Weekend projects

It’s my belief that the first weekend back from a long stay away should be productive. For practical reasons, you have to put away your Christmas decorations, do some laundry and a bit of cleaning – but I also found myself doing small projects and a lot of cooking (recipes to be shared!).

One post holiday project that I wanted to do is sort of silly, but necessary! I remember seeing or reading about making a holder for your credit card that you sewed up, so that if you wanted to use it, you had to literally cut it out of its holder to use it. Which will ensure, of course, that you actually need to use it instead of just splurging on yourself at anthropologie….or, you know, wherever.

I had some left over fabric from my card catalog project and thought that this specific fabric would be great to use:

My original plan was to cut out “EMERGENCY USE ONLY” and sew or glue it to the other side, but after cutting out 3 letters, I decided to not bother.

However, I think the next time I reach for my credit card and I see this face staring back at me, I’ll think again.

Not the best craftsmanship I’ve ever done, but for a 10 minute project and hopefully a bit of debt relief, I think it’ll do.

I also got around to finishing an embroidery that I started over three months ago! I found myself getting frustrated with it almost immediately when I started, then I picked it up last night and finished it within an hour

It’s a companion piece to my other embroidery. I’m creating a small collage on my wall along with a print that my BFF gave me for Christmas (the peacock) and a print from a RISD craft show (artist: Alli Coate).

I think it needs just one more small item. I’ve been eyeing this print from OldSchoolStationers that I may purchase. I also need a frame for the peacock print, but the clip works for now.

Hope you all had equally enjoyable weekends!

DIY HOLIDAY GIFTS

Back from holiday hiatus! I had such a blast with all of my family and friends! But I’m definitely feeling the effects of having to get up at 6am again. Back to the ole routine!

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This year I decided to make some DIY gifts. And I’ll admit, they didn’t turn out exactly to my standards of perfection, but I liked them anyway.

I had to post this after the holidays because the two friends I made these for are readers, so I didn’t want to ruin any surprises!But if you’re inspired to follow the same gift idea, these are simple and would work for any gift idea.

All you need is a tote bag, iron transfer paper, an iron and a unique design:

I purchased the canvas bags and transfer paper from cheaptotes. And as the name implies, the items are really affordable and decent quality. The items also shipped really fast which was great.

I made three of these bags (one for myself, of course!), but I’ll show you the process for my ingenious Lady Gaga lyric design.

Start by printing your design (on regular paper, don’t waste the transfer paper) and making sure that it fits and is arranged the way you want it. It’s also important that you flip your design so that it transfers correctly.

Then heat up your iron to it’s highest setting but DO NOT use steam. Iron your tote bag so it’s nice and wrinkle-free.

You have to love old apartments, I have a built-in ironing board in my kitchen. I suppose it’s so I’m able to cook a full meal for my family and get the ironing done at the same time.

Anyway, then you’re ready to iron on your pieces. For a full sheet, you can just arrange it and iron across the entire length of the paper for 3-4 minutes. Although in hindsight, I wish I would have cut around the design more because you 1) have more paper to use later and 2) you won’t get that transfer excess on the tote bag which is sort of noticeable.

Since these pieces are cut up, I decided to iron them one piece at a time keeping the previous pieces down until I was ready to remove them all at once.

After you’ve ironed over each piece and applied a small amount of pressure with the iron, you should be ready to take the paper by one corner and removing it slowly. I was worried I would have a lot of trouble with this part, but it was relatively easy. If it started to tear, just move to another corner. If you find that you left some paper that’s not ironed down, take the tip of your iron and smooth it down. Very simple!

Then, you have your finished products! The Farmer’s Market tote is for my (I blurred out my last name in the picture for at least some internet anonymity).

I think my girls liked them! I meant to take pictures of the awesome gifts they got me, I’ll have to post those later!

Oh deer

I have a confession to make, although it’s only October, I am already  getting pretty excited for Christmas. This is very unlike me as I’m normally the person bitching about how Thanksgiving doesn’t get enough love because it’s just completely overshadowed by Christmas.

But for some reason, I cannot wait to decorate for the holidays and, I think this is key, getting to go home and celebrate with my family!

My excitement may have initiated when I found these cute little candle holders at Salvation Army

I couldn’t pass them up! They just screamed Christmas to me. And oddly enough while scanning one of my favorite blogs papernstitch, I found this image in one of her tutorials

Which was actually kind of perfect because I was thinking about what color I wanted to paint these two guys and gold was one of my options.

