One down, a hundred and twenty seven crafts to go.

You know how I had a million and one crafts I wanted to make?

I finished one!  That's a start at least.

This is my fishing game, inspired from this blog I found through Pinterest.  I used a thin rope rather than twine or leather for the fishing line, but other than that I followed those instructions pretty closely.

Mo-mo the toddler approves.  Fat Mar-mar the cat approves. (See the paw?)

After watching Mar-mar eat the fish, Mo-mo wondered how they tasted.  She was disappointed that they didn't taste like Goldfish crackers.

Craftoholic.

I'm fairly crafty.  I made my daughter's awesome Halloween costume.

A lot of people told me how cute he looked.  I decided that it wasn't the right time to lecture about gender stereotypes.  Also, she did look adorable.

I've made numerous taggie toys, home decorations, and I rock at cross-stitching.  But for every project I complete, there is at least three that I get very excited about, buy the materials, then don't finish.

I thought this blog entry would serve as a combination of confession/reminder/guilting myself into completing these.  Here are my list of the crafts waiting for me to get off my butt and make.

1)  Fishing set. 

my materials

I got the idea from this blog, found on Pinterest.  (Can we pause for a moment and talk about how awesome Pinterest is?  Yes, it is amazing.  I'm in love.)
Time I have been meaning to make this:  about a week.



2) Apron from a scarf.

Pretty scarf, no?  I found it at the thrift store.  I've been wanting to make an apron (I make a huge mess when when I bake) and I thought it would be fun to use it for that.
Time I have been meaning to make this:  about three months


3) Felt Food.

As you can see, I made one little piece of felt food.  It turned out adorable--but I'm very slow at hand sewing.  I bought enough felt to make at least 15 more pieces of food for Mo-mo's play kitchen.
Time I have been meaning to make this:  about four months


4) A baby quilt.

This is one of those crafts that I started with the best of intentions.  My aunt makes beautiful quilts and often donates them to the hospital for babies in the ICU.  I thought it would be a wonderful project...and I only did about 1/2 of it.  Again, the hand sewing thing slowed me down.
Time I have been meaning to make this:  about a year

5) The Lorax Toybox.

It needs hinges.  And paint.  And more paint.  And even more paint.  I started this without realizing that I would have to prime it, paint the background several times, paint the trim several times (it's going to be bright purple), paint the scenes, paint the black lines in the little scenes, then polyurethane it.  I got about halfway done with painting it outside before it started raining, and I just never returned to it. I am embarrassed to admit that I use it to keep unfinished craft projects in. 
Time I have been meaning to make this:  about a year and a half

6) A knitted...something.

This is a....scarf, potholder, square.  Take your pick.  I learned how to knit then never actually made anything.  I'm kind of scared to finish it because I don't know how to cast off.  Or on again, if I want to make something else.
Time I have been meaning to make this:  about a year and a half

7) Purse made from a book.

Inspiration from this blog

 my materials

I have the materials.  I even gutted out a poor book specifically bought for that purpose (The Last Days of Pompeii).  (oh, and I saved the pages--I figure there has to be something I can do with them.  I have major guilt about ripping up a book.)  I just haven't made the darn thing yet. 

Time I have been meaning to make this:  about two years

8) Hair ribbons for Mo-mo.

When Mo-mo was about six months old, I bought some adorable ribbon with the intention of making cutesy bows for her.  I quickly realized that she would only keep barrettes in her hair for about 30 seconds. 

Time I have been meaning to make this:  over two years

8) The perfect Easter basket.

Apparently, finding an Easter basket for Mo-mo that I like (for a reasonable price) was too difficult.  So I bought one that I kind of like and was going to paint it and re-line it with new fabric.

Time I have been meaning to make this:  over two years 

9) Portraits of my animals.

 

I made the one of Odin and it hangs in our kitchen.  Still need to paint Athena and Fat Mar-mar.

Time I have been meaning to make this:  over two years

10) A corset.  Crap, this is embarassing.

 Pleather?  What was I thinking?

I cannot tell you for the life of me why I wanted to sew a corset.  I know it was for a costume of some kind--pirate wench, maybe?.  I've never sewn anything from a pattern before--and a corset with eyelets and boning and everything is tricky.  Plus I bought a ton of ridiculous faux leather and brocade, neither of which are particularly easy to work with.  I'm going to chalk this one up to being young and dumb and find something else to do with the material.

Time I have been meaning to make this:  over four years.  Well, I probably actually wanted to make it for a week.  Then I realized how difficult it was.

