What's Going On

NO  DISASSEMBLE

Remember the Ikea FORHOJA kitchen cart that I was using as a sideboard type thing before  I built the apothecary unit?

This is it, all disassembled. It's already been sanded down fully, and given a first coat of stain. Judging by how the staining is going, it may need 25 coats. We'll see.

What else am I doing right now?

• Crocheting a blue shawl
• Crocheting a multi-colored sweater
• Painting the legs of a little nightstand-table I have sitting around in my bedroom (finished)
• Sewing 5 cushion covers for a friend's couch
• Working on a painting I'm making for a friend for Giftmas

What's Next After That? 

• Refinishing my bedroom nightstand
• Refinishing an old wooden plant stand
• Crocheting a rug for my roommate, as soon as we find the right yarn
• Crocheting some slippers, maybe 
• Sewing a skirt or top for myself out of the leftover fabric from a dress I made recently 

What's New? 

I finally bought myself a new sander!  My old one was a work horse, but it was too big, heavy, and high-powered for me to wield safely anymore - it shook me and hurt me so much my hands and arms would be unusable for days after, every time I used it.  I got myself a little $23 Porter & Cable in-line palm sander, and it's GREAT!  Much more easily controlled, and it does as much work as my big one ever did - surprising, for such a little, lightweight thing.  Yay!  

More news on the FORHOJA as it develops.  Meanwhile, here's a crocheted scarf I just finished yesterday: 

ooh, ahh

Some Sewing!

I have new furniture!!!  And I finally got a job!!!   More on that soon...er...as soon as I get this disaster-zone of a house cleaned up and can get some nice pics.  Meanwhile:

Yesterday I made a dress for a 1950s-themed July 4th garden party for next weekend.  I made the pattern myself, based off of similar dresses from the 50s I've seen online.  I wish I'd been able to make the skirt fuller, but I botched the top  (the entire top is all one piece) and had to re-cut it. I still have accessories to put together and a hat to trim up;  pics of it after the party.

Here's the muslin that I draped up on my mannequin while developing the pattern, pinned together and covered with Sharpie notes. I did this back in March; when I made the dress yesterday, I actually had to bring both dress and mannequin down by two whole sizes, yay!

Earlier this month: 

I needed new clothing for my new workplace:  my last job was jeans-and-t-shirts casual, and after five years, I had NO nice, office-y clothes to wear.  I'd also been thinking for more than a year about making some of my old batik sarongs into cute tops, so I put the two ideas together and made some blouses for work at the beginning of June:

A simple peasant blouse with elastic neck
and cuffs, made with my medieval chemise pattern 

A brown leafy tunic with flutter sleeves, adapted from
Simplicity 2690

A little skirt, using the fringe edge of the
sarong for the hem and patch pockets. 

A drawstring "pillowcase" top (not
for work), made in the same way I made
 the top of this set of PJs back in March, from
a pair of old wrap pants. 

In other news: 

I am also a redhead now.  My hair [was] nearly black, naturally, but I started going gray in my TEENS.  It's been many varieties of dark auburn over the years, as well as cherry red, navy blue,  and several purples;  I decided to start growing out my gray - because I've always wanted, since I was a kid, to have loooong, white hair when I'm an old lady (because of the fairy godmother character in the book The Princess and the Goblin).  Since it's easier to maintain root color updates on lighter hair, and also to blend gray/white in with lighter colors, I decided why not go balls-out ginger for a while before finally fading/growing it out?  :) 

I Made A Thing!

Actually, I made a bunch of things.  I made my bedroom clean. (And re-arranged the furniture).  And then I made my sewing room clean. (And rearranged the shelving).   Pics of all that soon.

For now, though:  my sewing chair reeeeally needed an update.  I re-covered the back of it when I brought it home from the as-is bin at Ikea, waaaaay back in October of 2011.  The back fabric was still okay (aside from a couple of holes), but the seat had never been recovered, and it had definitely seen better days. It was covered with paint and loose threads, and the fabric had been worn shiny in a couple of large, butt-cheek-shaped spots.

Before: 

Oh, also?  It was...beige.  So office-y. 

After: 

Is that not some crazy grandma-riffic fabric?  Hee.  I've had this (printed, drapery-weight, cotton) fabric sitting in a bin for a couple of years, and though it's pretty horrible, I couldn't bring myself to get rid of it.  It's BLUE!  Like 90% of my stuff is blue.  And it's fun-horrible, tee-hee.

