Goodies! And the master plan for the goodies

As a treat to myself for completing the 3 Day I got myself a box full of goodies. Now what goodies are in the box you may be asking. And what are you planning to do with whatever is hiding in the box? Never fear all shall be revealed!

Have you seen the felted rugs that look like rocks? Like this one from VivaTerra

I absolutely love it, but there is no way that I can afford it. The 3' by 5' one is almost $500! As I said I love it and it would make an awesome little rug for in my kitchen area or even in the bathroom, but not as a bath mat. So why not make my own? And while I'm at it I would love for it to have a more organic shape to it. Which as I kept searching I came along some by Ronel Jordaan. You can see them by looking under the products link and then the floor link. It appear to have the more organic feel that I'm wanting! And all of this leads me to the box. And the giggles I got from opening it.

Still all squished in the box, but not for long...

And yep, I've already started this project. It is going to be a more tedious project, but I am determined to finish it. The bases of the stones are made from wool yarn from my stash wrapped in layers of wool roving from The Sheep Shed Studio. The mix I got was the black tones mill ends and I blended some of the mill ends using Tangie's cat brush to get varied shades of blacks/greys/off whites. And if anyone is ever thinking of doing something similar, you can felt the balls in the washing machine! Which is what I am planning for a majority of the rest of my felt rocks. A few of them I will hand to get the shape that I want, but doing it that way takes some time.

After taking it out of the bags it took up a good portion of the bed.

And the assortment of dyesoppers to do an easy kid friendly project with

Some of the mill ends might end up as dye experiment projects, but that will be a story for another day.

New Storage

My desk was looking rather sad recently with my makeshift storage of which there are no pictures for very good reasons. Things were being stored in cardboard boxes and water bottles with the tops cut of. Really not a pretty sight. I have decided that my little craft area needed some help and went with a black/white/blue color theme. 

First off was marker storage. The inside bight still be brown cardboard, but the outside looks pretty and that's what really matters. And it is made from poptart boxes.

Next up was the colored pencils:

She was in my photo area and was rather annoyed that I needed the space until...

She figured out what they were and started trying to eat them. Thus ended pencil storage photo time

Yes, my cat is a pencil eater. At least when they are just laying around on the desk. When they are all together she leaves them alone except when I tempt her.

And a picture of the all storage including two boxes. I ran out of blue ribbon, but have more on the way.

Kusudama

I finished! Instead of watching bad movies on Netflix, I noticed that Ghost Whisperer was on and decided to watch that instead. I think this took me around two hours total, but there was some waiting for glue to dry, making sure the cookies in the oven didn't burn, getting rice cooking and a few other distractions along the way. But it is done! And Tangie took a bite out of it, but it was fixable as well! 

The biggest challenge that I ran into while working was that some of the pages were so darn fragile! But I guess you can't expect too much from a falling apart book that was printed in 1844. Yep, 1844. It is one old book. My apologies to anyone who is offended by reusing a book that is already damaged beyond repair and yes, I do know some people who are offended by stuff like this. Seriously though, if I tried to fold some of the 2 inch by 2 inch squares it just fell to pieces. Lucky for me, I cut some extra squares so all was good. I think I am going to use the two ribbon tails to tie a bow at the bottom.

And because I just can't leave you with a single picture, or rather the only one that came out halfway descent (thank you rainy weather), here is a picture of my stays mockup.

I am going to need to take the side seams in a tiny bit from the front piece so I get a gap between center front because it meets and you need the gap to get the lift/shelf effect of the time period. But that's easy and I might wait until after I cut the fashion fabric and get the lining together because it might just be that the mockup fabric stretched some.

An Old Book Gets New Life

The sad condition of the book, which looks better in the picture than in person

I have this poor old book that has seen better days. Like, has REALLY seen better days as the pages are falling out (and missing) and the cover is flaking off piece by piece. It is pretty much unsalvageable at this point and instead of tossing it or recycling it or whatever, I figured that it would make some fun decor for around my place. Well, I'm planning on turing what is still bound into an altered book/altered journal and using all the pages that are loose into fun decor. The first project I'm working on is a kusudama flower ball.