The coolest costume. Ever.

This is by far one of the coolest things I have ever made.

Mo-mo is going to be a train engineer for Halloween--complete with a little red wagon made to look like a train.

Materials

• cardboard.  Lots of cardboard
• exacto knife
• sharp scissors
• glue gun
• duct tape
• PVC pipe (I used 1/2 inch)
• PVC pipe cutters
• spray paint- red, black and yellow matte
• empty corn meal can, but almost any can would work

I started out with two large flat pieces of cardboard, both divided in thirds.  I cut out half of the middle portion on each.  I added windows to one piece (see above).  Then I nestled them together like this:

 

I hot-glued and duct-taped the two pieces together.  I even trimmed the windows with duct tape because my exact-o knife skills are not too hot.

Next, I had to figure out a way to get it to mount on the wagon.  That's where the PVC pipe comes in handy.  I cut small X's in the cardboard and fed a PVC pipe through the bottom, so that it would have a way to sit on the wagon.  I reinforced it with duct-tape. 

Cutting PVC pipe is incredibly easy with one of these gizmos.  $10 from Lowe's.  Is it weird that I'm looking forward to using it for future projects?

Next, I reinforced the corners of the window unit with PVC pipe.  Unfortunately, I don't have a very good picture of it.  I simply measured it, cut it, then duct-taped and hot-glued it in place. 

Notice that the roof and front of the train is missing? I used those pieces that I cut out (to make them fit together) and both duct taped and hot glued it all together.

 This is what it looked like before the painting/final touches were put on.  I let Mo-mo give it a spin to make sure it worked.

Then I spray painted it red (two coats letting it dry at least 3 hours between)

I drew and cut out the wheels, spokes, wheel attach-thingies (no idea what they are actually called), a bit larger of a roof, a cattle-guard, and a light for the front.  I then spray painted them along with the corn meal can for a smoke stack (again, two coats), let them dry.  Lastly I hot-glued it all together.

I know it's not going to last forever--I'm not even going to show the finished product to Mo-mo until Halloween.  But I think it will last at least for that evening and she may even get to play with it inside for awhile.

I'll be sure to post photos of her on Halloween!

Coordinating.

My house can best be described as "eclectic".  Because that sounds a hell of a lot nicer than "third-hand furniture and crap that doesn't match".

Don't get me wrong, I love my junk.  I love my stuffed piranha that my grandparents got from Brazil, I love my eight bookshelves of novels alphabetized by author, I love my large framed painting that Batman says looks like "gorilla butts".

  Horses, people.  Not gorilla butts, not plums.  Don't hate on the Franz Marc.

More and more, I start looking around when I'm at people's houses--people my age, not "grown-ups" (we are not going to discuss how I don't consider myself a grown-up yet) and their stuff actually matches.  Their kitchen furniture is a matching set--not a table from a thrift store that is embarrassing looking without a tablecloth, two folding chairs, and two chairs that I painted turquoise on a whim and are falling apart.

I am never going to have a pristine, beautiful museum of house.  It's not my style.  I really do love eclectic decorations, bright colors, and unusual paintings.  I think homes should be comfortable--you shouldn't be constantly afraid you're going to break something or dirty something up. 

Still...I'm starting to tackle the little things and make an attempt to coordinate.  I've started with our bathroom.  I got rid of the accumulated clutter left over from the last three bathrooms we had--the trash can, the soap dispenser, etc. and bought an inexpensive but matching set of turquoise accessories from Target.  I also made these:

They are darling, no?  And they were ridiculously easy to make.  

1.  I bought frames from a thrift store.  $1.25 each

2.  I spray-painted them.  I did another frame at the same time with a different color--the high-gloss of the royal blue turned out better than the matte finish of the other one.

3.  I used Google images to find "octopus silhouette" and "shark silhouette" and copy and pasted the ones I liked into a Word document.  I re-sized them to fit inside of the frame and printed them out.  I cut it out and used it to trace the shape onto scrapbook paper.  Pay no attention to the bird, that's for a different project.

4.  Cut out the scrapbook paper silhouettes, rubber cemented them onto a piece of card stock cut to size, and framed them.  Viola!  I have art that matches my the colors of my bathroom.

Now if only getting a new set of kitchen furniture was this easy...

2 1/2 recent crafts

1.  Little Tike's toddler car

It's not really a craft, it's more of a fixer-upper. I bought this faded little car for $5 from a yard sale.  New, they cost something like $50-$60.  I bought Krylon spray paint for plastic, took it apart and painted it.

It doesn't look perfect but looks a lot better than it did!  Ellie loves it.  I let her pick out the colors. Now I'm tempted to buy a john deere sticker for the back.  I admit, I didn't think of this renovation on my own--Ellie's babysitter painted one for her son and it looked great.


2. Jewelry organizer

Usually, I throw all of my necklaces and dangle-y earring into a big basket on my dresser.  I can never find what I want to wear and they get all tangled.  This is a $1 mirror frame from a garage sale (I popped the mirror off of the frame--it was incredibly ugly), spray painted it, and used a staple gun to line the back with chicken wire.     


2 1/2.  Cross-stitch project

I haven't finished this project yet, but I wanted to brag and show off how far I've gotten.  This is how far I was in March of 2010. 

This is what it looks like now.  I've been working on it at least three nights a week for the last five months. 

Just to give you an idea of how small the stitching is:

Oh, and this is what it will hopefully look like when it's done.

As I said before, this isn't a craft project, it's a commitment. I don't even want to think of how old Mo-mo will be when I finally finish.

My first quilt blocks

I've finished 3 out of the 9 blocks for my first quilt.  I only have 2 more to do of this particular star pattern, then I switch to doing ones with a bunch of squares and rectangles. 

See my progress?  The first block I made turned out wonky.  By the third one, it's almost pretty.

I'm enjoying it so far. Strangely enough, I thought I'd be doing it with my sewing machine, but I wanted to be able to do something when I "watch" TV (I use that word very loosely as I tend to just listen to it).  So this small quilt is going to be entirely hand-pieced.

As I've mentioned, I'm learning this from a book.  I'm good up until the point where all of the pieces are put together and somehow, magically, it gets batting and backing...yeah, I have no idea how to do that.  The book wasn't quite clear enough for me.  I'm going to have to track down an expert or go to a quilt store and try and find a kindly person to help me out.

List of Five Things Going on in My Life

1)  Batman is taking the Missouri Bar Exam in nine days.  This means that I don't really have a husband for a week and a half.  I have a grouchy, Red-bull drinking, permanently-attached-to-a-study-guide person who sometimes is in bed when I wake up.

He's been studying at Borders to cut down on the distractions.  Apparently interrupting him to show him a video of kittens being cute, I mean really cute, like baby-panda-bear-sneezing level of cute, is an unnecessary distraction.  He and I must have completely different definitions of "necessary".


2)  I'm creating a Lorax-themed toybox.  I bought an old wooden toybox from a garage sale about ten years ago and I found in the garage recently.

I've primed it, drawn the pictures on, and now I just have to paint it.  It's awesome.  One of my hidden talents is that I can reproduce cartoons perfectly.  This made me very cool for about three days in sixth grade when everyone wanted me to draw them a picture of the Simba from the Lion King.

  

ONLY YOU CAN SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT.  No pressure or anything.  Except if you don't all the bears and fish and birds will die horrible drawn-out deaths.

3)  My family is going to Cozumel in two weeks.  I can't wait.  Batman will have just taken the bar exam and so it'll be lovely to be able to kick back and relax.

One thing we're going to do is go SCUBA diving.  Everyone in my family except my sister-in-law is SCUBA certified.  This sounds like fun, right?  Well, kind of.

My step-mom is certified but she only did it because she said she would if everyone else does.  Peer pressure is nothing compared to family pressure.  I get the feeling that she doesn't really like diving and now that she knows everything that could possibly go wrong, she doesn't want any of her children anywhere near the water.

She wants us to watch a refresher DVD before we go.  And practice in the pool before we leave.  And practice in the pool when we get there.  And never get farther away than five feet from the dive master when we go down.  And she'd prefer if we never actually SCUBA dived. 

She's taken to randomly quizzing us about potential SCUBA-related disasters.  We'll be eating dinner and suddenly she'll ask "Quick, what do you do if your regulator comes out of your mouth?  What if your secondary regulator isn't working?  WHAT IF YOUR DIVE BUDDY ISN'T PAYING ATTENTION?"

She's a bit of a worrier.


4)  I have two interviews coming up in the next two weeks.   Yes, I'm that awesome.  Now if only I could convince the interviewers of that fact...


5)  My friend Crystal just moved back to the St. Louis area.  We've known each other since high school and we were roommates for a year in college.  It's awesome to be back in the same city with her.

She just got engaged and I've nominated myself to be her unofficial wedding planner.  I like making lists, I have plenty of free time, I enjoy shopping, and I have tons of opinions---I'm perfect for the job.

Knit wit.

Last night I went a knitting club meeting at the library.  My cake decorating class just finished and I figured it would be a good way to learn, as learning to knit is one of the things on my 101 list. 

I was the first person there besides the little old lady who ran the group.  She was incredibly nice and showed me how to begin.  She was a little deaf, so we had the awkward overly-loud always-repeat conversation thing going on.

Nice Old Lady:  "SO HOW OLD ARE YOU, DEARIE?"

Me:  "I'm twenty-seven."

N.O.L.:  "EH?"

Me:  "TWENTY-SEVEN."

N.O.L.:  "TWENTY SEVEN?  I FIGURED YOU FOR SEVENTEEN.  I THOUGHT YOU WERE IN HIGH SCHOOL!"

This was flattering at the time but it fed my insecurities later.

I was enjoying myself until the next two people showed up:  two 12 year old girls.

At this point, an awful lightbulb went off in my head.  What if I had misread the flier?  What if this was not a general knitting club but one for teenagers and kids?  What if I was the creepy upper-20-something that just crashed in on the kid's knitting club and the nice old lady was too sweet to tell me to get the heck out?

Here's something you should know about me:  I'm a strange mix of confidence and insecurity.  I can fake confidence really well.  I do stupid stuff all the time.  I'm the sort of person who routinely loses her shoe in a mud puddle, drops an ice-cream sandwich on a white blouse, and walks into the wrong meeting room (always full) an hour early.  And I'm good at making it look as if I just brush it off all the while I'm swearing at myself in my head. 

So I'm sitting in a library conference room, knitting furiously, and trying to remember what exactly the flier said.  I search my memory for clues:  was that why the lady thought I was in high school?  Did the librarian who showed me the room give me an odd look?

I tried to search my purse for the flier.  Of course, everyone stops what they're doing and looks and me while I rummage around in it.  After an incredibly long and loud (how in the heck is the stuff in my purse that loud?) minute of searching to no avail, I pull out my chapstick and pretend that I was looking for that the entire time. 

As I knit, I thought furiously.  Finally I came up with a plan.  I excused myself as if I had to go to the restroom, went to the front of the library, and reread the flier that advertised it.  If it was a knitting club for youth, I would politely apologize, leave, and NEVER EVER EVER go to that library again in case someone recognized me.  I would wait until I was home to die from mortification.

As it turns out, the flier said nothing about age range.  When I went back to the room, there were two more women there, both in their thirties.

So I now know how to knit.  And I'm able to go back to that library without fear of humiliation.  I think I'll go again next week--I need to learn how to cast on and cast off.  

Crafty like a fox

So I'm taking a cake decorating class at Micheal's.  This week we practiced making a lovely cupcake design.  The cupcake in the book looked light and fluffy and cute.


Mine looks like a pile 'o brains.

What's that you say?  It doesn't look too bad?  Let's get a closer look.

Definitely a brain with a cherry on top.  Maybe I was just channeling my inner zombie.

It was still delicious.


I've also been working on a texture monster, a variation of the taggie monsters that I made before.  My cousin's son has sensory processing disorder.  He's been doing awesome with his therapy and they've been exposing him to toys with a lot of texture.  I made my standard monster, but added faux snake skin on one leg and tulle on the other, plus a uni-brow of fake fur and fringe around his back.  I think he turned out quite cute! 

Taggie Toys again

Since I'm 99.9% sure that my cousin does not read my blog, I'm sharing the surprise that I made for her twin baby boys. They are taggie monsters:



I made my daughter a cat version of these. And here is the tutorial that inspired me.

How to make a container for hair ribbons

I'm coming clean: This is not an original idea. I found it here first. It was quite simple and I really like how it turned out.



You will need: empty formula container, 1 or 2 sheets of scrapbook paper, paint, ruler, scissors, glue, and sealant.

1) Wash and dry the formula container.

2) Measure the container. Cut the scrapbook paper to size and glue.




3) Paint the lid. This took the longest time--it'll take three good coats of acrylic paint to get it all covered. Make sure it's completely dried before starting the next coat, or it'll rub off. I used only two coats, probably should have done the third.

4) Spray the lid and container with the sealant in a well ventilated space.

Here's the finished product, sans headbands.


Here it is filled up with bows and headbands stored on the outside. It turned out great!


Other possibilities: glue ribbons on the edges, cover the top with fabric, modge-podge initials on the lid.