The Return of the Return of That Craft Chick

OK so I may or may not have been a little... negligent about updating this blog. In my defense I started uni this year so I've been a bit swamped. It's the first time I've studied full-time since I finished high school almost 8 years ago, and it's been pretty intense. Alongside that, I've moved house (back to my Mum's place), broken up with my boyfriend AND started dating someone new (who is proving to be all I've ever dreamed of, thank you baby). I haven't had a lot of time to craft.

A few weeks back though, I began my mid-year holidays and after reading psychotically for the first few weeks (reading for pleasure in the middle of term makes me feel guilty because I know I should be studying) I started to feel a bit lost. I needed something to do with my hands. Now, I haven't been completely unhandy since the beginning of the year. I've been working on a hanging jewelery box in the garage for a few months now, but I need to get some glass before I can finish it, and glass is a little expensive for now, especially since I have nowhere to put the thing once it's finished anyway.

So the other day I grabbed some things for the seemingly bottomless 'To Be Fixed Bag' and did what useful stuff I could. By the time evening rocked around I was in a sewing mood and had nothing left to fix. I looked at my sewing machine and saw this:

White. Bland. Boring. Also torn:

I decided I needed to begin a campaign of beautifying. In the morning. At that moment I was too tired to think. Of course, by the time I got to bed I was back into planning mode and couldn't sleep because of all the ideas running through my brain.

In the morning I trawled by fabric box (a wicked old New Kids on the Block blanket box my cousin gave me when I was 10). I grabbed some fabric I'd picked up at Spotlight a few months earlier. It had been in the scraps and offcuts bin and I bought it for $3.75. I bought a half-metre of quilting cotton in a contrasting colour (I didn't need that much but half a metre is the smallest allowable cut), and a cotton cord and toggle and set to work. By the end of the day, this is what I had:

There's a gap at the back so I can get my fingers under the handle, a pocket in the front big enough to hold the instruction manual, power cords and foot pedal, and the bottom can be tightened so it doesn't flop around, unlike the old one.

All in all I'm pretty happy with my work. It's not much, but it's something, and it's kept me occupied for a few days. Now I just have to work on crossing off all the projects on my craft favourites list ;)

The Iron Craft Craft Challenge

I know, I know, I still haven't posted a photo of my dress yet. Every time I wear the dress somewhere I forget to take my camera, and every time I remember my camera I'm not wearing the dress, and every time I have both on me, I don't have someone else to take a photo. It's starting to drive me a little nuts, actually, because I have clothes I want to put on ebay and I can't just whack them on there without photos :P

I may just take a pic of myself in the mirror in the dress. It's probably simpler, but it looks so nice all puffed out, plus my room is a hole. As evidenced in this piccie here, of something I did manage to make over the holiday break (break from what?):

Yes, that's right, a zombie dress. Based off this little t-shirt here (PS, how adorable is that kid!). Here's a close-up of the front part of the dress:

And here's where my butt goes:

 I had a cotton minidress lying around that I'd gotten for free with a magazine. I laid it out flat on the ground and spray painted it green, making sure that I coated the bottom of the dress with more paint than the top so there was a graded look. I did manage to drip some paint on the dress (I find spray paint near impossible to use) but I think it suits it. Then I printed out some zombie silhouettes onto transfer paper, and ironed them onto the dress at the bottom.

Things I would do differently: I would make sure to use fabric paint instead of spray paint. I am a knob who bought cheap green spray from the local $2 shop, not thinking that 'enamel' is probably not best used on clothing. The dress is a bit stiff but it'll live. Also ironing the transfers onto enamel destroyed my iron. *sadface*
Also I would probably just do as the original t-shirt and cut out zombies for use as templates. The transfers didn't go well with the stiffened, yet still slightly stretchy cotton, so the zombies are surrounded by haloes of plastic.

