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If I Forgot Your Birthday, No, I Didn’t

Writer's picture: Aurelia DelaneyAurelia Delaney

Charlotte loves fruit stickers. She collects used ones in a little notebook. These are things that I know about her. These are the kinds of things I like to know about people. Birthday ammunition. This knowledge ultimately gave me a really great idea for a birthday present I could make for her. An idea that then spiraled out of control for three months.

Charlotte loves to put fruit stickers on things to decorate them. She’ll wear a used sticker on her forearm, she’ll cover her headphones in them, she’ll stick them to the tile above the sink. She places them with the kind of enthusiasm that my massive binder of new/unused stickers wishes I could emulate. The reason I’m so hesitant to use my backlog of stickers, and the reason that Charlotte’s fruit stickers usually end up stored away in her notebook, is the relatively short lifespan of a sticker’s stickiness. So wouldn’t it be neat to gift Charlotte a fruit sticker that she could stick wherever she wants over and over forever?

This was the first phase of my plan.

Simple enough. Create some pins with some unique fruit sticker designs. She’ll love them, she’ll wear them, she can reuse them and re-pin them wherever forever.

But then I thought about it some more… and really… what is a fruit sticker without a fruit for it to be stuck to?

I’ve reacquainted myself with Pinterest this year and I think the newfound hours I spend “pinning” may be partially to blame for this part but I was struck with the image of a small purse (in the shape of a fruit, of course) to stick the fruit sticker pins to. So off I embarked on a journey to construct what was really just an exuberate vehicle with which to deliver the pins. I will now document the many hurdles I both faced and imposed upon myself along the way.

  1. #1 This idea was too cute. I was going to need one of these for myself.

I have long since matured past the days of making a handmade gift for someone, realizing I liked it too much and wanted to keep it, keeping it, and having to make another less impressive gift half-assedly super last minute. Instead, today I choose to inflict upon myself a greater horror than showing up to your little cousin’s birthday with a shitty gift: having to make the same project twice. Yes yes, let’s double the amount of work ahead of us before we’ve even started but at least we have a plan:

Two Apple-shaped hand bags (one red and one yellow) with three pins each.

  1. #2 My first attempts at the crochet pattern really really sucked.

I chalk this one up to a bit of nearsightedness with my freeform crochet. I wanted to follow the basic structure of my inspiration from Pinterest: two apple shaped panels with a band between them to create the depth of the bag. Everything would be worked flat and joined after the fact. When I first started out, I tried building out the shape of the apple from the beginning with the flat panels and found it increasingly hard to find that delicate balance of increases and decreases that would keep the piece laying flat while trying to accommodate the curves of the shape on every single round. I ended up having to frog a full panel and commit to the much easier route of crocheting a flat circle and adding the ridges of the apple silhouette in just the last few rounds.

My mom came unknowingly to the rescue during a casual conversation about this stage of the project. I said I was worried, while frogging the first attempt, that I’d have trouble adding the curves in the last rounds with just single crochet (I wanted to avoid double crochet or triple crochet to avoid any significant holes between the stitches and thus holes in the bag), to which she laughed and told me to look up linked double crochet. Oh boy. When I looked it up the first tutorial was literally my mom demonstrating the technique back when she worked at WEBS. Oh linked double crochet… where have you been all of my life? My long, painfully perfectionist life…

  1. #3 My yarns were not all the same weight.

I grew up not giving that much thought to yarn weight. I knew that I liked worsted weight yarn because I could make decently sized stuffed animals relatively fast with thicker yarn. I don’t have the best sense of what weight a yarn is by feel alone. (And did I swatch my yarns? no.) From a more positive, sustainable perspective I would say that I’m generally trying to use yarns from my stash instead of buying new skeins for every project. What’s the point of having a stash if I can’t go shopping around in my own stuff for a project.

The first bag (the yellow one) went swimmingly, weight-wise. I have a sneaking suspicion that the yellow and white were the same type of cotton but I lost the labels a long time ago. When I got to the second bag (the red one) things got.. frustrating. I couldn’t follow the pattern I’d scribbled down while making the first bag because the cream colored cotton for the first panel of the second bag was just slightly thicker so my increases didn’t scale proportionately. What’s worse, when I got the the back panel, the red I had chosen was even thicker and I had to rework the pattern again for the last panel. Do not ask me how long this ended up taking. My patterns for this will never see the light of day.

  1. #4 The bags were too flimsy.

I had musings about the structural integrity of the bags early on in the crochet process. I wanted the finished bags to be able to hold their shape while empty. For a brief moment following my first attempt of the flat panels I wondered if I was going about this all wrong and if I could save myself a lot of time and frustration by just sewing the bags as they are in the inspiration photo. But alas, I had no fabric in the stash that fit the criteria and thus could not save myself any time or frustration.