Both the seat cover and the back are just slip-

covers closed with a drawstring underneath.
Ikea's seat cover was permanently affixed to the
under-side of the seat.  I left the beige cover on
the back, because it was the only thing covering

the bare foam. 

The back also has a discreet zipper on one side

edge. When I made the original beige cover, I had

to slip-stitch the open side closed by hand (because the top of the back is wider than the 

bottom). This time I just happened to have a zipper

that kinda coordinated. :) 

The whole slipcover project only took me about an hour.

That was after an hour of ripping four years' worth of sewing detritus from inside the wheels.  It rolls again! Yay! Ew.

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More Clothing!

What finally got me off my ass and sewing the purple bathrobe I posted the other day?  I'll be driving to Dallas this weekend with friends for a spa day at King Spa & Waterpark. I. CANNOT. WAIT.  I mean, can you imagine a cooler place to hang out?  It's a spa WITH SLIDES.  Seriously, you guys.

So, in addition to the pretty robe, I whipped together a couple of other things for this coming weekend:

Pants To PJs

In my SCA travels, I frequently end up in hotel rooms during and after events - long trips often require a break and a hot shower before the road trip back, and sometimes events are rained (or frozen, or baked) out and a group of us will end up bailing on the camping idea and just hotel it for the event.  And I'm always the dump truck in the ratty old Iron Maiden tshirt and men's boxers, hehe.  So I decided to do something about that for this coming weekend.

This set was made from an old pair of wrap pants I purchased a million years ago and then never wore because they were too short.  I cut the legs off and hemmed the resulting shorts, then made the top out of the pant legs that I had removed, like this: 

(I sewed the rectangular pants legs together at the sides, hemmed the top, and
ran a single drawstring through both front and back at the top, to form straps). 

And Of Course, 

A girl needs a swimsuit at a spa/waterpark (spaterpark?)  While I'm an admitted swimsuit junkie, I currently don't have any that fit me properly AND that I wanted to actually wear.  This weekend is an event:  it requires a new suit, dangit!  Tee-hee.  

After testing out patterns on a couple of old tshirts (and assing them up completely. Three times), I decided to go with an "Infinity Dress" style top to wear with some plain black suit bottoms I already have:  

I used a pattern based on the one in this blog post.  The only changes I made were to shorten the skirt drastically and gather the top edge a bit so it would flare over hips and stomach, omit the waistband entirely, and to shorten the "tube top" section into one that would function AS a waistband and also cover just my bust instead of my entire torso.  The fabric is a slinky, shiny, jersey knit that I've had laying around for years.  The teal-and-purple knotwork design at the bottom is printed directly on the selvage edge of the fabric. 

It's hard to see the upper edge of the back in these pics, since my mannequin, Violet, is wearing a black tshirt at the moment (I really need to make her a proper cover), so I put a red arrow in the second picture so you can see how high the back is.  

I'm doing a great job not sewing for a while, huh?  

FUCK. 

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It Goes "Ding" When There's Stuff!

I wasn't going to sew anything for one month after I got back from SCA Gulf Wars, since I'd been sewing practically nonstop for four months straight; but I did break that rule for this, yesterday:

No kidding, I've had this purple jersey knit fabric sitting in a bag for _over a year_ waiting for me to "just be done with this one project" before I'd start it.  Meanwhile, the knit bathrobe I made for myself in 2008 was literally full of holes (puppy) and falling apart at the seams.  So I made this one to replace it.  The pattern is the same as the Japanese clothing I've made in the past for Sir Takuan's samurai costumes in the SCA, and also the one I used for my short, silk robe/cover-up last year.

SO COMFY WOW.  

I've also been working in the yard - cleaning up, and building new garden beds in the backyard.  This is the year I get back out into the garden, yay!  I'm in the midst of it this weekend; I'll have pics when I'm done.  (More details on my garden blog).  

Don't worry, I'm up to my EYEBALLS in stuff I'm working on in the house, too, and I'll have posts and pics later this week! I also have a spiffy new phone coming in the mail in a couple of days - with a better camera on it!  :D 

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A Wee Fix For A Huge Problem

Problem: 

Of all of my little cosmetic pouches (I collect them, for travelling and camping purposes), not ONE was the *perfect* size for the makeup I actually carry around with me day-to-day.

Solution: 
1.  A $1.50 quilting "fat quarter" (an 18x22" quarter of a yard of 44" quilt cotton, called that because it's just a teense over an actual quarter. See here).