In any case, while I haven't been exactly productive lately, I do plan to make some changes. I've set myself a goal this year to make at least one thing every week, and coincidentally within the first week of the year I found The Iron Craft Craft Challenge.
Basically, they will post a challenge every week: a pattern, a plan, or even just a theme, and people in the challenge will have a week to make it (or something in the theme of it). It seems to me like a good way to expand my crafting abilities. I run out of steam if I'm left to my own devices - I run in too many directions at once, and sometimes run out of ideas and have severe crafter's block. This will fix that.

The other good thing is that it will give me something to blog about, so I won't have so much blank space floating around here. And if I make anything that I think will be easy enough to explain, I will post tutorials, coz I'm nice like that.

So join me, one and all, as I try to focus some of my insanity with my hands!

PS. Totes promise to post a photo of that dress. Eventually.

A Cushion, A Needlebook, A T-shirt and a Dress All Walk Into a Bar...

OK I actually have some Finished Projects for once!

Two days ago I got impatient and gave my friends their Christmas presents. Partly because I couldn't contain my excitement about the Pingu cushion, and partly because I was excited to get mine as well, since I knew what at least one of them was going to be.

So first: 

 

Noot noot, motherfucker!

And for his girlfriend, the Twilight-lover:

and

 

 

The Pingu pillow was made by reversing a picture I had found on the net AGES ago and printing it into transfer paper, which I then ironed onto some white fabric. A cushion is damn easy to make, so I won't bother going into it here unless requested, but the hard part was finding some good fabric. It's for a guy so I didn't want flowers or anything, and it was pretty much impossible to find some cool printed fabric that didn't have flowers or baby stuff all over it. I settled on khaki sharks because, I mean, khaki sharks, yo.

Then I discovered that I had made the cover a bit big for the pillow form I had (I always make things too big, out of fear it'll be too small if I follow my measurements) so I whacked a Coraline button on the back and made a button loop out of embroidery thread. It looks pretty wicked.

The top is a plain grey tee I bought at Kmart. I whacked a Quileute High Protectors badge on some transfer paper (reversed, of course) and ironed it into it. I also put a qr code on the back left as a tag:

 

I don't know if she's noticed it yet but it's going to be cool when she does, especially if she recognises it and checks it out without asking me :D

I also finally managed to finish the dress I've been making in sewing class, which finished last week by the way. It felt like it took forever, but that was because a) it takes an era to cut material, and b) I made a calico version first, to make sure it fit. Which it didn't. But I made it anyway. 

The lining made up for some of the bigness, but I ended up having to take the dress in anyway, by about 4 inches. I didn't bother cutting the excess away though, because my weight goes up and down like Oprah's and it's possible I'll need some more of that fabric in a few months time.

In any case it looks totally adorable, but since I finished it yesterday when no one was at home, I couldn't take a photo of it, so I'm going to wear it to a party today and get Mum to take a photo of me that I'll then post next time. I've given up asking The Man to take photos - he removes heads and limbs and has people off-centre and then insists that there's nothing wrong with the photo. Hmph. Men.

Anyway I still have plenty of stuff to make, including a car organiser for my best friend, a gardening apron for my Mum, a jacket for my brother and a wine-carrier for The Man's folks. So I'll be posting a bit more later on this week.

Ta-ra!

Well That Was a Long Hiatus - EDITED

OK so I took a little longer to get back into the swing of things than I thought I would.
It's been a hard few weeks for me. I've recently been diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder (also known as Manic Depression) and ADHD and it's been a constantly changing cocktail of drugs to try, in hopes of making me somewhat more... I hesitate to use the word 'normal'... Functional? It's been pretty freaking horrific at times, and I've come closer to death than I feel comfortable with, and it's only now that I feel like I'm getting back on track, which is sort of strange, since I'm not actually on any drugs at all.
In any case, I want this blog to be mainly about my often hilariously awful attempts at making stuff, and not so much about how shit I am/was feeling, so I'm just going to say that the above issues have been the main cause of my lengthy absence, and I apologise.

