Runaway October

I have a really bad habit of doing noth­ing dur­ing the sum­mer. You might have noticed that the heat is a cen­tral part of my last cou­ple posts.

It’s really a cen­tral part of our lives from May­ish to Augustish. Even in the house it’s just too easy to veg out and keep cool.

BUT! I have done some stuff lately. I swear. I have proof!

I made this clock for my brother a while back, for his birthday.

It’s pretty hard to pho­to­graph this, but oh well. I got lucky enough that a local BMX shop gave me the chain­ring, after I offered to buy one. Funny enough they had a sim­i­lar clock dis­played in their front window.

The tuto­r­ial is here. Mine is not nearly as cool, but hey I was work­ing with what I had.

I also made a cover for my sewing machine. I fig­ured that plas­tic one it came with wasn’t good enough for the new craft room. (More on that soon.) Also, the melted hole in it from the iron didn’t help any.

I just used the dimen­sions from the old cover, plus seam allowances, and threw together a rec­tan­gle with ties on it. I backed it with flan­nel, because it seemed like the thing to do. Isn’t that fab­ric gor­geous? I got it on a whim at a local mill end store. Kick­ing myself for not buy­ing more.

Sewing Machine Cover tutorials:

• Sparkle Power! — This is pretty much exactly what I did.
• Sew Inspired
• Chez Lars­son

Last, but not least, a new iron­ing board cover. I love mak­ing these things. It makes me actu­ally want to iron. Yuck.

This is also more fab­ric I picked up on a whim. This time from IKEA. Their uphol­stery fab­ric is the per­fect length from reg­u­lar iron­ing boards.

I always leave the old cov­ers on, for padding. Some­times I’ll throw a layer of fleece in between too if I have big enough scraps.

Here are a cou­ple iron­ing board cover tutorials:

• Stop Star­ing and Start Sewing
• Clear­ly­tan­gled
• Com­muning with Fabric

That’s it for now. I hope to have more soon. I ordered some good­ies.

What are you work­ing on lately, or do you have any inter­est­ing tuto­ri­als to share?

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I WON! I am SO not kid­ding. I WON!

I’m usu­ally not one to answer my cell­phone from Unknown Callers, but for some rea­son I answered this call. Then I talked very calmly, to a lovely woman named Stacey (because I’m sure she didn’t want to hear me squeal), hung up the phone and THEN squealed like an idiot.

Check out the offi­cial announce­ment here. This is my goofy appli­ca­tion. I feel so dumb writ­ing these things. Thank­fully the judges must have a sim­i­lar sense of humor.

They asked just a few things from me; To keep my pas­sion and con­tinue doing exactly what I do and to cross­post on a blog that they will host for me. In return, they will spon­sor a few of my crafts. And I’m hop­ing for a serger. Maybe my Etsy shop is closer than we all think?

I haven’t got much infor­ma­tion from them, but do you know who’ll I’ll tell first when they give me more info? Besides imme­di­ate fam­ily and the neigh­bors and the guy at the con­ve­nience store and every­one on Face­book and all my sec­ond cousins twice removed? You Guys! Yay!

And, in con­clu­sion, thank you — to all of you who voted, all of you who encour­age me when I hold up a project, wrin­kle my nose and ask “Does this look stu­pid?”, and to who­ever gave me my cre­ativ­ity since both of my par­ents claim it wasn’t them and it was my Great Aunt Kather­ine, whom I never met and thank you to Prilosec!

I’m ram­bling.

Now, really in con­clu­sion, Yay! Thank you!

Today we’re going to make this:

Well, you don’t have to but I’m going to pre­tend that you’re dying for me to teach you how to make this sim­ple wreath. Ready?

Gather your materials:

A wreath form– I used a 12″ press­board form, mainly because I had no final idea of what I was mak­ing and because they’re so much cheaper than styrofoam.

2 — 3 yds of wire-edged ribbon.

3 — 4 St Patrick’s day dec­o­ra­tive thingys. I think they call them flo­ral picks?

A Glue Gun and glue sticks — low temp is prob­a­bly best if you have one.

Scis­sors

What­ever doo­dads you want to add. Here I used mini “beer bot­tles” and some fake gold coins. Because what bet­ter sums up St Pats like beer and bling?

Okay, first step. Unroll your rib­bon and fold it in a zigzag pat­tern, kinda like so. Adjust it to make sure it will cover your whole wreath form.

It should like sorta like this from the front.

Now start to glue it to your wreath form. Tuck the end under for the first fold. You’ll have to adjust here and there to fol­low the con­tours. I found it eas­i­est to glue the bot­tom fold to the wreath and leave the top fold loose. If you look closely, you can see my glue marks here.

