My interpretation of the spirit of the Coach Willis bag.
Cheri: Whew, what a challenge this was. It was tough one, but, it was also an awesome one. I think I spent the first week trying to decide how and what I wanted to make my purse out of.
I have always enjoyed doing machine embroidery, so I decided that I would embroider the outside of my purse. I was pretty sure in my head of how I wanted it to look, so I looked around at my fabric supplies, (which is not nearly as grand as Loryn’s), and chose what fabric I wanted to use.
After one failed attempt with the fabric I had on hand, I decided to buy some new fabric. I headed to our local Wal-Mart, which has just put in a small fabric selection, after our Jo-Ann’s closed, and chose a half yard of brown canvas, I also picked up some lining fabric that went with the brown nicely. With fabric in tow, I headed home.
This was Thursday, I had 3 more days to go. I have to admit that my style of crafting is a tad bit unique. I don’t really measure anything. I will try to use a straight edge to get the proportions right but more often than not I will use the selvage edge to base my edges on. And so the great purse challenge began for me.
I worked until midnight on Thursday, midnight on Friday and started working again at 2:00 pm on Saturday. Most of the time was spent with the embroidery and the base of the bag, and then the unspeakable happened, I accidentally melted some of the lining of my bag with the iron.
I knew that this was not going to be an easy fix. So after entertaining several options I picked up some other fabric I had on hand from Loryn’s stash and started working with this. Essentially, I started again from square one.
I spent several hours on Saturday redoing my purse and in the end I was really happy with how it turned out. It looks like me and I am really quite proud to carry it.
The back of the bag and the details of the handle.The side of my bag and a close up of the hardware I used.Freestyle machine embroidery leaves.The lining of the bag and the reverse side of the front leaf embroidery. The reverse looks as good as the front.This pocket holds my phone.
WooHoo! I actually managed to get this Crafty Challenge finished a little early. For me, that is monumental (at least compared to my past Crafty Challenges).
The challenge this time was to use the Coach Willis Handbag for inspiration and create something in that spirit. It could be any medium and any size. I tried several mediums, but seemed to have the best luck when I finally went to fabric. Then I had to decide what size I wanted, so I needed to find a purpose for my bag. I have a large laptop (it has a 17″ screen and the keyboard includes a separate number keypad) that I have never been able to find a bag that I liked and that would protect it, that I liked. So, with that in mind, I was going to make the Willis inspired laptop bag.
I had some really cute flannel kitties fabric and some matching pre-quilted red fabric that would be perfect for padding. After looking at my dogs, I realized that I would be better off if I put the flannel on the inside to help keep some of the hair on my new bag to a minimum. I did draw a sketch, but for the most part, I made it up on the fly. You should know though that I have seen many bags made by Loryn and Cheri, so I had some idea of how to go about this, I wasn’t completely in the dark.
I just love that hardware!
I made the handle first as I wanted to use Loryn’s quilting idea to help reinforce the handle. The body was next and man, do not use denim Singer needles on medium-weight fabric, no matter how many layers you are sewing through. I trashed three needles very quickly. Once I switched to heavy-duty, medium weight needles, I had no problems whatsoever.
I made all the parts of the bag like pillows (right sides together, sew the edges and pull right-side out) and was very good about ironing everything. I am always surprised by how much of a difference ironing makes. Suddenly your project goes to the next level of wow and looks clean and (mostly) well made. Please keep in mind I am not the best seamstress. I tend to keep to pillows and curtains which are really just squares and rectangles with no real finesse (or at least the way I make them).
I did manage to find some excellent hardware for my bag at Kleindorfers. This is the hardware store I spent so much time in for our second Crafty Challenge. It really helped that since that challenge, I really know their stock. They are so helpful and they don’t look at you funny when you giggle and cackle with glee when you find such a wonderful hardware selection, they laugh and see if there is anything else you need.
I also have to mention in here my gratefulness for cellphones, good cellphone plans and AT&T. I spent almost the entire day on the phone with Loryn yesterday. I looked it up on my phone and it came out to 6 hours and 44 minutes. It is so nice just to have someone to mutter to while working on a project. I also spent the morning cleaning and having someone to talk to while doing that always makes the job easier.
