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 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!

Some­times it’s so nice to just wipe a slate clean and start over again.

Last years res­o­lu­tions were hit or miss.

1…) Stop cussing, com­pletely. Neg­a­tive

2…) Smile more. Kinda sorta, I guess.

3…) Spend more indi­vid­ual time with Declan and treat him like an adult. Yes and no.

4…) Cre­ate and add some items to my Etsy shop. Nope.

5…) Do more craft projects — for myself and with the kids. Yes!

So, once again I’m going to set some res­o­lu­tions and think about them ran­domly throughtout the year and feel bad when I don’t hit them 100%. Yep. Sounds about right.

1.) Stop cussing, com­pletely — How did I end up wih such a potty mouth? While I admit that Declan telling me my ass is too big makes me gig­gle, it’s also quite embarass­ing in public.

2.) Detox­ify the house — This one is dif­fi­cult because my mom buys her own clean­ing prod­ucts and calls me, jok­ingly, a tree­hug­ger for my choices. It’s just so easy to have things build up under the sinks. Thank­fully I clean so infre­quently that it’s not a real issue to toss every­thing. I’m also going to start “No ‘Poo“ing my hair again. I tried before while work­ing but couldn’t han­dle going out in pub­lic dur­ing the really wonky phase. Here’s a great Live­Jour­nal com­mu­nity for it. We have an on again, off again rela­tion­ship with the health­ier beauty prod­ucts, mainly because of finances. I think it might be time to just suck it up and buy what I know is best for the fam­ily — not best for my bank account.

3.) ETSY — Seri­ously, why can’t I get this going? I’ve decided not to do any­more swaps, so maybe that will make it eas­ier? Wih the purc­ahse of a new sewing machine (50% off clear­ance sale) I’m definitly going to com­plete more projects, but I’d like to make a lit­tle extra cash too.

4.) Try to cut back on HFCS and MSG — With that com­bi­na­tion it leaves next to zilch to buy. Thank­fully Matt is on board with me and we’ve both done some research into the issue. Frankly it scares us.

Alright, I think that’s enough bab­bling. And the boys are wait­ing on me to watch a movie.

Thanks for reading!

It seems alot of peo­ple are really get­ting into the spirit of the giv­ing sea­son early this year. There are some really spec­tac­u­lar con­tests and give­aways going on right now.

First off there is this lovely beauty:

Just head on over to Pig­tails and Snail’s Quilt Give­away and leave a com­ment. There are more chances to win listed also.

The sec­ond give­away is over at Indie Fixx. She’s giv­ing away more than $750 worth of hand­made good­ness. I totally love the bag by Faite Designs in the sec­ond prize pack­age shown below. Be sure to tell her I sent you!

The third give­away going on cur­rently is The Sew Sweet Give­away hosted by Fabric.com.

Here’s the Scoop:

Who says sweet things are only for kids?!  Enter the Fabric.com “Sew” Sweet Give­away for your own grown-up treat pack­age cus­tom tai­lored for a sewing fanatic.  We have 2 grand prize pack­ages that were designed with apparel design­ers and quil­ters in mind.  Both prizes come with a selec­tion of items spe­cific to your sewing “fla­vor” as well as a $300 gift cer­tifi­cate to Fabric.com and 1 year of free ship­ping.  You can even enter once a day, every day — so come back often!

You can enter every­day until Halloween.

And last but not least is the Sew Like a Pro Sweep­stakes from SeamsToMe.com and Anna Maria Horner

Enter now and you could win every­thing you need to sew like a pro! One grand prize win­ner will receive a Singer® Con­fi­dence™ Quil­ter sewing machine, a signed copy of Anna’s book, 20 yards of Anna’s fab­ric from West­min­ster Fibers, and the Dual Duty XP Thread Sam­pler pack from Coats & Clark. Thir­teen (13) oth­ers will win prize pack­ages con­tain­ing a signed book, fab­ric and thread sampler.

 

Of course if none of these catch your inter­est you can enter any­way and give my your win­nings. Yay!