Con­tinue around until you’re within one fold from the end.

Now guage how much rib­bon you will need to tuck under the first fold and cut it there. Glue the end of the rib­bon UNDER the begin­ning fold and glue in place. Yours should look some­thing like this.

Now flip that sucker over. This is where you pull your flo­ral pick thin­gies apart. Mine con­sisted of wired pieces and well, non wired pieces. I cut the wired pieces out of 3 picks and glued it in inter­vals around the back of the wreath. I chose to do a spi­raly type pattern.

Then go back around and add the non-wired pieces.

Not enough bling, Katie. Go around and add more if necessary.

That’s bet­ter. Now flip it back over and add your doodads.

Once all my doo­dads were on, I used the green stem from my flo­ral pick thing and bent it into a hoop and glued it within an inch of its life to the back of the wreath. Just in case. I want my wreath to with­stand hur­ri­canes. Ta Da!

Now take down your Valen­tines Wreath that’s still up and put up your blingity-bling-bling St. Pats wreath.

Now every­one will know what you plan on doing next week. Wear­ing green under­wear, of course.

Speak­ing of the Valen­tines Wreath you hadn’t taken down, here’s mine. I used Tater­tots and Jello’s tuto­r­ial.

So… What are you plan­ning for St. Patricks Day this year? Any good recipes?

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40 days ago my madre had a birth­day. This is what was wait­ing for her when she got home from work.

I used the Vin­tage Pil­low­case Lunch­box Tuto­r­ial from Oh, Frans­son.

While it’s nei­ther vin­tage nor a pil­low­case, I think it’s adorable. So did Mom. Good thing too, because I was fin­ish­ing up the last step as she walked in the door!

The tuto­r­ial pro­vides good instruc­tions for using Iron-On Vinyl. While you can’t see it in the pic­ture, the whole bag is essen­tially water/spill resis­tant. I had a heck of a time find­ing Iron-On vinyl. The girls at the JoAnn’s cut­ting counter had no idea what I was talk­ing about. Thank­fully some­one knew the store though. Turns it they keep it in the Home Dec depart­ment by the nail­head trim and cur­tain rods and such. $10 for a prepack­aged roll that should be enough for 2 lunchbags.

Also included in the tuto­r­ial is this cute lit­tle place­mat. Which is per­fect. We all know how ‘Ick’ lunch­rooms can be.

Next time, though, I don’t think I’ll cover the han­dles in vinyl. Or try to source a thicker vinyl. It already is get­ting a lit­tle ragged from light use. Mean­ing it’s car­ried back and forth to the car daily and that’s about it.

If you’re think­ing about mak­ing one be sure to check out the Flickr Group. There are some cute ver­sions there too.

I’d love to hear what you’ve made lately.

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I have a con­fes­sion. I can be quite a slob.

The evi­dence: Exhibit A — My craft room, The SMOR (sewing machine oper­a­tions room), about 24 hours ago.

When we bought this house, we knew one of the rooms would be used for hob­bies. Unfor­tu­nately, we had been using the din­ing room table pre­vi­ously so we had no fur­ni­ture to set up in there. About the time we moved, I was given a very nice cut­ting table and sewing machine desk. They came from a fam­ily friend who had passed away. Sadly, she was a heavy smoker and smoked in her hobby room. The tables just ooze nicotine.

My father in law con­vinced me that I shouldn’t try to paint them, as they’re cov­ered in melamine. While I’m fairly cer­tain I would be able to repaint them, new fur­ni­ture would be eas­i­est. Of course I decided this after try­ing to clean one of the tables with bleach (Bleck!) and ruin­ing a per­fectly good skirt.

So I struck a deal with my hus­band. If I clean the craft room, could we build new fur­ni­ture for the room? He agreed, poor sap.

So this is where it stands cur­rently. Not “clean” per se, but every­thing has been gone through and sorted and I found all kinds of stuff I had for­got­ten about! Score. My M.O. was to grab what I needed, take it down stairs to craft, bag/box up what­ever was left and toss it in the SMOR when I was done. Bad bad. I had at least 15 empty boxes when I was done, and dou­ble that amount of bags to recycle

(I still need to vac­uum, obviously.)

This is the table I want we’ll be mak­ing, free plans cour­tesy of Knock Off Wood. It’ll go well with the IKEA Expe­dit book­case that’s in there currently.

I know that if I had a vehi­cle right now, me and the boys would be ter­ror­iz­ing Home Depot and Lowe’s. I’ll keep you posted on our progress. I’m super excited to make my own craft fur­ni­ture, and for so much less than Pot­tery Barn too!