Back to the challenge, I then proceeded to put all the parts together and it went much better than expected. I added the hardware and giggled the whole while (Really, I did. Ask Loryn.) The one problem I had was with the dowel rod I had picked up for the top of the bag. It wouldn’t fit the hardware I had decided to use. When I bought the hardware, I bought more than I needed as I was not quite sure how or which pieces I would end up using for the bag. That meant another trip to Lowe’s this morning for the next size down in dowel rods. I cut it to size and painted it red to help it blend in to to the bag.I did that this morning and voila! my bag was finished. Hooray! The finished size is 22 1/2″ wide by 19″ tall. It came out a lot bigger than I intended, but I do like it. I may adjust the size eventually, but for now it is great just the way it is.
And now on to family and food. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
It must be said; better late than never. I am really (and I mean really) late getting my photos for this challenge posted. I have been really busy doing some painting (don’t worry, you’ll get to hear about and see it at a later date) and have just not had a whole lot of time to really do much else but sleep and work.
I had a hard time with this project for several reasons. First, I try to keep my hoarding down to a minimum and don’t have a whole lot of storage space right now, so my collection of incidentals was rather small. Second, for these challenges, I have been really trying to step out of my comfort zones craft wise and this has made for some uncertain outcomes. The project was to use the packaging or incidentals that come with a purchase. It must be the stuff that you would usually throw away or re-use for another packing job, not the purchase itself, in other words, free.
I love the slightly aged look the shellac gave the newspaper.
After all the plaster and paper-mache (or papier-mâché) work we did for our Halloween costumes, I thought this might be a good medium for this challenge. It wasn’t a bad idea, just an unknown path for me. I definitely learned a lot from this project.
I wanted to make a bowl for the little stuff that seems to get thrown on the counter. As it would be in the kitchen, I figured what better paper to use than the Kroger coupons I get every week (I do most of my grocery shopping there). This proved to be a good idea as the paper Kroger uses for its ads tears beautifully into strips. I then draped the paper-mache strips over some wooden bowls I had. I like their shape but not the material. I had covered the bowls with Vaseline to keep the strips from sticking to the bowls. Notice I am using the plural here for bowls. I managed to turn out one good bowl from the two starts. I then let this dry.
I intentionally made sure that one of Kroger's logos would be visible.
I am glad I used small bowls, as larger ones would not have worked at all. The Vaseline seemed to prevent the paper-mache from drying completely (this process works just fine with plaster, but not so much with paper-mache). I managed to pry the shapes off the wooden bowls, but pretty much destroyed one of the shapes in the process. I used some of the paper strips from the destroyed shape (which were not sticking together) to fix the salvageable one and this time I used some wood glue to keep the strips down. I let this dry overnight and started shellacking the bowl the next day. I did multiple coats all over the bowl. I really liked the effect of the shellac as it gave the newspaper a lovely aged look.
At this point, it was time to present our projects and mine was really not dry. I kept it on some wax paper to present to my Crafty Sisters and it worked out fairly well. It is now a week and a half later and I have just finished taking the photos you see here and the bowl is completely set and hard. It has turned out just like I wanted it to, I just needed to be a LOT more patient. I whined a lot about this project and I apologize profusely to my Crafty Sisters who had to listen to me. I am really happy with my final project although it took over a week to get there.
I did trim the top edge of the bowl with scissors to give it a clean edge.
Lessons learned: 1. be patient; 2. do not use Vaseline with paper-mache or at least put plaster on top of the Vaseline and then do the paper-mache; and 3. shellac takes a long time to dry.
Lynne: I really enjoyed our crafty challenge 3. I thought all of the projects were fabulous and I’m still experimenting with the different papers in my new notebook. But now, we must turn our faces to crafty challenge 4. I am told that this challenge was my idea, but I don’t remember and I don’t want the credit.
