class is from my first sewing book, Sewing Happiness, featuring the Triangle Eco Bag. I’m going to daringly say that this would be an excellent Mother’s Day gift — I have a bunch of these Triangle bags around the house and use them for various purposes. They’re quite versatile!

Back in December of 2021, my Quiet Adventure Book class launched on Creativebug, a project from Animal Friends to Sew:

It’s so simple to make, and I’m extra proud of the secret pocket element. Plus, cutting out all those felt shapes is SO FUN.

I’m so appreciative of the many lovely comments and reviews that the classes have already received. I love that these projects that I poured my heart and soul into are offered up in different iterations. I’ve been teaching more and more and I’m getting into it. Part of the reason I’ve become more comfortable with teaching is because I’ve done it so much by now and don’t feel quite as imposter-y as I used to.

For example, this past weekend I taught a watercolor class for Camp Thundercraft and I had a blast. I was amazed that I knew so much about various tools and techniques. It will probably elicit a “duh!” response given that I’ve been painting with watercolors for over 10 years now, but for some reason I kept thinking of myself as an amateur and not good enough to teach the medium until very recently.

There are some other exciting teaching events coming up and I will share them with you in the near future. If you know of a class that you think might be a good fit for me to teach, hit me up! I’m always looking for ways to communicate and instruct in better ways.

I hope April has been a good month for you. It’s been productive, good and hard for me. Such is life. I won’t update the blog until the end of May, but if you’re subscribed to my email list (see my sidebar), I’ll send you a little digital goody that will come in handy for Mother’s Day! Until next time, take care my friends!

Photo credits: 1st and 3rd images by Creativebug, 2nd image by George Barberis Styled by Rachel Grunig

January 31, 2022

Quieting

I’ve become very good at ratcheting down the pace. I was using my phone to record a video a couple of weeks ago and when I played the video back, I discovered that I had accidentally hit the “Slo-Mo” button while filming. My life feels like it’s in perpetual slo-mo these days. I call it “quieting.” It’s kind of nice. I’ve even been tiptoeing into the ultimate quieting activity: knitting.

When I was a striving bundle of youth, I constantly sought out excitement and novelty. World travel! New jobs! Torrid romances! Actually, no, I was not so good at finding torrid romances. Valentine’s Day was a bane of my existence, and I often greeted it solo and yearning.

I’m halfway through my 50th year on this globe, and I’m fully ensconced in an almost obsessive dedication to doing exactly the same thing every day. I’ve always been a creature of habit (who isn’t?), but I’m taking it to new heights.

Every morning, I take a long walk. Then I paint and write purely for myself. Then I walk to a coffee shop and work on my latest book or whatever project happens to be on my to-do list for a few hours. Right now it’s dreaded tax paperwork. Then I head back home to eat a late lunch, give the cat a snack and take care of admin stuff or sew or knit. Then I do yoga and cook dinner and chat with my family. Then I tidy up, get ready for bed, and read (I’m currently devouring The Inheritance Games series by Jennifer Lynn Barnes — how does an associate professor with little kids pump out so many books??).

I do have the occasional business meeting or social gathering or class to teach, and weekends don’t usually involve any work, but for the most part the above routine is what I adhere to day in and day out. It’s not glamorous or exciting — in fact, from the outside looking in, it probably seems extremely mundane and repetitive. I have to tell you, though, my days feel very “loamy” (a reviewer described The Inheritance Games with that word and I love it). Full of rich potential, ready to sprout and bloom ideas.

Lately, I’ve lost the yen to check Instagram, which seems to contribute to the sustained peace and quietude I’ve been experiencing. This dearth of desire to stay on top of digital connection is possibly career suicide for someone who wants to create books and many things for the big wide world, but I’m trusting my intuition that right now is a time to thoroughly inhabit this routinized schedule, to cultivate my fertile inner world. I feel like I’m channeling Cal Newport, he of the the Deep Work and anti social media proponent. I’m a big fan.

I will emerge from my social media hibernation eventually — I have three books coming out this fall, and they’re not going to promote themselves. Until then, I’m savoring this insulated loaminess.

On a side note: The Secret Valentine Exchange will have to be laid to rest because shipping costs are skyrocketing. For example, I was recently quoted $150 to send an item to Australia. The shipping cost was 10 times the value of the item itself! Though I’m sad about that I do have something up my sleeve for Valentine’s Day that I’ve been working on for a while. More on that soon.

