Merry Christmas. Holy shit. Where's the Tylenol?

Right. So it's been a while. A LONG while. I've been rather slack this year haven't I?
Well I can't promise I'll be any better next year but I do have excuses!
I've moved in with my boyfriend and his family and although it's a big house, it's not mine, which means I've been sewing-machine-less for the last 6 months. It's driving me quite batty. His Mum keeps telling me I should bring my machine over, but if I do that I'll have to bring my sewing kit too, and then my fabric stash, and then my craft kits, and pretty soon her spare bedroom would be chock full of my stuff. So for now I'm holding back on the craft somewhat.

I will TRY to be more diligent in the new year. I do have a few things I plan to make and I'll try to blog about them, but being the start of a new year I'll have a whole heap of stuff to get ready and plan and start, so I won't have a whole lot of time to blog. Obviously I'll be starting uni again. I also have my boyfriend's 21st birthday party to organise and fancy dress costumes to make for us both AND my Mum. Then I also have the new horsemanship classes my best friend and I will be taking. And the cruise we're all going on in February. And an all-day concert that's also in February. And the BF and I will be down the coast for much of January too. So it's a packed start to the year.

For now though I have a little time on my hands so I thought I'd stop in and drop a line to my millions of adoring fans *cough, cough* and let everyone know I'm not dead yet. Just lazy.

Also there will be another post soon. I've gone and volunteered myself for the 'Secret Santa Can Suck It' game at Shadow Manor and will be putting up my own gift idea for my Secret Santa recipient by the 21st of December.

So anyway. Merry w00tmas.

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 ;)

Stuff and Nonsense

So it will come as a surprise to not a single entity that I have done bugger-all of the Iron Craft Challenge I was so enthusiastic about in my last post.
I came in at the end of that week and just didn't have the time or energy to think of anything other than curtains, and when the next week rocked around and the theme was basically "ways to keep the house warm and muggy as shit" I gave up. It's far too hot here to have to think about ways to convert a theme of keeping the house warm to keeping it cool every single week, while sticking to a piss-tiny budget.

In other news, I managed to get into uni! Yay! I start on the 1st of March, which isn't far away at all, and I'll be moving to Sydney in a few months so that I don't have to commute. I'm an awful student, and even worse when I have to travel 2 hours to get to a one hour class. And travelling in Winter is unthinkably shit. Although it doesn't get all that cold (compared to other places anyway) it does get dark at like 5pm, and considering that that's when my classes end, I don't feel like lazing around Central Station until 6 just waiting for a train full of bogans when I could just zip on home to some hot soup in half an hour.

So for now I'm trying to flog all my old crap I don't need and make some money while I move back to Mum's place to save what I can for the move. Crafting and sewing has pretty much fallen by the wayside for the time being.

ALTHOUGH.
A friend of mine convinced me to sign up for marching in the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. I've always wanted to go, and I figured why not make my first time going be my first time in it too? The theme of our float is 'Angels and Demons', with half of us dressed as angels and the other half as demons (obviously). My first instinct was to go for demon - I love red, I love the slutty style of the demon costumes lately, and I pretty much own all of the right things to make the costume. So I went with being an angel instead :D I wanted a challenge, and dressing as an angel when I hardly own anything white was pretty challenging.

I bought a silver sequinned lingerie-dress from Bras n Things for $8 (down from seventy!) and took the red straps off it. I bought some silver sequinned shoes ($10 from Tattoo) and hot-glued silver ribbons to the sides so I can tie them up my legs like ballet slippers. And I found my old white wings from years back and tried to add a bit of razzle-dazzle to them by gluing on some extra feather. Frankly the wings look a bit shitty, but they'll do.

I've worked out makeup (whiteface, with silver glitter Carnivale eyes, cheekbones and lipstick) and I'm going to bleach the shit out of my hair, but my main concern is the dress. It's just not Carnivale enough for Mardi Gras. It's been suggested that I add silver ball-tinsel to the dress but I don't know where, plus I still have to fix the straps after I took the old ones off. Mardi Gras draws ever closer and I'm going to look like a gimp.

Gimpy or Fabulous photos will ensue in a few weeks.

SHOES! Also some annoying wanker curtains

I fucking love shoes. Seriously. And I love comics because... well... I don't know why, I just do.
I've had a plan in my head for quite a few months now for a pair of shoes that I could make. It was inspired by a tutorial posted on Cut Out and Keep.

Before Christmas I had every intention of having a garage sale and flogging all the crap in my house that I didn't want anymore, but I realised that few people would be garage saling that close to Christmas, and after the holidays everyone would be broke. So a few days ago I got the shits and took it all to the local op shops. On my way out I found a pair of shoes in the exact style I wanted, in the exact colour I wanted, in my exact size, and I had exactly the right change on me. Jackpot.

This was them when I found them:

Observe the ensuing nerdliness:

Yes. That's right. Harley Fucking Quinn shoes. And if, god willing, I find a pair of green slip-ons, her darling girlfriend will follow.

Also I made some dickweed curtains. I needed some for the bedroom badly. Summer is bad enough in Australia without having a huge bedroom window that catches all the afternoon sun and none of the sea breeze. Mum had some old damask left over from what was either her own curtains, or a bedspread, and I just folded over one end and sewed it to make a lining for the curtain rail. Of course, halfway through doing the second curtain I accidentally sewed the top of the curtain to itself halfway down. My ensuing hissy fit resulted in a hole torn right in the middle of the damn thing. I couldn't fix it. So for now my curtain has a hole in it which, to be completely honest, is entirely invisible to everyone but myself. I debated appliqueing some pretty blue patches onto the curtains, dismissed the idea as dumb, and then had The Man suggest exactly the same idea to me a few minutes later when I whinged to him about it. So that's now the plan. And I've decided to count the curtains as my contribution to the Iron Craft Let In The Light challenge. I decided to do the opposite because, being in the antipodes, I get to do that. So ha!

Next challenge: Stay Warm. How am I going to change this one to suit me?

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!

The Christmas Crap Post

OK So I made a few more things for Christmas presents and stuff. I made Crystal another present, which can't be shown here or spoken of because it's possible that she comes on here and reads my blog. I will show one tiny little photo of one tiny little section of it though, because I need to share with you something incredibly epic that I found yesterday.

Yes that's right. It's a QR code. Now, I don't know whether it's readable or not, since the qr code-reader on my phone seems to have disappeared into fat air. But to be honest, I don't care. I have found a way to tag my items that is both nerdy and cool-looking. The generator that I used to make the tag can be found here. It says WitchArachne, by the way.

Her man's gift is another thing though, since he's not likely to read this. So check this out for a Pingu fan:

Yep. A guttermouthed penguin pillow. Noot noot!

That's pretty much all I've done so far though. Which is pretty sad when you think about how much spare time I've had, but to be honest the huge amount of fuck-all in my life now that I'm jobless is actually pretty depressing, so I've been doing little else other than lying around feeling sorry for myself. I'm just getting back into form now (hopefully) and this is what I managed to get done today. I can't wait until after Christmas so I can actually post the rest of the stuff I've made :D


PS. I found an awesome, AWESOME website that's packed to the eyeballs with links to craft tutorials. It's called Sew Mama Sew and is so mind-bogglingly fucking awesome that everyone needs to look at it.

Check the plans they have:

Christmas Stockings

Wallets

Camera Strap Cover

JELLYFISH!

Go. Now!

Noot noot!