New Year...

New Earrings.

I just picked up these beauties for 50% off at Swarovski.
Love them! They were featured in the January Lucky Magazine. The thing that makes them unusual is that they're clip ons!

Clip ons are coming back. The good thing about clip on earrings is that your ears can hold more weighty earrings without getting that saggy earlobe look.

Check out these beauties by Siman Tu:


You can buy similar ones at Vivre.

In addition to awesome clip on earrings, another trend I foresee for 2010 is:

Friendship bracelets!!!

You can buy them, like this gorgeous one from Etsy (here), but you should break out your stash of embroidery floss and make your own.

Trends should be fun and these two definitely are. Happy New Year!

Rose Bud

J. Crew has been having some adorable flower hair accessories and I thought it would be fun to make some. I used fabric and beads I already had.

I started with some airy pink silk, brown felt, and black beads. You also need a bobby pin or something that works for your hair.
Cut the silk into strips that are 1.5 inches wide and 18 to 24 inches long depending on how big you want your rose buds. Pull a needle and thread through one end of a strip. Begin to twist silk strip as you coil it around the end, securing it with the thread as you go. Keep one side neat while the other can be messy and have the thread showing. Don't worry about the frayed edge of the silk. It's pretty and gives the buds an antique quality.
Make the flower look more natural by loosening and tightening as you twist. Sew three beads into the center of the bigger flower.
Position flowers as you want them on felt and pin them in place. Cut around felt so that it mostly covers the back but can't be seen from the front.
Sew all around edge of felt to the back of the flowers. Tightly sew on bobby pin or other hair clip.
That's it! Have fun with other sizes and arrangements. You could also hot glue some to the side of a head band.

Pink wristlet project

This is a fun little pink wristlet I made from some silk fabric I had:



The blue lining is silk too. I got about 2 yards of it for $10 at a flea market and use it ALL THE TIME.


I made it on the machine and even played with pleats to make the bottom have more volume than the top. It's (again) kind of Lily Pulitzer looking. I just couldn't resist using the green zipper with the pink. It's like a watermelon on a clear blue day. What could be better?!

Before and After: Painted Box

This was the old box I bought at a yard sale:


And here it is now:


I love goooooold.....
The design is a zoomed in view of a modern take on classic brocade. Or, as I call it, a doodle.

The box sat unfinished for a few weeks because I couldn't decided what to do for the lid. I was going to finish it with a glossy coat all over, but I like the way the gold shines against the matte turquoise. Pretty pretty pretty.

Button Collection Avalanche!

I have more than this, but it's the bulk of my button collection. I love to dump them out like this because I always find ones I never remember seeing before.

To button or not to button...

On and off for the past few days I've been painting this box:


I like to use what I already have around so for the inside I went with, surprise, GOLD:

For the outside I'm using a blue/green color. It's so humid that it takes forever to dry between coats and since I didn't uses primer the black keeps showing through. I really want that gold to glow. Sigh. Gold gold gold.

I keep going back and forth on what I want the final thing to look like. I have already picked out buttons to glue all over the outside, but maybe it would be more, I don't know, elegant(?) if I painted a brocade pattern on it. Oh, yeah, brocade is the third wing of my personal craft trinity: Gold, Buttons, Brocade.

Pencil Case

For some reason I love making little purses and things with zippers and buttons. (I think it's because I don't have to worry about them fitting and I can make something with even the teeniest scrap of fabric I find.) When I went back to school in January I wanted to "craft" out my jitters so I decided to make a pencil case/supplies organizer. Here's what I came up with:


You may recognize the fabric. It was left over from the table cloth I made. It looks very Lilly Pulitzer to me, which I LOVE. The button is one of the old anchor ones I found in my collection. The inside folds out into three panels which each have compartments. The scissors are coming out of a zippered pouch.


I really liked making it and will definitely do more. Next time I'll take progress pictures and do a sort of how-to in case anyone wants to make one. I'm just waiting to come across the perfect fabric again.
And, PS, crafting as a stress reliever totally works. Just try to stay anxious while holding a handful of tiny pink buttons. It's impossible. IMPOSSIBLE.

Striped Shirt- Before and After

Here, again, is the old shirt I decided to cut up:


And here is what I made(!):


OK that picture makes it look kind of boring. But it's crazy interesting in real life, I swear. The inside is lined and I took one of the shirt pockets and sewed it in:


I switch up which purse I carry almost every day (sometimes more), so I'll use this for lip gloss, hairbrush and the like so I can keep them together. I still have about 75% of the shirt left so I can do more with it down the road.

Some Assembly Required

Here is the current status of my striped shirt project.


The lining is gray jersey that I had already. I bought the zipper today at Windmill Fabrics in Chinatown. I love that place. They have great prices and a very large cat that sleeps on the piles of upholstery fabric.

I also bought these two zippers because they're good to have around (you know, like when you're blazing ahead on a spur-of-the-moment craft project and then you realize that you don't have a proper zipper to use, which means you have put it down until you can pick one up at the store. That's just a situation everyone hates to be in. Am I right?).
The top one is pink, but I especially love the bottom one which is navy with a gold zipper. I would love to do a little something in navy blue with gold accents on it. I have some gold buttons with anchors on them which would be pretty great on a little clutch. I hope the nautical trend doesn't go away anytime soon because I still go crazy for anything with stripes or anchors.

Pro-ject! *sing song voice*

I thought I loved this shirt when I bought it years ago (circa 2003?) from J. Crew. I think I’ve worn it maybe twice. And yet it has survived dozens of closet purges and big black garbage bags being carted off to the Goodwill. (It's just that it's so soft and well, maybe I'll be wear it some day...) I realize now that what I love is the fabric. Scissors, please.


I think I’m going to make a little makeup bag or maybe a summery clutch. This isn’t the first time I’ve cut up an old shirt or skirt to repurpose the fabric, but usually it’s been from something I loved but some how died from an unfixable snag or a stain. Confession: Once I have a project picked out, I get really excited and think about it a LOT, working out all the details and picturing how to do it. It might be my favorite part. So, yeah, totally normal.

Wall Art: Before and After

I finished the wall art paintings and hung them up last night in our room. Not that there's anything wrong with the olde dainty flower pictures. I've been wanting to have a bedroom that was more bold than cute. Here's what the wall space above a waist-high bookshelf looked like before:

And here it is now:I'm pretty happy with it. It was the first time I've painted for fun (other than walls and furniture) and it makes me want to do more.

Wall Art

After realizing that I may have decorated our bedroom a tad in the style of Classic American Grandma, I decided I wanted to replace some old flower prints with something more modern. I did a Google search of Queen Ann's Lace (another flower, baby steps) and found an image of a silhouette. I bought four canvases at the Blick across the street and decided to go with gold and purple. Because I lof gooooold. And purple.

Here's what I have so far:



I'm dividing the flowers onto two panels and there will be two other panels on the side to make it "four square" style. The blue is the original picture which I used as a reference point, although I made changes and just sort of winged it with the size difference. I'm not sure how I feel about the brush strokes being visible in the purple. I'm also not sure how I'm going to mount them on the wall either. It's funny how in the middle of a project I usually go "Yeah, I would have done this completely differently." Eh, that's how you learn. I'll do a sort of before and after once it's all done and hung.