Now to the good stuff:

I've made very few things lately, for the reasons listed above, but in the last few days I feel like I've been kicked in the arse by the craft fairy and I've started making a few things. The craft fairy has appeared in the guise of a girl my own age, named, well, I don't know what she's named. She calls herself Corvus Tristis after the Grey Crow, and I like that, since the bird I've always identified with is the Australian Magpie - a passeriform bird, as are all true crows. Plus crows are just fucking awesome anyway!

She's given me the urge to make the combs I've been planning for months now. I've so far made only one, for reasons I will outline below. For now - LOOK AT MY PRETTY COMB!

I bought the comb ages back in a set of 8 or 10 for this specific purpose in mind. I may have made a mistake buying them from the cheap store though, because as soon as I put the hot glue on it and whacked the flowers on, the comb itself started melting. If you look close enough at the actual comb you can see that the tines aren't quite as aligned as they should be. That's because I had to push them into place while holding all the flowers in place and not burning the crap out of my hands. I did well enough that the comb will stay together and will stay in my hair, but they're not good enough for me to sell. I'll have to buy some slightly better ones for next time. For now I'll stick with the cheapies while I work on styles and techniques. They look nice enough anyway. I might make some for friends too.

Corvus has also inspired me to try making everyone's Christmas presents this year instead of buying them (except books, I will be buying books as always and they totally don't count). It should be a lot easier on my pocket (not that I carry my wallet in my pocket but you get the point) and it sounds like a good way to focus myself and have a bit of fun as well. Last night when I couldn't sleep I made a present for Crystal. Behold: the REDACTED, shamelessly filched from the mind of someone else (probably Corvus again).

Yeah, sorry guys, my real life friends don't really check out this blog, so I wasn't too worried about posting pictures of upcoming presents. Then the next post came along and I'm directing everyone here to post, so I've had to take the photos and all mention of what they are of, away. I will put them back up after Christmas :P


I had (and have) plenty of felt lying around, and Crystal loves REDACTED, and also sewing, and I thought it was an item that combined the two quite well. I also plan to make a AHEMHEM WHAT'S THAT OVER THERE? for her, using transfer paper and an image I flogged from someone on Craftster (though she found it through Google Images, so I don't think it counts as flogging). I'm going to have to print the picture on regular paper at least 85 times before I try it on transfer paper though - that shit is expensive.
I'm going to make all the girls personalised gift bags too. I don't really see guys using bags very often - in fact they seem to be allergic - doing all that they can to avoid using one, even when it's downright inconvenient to do anything else. Plus most of my male friends live with their parents still, and won't even be able to use a bag for grocery shopping, so they will just get their stuff wrapped up or something.

OK. As far as regular sewing goes. I have been doing sewing classes with a girl from work, and they're going pretty well. We went through WEA, the local adult learning centre, and it's a course that's designed for people with no experience at all with sewing machines. We both do have a little bit of experience - I did sewing in school, and she has made one or two small non-clothing items - but we wanted to go as simple as possible to make sure we didn't go out of our depth and waste the tutoring fee. We both picked out our simple patterns from Spotlight (and they're actually pretty similar, which isn't surprising, really, since we're quite alike in our fashion tastes) and the third class will be on tomorrow (after which we'll be going to the pub as a farewell drinks night for me). We've both been pretty capable of keeping up with the instructions, and I haven't actually had to ask for any help yet - which is strange since I think if I didn't have the option available I would have needed help. In any case, I'm currently in the process of making a calico version of the dress to make sure it fits ok, and then I'll know what needs fixing for the end product.

And finally, for Halloween this year I did a bit of decorating, but with such a small house I was left with few options. I did get an awesome idea from Cut Out And Keep to make a Halloween Wreath for the front door. I grabbed a wire coathanger and bent it into a circle, then cut dark grey plastic bags into strips and slipknotted them onto the hanger. Once the hanger was full, I hot-glued some fake flowers I had previously spray-painted black (it's ok not to cover them completely in paint, in fact, I think it looks better that way) and also added some cobwebs I made with the hot glue. And voila! One Halloween Wreath:

 

And that's what I've been doing when I wasn't here. Stay tuned for a competition, bitchez!