  1. The solution was constructed as follows:

  2. Finish crochet pieces

  3. Measure the pieces for both bags to create paper patterns

  4. Cut out two layers of lining fabric (one layer from thick felt for stability and one pattered cotton for fun)

  5. Stitch the two layers together

  6. Learn how to starch fabric

  7. Starch the lining for extra stability

  8. Sew the pieces together

  9. Insert the lining into the crochet shells, lining up the inner seams and the zipper openings

  10. Stitch together

  1. #5 Nobody sells the completely niche apple seed-shaped buttons I wanted.

I thought it would be a nice touch to add a button detail for the seeds on the apples. I didn’t want to embroider the seeds on as I thought that stitching would get lost on the crocheted textile’s texture. However, my many google and Etsy searches for brown teardrop-shaped buttons were a complete bust. Oh well. One more thing I have to make myself. I ended up making the buttons out of Shrinky Dink plastic so I could make them all slightly different shapes/sizes for some additional character.

  1. #6 I couldn’t decide what the straps should look like.

I’ve made my fair share of crocheted straps for different projects. In fact, I have a passionate personal philosophy about what makes a good crocheted strap, mostly centered around things I’ve seen other people crochet and hated. NO single strings of chain stitches (too thin). NO long worked-flat rectangles without edge finishing (I hate edge texture of worked-flat crochet, it reads as so messy to me). I’ve had a hard time in the past making functional straps for crochet projects that are durable enough and compatible enough with strap hardware. Originally I had assumed that, like with most of the bags I’ve crocheted, I would make these straps adjustable, but I was slowly running out of yarn and the patience to crochet that much more material for this project.

My final idea ended up being a lot cuter than the adjustable straps I had originally envisioned. I braided three straps of foundation single crochet and sewed on a felt backing for stability.

  1. #7 I was still only halfway through this project.

With the bags done (almost two months later), I switched gears to think about the pins. I gathered some inspiration from Pinterest and set about designing some unique fruit stickers for Char. I wanted to include some cheeky details: a product ID number that was actually her birthday, a reference to me making all of it up here and there.

Charlotte’s from Cape Cod

Her Birth Date as the product ID

My theory that Char is secretly French

sneaky reference to myself

Of course, It’s a special gift

Some of the stickers were completely original designs, some were reworded with little easter eggs and others were just redrawn from inspiration online. I thought just sketching out a nice page of stickers would give me a good variety to choose from as I only intended to make three into actual pins, two for each of us. Problem is…

  1. #8 I fell in love with all of the stickers I designed.

I was lamenting to my mom that after spending all this time picking out cool designs and retooling them for this project, I was finding it pretty much impossible to narrow the choices down.. She said very casually that I should just make them all into stickers so I could have them all. Would that be extra work? Yes. But boy did that suddenly sound like an amazing idea.

So I ordered a pack of sticker paper and found time to go print at the school. I still had something like 20 bucks left on my college printing tab and I’m set to lose access to my college email at the end of June so the timing worked out really well. I printed a few extra sheets because I knew my mom made the suggestion out of at least a partial interest in getting some of the stickers herself.

  1. #9 I needed to settle on a medium for the pins.

A long time ago, probably middle school, I made a set of clone trooper pins for my older cousin.

I think I blacked out while working on these because I have absolutely no memory of even picking up an embroidery needle for them. They are however, the only real parallel in my lifetime’s worth of projects for what I was attempting to do with these fruit sticker pins. I wasn’t really considering embroidery at any point though. I considered painting the designs with puffy fabric paint as a way to create a pin with some volume that would be a little less time consuming. I was mildly concerned though, as I drew the pins, that some of my best designs might be too intricate for puffy paint.

In the end it came down to Shrinky Dinks again. No need to feel shame about the simplicity of the humble Dink. I could draw the designs much bigger than they’d end up being, giving me lots of room for details. My stash of stolen Prisma Colors from high school still hadn’t run out of any important colors. The final product would be nice and sturdy and would attach to a pin clasp easily. Everything was finally falling into place.

  1. #10 The final decision…

This last one isn’t so much a ‘hurdle’ as it is an excuse to end on a nice even ten. I definitely did spend a good day considering which of my designs would see the ultimate transformation into pin but it was less difficult knowing all of the designs would at least make their way to Charlotte in the form of stickers. My mom gave me two final suggestions that I am really grateful for. She suggested that I make some of the pins looks like two overlapping stickers and that some of them could curl up on the edge like their being peeled. I did enjoy picking out which stickers I could pair up and which deserved the dainty little peeling detail. I was also still too indecisive in the end and I made four pins for each of us instead of three (which means I got to pin-ify ten designs if you count the two overlapping sets).

Charlotte was emotional in a way that sorta surprised me when I did finally deliver her birthday gift (three months late). She said it was maybe the best gift she’d ever received and that she felt incredibly “seen”. I wasn’t exactly trying to beat the best birthday present world record with this purse. I think I just got a bit carried away with each step of making something really neat. I also think it was just nice to know someone well enough again to know that they’d resonate with something like this just as much as I did.

Anyways, Love you, Char.

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