2.  A $2, 7" zipper.

3.  About ten minutes.

The round compact fits, but if I had this to do over again I'd have made the thing about 1/4" taller so it wouldn't bulge when the compact is in it.

Otherwise, this is perfect!

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The Slowest Couch Update EVER

So, sometime around April or May of 2013, I nabbed a sofa off the side of the road, and, looking back over this blog, I realize I never actually TOLD you about it. Oops.  The short version:  it was free, one arm was moldy and gross and I spent about three weeks cleaning, bleaching, and fixing up the fabric on that arm, and it came out great. Stained, but still great.  The couch looks to be an old Ikea piece - I can't find anything like it in the catalogs for the past five years, so it's at least older than that.  It came with two seat cushions, and no back cushions - no cover, either, just the basic under fabric that Ikea furniture comes with.

Fast forward to...yesterday.  Tired of both sitting on the floppy, thin cushions this sofa came with, and of that damned Day Sofa from World Market (I never like anything I do with it, and every time I decide to fix it up I get bored with it before I'm even finished, anymore. It's in the garage now), I took the loooong seat cushion that I made for it in 2012 apart, and used them to build and bulk up the white sofa's seat cushions.

Creating a long cushion for the convertible Day Sofa. 

All four of these pieces were made by slicing a pair of very thick salvaged seat cushions in half horizontally.

For the white sofa, I sliced the two larger seat pieces in half horizontally again, angling them to make a wide wedge, to build up the white sofa's cushions all over, but with the thickest part at the back to help reduce the steeply pitched angle of the sofa seat (I couldn't get up!)

Trying out pieces and shaping. 

A pic of the dry-run, with the wedges, a bit of rolled-up batting at the front edge to soften the transition between pieces, and a thin layer of batting (later doubled) wrapped around the whole thing to smooth out the seams between pieces.

After I was sure of the result, I used spray-adhesive to stick all the parts together and smoothed out all the edges.

Then I used an old cotton sheet to make a cover for each cushion, to hold it all in place.

Yes, I fixed the wrinkliness of the one on the right. It was just on weird. 

Now THAT'S what I call seat cushions.  They're about 2" thicker than the old cushions, smooth, soft, and squishy.  They look a bit slapdash in the pic, here, but keep in mind, this whole sofa is meant to be used with a slipcover, and the seat cushions are the same way.  This thing is so comfy with the deeper, softer cushions, that when I lay on it to chill later in the evening, I fell asleep right away and woke up covered with cats.

The next step will be to create back cushions out of the remaining two pieces from the Day Sofa in the top picture. After I'm satisfied with those, I'll be on the hunt for some fabric to cover this entire piece of furniture.  I can't wait!  This thing has needed a lot of work, but I adore the shape of it, and I'm really excited about getting it covered.  :)


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Cheater Post

Holy COW do I have some updates.  But at the moment, this week, I'm up to my ears in social engagements and catching-up with other things, so for now, here's some more jewelry I made last week when I was on my jewelry-making kick:

Iolite and glass

anklet for my sex!boots (wore to a wedding recently)

tiny blue glass drop at the clasp

Lots of blue drops happened.  The
moonstone bracelet is old, but I made
it, too, back in the day. 

By the way?  Fuck the camera on my phone. 

An old beaded memory wire bracelet that I
made fit again.  

pink and black glass with silver, earrings 

ipnk and black necklace to go with the earrings;
I made the little charm loop in the center, too. 

One last phone-cam pic of a "ruby" and "topaz" + "gold"
costume piece I made for the SCA

Some of the blue and silver beaded jewelry here is part of a set I made to wear with a specific outfit, that I'm sewing myself, and which I haven't talked about, lol. Sorry.  Been posting about that over at my SCA sewing blog, since it's clothing stuff; you can read those posts here.  Should be a finished product photo in a couple of days.  :)


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A Quick Check-In (To Laugh At Other People)

I'm pounding away on the SCA projects, and I'm also right in the middle of building a table for my electronic keyboard, as well as a new workbench for my shop! Whee! Busy!

If you'd like to see the SCA stuff, it's over here.  

The table and bench will be up as soon as they're finished, and I'm hoping to get at least one of them done by this weekend.

Meanwhile, I went to Texas Thrift Store last night, killing time before I had to be somewhere else.  TTS is one of my favorite thrift stores in town.  It  was recently featured on Refashionista and is mentioned often on Thrift Horror.  I follow both blogs, and I have to say, Thrift Horror in particular cracks me the f#ck UP, often first thing in the morning when I need it most.