OK I swear I haven't abandoned this blog, or, FUCK LIQUID NAILS (UPDATED)

I know, I know, it's been AGES since I last blogged, but it's not because I haven't been doing anything (I totally have, strangely enough) it's because I can't find my motherfucking usb cable anywhere. It's like it's disappeared into fat air and fat air won't give it back.

Epic, epic sadface. :'(

Until I find it again or buy a new one, I'll have to just talk about what I've been doing, and y'all can just use your imaginations.

Since I last blogged about painting my dresser so beautifully, I felt the fires of inspiration take a hold of my soul and when I walked in the bathroom and saw the ugly "pine" (read: chipboard) cabinet with the missing door and melamine drawer base, I decided to get rid of it (read: take it to Mum's) and swap it for something better (read: take the one from Mum's garage).

The one in Mum's garage was in worse condition than I remembered, probably because like me my mother likes to start projects and then gets distracted or lazy and takes ages to finish them. So I grabbed the pieces of the cabinet, found the awesome metal ruler and took to the sky-blue gloss enamal like Conan with a motherfucking sword. Except slightly less kill-y. Also I stopped for coffee a few times. Once I had stripped and sanded most of the paint off (I got bored and figured "meh, that'll do") I went to Bunnings and got a can of gloss spray enamel because spray paint is much easier than regular brush painting.

Note: spray painting is not easier than regular brush painting. For one, the paint barely goes on if you hold it the recommended 15-20cm away from the surface you are painting. If you hold it any closer though, too much comes out and you end up with paint drips. I did a coat and then went and clipped the hedge. An hour later I came back and did another coat. On the cabinet only, not the door or drawer. Unfortunately, my spray ran out before I could get to the door or the drawer for a second coat. Unlucky for me, since the door and drawer were the two things that had the most amount of blue left on them from when I had gotten sick of stripping the paint.

*sigh*. So once that had dried I grabbed some thin strips of wood and some Liquid Nails and glued drawer runners to the sides, and some supports for a shelf in the lower section.
Liquid Nails sucks cock in hell. It's impossible to push out of the gun if you don't have Hulk Hogan-like biceps, and once out of the nozzle it dries up like my vagina while watching Smallville. With the help of my brother, I managed to get the drawer runners on. Of course, the glue wouldn't dry. A few hour later when everything was still repositionable, I got the shits and nailed the damn things in. Because the supports were curved, I bent about 15 nails before I gave up and pretended to cry and Mum found me some square ones in the garage.

When I attempted to put in the shelf, which I had measured to the millimetre to fit in the cabinet, it didn't fit. By this point I was about to shit a brick. Matthew came over to ask me a question and I started hissing and growling and rocking the cabinet around. He ran away. I grabbed the rubber mallet and bashed the shelf into place, then nailed it from the sides to hold it in place, though I don't think it would have moved anyway, it was jammed in that tight (that's what she said).

My attempts to put the hinges back on were, of course, foiled by the huge amounts of gloss paint all over them. A poisonous mixture of turps and WD-40 in a jar with the hinges and shaken around for an hour or so seemed to loosen them up enough to be useable however by this point I was so damn cranky that Mum literally took the cabinet off me and sent me to the movies. I have reason to believe she may have put the door on for me. I hope so. Because it's been almost a week now of having the contents of my bathroom cabinet all over the floor and it's annoying to have to step over 3 hairbrushes, a bag of TP and a tonne of makeup just to brush my teeth at night.

The cabinet had better bloody well go nicely in the bathroom after all this effort, though having a look this morning has made me suspect that it may be too tall to fit next to the sink. Goddammit.

UPDATE: So I chuffed around to Mum's yesterday, expecting the cabinet to have been finished for me. No such luck. The door was still not on, the hinges were missing (I later found one on the floor and one in a jar of scraps - thanks Mum) and all the tools I needed to continue working on it had been put away. I decided to get a move on and actually work on it. I grabbed the door and attempted to measure where the hinges should go.

The door did not fit.