I was also considering my oh-so-favorite color turquoise or a nice yellow, but since I’m considering buying some candle sticks for these I opted to go with white.

I bought this spray paint a long time ago for another project (that I swear, one day I’ll get around to) but I was always concerned about spray painting indoors. Luckily this weekend was beautiful so I turned on my ceiling fan, opened my windows and went at it.

After a couple of coats and some touch-ups here and there they were all finished

So until I can no longer contain my holiday excitement, they will quietly adorn my bookcase – with the ranks of my favorite photo of my two favorite people, busts of Mozart and Beethoven and my books.

Homemade Halloween!

I can barely put into words how excited I am about my Halloween costume! Hence why I'm posting on a Saturday!

I decided this year to go after the ultimate fashion no-no icon:

A completely ridiculous idea but I knew the whole outfit hinged on finding cheap, white feather boas. Once those had been found (4 to be exact), it was a matter of being patient and stalking salvation army. Fortunately today was my lucky day!

Here was my cast of characters:



Feather boas, a child's black t-shirt, an orange onesie (it was thicker than a t-shirt and I liked the color), a large men's white t-shirt and the piece de resistance: a child's Christening gown.

In the spirit of New Dress A Day, I couldn't help but put it on before snipping away at it



The muslin in at the bottom needed a little love to get right, but it was the puffiness of this dress that made it perfect!

I started with cutting off the...um, fringe near the neckline. I'm definitely keeping it for when I feel like dressing like a schoolmarm



From there I don't have a lot more photos because I was in full-on crazy crafting mode. But once the neck on the dress was cut off, I worked on the swan neck.

I cut up the white t-shirt into two long strips and sewed them together leaving both the top and bottom unstitched. Then I cut up the orange onesie (which made me feel kind of bad) into two sides to make up the beak and sewed those two pieces together leaving the one side open so that I could then sew it onto the white tube. Once I sewed together the white "neck" and orange "beak", there was visible stitching when I turned it inside out, so I covered this with black ribbon. I hot glue gunned the ribbon and black t-shirt to make the eye. After all of this, this is what I had:



I also glued some jewels on for the eyes that I found in my craft box. I stuffed the swan with the extra t-shirt & onesie fabric - reuse and recycle!

Then it was just a matter of securing the feather boas to the lacy part of the dress. I found that fishing wire worked perfectly -- it was so easy to knot it into a small part of the lace and just wrap it around the boa so that it held it in place. It took me 3 boas to wrap it around the front of my dress (I left the back plain) and 3 hours later...TA DA:



I left the lace sleeves on because I think it looks kind of cute and it will be warmer in the New England weather. Believe it or not the feathers keep me pretty warm, so I think it will be great for walking around outside.

*****



Happy High Fashion Halloween, ya'll!!

Dressing up the Dresser

As I mentioned in THIS post, two weekends ago I was inspired to do a craft project. I had been collecting the materials and waiting on the perfect paper and luckily I found some at Paper Source.

Someone had given me this dresser and although it’s in really good condition, it was decidedly too plain for my liking.

It’s the first thing you see when you look into my bedroom, so I thought I’d give it a little more life. Here is my cast of characters:

I started with the screw driver to take off all of the dresser pulls and once these were off, I made sure to dust off and clean the dresser before I did anything else.

Then I measured the area of each drawer that I wanted to apply the paper to and cut out this length on the paper. In my case, the longer drawers required me to match up the pattern and extend the paper because it wasn’t long enough. I worried that it wouldn’t look right, but you really don’t notice it.

I applied mod podge (which has the texture of Elmer's glue) with a paint brush to the wooden drawer area, laid the paper on top, smoothed it over with the credit card (select a card you don’t ever plan on using!) and then just let it dry. Some tutorials I read online suggested applying mod podge on top of the paper once it’s been applied, but I kind of felt like this was unnecessary, except around the seam area.

After some meticulous measurements, cutting and painting with glue I had this:

I opted to keep the brass handles because I thought they tied the design and wood together. I’ve contemplated spray painting them but it seems like the paint would just wear off since I actually use this dresser.

I did however, want to replace the top pulls with knobs, so with a little searching I found these turquoise cuties at Hobby Lobby (which we don’t have around here so my mom picked them up)

Turquoise and damask! Perfection!