Because schadenfreude and coffee are just a match made in heaven, dontchaknow.


Anyhow, I discovered a couple of my own thrift horrors, and I thought I'd share them with you: 

I'm sure someone made this with love.  Or something.


Just...why?


Was the bottle cold?  Do you shake this at football games when your team scores?


Who's out there scouring thrift stores for a beer bottle covered in dirty yarn?


It's too bad the bottle isn't blue.

I very nearly said something out loud when I saw this.  Then I had to pretend to admire it while I made sure the guy admiring a dish drainer four feet away wasn't watching me take pictures of thing, lol.  (I do, actually, often photograph items I'm interested in in a store, so that if I don't buy them, I know what to come back for).

I know they sell lampshades like this, but this one is homemade.  Someone glued a bunch of really cheap polyester rose petals all over this poor bell shade, and then whole roses all the way around the lip, most of which have fallen off.


Also the glue was...greebly...and peeling, and separating from things.  Which I guess was why the thing was falling apart.  I was tempted to buy it and clean it up just to make it feel better.



What I DID buy, though, was a couple of really zesty dresses, one which is fabulous as-is, and the other needs a tiny bit of "refashioning" to be completely fabulous.  I'll show you when I'm done.  It's at the end of  a loooooong to-do list.  :)

Lub yooz!

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An Aside

I have an update for you on the whole light fixtures thing, which will be coming later this week; but in the meantime, I finally attacked my mending pile in the sewing room over the weekend, and wanted to show you a bit of that.   I altered the neckline and sleeves on several shirts, and took in two pair of jeans that were gapping in some very odd places.  I still have lots of mending and alterations to do; but I'm pleased that I got that far!

This was one of the shirts I had on the pile:

(well, almost this shirt - mine has a round lower hem)

I *love* Holy Clothing's stuff.  It's all viscose and rayon, beautifully hand-embroidered, and soooo comfy to wear.  I bought this blouse at the renaissance festival a few years ago, and I've always loved it, but I haven't gotten to wear it much, because of the neckline.

These pics are from HC's website.  The second pic shows my problem:  on me (being a bit, ahem, thicker than the model shown), the neckline was quite a bit higher, and I'm REALLY weird about things on my neck.  I can NOT stand shirts touching my neck at all - I cut the neck off of every t-shirt I buy, before I ever wear them, and I never wear shirts with collars.  I have a standing order that every turtleneck that enters my kingdom  be executed on sight.  (That said, I love cowl-neck things and scarves, because they're soft and drapey, and not restricting at all).

So over the weekend I enlarged the neckline - I zig-zag stitched along the pink dotted line in the third picture above, cut along that line, folded it over, and stitched it down.  Easy peasy. Five minutes.

MUCH better.  *sigh of relief*  I can breathe now.  And that took like NO effort.  Yay!

And now back to your irregularly-scheduled Housey Stuff...


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Success!

As I promised myself, I've hit the ground running after my cruise (after I slept for two days).  SCA's Gulf Wars is in March, and a large percentage of my free time between now and then is going to be devoted to working on my costumes and campsite elements for that event;  but I do have a few things planned around the house.  In fact, last night, after finishing a costume project I've been working on for some months, I hit my craft room like a tornado and cleaned it the heck UP.   I even moved my project board to a new place on the wall (where it'll be more useful), and hung up some new artwork, and a clock.

In the next couple of months, you can expect to see:

• the progress in the craft room, and some more changes to it
• changes to the headboard in the bedroom, as well as the art wall
• a new gallery wall in the hallway next to the living room
• more painted ceilings
• new wall color in the guest bath
• yardwork - can I get the garden going again this year, finally? 
• general house maintenance, including some effort going into saving energy and money on my electric bill, because holy crap. 0_0  

Slowly, but surely.  Incidentally, if you're interested in the SCA costume/reenactment stuff, there's a link to that blog at the top right of this page; or you can visit it here to see what I've been sewing. 

Recipe for Organization

Organized Sewing Patterns (serves 1)

1 file cabinet with broken wheels and lock, free from friend

1 package legal-size hanging file folders

1 package letter-size hanging file folders

1 box of sewing patterns, already organized into manila folders

1 box homemade costume patterns, on various bits of paper and fabric

leftover adhesive-backed door insulation strip

screwdriver

1.   Remove wheels and lock from cabinet.  Use insulation stripping to pad the bottom of the file cabinet edges so it won't scratch the floor. 