To this day, I do not understand how the door, which came OFF the cabinet in the first place, could suddenly not fit it anymore. Maybe someone put it in the dryer or something. All I know is that when I went to put it on, there was a gap about an inch wide between the door and the bottom of the drawer.

I got the shits and went inside. After 3 hours of Age of Mythology, Mum badgered me into having a go at finishing it. She sawed off a thin piece of wood and I decided to nail it in from the sides, because Fuck Liquid Nails, and of course we put it in too high and had to redo it. Then she pestered me into glueing a thick piece of wood in the back to act as a spacer between the back and the drawer, because the drawer kept sliding in too far. We used the cheapo wood glue from the Reject Shop instead of Liquid Nails.

I took the cabinet home that night (almost forgot it actually) and it fit in the space in the bathroom with about 5mm to spare. Thank fucking Christ. I was (and still am) hell proud of having actually completed it, despite the universe's clear attempts to make me give up, and pointed it out to The Man upon his arrival that night. His only thoughts? "That bit's not painted."

Harrumph.

Fucking photos y'all!

Check my dodgy paint job and last-minute addition!

More of that sexy, sexy, glossy blue goodness! (Also I just noticed you can see The Haunted Tampons in the cupboard)

Distressed and Beachy Chest of Drawers (also Doom) (UPDATED)

This is the probably-boring backstory to the COD. Skip this part if you don't care, but please know that by doing so you are destroying my bard-like spirit.
About a year back BFF and I were driving down the mountain to my house for post-archery cuppas during council pick-up week. I fucking LOVE council pickup week. Council pick-up week = free furniture and untold plans to renovate said furniture, which normally just sits in Mum's garage until she gets the shits and takes it to the tip a few months later. Mum doesn't like council pick-up week as much as I do.

This time I found a chest of drawers that looked to be in pretty decent condition. It was also about to rain and I was worried it would get wet and ruined before I decided if I wanted it or not, so we jammed it in BFF's Lancer and shimmied on down to my house where I whacked it in the back room and promptly forgot about it.

A few weeks later I was getting the shits with the mess in the study and after 3 days of clearing away and filing papers randomly (god forbid the ATO should ever audit me) I found the COD. Inspired by recent episodes of Better Homes and Gardens (or maybe I was just in a manic phase) I decided to repaint it and put it in the lounge room. So off to my Mum's garage it went.

Scroll to here for actual blow-by-blow directions for stressing out your furniture.
First I had to strip back the paint. The COD was wooden (not that chipboard shit) and had been painted a few times, once with a matte white and at least once in gloss white that had gone creamy-yellow. Originally my plan was to get the belt-sander out and just rub off all of the paint back to the original wood base. 14 000 slipped sanding strips and 10cm later I got the shits with this technique and decided to just get rid of the gloss. I grabbed a metal ruler and planed the paint off by dragging it towards me along the surface like a razor. This got the majority of the gloss off. The smaller bits were done with an actual paint scraper. This technique worked better than using the paint remover, which just sort of bubbled and then sat there looking pathetic and useless. Go figure.

OK. Next step. I sanded all of the surfaces to make sure they were smooth but slightly rough. Paint will only stick to porous surfaces, but I didn't want splinters either. This only took about 20 minutes to do, including  making sure all the corners and edges were smooth.

Then I got my sea-blue pot of paint from Bunnings. It was only a sample pot of water-based paint that I had bought on sale for $4 (they sell out old sample pots cheaply, and they're more than enough to coat most furniture a few times over) and I poured it into an old ice-cream container. I mixed in about the same amount of water and stirred it well to make a thinner paint mix and did a coat of paint all over it (making sure to do the drawers separately of course). Once that had dried I noticed that the 10cm spot I had done with the belt sander was actually pretty noticeable because of the thinned paint, so I did another coat of blue.
If you do this yourself, remember that the point of it is to look distressed, so it's not too important to do a good job. I mean, try not to make a real hash of it, but missing little bits in corners and stuff is actually a good thing. You may want to make sure that just inside where the drawers sit is done, and between any legs (of the COD, not yourself - no one finds Blue Waffle attractive). If this is going to be the outer layer, you may like to take more care to get it right than if it's the inner coat.