We are lovers of handbags and Kristin has this gorgeous Coach vintage purse. The challenge is to make a purse based on the spirit of this Willis Satchel. The project does not need to be a copy nor does it matter what materials we use; but the finished item must be in the spirit of the Willis design and done by Sunday, November 20.
Cheri: I love ballet. I like to watch it. I liked to dance ballet when I was younger. And I like any art form connected with it. When I decided to make this collage I wanted to convey this in this piece.
The idea for this started when I bought a book at a garage sale that was a child’s book of ballet. The book was from the 60’s and it had a very stylized look to it. As I flipped through the book I came across this picture of a dancer in an arabesque. This picture was going to be the focal point. After I cut the picture out I flipped it over and felt the reverse side with the text was the better option.
I went through my scrapbook paper until I came across a pattern that I liked. Then I chose a frame. (I have several to choose from). I used spray adhesive to glue the paper to a mat and sized it to the frame. The frame says a lot about the piece and often if I can get the frame correct the rest of the piece seems to fall into place.
The fun part begins after that. I colored the dancer in and then I took little pieces of newspaper wrapped them around the end of the pencil to give them the form of flowers. I then dipped them in glue and placed them as the skirt for the dancer.
As I have said before I have all kinds of odds and ends that I picked up and sometimes these pieces just kind of call to me to be placed in a picture. The round paper disc was one of those. It has a vintage feel to it and I felt that the placement of it made it feel like the dancer was balancing on the tag. The butterflies were cut from tissue paper and have a really nice light, pastel, look to them.
Last but not least is the dancer that seems sad in the corner. She was another figure that I cut out from the book and I chose not to have the complete figure show for this. The piece does say some things about life to me, and I think that is what really makes me love collage so much.
Close-up of the dancer and her butterflies.Curled newspaper wrapped around a pencil forms her skirt.My incomplete sad ballerina in her corner and a close-up of the label tag.
Crafty challenge number 3 is no one’s fault but my own. While I was making my hardware-store handbag for the last challenge, I began to think of a challenge that would be mostly confined to materials that were incidental to an item I had bought. Things that you do not buy to use, such as packaging materials, plastic sacks, and styrofoam drinking cups.
There were two materials that had particularly caught my fancy. One was sales slips. Every time I clean my car, I cannot believe how many slips I can accumulate in just a few days. The other was the paper wrappers that hamburgers and breakfast sandwiches come wrapped in. These materials are perfectly suited for their original purpose, but could I think of a secondary recycled purpose?
The sandwich wrappers are plasticized on one side and I thought that perhaps they could be used as an element in a plastic fused-fabric, but the sales slips proved harder to recycle. Sometimes when I don’t have any deposit slips, I’ll grab a sales slip from the floor of the car to write my information on, so I decided that they could be made up into some kind of notepaper.
Since I could only think of notepaper as a use for the sales slips, I knew I would need to make a notebook. I could use other types of wastepaper for additional pages and the various plastic items I had been saving could be used for a plastic fused-fabric cover. One unintentional consequence of this challenge was the ever rising pile of junk on my work table. Just as I found myself putting something in the recycling or the trash, I would think: “wait that may be useful.”
I decided that my “fast food folio” notebook would be composed of three signatures of paper. A signature is a sheet of paper which folds to page size and is then bound with other signatures to form a book. My signatures would be made from sales slips, paper fast food sacks and sandwich wrappers. I glued the sales slips into 8 1/2 inch by 11 inch sheets and cut the paper sacks and sandwich wrappers to the same dimensions. There was just enough material to make eight sheets of 8 1/2 by 11 inch paper per signature. When folded those 8 sheets gave me 16 sheets of 5 1/2 by 8 1/2 inch paper and with three signatures that gave me 48 sheets of paper in a notebook that would be approximately 6 inches by 9 inches with its cover.
I decided that I would make the cover from layers of plastic bags, bubble wrap and sandwich wrappers. I wanted the bubble wrap to give the cover a honeycomb texture and to make the cover stronger. The plastic bags would provide the graphics and the sandwich wrappers were unique in that only one side is plasticized and I could use them as a protective layer on one side and a fusible layer on the other.