So, it’s been a slo-mo start to 2022 for me and I like it. How about you? How was your January? I hope all is well and that you’re all staying safe!

P.S. The image is part of a PDF I created for a Basic Sashiko Stitching class that I’ll be teaching on the Making App on February 18th at noon. It’s a laid back, easy class that I really enjoy teaching!

November 30, 2020

2020 Advent Calendar

Hello my friends! I wasn’t sure if I would be able to add a post this month because my blog got hacked a few weeks ago, rerouting my site to dubious-looking websites of the spammy, identity-theft sort. My techie husband stepped up, however, and tackled the problem, and for now things seem to be back in order. So here I am, on the last day of November with a little update.

How are you? I spent the last four days of the Thanksgiving weekend relaxing and working at a snail’s pace on the project you see above. Yep, the annual Advent Calendar.

I returned to my neutral roots after the colorful calendar of last year. Because we’ve been fully quarantined yet again with the rise of COVID cases, I wanted to add some extra-ness this year, and decided to bend my normal rules of using mostly what I have on hand. I sketched out a design, then ordered faux foliage and large wooden beads and some kitchen twine. I think the fake leaves are pretty convincing from a distance — what do you think? Am I deluding myself? No matter, it looks pretty to me and I know that K will love it (she hasn’t seen it yet as I write this). A couple of my fingers are sporting burn wounds from my enthusiastic hot glue gunning of the greenery, but the effort was well worth it. Hmmm…you can see some of the dried glue strands on the leaves. Oops.

The big beads are 1″ in diameter and the smaller beads are about 3/4″ in diameter — the sizes feel just right. The little sparkly beads that are holding the wooden beads in place were a lucky find in my messy buttons container. I immediately found about half a dozen and I kept getting more and more excited as I unearthed bead after bead. Wouldn’t you know it, I found exactly 24 beads, so they were obviously meant to be.

This is the countdown part of the calendar and I wrote numbers on each bead with a grey colored pencil. The idea is to snip off one bead per day, so the numbers start at the bottom and go upward for each string. I’ll place a little container to house the snipped beads. There are some other treats to go with the calendar and ways to encourage K to give, but I’m still assembling those parts and will have them done by the end of the day, just in time for tomorrow, December 1st. If I get around to it, I’ll share all the components of the advent calendar at a later date (probably not likely, but who knows?). I feel like the main part is done, which was my ultimate goal. Simple, neutral, pretty. Ahhhh…now this is my kind of advent calendar!

Here are all the past calendars to date:

December! Are you ready for the holiday season? I’m actually looking forward to it — it will be quiet, of course, and I’ll miss gathering with family and friends, but I’m determined to make this a festive one regardless!

April 26, 2019

Giveaway!!! Making Issue No. 7: DESERT [CLOSED]

Hello my friends! It’s been a long while since I’ve done a giveaway, hasn’t it?

One of my favorite things is to contribute to Making Magazine. No matter how crazy my schedule gets (and it’s truly crazy these days — in a good way), when Carrie, Ashley or any of the lovely ladies from Making contacts me about a project for the next issue my answer is always a most enthusiastic YES.

The magazine itself is gorgeous, obviously, and it’s an honor to be a part of it. But the reason I love working with them is because I’ve had a LOT of jobs in many fields in my lifetime and have worked with a LOT of people and I have rarely found such a heartening mix of integrity and kindness and generosity and creative abundance. Carrie and Ashley are thoughtful people cultivating the beauty and delight of creation in its many accessible forms. It’s such a brave thing, such an important thing, especially these days when the act of making and the attendant presence it requires seem overshadowed by outrage and strife. “Crafting” often gets a bad rap as a self-indulgent, frivolous hobby. Yet, it’s one of the most healing, joy-inducing, meaningful activities I’ve ever engaged in. It’s so easy to get caught up in judgment, yes? I know that I get judgy all the time and have to gently and consistently pull myself out of that unhelpful mental space.

For issue no. 7, I contributed a simple backpack and animal keychain tutorial. All these photos are by Carrie Hoge and @makingzine, by the way. So pretty, right?