Once that had dried I got an old tin of white ceiling paint (water based) and did two coats of that (allowing for drying time). This step is not essential. You might like to just have the one colour, with the wood grain peeking through at some points, but I wanted blue, white and wood to fit in with my beach theme.

Once dry, I grabbed the sanding strips and went to town. I made sure to work on corners and edges, which always get bumped when moving furniture, and added a few rubbing circles on the top and on the sides. I left the side panels alone, because I plan on adding a painting on each of those, but they would look good with some rubbed circles as well (from leaning on them, of course). I scraped away at the drawers, and made sure to match scraped parts on drawers with the parts between the drawers, so they look natural.

Then I covered the whole thing (separated again) with a coat of satin wood seal. It needed to be sealed because water-based paint rubs off fairly easily, as is very porous, so it soaks up any dirt or stains. Since my cats like to sit where it's going I decided I should probably give my masterpiece some protection from the little douche-bags. I picked satin because a) I hate glossy paint on furniture, and b) it's meant to be beachy and glossy just doesn't suit that theme. Satin was a good compromise between matte (which I couldn't have) and gloss.

Then I added the handles I found at this gorgeous little vintage shop in Thirroul. They were only $2.50 each. It turned out though that the screws were a little bit too long, and I had about 5ml left after screwing it all the way in. I didn't have any shorter screws, so I got some thin wood, sawed some small squares out of it and drilled a hole in each of them about the diameter of the screw. I then screwed the screw into that (to act as a buffer) and then through the drawer and into the handle and the whole thing was finished!

Now as soon as I find my damn USB cable I'll add the photos.

UPDATE: Here are some radical beachy-type photos!

Here's the drunk-ass looking photo from the front

Slightly less drunk-ass side photo

The Paddington house ink-and-watercolour

My swexy drawer lining and stuff

When I got the COD to my house I was intending, at some point in the probably-distant-future, to paint something cool onto the fairly-boring side panel. While clearing out the old COD I found the third in a series of ink-and-watercolours I have up on the wall of various terrace houses in Sydney. Conveniently, it fitted perfectly on the panel. So yay!

The drawer lining is done half-arsedly with wrapping paper :D

Little Shorts of DOOOOOOOOOM (A Lazy Girl's Guide to Feeling Productive)

So I spent most of my work day feeling like someone was drilling into my right leg through my pelvis and pouring nitroglycerin through the hole. Sciatica is a bitch. On the bright side, it meant I felt less guilty for passing up on a shift tonight so I could go to pub trivia with friends and bludge around at home afterwards. I did feel a little guilty though, so I felt like I had to do something vaguely useful to make up for it. Also I've been feeling slightly sewey this week, but not enough to do any actual sewing.

I've been needing a new pair of little denim shorts since last Summer when I finally bit the bullet and threw out the LDS I've owned since High School. They were so ridiculously big on me that I just had to get rid of them. When I threw them out I felt like I was throwing out part of myself. Which is really just fucking pathetic when you think about it. Also they were totally cute. And denim goes with everything (especially in Summer).

So anyway, I needed some more. So I grabbed the pair of jeans I bought last year that are just a little too small on me, and I cut them off just under the crotch. So these really are little denim shorts, yo. I made sure not to cut across the pockets at the back and front, but I didn't reallu measure them, just put them on, estimated where they should end, and cut across in a line. When I put them back on afterward I discovered that they needed to be a bit shorter at the outside of the leg, so off they came again while I kneeled on the floor in my knickers and snipped away some more. Simple as Ashton Kutcher at a Mensa meet. The end result is serviceably cute. Definitely worth it when I remember that every single pair I've seen in shops has been $20 minimum. The bottoms should fray nicely after a few turns though the washing machine, and since it's been so hot lately, I get to wear them straight away! w00t for me and my sexy shorts!




Now I just have to work on getting rid of my winter arse.