When fusing plastic into fabric some people use wax paper to protect their iron, but I believe that parchment paper is sturdier and less likely to become a part of the fused fabric.This fusing plastic bag tutorial has excellent instructions. The one thing to remember is that when you start mixing different types of plastics, you can have unexpected consequences. Not all plastic materials melt at the same rate and at the same temperature. You have to keep experimenting and have some back-up materials in case a “shrink and shrivel” happens.
When I had the cover and the signatures made I sewed them together with a large-eyed blunt needle and cotton kitchen twine. I used beeswax on the twine to make it slide easier through the holes in the cover and the signatures. This youtube video ‘simple bookbinding part 1 and its companion video part 2 were the most helpful to me in explaining signatures and how to sew them to a cover.
Most of the time we keep our projects secret from each other but Kristin was in town and I did not wish to spend our time together alone in separate rooms while we worked on our projects. So Kristin saw my project and had some helpful ideas. I wanted to use drinking straws in my project and had experimented with melting them onto a sheet of plastic vinyl. The straws do melt, but not in the way I wanted. Kristin suggested slicing the straw into small circles and then melting them onto the cover. As you can see below, the idea worked extremely well and is quite decorative. She also suggested using a straw as a bookmark. I connected it to the end of the binding twine and used beads as stopper knots. That is the one problem with these challenges. We miss the feedback and suggestions from each other that make our projects just that one step better.
I am surprised by how good the plastic cover feels and by how sturdy it is. I was also very curious how the different types of paper would respond to ink, markers and colored pencil. The brown paper works very well for my squiggles and surprisingly so does the plastic side of the sandwich wrappers. However, the sales slips are treated to accept the ink of their cash registers and are hard on markers, pencils and ink pens. I am thinking of covering them with gesso and if that doesn’t work, a few collage pages will look very good in my notebook.
Our crafty challenges have challenged us in ways that we never anticipated. I have been surprised and amazed at the results. Enough so that we are already working on crafty challenge number 4.
Outside cover and view of hand-sewn binding.Pages made of sales slips and sandwich wrappers.Detail of beads used to cap the drinking straw bookmark.Inside cover and first page with first squiggle on brown paper bag.
Drinking straw necklace with triangle and chain links.
Cheri: Wow, what a tough challenge number 3 was. I spent a week trying to figure out what I was going to make. I had all kinds of ideas floating around in my head and it really gave me a new perspective on how I looked at items that I was throwing out. With projects like this, I guess the hard part is just picking up something and working with it. It doesn’t always mean that you will like what you are making but each step will give you some insight into your final product.
I decided that I would make my project out of straws. So I grabbed a bunch of straws and started to cut them, bend them and punch holes in them. When I came to the flexible part, which I had discarded, I started to work with the curves. I finally decided that I was going to make them into triangles and I would link one into the other. I fiddled with them until I had the size I wanted and then I glued each one of the ends in to the other end.
I worked with the possibility of making them into a bracelet, which would be awesome, but I really wanted to make a necklace as I had been working with using the leftover portion of the straws as a link in a chain and I liked how it looked.
I love the way the necklace hangs. After I completed it, I started thinking about using straws in different colors or using clear straws. I even worked with a hole punch and put holes in the straws and was able to put other straws through the holes and build structures, like you would with Tinker Toys.
For all my misgivings about this project it ended up being a project with unlimited possibilities, and a go-to whenever I want to make a unique piece of jewelry that is really “out of the box”.
Close up of triangle links.Close up of chain links.
Loryn: Craft Challenge Three ended today, and we have a lot of fun projects to present!
When I craft, I usually think in terms of functional, rather than decorative, objects. This craft challenge was no different. I started out with the idea of making an organizer with compartments, and I decided to use plastic bottles. I raided the recycling bin at work and got to work cutting up water bottles.
My first thought was to cut the bottoms off and staple them together to make a drawer organizer, but most of my drawers have too many items of different sizes for it to be really useful. Then I started thinking about a wall-mounted system for my craft table.