My finished product! I’m so pleased with how this turned out and if I move and decide I want more of a statement pattern, its easy to tear this off and replace with new (or so I’ve been told).

This also started a paper frenzy in me! And with great inspiration pieces like:

via living la vida rita

The oh so plain but necessary ANEBODA ikea wardrobe in my bedroom (the image above is in the ANEBODA family) needs something fabulous like this.

and of course my filing cabinet that’s currently sitting in my living room could use this:

via design*sponge

I found this gorgeous wrapping paper this weekend that I plan on applying to the third dresser in my bedroom (old apartments have NO closet space, so yes, I have two dressers and a wardrobe in my bedroom). Hopefully I’ll get to that soon…

Back to craftin’

Even though I’m up to my neck in graduate school items, I still want, and at this point, need a creative outlet. Sure I should be working on my study guide but fall is here and I want to celebrate it with some apartment decor.

When I first started exploring the arts and crafts of Blogland, I found THIS book wreath tutorial at Living with Lindsay. My favorite DIYs are the ones that find professional crafts that are super pricey and copy it for 2% of the cost, and that’s exactly what this woman did.

The supplies are simple enough:

Styrofoam wreath, hot glue gun, and a trashy, well-aged novel. This book has more life hanging on my door than it would have unread on my shelf.

I started by covering the Styrofoam in a layer of the book. This ensured that if I missed any places that you wouldn’t notice any startling white spots.

I also found that the best technique to apply the pages to the wreath was to fold it up (as you can see above and by fold I don’t mean press it down, let it be fluid) so that the bottom part of the page where you will be applying the glue is visibly layered. I then (actually) folded a small section at the bottom so that the entire bottom page’s layers were showing and applied glue to all of the layers. I found this handy as it made sure the pages stayed in place instead of parts of the pages being unglued.

Two long telephone conversations later (I love to multitask) and I had my finished product

It’s not perfect, but it is fun and great for a book lover in the fall. Also each wreath depending on your fold will come out differently. Honestly, this was so easy and very rewarding. Also the entire thing cost me $3 glue gun + $1 book + $1 wreath =$5!

I can’t wait to do more fun crafts in the future.

Bad Ass Embroidery

For my latest project, I had two sources of inspiration that I decided to combine into one kickass project. The first one was THIS neat DIY from Design*Sponge. But I decided to expand on it because I don’t have a color printer and the idea of actually stitching something like this sounded fun. Then I saw THESE prints from Paper Jam Press and the ideas just merged.

So for my first embroidery, I give you:

I just love the mix of homemaker and gangster. It's just my style!

I used the downloaded the needlepoint font from HERE, which I realize is a little redundant since I’m actually using needlepoint, but I really liked the style of it. Then I just purchased the fabric (I used a thick, embroidery fabric for this first project. I’ll probably just purchase regular fabric from now on but it did help to guide my stitches), some thread (like the kind you used to make friendship bracelets out of), a wooden hoop and needle and went to town!

Also, I realize I’m using embroidery and needlepoint interchangeably, which is probably incorrect and I apologize to anyone whom this might be bothering.

I’m rather happy with it for my first attempt. It’s a bit off-center and the fabric needs ironed so badly, but I like it. I’m hoping it will become one of a series so that I can hang all of them on my wall.

If anyone has some great rap lyrics, I’d love some suggestions! I’m thinking “Damn it feels good to be a gangster” is next and possibly making one for my brother as a housewarming gift that says, “Bitches ain’t sh*t”.

Beauty lies in the details

The minute that I brought home my beautiful craigslist find, I knew I had to add to it just a little bit - give it that sense of uniquely mine and all. The easiest and nicest thing to do was to add some color to the bottom of these drawers. My initial props have to go out to THIS POST for the inspiration.

I was looking for wallpaper or scrapbook paper to line the drawers with when I went into the hardware store – just to see if they had any pre-fabricated shelf lining that I loved even more (which I didn’t expect to be the case). I was just about to walk out when the sales guy told me to come over and look at what they were about to throw out. He had 4 HUGE books of fabric swatches that they were going to toss because they were discontinued and he wanted to know if I’d want to cut out the fabrics I liked before they did it. Needless to say, I praise this hardware store and gentleman now because it was perfect for what I wanted to do!

So my combination of fabric swatches:

And my empty drawers + a roll of scotch tape:

Lead me to this!!

