Stretched Fabric Art

It's lovely out and the flea markets have started back up. Let's take a moment to appreciate some of the wonderful things that you can find for $10 or under at flea markets:


I wanted to make some stretched fabric art for my guest bedroom so I drug my chop saw outside and set up shop:


I used some 1"x2" pine scraps and made frames:


Then just wrapped the fabric and securing with a staple gun.


I'm not ready to hang the ones for the guest bedroom quite yet, but I finally made a a frame for our awesome picture that we bought in Belize:


Coming up soon:


Art made from killer Better Homes and Gardens book covers found for .50 each at the flea market. Also coming up soon, installation of the glass tile behind my Klimt picture in the living room.

Guest Bedroom Design Challenge

I swear I didn't die, I had the February blues and spent most of my spare time wrapped up in a Snuggie while watching TV. Or playing in this:


But the sun is shinning and the days are getting longer so I'm inspired again.

So I have this guest bedroom; a tiny little room that gets tons of great sunlight but it's untouched since our move.



I can't buy new furniture or paint and have a budget of about $300 (high class!). But I have a great head's start. I already own the curtain fabric and the two accent fabrics as well as the bedside lamp. All I need to purchase are pillows, a bedspread, wall paper, a overhead light and a crazy piece of art. It can be done!

Here are some super rapid sketches of what's in my head:



This whole design started brewing the day I found this lamp at an antiques mall in Duncannon, PA almost three years ago:



These are the fabrics I've gathered from various places:


The damask is a tissue paper that I would like to decoupage into a piece of crazy art in a gilded type frame. Something like this:



The other 2 fabrics are for curtains and for stretched fabric art in the manner of:


I can't decide between these two wall papers, both from the extensive Classic Wall Coverings, Inc:



The red damask is right on in color but it may get a little too red and yellow in there with the curtains, accent art and these amazing pillows from from the awesome etsy artist, This Little Home:



Still to do is to find a black overhead light that won;t cost $7000:
(i love you i love you i love you)
and the bedspread... Oh yeah, and to actually install this. There aren't enough hours in the day...

Tattoo Round Two

More West Virginia Tattoos for a friend. This time it had to incorporate trout fishing. I learned two things from this exercise:
1. Drawing fish and/or fishermen is incredibly hard. Big fail on that, but any good tattoo artist would redraw. It's the design I do. Aint no artist.
2. I am tired of the blue and green color pencils

This one isn't for the fish tattoo, it's for my sister. This is my memory of a special camping spot at Otter Creek:


And these are the fishy tattoos:

Great Things are Coming

Why is crafting feeling like a chore lately? Oh yeah, because I have several more rooms worth of curtain sewing to do, uuuuuugg.
I got that chop saw for christmas! Yahoooooo, so tons of crafts are brewing, but lately I've needed my Sundays for sleeping.
I'm in the middle of a birdy craft, but it's under construction.
The big news is the box of glass tile that I liberated from the dumpster at work. 20 or so square feet of this stuff!




I'd like to make some necklaces out of the super beautiful tiles but my soldering iron experiments this morning were a big fail :( I got to figure out how to either
drill a hole into glass or how to adhere metal onto glass.

I am going to tile behind my lovely Klimt painting in the living room with the 2x's and 4x's. I laid it out on the floor today just to work out the details:









So, I can not wait to lay this pattern permanently. Tune in soon (hopefully).

Shower Curtain Curtains

I apologize for being so long in between entries, the holidays and all. . .

I saw these 100% cotton shower curtains at WalMart. That got me thinking. . . they're cotton, they're cute, they're presewn, they come with hooks. . . what's stopping them from being living room curtains? With just a few alterations, NOTHING is stopping them. And they are so much cheaper than buying regular curtains.



I have two large living room windows- 60" wide by 48" high. One shower curtain covers one window. 60" is the max width that you could use shower curtains for, however, they work great for long windows.

Step 1:
Fold curtains in half and cut down the long length of the cloth


Step 2:
Measure your length and cut- my windows were 48" so I cut at 51". That left me with a lot of seam allowance.



Step 3:
Press your seams. Fold over and press, fold over a 2nd time and press. That's the great thing about converting these curtains because you only have 2 sides to press and sew.


Step 4:
Sew


Step 4: Finished!


Just look at those cute hooks- and they come with the curtain! So easy:

Reusable Christmas Wrapping

Several years ago my mom came up with the genius idea- cloth Christmas bags. No more waste on Christmas morning; no more paper or gift bags, no more spending all that time wrapping presents and using tape. Instead, she bought a bunch of different Christmas fabrics and sewed bags of all sizes. After everyone is finished opening presents we just fold them up and use them again.

Sewing Christmas bags is very fast and easy. You can make 1 in about 10 minutes, really! Here is my process:

1. Cut fabric according to the size of present you want to wrap. Put the fold on the bottom or one of the sides, it doesn't really matter:


2. Fold over the top seam just once and steam into place. Make the fold about 1" or more:


3. Sew up the sides:


4. Make a little cut in the middle of the top fold:


4. Then sew up the top seam:


5. Next cut some ribbon long enough to be pushed through the top seam. Take a ball point pen and with the tip, pierce through the middle of the ribbon:


6. Push through the seam:


7: Finished!


8: Throw your presents into their bags and your done:

Changing Table Organizer

My final pre-birth craft for Little Sherri comes in the form of an over-the-changing-table-organizer. It has pockets for bottles and monkeys- the essentials for changing a baby, or so I assume.

To "picture frame" a decorative element you need a right-angle square and a marker:

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Cut off your angle, repeat all around:





The pockets sure did take a while to figure out. I tried about three different styles but every single one looked a little too ruffly- no one knows what the baby is going to be yet so it was best to not make anything too girly.