Catching Up

It's been awhile since my last post, and I plead the Fifth!

Aside from not feeling so all right, I've been steady working on cleaning my studio. I know I always say I'm working on it, and so far I haven't managed. This time, since I have a big project coming up, I tore the whole blinkin' thing apart and started anew, beginning by wrapping my fabric yardage around comic book boards so I could store them like books.

(Whoops! Guess DCW didn't want me posting pics of the comic book boards. Still, if you click on the link below, it'll take you to the site where there is a pic. Thanks, Daisy, for bringing this to my attention.)

I only bought a hundred, couldn't imagine needing more, but I'm running really low on them now. They're only about 10 bucks for a hundred here, though shipping doubles the cost. (Find the tutorial for fabric wrapping here.)

When I took the above photo, I'd only done three shelves. The basket on the bottom left has now been redone as well with all my scrap fabrics rolled into tidy parcels and secured ala Just Something I Made. She shares a PDF Download for labels to wrap around cigar-wrapped remnants here.

I'll show more pics of my cabinet once I complete the arranging.

The other thing I did while I was not posting was this new tea cozy.

I made it of a lovely linen fabric I found at our library thrift store a while back.

I've had a good old time testing fiber content of this and other fabrics I've picked up here and there. Did you know that if you leave a piece of 100% wool in bleach for a while it will disappear? Silk will disappear as well but takes longer. Other fibers need the burn test to determine content. You can use the burn test on silk and wool as well, but since my smeller's not the greatest, I find the bleach test more conclusive. Just know that petroleum products become molten plastic.

So with that and my sincerest apologies for my inattention to the blog, I'll sign off now. Take care, y'all.

A Few Finished Projects--Finally

For a while now, I've been working on some projects that seemed to take forever. First, I've been making a couple of tea cozies as a gift for a friend. Both her large for-company-only and her small daily-usage teapots are Meissen Blue Onion pattern. I wanted to make cozies for each.

The large was relatively easy, once I worked out the design. I used white linen as the outer fabric and embroidered the word tea on the front.

The trim on the bottom came from Etsy, a nice woven blue onion-patterned trim.

The lining also came from Etsy. It's a remnant of a vintage tablecloth, which I machine-quilted onto a piece of felted wool blanket for heat retention.

This one I'm liking.

The hardest was the small cozy, and I'm still not happy with it. First I wanted to use the same white linen, but as it's very easy to drip tea on a bachelor tea cozy, I nixed that. Then I tried a fabric I had only a small remnant of, and I cut it wrong! So I decided to do a patchwork with what I could salvage from the messed-up fabric and another piece I had. That took me in an entirely different direction than the blue and white I intended.

See the teapots on the blue and white stripe? That was my original messed-up fabric. Since there was a great deal of pink in the teapots and cups depicted on the fabric, I originally intended to use a pink for just the liner, but instead used it as alternating patches on the front as well. Now I'm thinking the pink has taken over, becoming the dominant fabric.

I've made bachelor cozies, with the handle and spout free, before and had no problem, but since I was using lightweight fabrics for both the outer and inner sections, I decided to add felted wool to make sure I had heat retention capability. I got a bit zealous though, putting it on both the outer and inner fabrics. It makes it seem more of a down-filled teapot jacket as opposed to a nice dressy woolen teapot coat.


I'm going to send it to Kathy as is and hope she can use it. Maybe I'll make another and send later.

The other project I've had going on lately was for my sister Daisy.

This is the fabric she used for her dining room drapes, nice and tailored-looking. And this is what I made for her wall.

Again, I'm not as happy about this as I wish I were. Since I had no fabric to go with her drapes, and since I'm trying to use things in my stash, I opted for wallpaper, which was in my stash. This picture makes it look as if it needs batting underneath. 'Cept there ain't no way I'm gonna start all over on this one! (Sorry, Daisy.)

I'm hoping to get both of these in the mail tomorrow. Kathy doesn't read the blog so it should still be a surprise for her when she gets it. Daisy does, sporadically, which makes it a coin-toss as to whether she'll see it online first.

So what have you been working on lately? Does it take y'all as long to finish projects as it does me? Do you have long lists of things you want to get done...one of these days? (I'm thinking my next project--once I get my studio back into a shape where I can actually work on something--is going to be the pillow with the flower I blogged about last.)

Hope you all had a lovely Labor Day! Ta.

Pillow Design Quandry

First, before I get into the pillow design question, I want to note that I've decided to use my blog as a memory jogger. After spending what seemed like hours this morning searching for a design I recently saw, storing the images here seems the easiest way for me to find things.

So now for the question--I picked up a pillow the other day from the thrift store, solely for the down insert. Both the cover and the insert are in perfect condition, hardly used, but it's a banana color, not so great for most people's decor, definitely not for mine. But it's a Crate and Barrel pillow, not expensive but still not something you'd pick up at the dollar store. So I decided to find a way to foof it up, yellow and all.

This next pillow was on Cluck Cluck Sew's blog and was also featured on Someday Crafts.

I'm thinking the bright yellow Crate and Barrel pillow would look cool with a flower like this. (Tutorial found here.)

Using the same process, different dimensions, she also made this flower brooch. (Tute here.) 

That would look terrific on a bag. And isn't it cool that it's using scraps of fabric? I'm all for using what I already have.

Another design I'm considering for the front of the pillow is this one from Michele Made Me. She calls it Teddy Bear Swim Needle and Hook Book.

Pretty cool, innit? Tute can be found here. Whether or not I use this design for the pillow, I certainly mean to make the needlebook. I do love me some needlebooks!