2.  Carefully fold and sort costume patterns into folders in top drawer. 

3.  Adjust lower drawer file rack to fit letter-sized folders sideways, and insert regular patterns already in manila folders. 

4.  Recycle empty cardboard boxes, and enjoy your new organized pattern cabinet AND the extra space in the craft room closet! 

And because someone is always curious about this, here's what I do with my store-bought patterns: 

Slice open the pattern jacket, and glue the front to the outside of a folder, and the back to the inside. Label the folder tab, unfold the pattern pieces to fit inside the folder. Done.  Much easier to store and locate them, I feel.  

Resurrection of the Day Sofa

I didn't waste any time putting my World Market sofa back together when that hardware came in the mail.  It  took longer to bring the frame pieces in from the garage than it took to put the arms onto the base.  The back, though, not so much.  Turns out they've tweaked the design of this thing just a tad since I bought mine, and the bolts for the back didn't fit quite right.  They'll be easily replaced at Home Depot on the way home from work later this week, though.

The next step was to create a cushion for the thing (see previous post).

Enter  (1) two salvaged couch seat cushions and (2) an electric turkey knife.  No, I'm not kidding.  A serrated blade cuts foam really well, but a hand-held one leaves little bits and chunks.  Two fast,  reciprocating, serrated blades cut through this stuff like buttah.

cat-approved

Once both cushions were split into four, I cut two of them down to fit the arms of the couch (a little longer, actually, so that the entire finished cushion would be long enough when the couch was laid out flat):

notice the Jiffy Pop Method of  cat deterrent for plants in the background. 

Next step is the cover.  That's going to be made from a cotton upholstery twill that was, actually, once another couch cover - the cover for the seat of the couch, actually, which I had first made into a cushion for this sofa, LOL.  The fabric is in great shape, though it's a tad discolored, as old as it is (and as many dogs as have sat on this couch.  It took a long time to train them to stay off the furniture when no one was looking!)  The inside, however, is still nice and fresh-looking.

The basic idea is a variation of this:

source

The seat cover I'm using is already mostly sewn.  I just have to trim the seams and flip it inside out, shorten it a bit, and throw a zipper into one side.

More on that when it's done. :)


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TER SHERT HERCK Encore

Hey guess what?  I haven't painted the bathroom yet.  I'm better, though - it took nearly two months, but I'm back to my old self...actually, scratch that:  I feel healthier than I've ever felt in as long as I can remember.  It's been nearly three months since I quit smoking, my asthma's pretty much gone, I'm all healed from the narsty lung infection I had in July, and I've been working out like a fiend for the past three weeks.  My voice is back and I'm singing again - and I have a new guitar!  Well, I'm taking care of it for a friend for a while.  At any rate:  I feel awesome, and things are back to normal.  Better than normal!

And yet!  I haven't gotten much done around the house, for the usual reasons:  SCA stuff has been taking precedence.  But I'm way ahead in my sewing, enough that I think that bathroom might get painted next weekend!

In the meantime, I've cut up another shirt.  This one was a crap shirt I made out of a scrap of fabric:

Um...no "before" pic, sorry.  It looked like this, but dark green.  And it was always falling off my shoulders, which was a pain in the ass.

So I braided the top of the neckline, because I still love this braiding technique, and I wanted to give it a try with wider, longer slits.  As you can see here, they're nearly 3" long.  Same distance apart as on the black dress, but in relation to the length of the slits, it works better.

This is the stage at which I go, "GAH!!!"  Except that this is totally normal.  If the fabric between two slits is a loop, then what you're doing here is pulling one loop back through the one before it, and then forward, then pulling the next loop back through the previous one, etc.  Just folding them over each other - the effect looks like a braid.

Well, actually it looks like this until you pull it flat with your fingers.

Okay, that's better, see?

The wider slits were definitely  easier to work with, gathered the fabric up much less, and produced a more even, flatter braid.

However...

Overall, I like the finished product.  A couple of things about the neckline came out...not badly, just not as expected:

1.   It's higher than I wanted.  I like cleavage.  This shirt has no cleavage.


2.   The braid is smaller than I thought it was going to be.  it's about an inch wide, as you can see in the pictures; on the shirt, though, it still looks tiny.  I don't know what to do about that.  I could cut the slits longer still, but then the shirt would draw up even more, so...?

Anyway. I DO like it.






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