I cut the water bottles into various sizes and used grommets to hang them on nails. The grommets keep the plastic from ripping.. This scissors holder was a last-minute idea, but it may be the one that I like the most.
This is a three-tier holder, made by cutting three bottles. I left a long tab one third the circumference of the bottle as a hanger. On the longest tier, the tab is nearly as long as the bottle. The tab on the middle tier is half the length of the bottle, and the top tier is just the bottom. I used the hanging grommet to hold the three tiers together.
The organizers are very lightweight, so I put a strong magnet into the round indentation at the bottom of the bottle to hold pins. It’s held in place with packing tape.
This is a two-tier holder. The bottom tier is made just like the one on the three-tier holder, and the top tier is half of a bottle.
After doing the multi-tier organizers, I decided I wanted a couple simple pencil cups.
Here you can see the tiers in side view.
Here you can see the grommets that hold the tiers together. I used a sharp yarn needle to poke a hole in each layer, then a larger upholstery needle to enlarge the hole. Then I threaded all three onto the grommet and used a small piece of scrap wood inside the grommet as a hammering surface to fasten the grommet.
I also made two string holders by cutting the top and bottle of bottles off and fitting them together, and I used the top of a bottle as a funnel. There are a lot of possibilities with all of the different plastic bottles out there!
Beatles at The Cavern with Yellow Submarine and Strawberry Fields Forever.Beatles at The Cavern with Yellow Submarine and Strawberry Fields.
-Cheri: As I have mentioned before, I really like to make dioramas. They tell a story and it always amazes me of how detailed you can make your creation. So when I decided to pay homage to The Beatles, I felt that a diorama of them at The Cavern in Liverpool would be a fun idea.
I spent about a week drawing out my characters and getting them colored and cut out. I looked at a photo of The Cavern to get a good idea of what it looked like and how I would make the stage and the equipment that would be there.
After I had that all designed it came time to glue all of my items in their place. This is always the best part of the project and is where I really start to tell the story of the scene.
Diorama close-up. Is that George behind the mike?Diorama close-up. John at the mike and Paul on guitar.
After I had all the pieces glued in I looked at the outside and felt that it should be included in the story. I really didn’t want to make a copy of the streets of Liverpool, so I decided to make a yellow submarine diving through a strawberry field. I never get tired of looking at this diorama, I hope you feel the same way.
The Yellow Submarine.The Yellow Submarine in Fields of Strawberries Forever.
Happy Halloween (again and again) to all our readers who celebrate this weekend (and Monday)!
This year as stated in my previous posts here and here we decided to be attendees to the Goblin Ball, from the movie Labyrinth and here is an excellent video of the ball scene (and yes, that is David Bowie as Jareth, the Goblin King).
I have talked all about the creation of our fun costumes, now for the unveiling.
Photo courtesy of my M-I-L.
We stopped at several friends houses and my M-I-L’s house before heading out on the town. My M-I-L took the above photo. There should have been some more photos by her, but my camera died just after she took one photo. So, we waited until after the night was over to take some more, and, as you can see, the costumes held up really well.
I love that drawstring purse. It worked great!
I do have to say that my feet really hurt in those shoes. I don’t wear pointy-toed shoes and my poor toes just did not like them, but it was endurable and they did look quite perfect with the dress. I had not planned to wear any jewelry, but that necklace just finished the outfit off perfectly. It is also courtesy of my M-I-L (she also supplied the shoe buckles).
Wish I had noticed that his socks needed to be pulled up.
My SO looked great. He had a lot of comments about his mask. Several people thought he was supposed to be a plague doctor (they wore these long filtered masks that were supposed to keep the germs out). He put two of my unused feather ornaments in the cuffs of his jacket and it was just the right touch. I made him a sash from the same velvet as my shawl and purse. We looked pretty good together.
My shawl that really did help keep me warm!Here you can see the feather ornaments in my hair.
I was really happy with how the costumes turned out and we had a great time last night. Bloomington is a great town to be in for Halloween. Now what are we going to be next year?
P.S. Massive kudos and thanks to Mom (Lynne) for her magic work on the photos. They look wonderful!
the crafty sisters 