I don't do that much crochet anymore, but I'm thinking the inside could be adapted to hold tools I'm always misplacing, i.e. my sewing gauge, bodkins, seam rippers. It could be made to be very functional, methinks.

My last idea for the pillow transformation is to translate a rainbow in buttons. How cool is this picture? I'd love to use that as an inspiration but I'm afraid it would take more buttons than even I have.

But a simple arc of buttons in purple, blue, green, yellow, orange and red shouldn't take that many, should it?

So those are my options. I'm leaning toward the flower because 1) I have some pretty cool scraps of fabric and 2) it seems fairly easy. Still, I'd love feedback on which design you think I should choose. All comments appreciated, my friends!

Etsy Texas Crafters $5 Monday

I'm a little late getting this posted, but the Etsy Texas group are having a $5 Fifth Monday sale. To see a listing of items offered, go to Etsy and do a search for the ETC5 tag .

I've chosen a few items to tempt you:

These hair clips are by lilwawabutik. She calls them Hello Kitty Korkers. Cute, aren't they? I can just see them in a little girl's hair.

Love the fabric in this Vintage Yellow Rose Mini Wallet by The Yellow Rose.

These Turquoise Teardrop Earring Charms by Wild Moon Design are wrapped with sterling wire. Five dollars will get you one set of charms. (I have a small pair of silver hoops these would look gorgeous on. Better hurry; they may be gone soon!)

I'm loving this Cobalt and Yellow Glass Bead Bracelet by Simply Raeven. At $5, it's a deal!

This handmade Goat's Milk Soap by SophieCls is $5 for one bar. Gotta love it!

I'm really liking this set of Button Hairpins by Texas Eagle, though truthfully it's making me think, "I can do that!" If you can't though, five bucks is cheap, cheap.


This is only a small taste of what you can find today. Why not check us out?!

Button Fever

My friend's downsizing. For some, that might mean moving into a cottage sized for one. For Carrol, widowed for more than ten years, it means a 2400 sq. ft. house, bigger than any I've ever lived in!

But, lucky me, her downsizing means I inherited a box of buttons. The neat thing about Carrol's button box is that these are the extras that come with garments, and she's never stinted on the quality--or the cost--of her clothing. There are some gorgeous buttons in the collection.

Which has started me thinking about buttons again. (As if I ever stopped!) And started me tooling around the 'net again. (Ditto on the earlier parens.)

I think I referenced this pillow in a post I did a couple of years ago, but really, it deserves another mention. You can find the tutorial here.

Love the way these buttons have been woven together to make a coaster. Check here for the tute.

Another rendition of the woven button coaster. Looks like crochet here, doesn't it? The tute's here.

These buttons I made a while back. Love the look of them! They're called Singleton buttons and you can find the how-to here. (They look pretty darn cute at the top of my guest room shower curtain, which I will show one of these days.)

These Dorset buttons are similar to the Singleton--both are made with plastic rings. Pretty darn cool, aren't they? Get the tutorial here.

And these are Sharpie-painted. Again, I'm enamored. Info here.

For the final button magic, this necklace is a stand-out. Info here.

Time to fold clothes. Ta, y'all.

Fini

I worked my bum off last weekend, focusing on my friend's gift. If you'll recall, I used as inspiration this pillow I found on Letter Perfect's Etsy site.

Lovely, innit? She used a darker burlap, which wasn't available at the store when I got mine. So once I'd finished the lettering I felt the buttons didn't have the oomph they needed.

There were other problems with this version, which I mentioned here.

So-o-o, back to the drawing board. First I outlined the lettering with embroidery using a green perle cotton thread: green because of the green and cream check I put in the back. Still it needed... something. I was off to the 'net to find inspiration.

Anthropologie has this:

I like the double poms, but I was working on a deadline and I'm not an expert pom maker. Then I found this, still at Anthropologie.

Tassels I can do, tassels I excel at (IMOHO). I unraveled some burlap threads and made a couple of tassels, then made a couple more using the unraveled burlap and the embroidery floss from the front. Voila! Two per corner.

And here she is, all done.

The front...

And the back. Okay, she looks a bit wonky on the back, but she isn't, I promise. I'm a worse picture-taker than I am pillow-maker.

I'm linking this to Cheap Chic Home's Fabric Fun Thursday.

Check her out!

The End Result

Yesterday I posted about a couple of projects I've been working on. I've finished both, one I'm fairly happy with, the other not so much.

This was a new St. John's Bay straw bag I picked up dirt-cheap. It had a plain blue ho-hum lining, which I decided I could change out easily.  (Turned out to be more difficult than I anticipated. :P )

I picked up this fabric from Etsy and translated one of the flower images into a button design for the front of the bag.

It's a loose translation; I wanted to use all MOP buttons and didn't have that many greens and blues. Still I think it turned out kinda cute.

 

This is the inside of the bag, post transformation.

This project I'm reasonably pleased with. Not totally, I'm too much of a perfectionist for that, but, as we Southerners often say--sometimes maybe too often--it'll do.

The next project I'm judging thumbs down. It's meant as a gift for a friend, needed by next Tuesday.

I really don't like how it turned out, reason being that I always over-think projects and thus shoot myself in the foot. I decided that in order to have clean seams I'd make a bag, one side burlap, the other muslin, which I could turn inside out with the seams caught inside, then seam the resulting package together. Good in theory, not so great in practice cuz I wound up with a double-bulky seam. So I either have to rip this thing out, resew, and serge the seams or come up with another quick to make idea.

I'm thinking I'll be doing some ripping this weekend.

And with that, I'll sign off. Hope y'all have a weekend filled with better things than re-making pillows!