Monkey Frame Clutch Purse

Finally, I made it…. specially for my friend Sumay. I purposely delayed this posting as I wanted to surprise her by not letting her see how the purse actually looked like. I even asked her not to peek my blog on the felting part too until she receive the parcel. I sent it out yesterday and she received today ) Her reaction was “I am not going to use it as it is too precious, I will keep it as a souvenir. I am going to be devastated if I lost it or dirted it”. Oh, how sweet she is…

This one took me little while to finish as I spent time to photograph each and every step I did. It is going to be shown on my step-by-step tutorial for frame clutch purses and is going to take some time to edit and rearrange. I will post it up as soon as I finish editing it, please be patient

Tutorial – Felting on “Chi Chai Monchan”

This is the monkey, Chi Chai Monchan that I planned to made as part of the frame clutch purse to my friend, Sumay.

I would like to show you the process to make one, hope you will try it out too.

Colour selection of the felt material.

Making cardboard stamplates for each part of the body.

Cut out the required ….

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Belated Valentine’s Day – Food Of Love

I was so sick on the weekend of the Valentine’s Day. Bad flu with heavy running nose and cough. I was not in the frame of mind to celebrate this romantic occasion with my husband who is on his way to catching my virus. It is just not a good time to get sick when we have two kids to take care of.

That’s over now and very glad that our kids didn’t pick up the virus. I was so happy and in such a good mood that I wanted to cook our favourite food, spaghetti!!! I seldom cook though I am good, just that I am lazy. I will only cook for pleasure and for love. So, we celebrated our Valentine’s day a week later. If there is love, everyday should be Valentine’s day!!!! If you can see from the photos, I didn’t sprinkle any pamersan cheese on it and there is a story behind it.

Since we are on the subject of Valentine’s Day, I thought I’d tell you a story about spaghetti and the subject of love. Spaghetti is my all-time favourite but it wasn’t my husband preference before he knew me. During our early days of courtship, he brought me to a romantic little restaurant in town which serves good western food. He ordered a lamb stew and mine was bolognaise spaghetti for the main course. The waitress served his lamb stew and it looked and smelled great, so he started eating his main course. After I finished my starter, it was my turn to have my main course served. As usual, I would ask for more pamersan cheese. The waitress brought me a can of it and without think twice, I shook a lot of it onto my spaghetti and ate as usual. After a while, realising that my husband stopped eating his meal with a pale looking face, I asked him “are you full?” he said “yes, I am.” but he hardly finished half of his tasty lamd stew in front of him. I didn’t suspect anything and continue with mine.

After going out for a few times and I noticed that whenever I ordered spaghetti, my husband would lose his appetite half way through. Silly me found out much later that he hates the smell of pamersan cheese. ha ha ha :p Yes, not many people, especially asians like the smell of pamersan, the smell is akin to “baby vomit”.

It took him years to tatse his first spaghetti and it was from my cooking. I am so glad that he likes it now but he still won’t eat it anywhere else unless I cook it. It surely must be love, for him to tolerate the smell and not tell me about it until much later!!!! Food Of Love!

Special Thanks

Friendship is such a weird things. It connects 2 people from two different worlds. Friendship are there to share, help, support, accompany, and most importantly there must be trust in between. 3 years ago, I found her, my dear friend, Sumay, through a web supporting group. She is 350km away from where I stay, yes, I am in Northern Peninsular Malaysia and she is in the Central. Our long distance friendship grows thru emailing, the topmost record that we hit was at least 1 email everyday, non-stop for weeks!!!! If If writing emails to each other is like the old fashioned pen-pal, then we should be re-classifed as e-pal. We talked about almost everything, covering from daily topic to medical, laws, sports even to politics. I love exchanging ideas and thoughts with her, she would always surprise me with her vast knowledges in all aspects. We seldom see each other since we are so far apart. Sometimes when I think about it, I cannot believe that we are still writing to each other even though our projects are complete. I will cherish this friendship for as long as I can and hope we will continue to do so until the day we are old enough to loose all our teeth.
To show my appreciation to her who is also helping edit my blog and getting more and more successful by the day, I decided to make her a frame clutch purse. I told her my intention and ask her for ideas and opinions…. She likes monkey so much, without any delay she gave me a link to a picture of a Monkey, Chi Chai Moncha. Hope that it is gonna be a nice and cute little purse for my dear friend, Sumay.
“Chi Chai Monchan is a fun-loving little boy monkey with a whirly-curly tail, he lives on a small tropical island in the South Seas with his parents where he spends his days climbing trees, playing hide n’seek in the jungle and sailing in his banana boat. His favourite food is bananas.”

Note from Sumay: Thank you so much Joanne! Yes it was so strange that we met up on a support group and from then on, struck a friendship which included meeting up a few times. Joanne has been such a good friend, giving me support in other aspects (he he Joanne you know!) and found her to be such a warm, beautiful, smart (a qualified engineer!!!!!) and from this blog, obviously a very talented and artistic lady (how does she find time, with a baby and pre-school child?????). I am more than happy to help her out with her blog and so surprised and touched that she is making me a special bag, all for me and the only one in the world! Thank you, Joanne!!!!!

Handmade Frame Clutch Handbag – Flower

I made another frame clutch handbag, I am really crazy about it and I will continue to do this type of bag and purse for a while. My first frame clutch handbag is LEAVE motif, but this time it is in the theme of FLOWER….. This is a tougher project and took more of my time as I faced some obstacles throughout the process.
The problem with frame clutch is that the metal frame plus the clasp ball is heavy and that doesn’t allow the bag to stand up straight. In order to make the structure firm, I ironed a layer of adhesive interfacing onto the upper part of the bag (plain brown colour fabric) to strengthen it’s upright position.

Next, I had to put something on the blank area just to decorate it so that it won’t look empty and boring.
Same as what I did to the LEAVE frame clutch handbag, I sewed the outline of the flower to make it look embossed likt those in patchworks.

If you missed my previous post on how to make the handbag, please click here to go there.

Manek Purse & Shoes

I made a frame clutch purse to go with the kasut manek I did weeks ago.

***Update***
I developed a step by step tutorial for manek shoes beading:

• Part 1 – Preparing the frame and canvas
• Part 2 – Border Beading
• Part 3 – Interior Beading
  
• Part 4 – How to take measurement on your foot