For the ball I need to fold 60 square sheets of paper, five per flower, to make all 12 flowers. Well, I have 7 pieces folded as of this moment, but am going to work on more while I watch really bad horror movies via netflix. Yeah, I will totally admit to that.

Sense and Sensibility Underthings Pattern

I also got my Sense and Sensibility Underthings pattern before I ran out the door this past weekend and managed to whip up a mock up of the short stays in a couple of hours completely by hand stitching. It fit rather well and I'm hoping to cut the fashion fabric in the next couple of days and get going on the project. Sadly, the paper cranes were left at my parents when I went home this weekend, so they are on partial hold until I make it back to snag them, but that won't be for at least a month because I leave to meet my little sister in 16 days!

Invasion of the Hairpins!

There is seriously an invasion going on over here because I didn't have a pace to store them. At school they lived in one of the pockets in  my dance bag and at home they lived in an empty container in the bathroom, but here it was a free for all. And something had to be done about it. Enter the empty fruit drop tin...

Not my tin, but this is what it looked like. Mine ad a few more nicks and dents in it

Ok, cute tin and all, but kinda blah for my tastes. I pulled out some scrapbook paper, a gold Sharpie, some glue and went to work. This is what I came up with, the flowers don't exactly match, but it was the best I could do. And yep, the flower is very similar to the decoration post original flowers.

Hair pin tin

If When I get around to cleaning off the top of my dresser I will let you see the tin in its new home. For now, it is living on my desk. What do you think?

Decorating Part 2

I feel like there needs to be some cheesy music after that, like the dun dun DUNNNNNN kind of music. I hope you all get what I mean by that. And on a side note, the word cheesy looks really weird today.

So to the point of this post, I have some more flowers made and go figure at first I couldn't recreate how I did it so I ended up with a rose like flower. Then I kind of remembered after pulling out the flower I showed you before. The tally is now original flowers: 5 and rose flowers and buds: 5 (one of the rose buds is hiding out inside of the smallest original flower). And I still have two smaller flowers from the blue to play with.

Close up of the roses minus the bud that is hanging with the other flowers. The big rose still needs a bit of work because it doesn't want to stay in a more closed position.

I'm thinking that orange roses might also be in the crazy flower mix as well as some green roses which are all cut out. Heck I might just make a mix from the odds and ends of card stock I have hanging around. 

And because I haven't shown the trouble maker/my helper in bit

I really wanted to post this yesterday, but I was out all day at a commercial shoot which was awesome! I will definitely let you all know when it airs, but all I can say about it right now was it is funny how long it can take to make a bread wrapper/bag look camera ready.

Decorating, decorating, decorating

Take a wild guess what this post is about. I bet you will never be able to figure it out!

Oh, you guessed it? Huh. So as you know know this post is going to have something to do about decorating. As much as I love the fish art in my place, it's not me. So I need to girly the place up. Cue the curtains that I was planning on using for my regency dress. Those are being saved from destruction and are being used as the manufacturer intended. Now I will admit that it is only because I found where I had stored quite a bit of a heavier light weight linen. YAY! Natural fibers!

Ribbon is temporary

Now I couldn't just leave the curtains plain and white cause that would defeat the purpose of trying to girl up the place a bit. I want flowers! But there is no way I am going to buy fake flowers. Yes they are pretty, but I want to customize them. Well I have bright colored card stock, scissors, glue and a host of other items.

It is a bit brighter than the photo

How do you like the flower so far? I have three more cut out of the bright blue that I haven't edged in gold yet and I have some purple,green and pink that I think might look good with them. I'm also thinking about doing a bunch of red flowers for my dresser or to be interchangeable with the blue/purple/pink/green when I want a change of decor. Though if I want to make a LOT more, I might invest in the Tim Holtz Flower dies because cutting that many flowers could get slightly annoying. Or maybe I'll just make a stencil for myself.

Now how is she planning on decorating the curtains? It is a valid question. Am I going to scatter them all over the curtain? Nope, though I did think about it. Am I going to attach them along the bottom edge? No cause I'm pretty sure Tangie would try to eat them. I am either going to cluster some along the top where the curtain is shadily attached to cover that or I will add some to a tie for when I would like to let more light in. As shown by my quick sketch. What do you think?

The scribblies are where the flowers would go.