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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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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Sorry, I haven’t posted lately. Things have been more hec­tic than usual around here and the late win­ter light is bad for decent pictures.

I did put together a new list of tuto­ri­als and inspi­ra­tions for myself, though. Proud of that.

Check it out here, or in the side bar.

Not too long ago we bought two sets of the Svala table and chairs from IKEA for our “play­room”. I was kinda bummed they came unfin­ished but then got excited that I could do what­ever I wanted with them. I mean, who doesn’t dream of this per­fectly coör­di­nated play­room that looks like it came straight out of a Pot­tery Barn or Montes­sori guidebook?

Svala from Ikea

The kids had dif­fer­ent ideas, as usual. Within a few days they had scrib­bled all over the top with crayons and who-knows-what. Even the table legs had been col­ored on. I’m totally psy­ched with the cre­ativ­ity com­ing from these two lit­tle boys. Psy­ched. Too bad they didn’t con­sult me first because their art­work totally didn’t go with my Pot­tery Barn color schemes.

Daisy Dreams lam­i­nated cotton

I recently came across a tuto­r­ial for an oil­cloth table cover from Twig & This­tle, that I thought was a great idea for the boys’ work­space. I had some oil­cloth that I picked up from my favoritest fab­ric coop but it was very girly.

Then it occured to me that I had a yard of chalk­cloth in my stash. That would be per­fect! It’s fairly water resis­tant for spills and such, and I could whip out the chalks when the kids were bored. Score!

Kathleen’s tuto­r­ial included adorable lit­tle scal­lops around the edge, which I thought would be okay if done in a nice manly color, like black

chalk­cloth. But man, chalk­cloth is hard to work with. I didn’t have quite enough to cover both tables sep­a­rately so I did one cover for both tables pushed together.

I ended up just hav­ing straight edges with a lit­tle bit of dec­o­ra­tive stitch­ing.  I think it turned out pretty good and the kids have throughly tested it. Heck I even ended up eat­ing on it last night because we had a HUGE crowd to feed last night.

Chalk­cloth Table Topper

Pretty Col­ors

This is seri­ous business…

(Declan was still napping)

So if you’re in need of some­thing sim­i­lar head on over to Twig & This­tle for the exact instruc­tions. Or you can check out Oil­cloth Addict for a no sew cus­tom chalk­cloth table top­per, also.