Isn’t it darling! All I did was roll some scotch tape like you do to hang posters and tape the fabric down to the wood. You can use double sided tape or something a little stronger if you want, especially if you're going to be taking items in and out all of the time, but for me this is the perfect and seasonally temporary solution! The bottom drawers didn’t even require any cutting!

And on the top drawers I got a little more creative with my felt fabric:

I’m so pleased with it and it cost me a total of $0.00! Plus I have tons of leftover fabric swatches that I can use later, like this little gem:

Horrah for simple touches!

My eastern European kitchen

This weekend I was happy to finally buy plates for my new place. I went with the classic white with a rounded-off square design (I believe it’s called quatro). I like a white plate for serving food, but as for everything else I love some color.

I think that’s why I’m so drawn to polish pottery and immediately wanted to decorate my kitchen with my small collection of Russian (ie Matryoshka) dolls.

It started when someone bought me this set of DIY Russian dolls.

It was pretty daunting, but one day I took to the task and created these:

I think they turned out pretty cute; especially the middle one with fangs and the scared one next to it. I love putting a twist on things. I placed these on the shelf over my kitchen table.

I paired these with these adorable houseware items – the salt and pepper shakers are from Anthropologie and the measuring cups are from Urban Outfitter (and are still available online!).

My mom also found me a russian doll soap dispenser and spoon rest (yes, it’s an obsession). And my aunt gave me these great little pieces of polish pottery.

Don’t you just love that mug! I haven’t purchased any bowls yet because I really want to get some fun design like this to pair with my white dinner and appetizer plates. This weekend I actually found a polish pottery vase at Salvation Army, so my dream is to find a great set of bowls. But maybe I’ll just end up splurging on those anyway – or see what Anthropologie has and end up buying those instead. I’ll have to wait and see.

first DIY of my apartment!

I hope everyone had a great weekend. The weather here was absolutely gorgeous and I was able to spend Saturday having brunch with friends, going to a local art college's art sale and watching a rugby game. After all that, I decided I needed to spend Sunday getting things sorted out in the new place.

One thing that's been near the top of my list is turning this really fun and cute fabric that my mom got me into curtains.

I bought a couple of curtain rods last week and was feeling a little ambivalent about whether or not I should put them up. Then on Sunday, I just got this massive urge to Do It. I've noticed that happening more and more where before I'd talk myself out of a project, but lately I've just had this push to Do It. And I did!

So this is how I created my Half-assed, should-absolutely-be-ashamed-of-myself-for-even-calling-them-this, Curtains. Why so hard on myself? You'll see.

Fortunately, it's a huge piece of fabric - this is with it folded in half. I was able to use the additional couple of feet for another temporary project.

So to begin I measured the window space and the desired length that I wanted for my curtains. The windows are 5ft high, so I wanted them to be 5 1/2 feet plus extra space for hemming and creating the space for the rod to go through.

So after measuring and cutting, I was pretty much stuck. I have no sewing machine and no iron. I have stitch-witchery to hem with, but I would have to borrow someone's iron which would mean I'd have to finish this project in the next couple of days.

Then it dawned on me, I can just make some quick stitches by hand and those should be able to sustain the weight of the curtain. Some of the sides are already hemmed, so I can make sure those are placed in the areas that it's noticeable, but for right now there's no reason to get too fancy. Then it dawned on me again, I can just place pins instead of sewing and be done, so I did it.

You can see my little pins, haha. After installing the curtain rods, which was a micro-feat in itself because the screws couldn't screw in completely, I just wanted to get these curtains up and complete this project - no matter how half-assed it is. I apologize to anyone with a sense of propriety or anal retentiveness because these "curtains" really are shameful, but look at how beautiful they look:

I think they look darling. Oh and that key print at the top of my bookcase is what I bought from a former RISD student at the art sale (you can find her work HERE).

Did you see what I did with the remaining fabric? I created a total half-assed, but-I'm-not-going-to-actually-keep-it-this-way-I-SWEAR, Table runner.

This was another just quick pin-up job mostly to see if I liked that fabric there or if I wanted to go with another color/pattern. I still haven't decided yet, but certainly if I stay with this fabric I'll get a stiff backing for it and actually sew it together.

I wish I could say that one day I'll actually hem the curtains, but frankly they're more for decoration than use anyway, so I'll likely keep them this way unless I run into problems. However, I did go into my bedroom that night and think, 'I need curtains in here now!' In which case those could actually serve a function, so perhaps I'll do a better DIY job or take the easy route and purchase a set. We'll see!