In keeping with their magnanimous spirit, the folks at Making sent me multiple copies of their recent issue, DESERT. I immediately knew that I wanted to do a little giveaway and have two copies to offer up! Plus, I’ll toss in one of my cute li’l animal keychains that I hope will amuse a little one. Or a grown-up one!

Please leave a comment here or on my IG account (@sanaeishida) to enter the giveaway. Hmmm…maybe you could share your favorite hobby? I’ve probably asked this before, but I love knowing what interests people. I’ll leave the giveaway open until May 3rd and will contact the two winners that weekend. International entries are more than welcome as usual! Good luck!!

December 7, 2018

2018 Advent Calendar + Free Holiday Tags

Hello, my friends! I’m testing out different blog posting schedules to see what feels right and so far, once or twice a month seems the best fit. I’m all about not overdoing anything nowadays, and methinks it’s the ticket to not getting sick. Both K and M came down with the sniffles in the last few weeks and I’ve been impervious to the germs (knocking furiously on wood as I type this).

Let’s talk about this year’s advent calendar shall we? I’m quite proud of this one.

About five years ago, I spotted a DIY project for paper houses on Pinterest and desperately wanted to make a winter village as an advent calendar. However. To start with, the time commitment was obvious — that’s a lot of cutting and folding and gluing. I don’t have one of those handy dandy Silhouette or Cricut machines and had no interest in owning one. Since I tend to procrastinate, I would come up with a different idea at the last minute every year.

For whatever reason, this year I was on top of things. Not only did I plan out the project three weeks in advance, but I even designed the houses myself. I know. Crazy. I was going to download a bunch of free online templates but when I saw how basic the shapes were, I figured it would be easy for me to customize my own. I spent an afternoon designing and voila, I had 8 templates.

I spent maybe an hour or two a day working on the calendar for a couple of weeks. I printed the houses on my usual inkjet textured paper, of which I seem to have an endless supply. I printed three of each template for a total of 24 houses. Then I sliced out the windows and doors with an Exacto knife but used regular scissors to cut out the houses. For scoring the sections that would be folded, I used a Japanese hera, which is actually a marking tool for sewing. I don’t like to get messy, so I got these mini glue dots, which were perfect.

Now, I typically design the advent calendars in a count-down style. The visual reminder of the number of days left is fun for K, and it makes clean-up a breeze later. But I spent so long on these houses and I love the way they look so much that I wanted the whole village on display for the entire holiday season. After mulling over this situation, I landed on the idea of flameless tea lights that K could place in each house. I considered adding numbers to the houses, but I’m more of a visual minimalist. I’m lovin’ the plain white houses.

Conveniently, there are 24 tea lights in a pack. Since these tea lights only last 3 hours, we decided to light them all on Christmas Eve.

I was making excellent progress, but something was still missing. I wanted a sweet little package that K would be able to open each day and a single tea light left something to be desired, so I painted a bunch of animals. I went to town dressing them up in winter garb and labeling them with numbers, then printed these out on the same inkjet textured paper. Aren’t they cute?

I scrawled the daily activities on the back (every other day, she gets a book so I simply wrote “book” for those days).

I wrapped each tea light with an animal card and placed them in a basket, which served as the count down aspect. On a side note, I found that basket at Trader Joe’s and it’s made out of newspapers. So cool! Oh, and the books are wrapped in this super darling black-and-white paper I found at a local natural foods grocery store.

This advent calendar has been THE BEST. K absolutely adores it and I feel so happy whenever I look at the winter village displayed on top of our old upright piano. At first I put it on our credenza (photo below) but quickly realized that Katara, our cat, will think they’re her toys and scatter them willy nilly.

Can you tell that I had a blast making this calendar? I’m going to display it every year for the holidays, you betcha.

I chose a few of my favorite animals that I painted (I removed the numbers so they’re not advent specific) and made them into a free downloadable for you as a little gift from me. Just print them out on cardstock (or the inkjet textured paper that I use), cut around the shape and make sure to leave a little extra at the top to punch a hole. These make lovely gift tags!

Click on the image to download (you may need to right-click and save onto your desktop to enable printing). Please let me know if you have any issues with the download.

Well, it’s time to wrap this up and tend to other to-dos. I’m almost done with Christmas shopping and making and I have some book stuff to finish. If you’re interested, here are the other Advent Calendars from years past: