At last, at last! My Studio!

For those of you who know me, you know that I don't really have a room in the house to call my own, a place where I can create and feel free to leave my stuff laying around however I like. In the last year, 1/3 of our family room (a long narrow room) had been set aside for me. But it lacked a lot of what I needed: shelves and a division from the kids' play area. I decided that if I could create this space myself, with a limited budget, I would be that much prouder of it. The first step was to take what I had and organize what I could. I started out with my sewing cabinet, 2 sets of plastic drawers, a 6 foot conference table, a sofa table and a homemade shelf that could stand on a table, plus a few odds and ends like plastic storage boxes, a drawer-style organizer (like my husband uses for nuts and bolts,) and baskets. I am a huge Pinterest user. So I've been pinning my ideas for Organization and Decor on a dime. I figured the best way to start was with my messiest supplies. So I decided to organize my ribbon and fibers. I took my inspiration from Sippy Cup Mom, I went to Wal-Mart's paint counter and asked for some paint mixing sticks. The lady gave me a handful without blinking (they also don't care if you take one of every single paint sample card they have.) I took my homemade shelf and attached a small curtain rod that I had laying around. I also had the little hooks designed to hang the curtains, so I used those to hang the paint sticks which were wrapped with my ribbons. I have a lot more ribbons and fibers than what you see on my paint sticks, I just didn't have the time or space to add them all to this organizer. The ones already wrapped nicely on cardboard bobbins stayed in their case and the ones too big and bulky were placed in a drawer of one of my plastic drawer sets.

I also liked Sippy Cup Mom's jars, so I picked up small jars during canning season so they were on sale, and nailed the lids to the underside of my shelf. Arranging the buttons by color has helped so much! I also keep my hot glue sticks (plain and colored) in some of the jars and my sequins. On top of the shelf is my little drawer organizer. I decided to make it pretty by cutting and gluing paint sample cards to each drawer (I kind of have a thing for rainbows.) But then I realized there was no way to tell what was in each drawer, so I used little plastic game pieces and rub-on letters and numbers to set up a grid system. Then I wrote out an index of what is in each drawer - in pencil for easy changing. It's a new system and I'm still working the kinks out. I have a wonderful husband who can do just about any job around the house, but he hates to hang shelves. So I decided I could do it myself. In our back yard I found deck planking salvaged from my brother-in-law's house that was around 12 feet long. So I got out the circular saw and cut each one in half. I had room for 3 shelves, so I save the 3 in the best shape (as a side note, my husband has forbidden me from ever using the circular saw again, saying I was going to cut my head off one day, whatever that means.) After the shelves were cut, I scrubbed them down with pine sol and attached my brackets. Okay, as a disclaimer, I thought I placed them correctly. But 2 days ago when my husband came to help put them up, I had apparently measured the studs wrong and the brackets had to be removed and replaced. That's when I learned how to remove a stripped screw. But yesterday we got the shelves up and I started putting my stuff on them. It's nice to get all my stuff up off of the floor!

We tossed around a lot of ideas of how to divide my space from the kids' play area. My first thought was to wall my section in and make a bonus room, but my husband didn't think that was a good idea. So then we decided on a false wall of some sort. The first plan was for a room divider made of old doors. Old doors can be expensive, but when you check with your friends and in your community, you can get them pretty cheap. So it seemed like that was the plan until I realized my only light source was from the ceiling fan in the kids' play area. A divider made of doors was going to remove most of my light and the air-flow the fan provides. So plan b was to create a false wall with pallets - with the stipulation that he find them. They had to be oak pallets. The false wall I like came from this article on Dump A Day. So that was the plan...until I found a brand new 3 section room divider at a garage sale for $15. I talked the lady down to $12 because that was all I had. The divider was meant to hold pictures, but I figured, why not make it more functional? This is also a work in progress, but I started with the first panel adding my wine cork collection to make a simple cork board (I ran out of corks so I might go back and cut them in half and re-glue.) The second section I just put black paper in and then I hung my thread organizer in front of it. I got the organizer for $10 at Wal-Mart and painted it black. Since I earn extra money by sewing badges on Girl Scout vests, I need a lot of colors. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my favorite thrift store sells them for a quarter apiece! The third section is a fabric picture board. I have not yet chosen how to utilize the next level of panels, but I'll come back to it when I do.

The last big issue was how to store my pens, pencils, markers, brushes, pliers, tools and other small odds and ends. I have a 5 year old daughter who can't seem to hear me when I explain that my scrapbooking pens and markers are not for her coloring books, and I still can't figure out what she did with my good acrylic paint brushes. Plus I had an open space where the corners of the big table and the sewing cabinet met up. I decided to use a homemade card case (my father-in-law built the cases and the shelf, plus some awesome CD cases. He's pretty handy), as my tool case. She would have a harder time getting into it, but it wasn't tall enough on it's own. I considered buying premade table legs for it but then I realized I had the larger of my 2 plastic drawer sets available. It houses all of my Girl Scout supplies and didn't need to be opened up from my main work area, so I faced it out into the play area and placed the tool box on top. It worked pretty well.

So that's where I'm at with the studio. Not a bad start. I'll update things as I work out the bugs. And look, I even had room to hang my toy collection, my favorite poster and to display my own art.

Rainbow Gum-Wrapper Weave Bracelet

Lately I've been seeing a lot of really neat art projects with rainbows. I love rainbows and I love the look of paint chips, plus they are free. So I've decided to create some rainbow wall art using paint chips. This post is not about that wall art. Okay, I played around with the paint chips for I don't know how long and realized that I couldn't make it work while they were in one piece.

So I started cutting my stack of chips apart, tossing the white segments off to the side. My paper cutter wasn't doing a great job cutting just the white off, or maybe I wasn't doing a great job of it. Anyway, I noticed that the growing pile of white strips had thin bands of colors around them that variegated up through the rainbow as I cut through my stack. So I'm sitting there, mindlessly cutting and trying to imagine what I could possibly do with those strips. I decided to try a gum-wrapper weave with them, like the one I did the Christmas tree garland out of. I worked through the colors, trying to keep the pinks, pinkish reds, reds, reddish oranges together and so on, but not stressing about making the order exact. The chain ended up being a couple of feet long. So, how to make it into a bracelet? I decided to use a can as my form (I liked the size of a can of baby clams. Not too big on my wrist but big enough to slip the bracelet off easily.) I wound the chain around the can and started "sewing" it together with an elastic cord. I didn't want it tight, since it is paper it needed to have some give to it. Also because I didn't stitch every single link together, it doesn't look quite as pronounced that the chains don't match up exactly in the zigzags.

There are a lot of different gum-wrapper weaving tutorials online. This one is pretty good, though it starts with a wider piece of paper than I did. It would be a stronger weave, but sometimes you just make do with what you got.

Vintage Wooden Ornament Wreath

One of my favorite things about Christmas is the vintage wooden ornaments that I was given by my mother-in-law. We have funny little gnomes that have furry beards and our cats steal them all the time. The other fun set I got from her was a neat set of spinning circus themed ornaments from my husband's childhood. I then went to my mom and asked for her old stuff. I was able to find a few miscellaneous ones from my childhood and I love the look they add to the tree. I decided they would make a very cute wreath, but I have no heart to hot glue our family mementos to a wreath, so I decided to start checking the thrift stores. I found a ton of cute little ornaments that look like they were produced en mass in Japan or China in the 60s. Perfect! I think I payed less than $5 for all of them (aided by my friend gifting me a blank wreath.) I sat down with the ornaments and removed all the strings and then started randomly gluing them on. I wasn't trying for a pattern or anything because I wanted it to look like a section of a Christmas tree. I could not get any of my ribbon to look good with the wreath and I decided to try the ric rac. Perfect! It looks homemade, and it looks like something done back in the day.

Homemade Christmas Gift Ideas

My daughter is a Tae Kwon Do student and this is our first Christmas at the gym. I have been wracking my brains for what to give the teachers and Master Amanda at the gym. I have been making some super cute felt charms for my Girl Scouts and I was thinking, what else can I do with felt? What I ended up with was:

This is Master Amanda (who earned her 4th degree black belt right before Christmas) and Sammi who is currently a green belt. I used my gingerbread men cookie cutters to cut create the "bodies". Then I made the deboks basically the same way, tracing them and leaving myself some sewing room. I sewed them together around the bodies, I don't think they would have gone on after I sewed them up. I added the belts and tied them in traditional knots, then sewed the two figures together. I added the date and Master Amanda & Sammi's names to the back with fabric markers before giving it to Master Amanda. I ended up making homemade lemon sugar scrub for the teachers at my daughter's schools. Here is the link. It was super easy and I had enough left over to give 1 jar as my secret santa gift for Girl Scouts and keep 1 jar for myself (I multiplied the recipe and ended up with way more than I intended.)

Homemade Christmas? Ornaments & Garland

'tis the season to make some holiday cheer! I have been hard at work on a few Christmas projects. First off, we have a yearly fundraiser at the library and I was asked for some ideas of what I would put onto our tree this year. One of my jobs at the library is to help sort and sell donated books. Sometimes books are in such bad shape that I can't do anything with them but throw them into the recycling bin. (Some people cannot throw books away, no matter how bad of shape they are in.) Apparently there has been a 'fall cleaning' mindset going on in our town because we have had so many books donated that I have no room to put them onto the sales shelves. So I said to myself, we're a library, couldn't we make ornaments out of old books? I quick search on the internet later and I knew this was going to be fun. I didn't expect the whole tree to have my "recycled books" theme, but the director liked the idea and was willing to give me the chance to run with it. I found inspiration for the paper tree topper at Great Green Goods. The topper is actually 2 pieces tied around the top of the tree. The backbone is a page from a very badly torn board book. I then made 12 spiral rolls of pages from picture books and hot-glued them on to the backing. Then I made 12 spiral rolled pages of old romance novels (which were about 1/2 the size of the picture book pages,) and glued them in between the first set of spiral rolls. To make a center for the topper, I added one of the fanned ornaments made out of picture book pages and glued on a sparkly snowflake.

The fanned ornaments were an idea I found on the blog Pinecone. I didn't make them with two layers but we did use the button center idea and the assistant director helped me out by adding glitter to the edges of the ornaments.

We made the cutest round ornaments that I found on the blog Craftside out of children's books that had broken spines. I liked this type of paper best, it is heavier grade and holds up better.

The last touch for the tree was to make a garland. I cut strips of paper about 1/2 inch by 6 inches long from old romance novels, kids' books, graphic novels and atlases These were randomly woven into a gumwrapper weave. You can find instructions and videos on how to do this all over the internet.

The final touches that really brought the tree together were the great idea by a coworker to use glitter hairspray to add some sparkle to the fanned ornaments and the tree topper, old fashioned strands of silver icicles and a random box of vintage glass ornaments we found stashed in the storage room marked, "Janitorial Supplies." I think the tree topper looks like a prairie windmill and so I'm going to give my tree a title: Homemade 1940s Prairie Christmas.

I want more Halloween jewelry! Spider Ring

Okay, so it's no secret that I love Halloween. I have an amazing costume put together for myself as well as two great ones for my kids. But the entire month of October deserves special treatment. So I want creepy jewelry to wear to work, but I don't have the budget to buy it. What to do?? Make it! I've been wanting a spider ring and my buddy Ann suggested I could make my own. I started out with the plan of making the spider and then making a stretchy one-size-fits-all band for it. I watched an awesome video on making bead spiders on YouTube. Then I had to look at my collection of beads to see what I had. My beads are usually leftovers from projects or given to me. I also harvest them from old costume jewelry I've picked up inexpensively. I liked the video's use of seed beads to create joints in the spider's legs and decided to go with coiled spacers and seed beads to create the same look. I used simple hang pins to to string them, creating a simple loop at the end to attach them to the body of the spider. My original idea was to use the oblong greyish bead for the abdomen and a black bead for the head, but I couldn't quite get it all attached securely. Here is what the first prototype looked like. I am not by any means a jewelry maker, I don't know a lot of the proper ways to make things, so quite often my projects are cobbled together. If they look good and stay together I don't care what they look like on the back side. The first spider looked good (I love the little rhinestone spacers I used on the front legs!), but my 7 year old gave it a few good shakes and it fell apart. Back to the drawing board. I decided to try for a jeweled main body but I had the worst time with the supplies I had on hand, until inspiration hit and I remembered a fake engagement ring sitting in my costume jewelry stash. I found a large jump ring that I could use around the base of the rhinestone's setting and added the legs to that. I left the ends of the legs loose, and it looks more realistic but it'll take some getting used to having them on and between my fingers. I then used a long hang pin to add the oblong bead abdomen. Instead of hanging it from the jump ring that holding the legs, I attached it directly to the base of the rhinestone's setting.

Scrabble Tile Jewelry

I was scheming away the other night, trying to figure out how I could make some more jewelry to wear for Halloween, since I don't have the cash to buy any. I was thinking about my inventory of junk jewelry and nothing seemed right. I thought even if it was super simple, like saying "boo" it would work. Voila! Inspiration hit me, I have a whole bunch of scrabble tiles that I've bought for scrapbooking and crafts. Why not drill holes into them and make jewelry?? Here's what I came up with:

You can pick up scrabble tiles pretty inexpensively on eBay but I love finding them at garage sales and thrift stores. I used a small drill and an old scrap piece of wood to do my drilling. You have to be careful with the drilling, if you drill too close to the tile's edge it will break or be too weak to use with jump rings. If you drill too far in, it makes it really difficult to use the jump rings. Good luck with that. The other thing that tripped me up was that I wasn't paying attention to which tiles I was drilling and I accidentally drilled holes at the top of the "I" and "R" in Girl. I suppose I could have added charms or something, but I just switched them out, they are pretty common letters in the scrabble sets. I started with the "Boo" earrings for Halloween, then I thought it would be fun to make a necklace for my daughter for homecoming. Our town's colors are purple and gold and our team is the Arrows. It was pretty simple from there. My husband suggested making a bracelet in case my not-girly daughter wouldn't wear the necklace. So I tried using the gold thread to link the letters, then used the jump rings to attach the word to the purple cording. I don't like it as much as the necklace but my 4 year old loves it. I think I'll make a necklace for myself too. The last project I made today with the tiles was a Girl Scouts bracelet. I thought maybe it would look nicer and be more flexible if I used a 3-ring combination to connect each tile. I got the whole thing done and realized that it wasn't as strong as the large jump ring style because now there were 3 weak points instead of just one. So I took it apart and switched it to the larger jump rings. It turned out better, and I think it will be pretty strong