As a sort of post engagement, “I never make you anything” present, I made Mike a button up, collared dress shirt that he could wear to work. I have made this type of shirt before, so I sort of knew what I was getting into, but it still wasn’t quite perfect. I’m half way through second one for him, and it’s going much more smoothly! On to the pictures!
I’m a Craftster Best of 2009 Winner!
Wow! What an honor it has been to have gotten one of the Craftster Best of 2009 awards! I got it for my cat-proof toilet paper cover, so Pogo was a huge help in this matter. I’m totally flattered!
Now that the cats are out of the bag, I can post a few things I crafted for Christmas. My favorite was the tile coasters! I made four sets, one for my dad, step mom, grandmother and grandfather. They all seemed to really like them, and couldn’t believe they were hand made! I was very satisfied with their receiving! I put on about three layers of Modge Podge, and about three coatings of acrylic sealer. Here are the sets I made:
Here they are, all dolled up and ready for gift giving:
I also made this, for my oldest niece. She (with her mother’s help) picked out the ninja monkies. It’s a soft fleece pullover, with hood. Aside from the fact that it was clothes and not toys, she seemed to like it!
I also made some beeswax and honey soap for my mom, sister, and step mom, but for someone reason I totally blanked out and forgot to take photos! A few things didn’t get made in the rush of the holiday season, including a guitar strap, a completed scarf (1/2 done), and a pair of socks (3/4 done). Time to finish those up, I’d say!
Ahhhh most of the stitching and crafting is done for the holidays. I’ll post pictures afterwards (don’t want to spoil it for anyone before they get their gifts!) For now I’m dreaming about the projects I want to work on after the holidays. In no particular order….
- Martha Stewart’s lip gloss recipe
- Leather(ette) guitar strap
- Leather(ette) and houndstooth corset (this is going to rock!)
- Curtains for pretty much every room of the house!
- Work shirt for mike (got a pattern picked out! Yay, Burda!)
And who knows what else! I’m excited!
When Mike and I moved into our house, the same owner had been living in it for over 40 years. We found a chair in the basement that he had probably bought with the house back in the 1960s. So I had Mike pull it out of the basement and I went to town on it.
Here it is in its original form. Notice the mystery white spots; best not to ask I suppose! Once I had gotten the chair completely apart I could tell that the yellow upholstery had been a home-job. I wonder what was on top of it before that!
And that’s just a handful of the staples that I actually removed with my handy-dandy screw driver. The pliers came in handy a couple times, too.
Tada! La fin! We took our paint samples to the fabric store to find something that would match the room when we re-did it at the beginning of December. The chair shape is still ugly, but at least I feel safe enough to sit in it without catching something….
Here’s a close up of the fabric and the awesome buttons that Mike and I picked out!
And now the chair is in its natural habitat. I think the fabric was a great choice to match my awesome colonial writing desk!
Overall, upholstering is haaaaaaaaard work, it was two days hunched over the floor, yanking staples out. But at least I had Mike and Season Two of the Secret Diary of a Call Girl to keep me company (I fancy Billie Piper)! And I got to use a staple gun, wooo!
With a divorced family (all five members in five different states, not to mention grandparents and aunts and uncles!) and the boyfriends side of the family, we do a lot of traveling. The past year or so we’ve been stuffing all of our toiletry stuff into one bag….kind of a tight squeeze! So I saw this tutorial by Patchyapple, and decided that I had to make a couple! His and Hers, finally!
Here’s the end result:
The polka dot one is mine, the green one is Micheal’s! We used them the weekend after they were made and they held up very well to our travel demands.
Listen folks, I get it. I understand the mind of a crafster. You wake up in the morning after abandoning a project out of drowsy frustration. You had tossed and turned all night trying to figure out how to get over this hurdle so you can complete a project. The idea comes to you as soon as you wake up and you rush off to your craft studio. You craft and craft and before you realize it you’re already late for work! No time for a shower, hop in in the car and burn up that clutch! That’s why us craftsters need a powerful, quality soap! 
Sooooo, I decided to try my hand at soaping tonight! I chose the rebatching method which involved melting down an already processed bar of soap (in this case Jergens) and mixing in additives. For these bars I mixed in ground oatmeal and whole milk (both fantastic for the skin) and lavender/vanilla scented oil. I tried this first with a bar of Ivory, but the Ivory was very heavily scented making it impossible to smell the oatmeal/lavender/vanilla.
Here are the finished products, made from 3 bars of shredded, re-batched Jergens Soap.
Just completed a Harry Potter swap on Craftster last week so I’m excited to finally post some of the stuff that I worked up for my partner!
First, she’s a Harry Potter Puppet Pal fan, her favorite being the Mysterious Ticking Noise. So I did a freezer-paper painted shirt. On the front is Snape’s puppet, on the back is Dumbledore. The photos were taken with my partner wearing her new shirt and posted here with her permission!
I also made a wristlet with a blank canvas-type material then drew the art of the Marauder’s map on it with a brown fabric pen. I was insanely happy with both the sewing and with my actual drawing! 
If you’re curious, I used this tutorial from JavaJem to create the wristlet. It was a great, easy to follow tutorial!
I got an awesome charm pack from a I <3 Coffee/Tea swap on Crafster, and have finally gotten the motivation to do something with it! Having never made a quilt before, I had no idea where to start. So I played around in Gimp for awhile and figured out how I wanted to arrage the blocks.
I laid out all of my squares on the floor and took inventory. My block design required four squares per block.
After laying them out, I arraged them in 10 groups of four, matching the color schemes as best I could.
Looking good so far! Then I just sliced up the blocks according to my plan and pieced them all together, sewing them in place.
Tada! Perfectly sized for a nice wall quilt =D
Now I just have to do some research and figure out what to do next.
I found this technique online and have tried it quite a few times! I absolutely love this method for making custom tshirts. When I think of painted t-shirts I think of the 90s with the fat little tubes of paint with the tips that did textured paint designs, and most of the time it was really glossy, really sparkly, and really tacky. With the freezer paper method, our generation is bringing back the awesomeness of painted shirts!
Here are two designs that I did recently using this method. The first is a moon face, inspired by art styles of the Pacific North West.
The second here is the UNC logo for the Tar Heels. It was made for an uber smart friend who is going off to grad school at UNC at Chapel Hill
