Space Invaders
I pick up lots of small items at sales, and I have always had a pretty vivid imagination. I like to create creatures out of objects. The TV tubes are the perfect example. At one point you have just TV tubes, (which are really pretty amazing works of art by themselves), but if you put eyes on them, you give them a personality. And if you give the creatures a landscape, you have a whole story. It’s true, one picture is worth a thousand words.
-Cheri
I wanted a chair to put next to the back door in my mud room/laundry room/entry way if I needed to set something down or take off my shoes. This chair was my great-grandmother’s, a vanity chair that is part of a bedroom set. It has been up in the guest bedroom doing duty as a bedside table, and it’s just the chair I’ve been wanting for the mud room.
I put that brown upholstery fabric on five or six years ago, and it’s worn and too drab. I just wanted to do a quick and dirty upholstery job.
First things first, I removed the screws to take the chair seat off. This chair seat is a good example of why perfectionism isn’t always necessary. My previous upholstery job wasn’t that great. Two of the four screws holding the seat on were missing, and many of the staples holding the fabric on had loosened. It still looked fine and held together. Imperfection works!
Normally, you would use poly batting for upholstery, but when I did the first job I just used what I had around, which was Warm and Natural quilt batting. I put a layer of muslin over it to protect the batting, and it made this job really easy.
Here you can see most of the stapling of the new fabric. The print is random, so I lined the grain of the canvas up with the front edge of the seat. The fabric is a vintage paisley canvas from an auction years ago.
Turning the corner properly is the hardest part, but it doesn’t have to be perfect. Cut away any excess to make it easier to fold.
To make reattaching the seat easier, put the chair upside down on a table.
Here’s the finished product!
And here is the chair in the room. I still have a few things to do, including finishing the baseboards, so watch for upcoming posts on this room.
For a really detailed explanation of chair seat upholstery, see this excellent guide from one of my favorite blogs, Design Sponge. The tool list given may seem a bit intimidating, but don’t let that stop you. I only needed a flat and a phillips screwdriver, staple gun, scissors, and water bottle (to keep a cat off my project!).
-Loryn
-Cheri
Woohoo! So, Loryn is coming down to B-Town to visit me this weekend. In fact, she is on her way now. This is the first trip for quite a while that is just for fun (for the most part) with very little on the agenda. Loryn is going to train me in photography 101 with and emphasis in macro photography for my up and coming etsy jewelry business. More on this later.
Anyway, I don’t know if it has been mentioned yet, but Loryn is a vegetarian and I just love to cook for her. It makes for a complete different set of challenges in food preparation. Tastes and food combinations change quite a bit when you take the meat out of a dish. The key I have found is not to approach vegetarian cooking with this idea. You have to think of it as a whole dish, with nothing missing, and build up complex flavors and aromas (not that you shouldn’t do that with all cooking, but I have to focus on it more for vegetarian cooking).
Currently I am experimenting with quinoa. I have never made it before, but I know that Loryn really likes it, so I bought some at Sahara Mart today on my way home. I am making a black bean recipe from allrecipes.com that has very high marks. Right now my house smells wonderful, all cumin and oniony.
I changed the recipe a little (I so rarely follow a recipe exactly that it is more of a statement if I said I DID follow it) and added some red bell pepper and tomatoes. I also made my salsa recipe (listed below) to add as a topper.
Kristin’s Fool-Proof Salsa
Boy, it sure takes me a long time to post a blog. The food is done and Loryn should be here very soon. Here is the finished product:
It tastes very good. I will have to start keeping quinoa in my pantry as a staple from here on out. She’s here!
Bon Apetit!
–Kristin
I love to craft, and I love to draw. There are a lot of creative endeavors that I like to pursue, and since we have started this blog, I have come to the conclusion that I even might like to write. But there are times when I am surfing on the web and I come across something that is so incredible, that is so creative that I am embarrassed. (For example, look at this Sarah Mensinga website.). Those are the times that I ask myself, “why can’t I do that?” “What am I missing, why can’t I create like that?” As I wallow in my own self pity, saying less than savory things to myself, I decide that I will never make another thing. Forget it. No way. My hands will not touch a paintbrush, a pencil, pliers, you name it. I am finished. I am done with that part of my life that gives me so much pain. As I continue to argue with myself, imagining that I am packing up everything to give it to Goodwill, there is a little part of myself that is saying, “stop being a baby, grow up, how are you going to know if you don’t try, you have faced tougher things than this.” And eventually I have to admit that this little part of me could be right. This part of me could probably be right. This part of me is most likely right. Okay, okay this part is right, and I get back to the part of my that I truly love, besides the wonderful art that people create gives me wonderful images to look at and maybe some ideas to try out myself.
-Cheri
Several years ago while I was selling on eBay, I came across an antique Japanese ginger jar full of rose petals, with a slip of paper that said “Rose jar, 1868.” That slip of paper and those petals elevated that object into a story. I wanted to do the same thing with the dried roses from my wedding bouquet.
It took me a while to find just the right container. I would have loved an antique ginger jar, but those are not going for 50 cents at every local garage sale. Mason jars, on the other hand …
Here you can see my bouquet before it dried. The pink and yellow roses are beautiful. My Uncle Bob and Aunt Rita bought the flowers as a wedding gift, and Cheri arranged them. Cheri also made boutonnieres, and I saved my husband’s along with the bouquet. I hope that 100 years from now, the roses and that slip of paper will tell our story.
-Loryn
Here’s my craft project for the week—a puzzle for the United Way Rally on August 5th. I’ve been on the committee to plan the rally for the last three years, and every year they challenge my crafty skills. This year, we wanted a big gesture that demonstrated how the United Way, the agencies the United Way supports, and our community are all interconnected.
Interconnection is the theme behind the UW logo “Live United,” and it’s why I am a big supporter of the United Way. Everyone in Cass County knows someone (or is someone) who has been touched by services supported by United Way. If you or someone you know has received blood from the Red Cross, gotten a ride from Cass Transit, used the Y, or been a Scout, you’ve benefited from UW donations. I give time and money to United Way because I know that every dollar is helping people right here in Cass County.
I designed the puzzle to focus on that interconnection. There are 15 agency puzzles, each in one of the small circles around the edge. Within each circle are seven facts about that agency, and each fact is on its own puzzle piece. The United Way logo was in the middle of the puzzle, with concentric rings radiating out to the edges, and the puzzle itself was the shape of Cass County. At the beginning of the rally, each table assembled an agency puzzle. Then, near the end of the rally, each table placed their puzzle on the main board to make the complete puzzle seen above. The last pieces placed were the campaign goal for 2011.
Here, I’m trimming down the agency puzzles so they can be mounted on foam core. The puzzle was too big to place on a single piece of paper, so I carefully lined everything up so you can’t tell where one sheet ended and the next began.
Here I’m lining up the mounted pieces with the center pieces. The concentric rings really helped with alignment! To give you an idea of the size, the big worktable is 5 feet by 5 feet.
Once we had all the pieces cut and mounted on foam core, we could start cutting the individual puzzle pieces. There were 110 pieces total. My mom, Lynne, helped by cutting, cutting, cutting, and then cutting some more!
We ran into a snag at this point. The puzzle pieces needed to be magnetic to attach to the sheet metal backing. My first idea, to use magnetic primer, was a complete fail. If you’ve been thinking about using it for a project, be sure to test it first. A magnet will stick to it after two coats, but it itself is not magnetic, which is what I needed for this project. Also, it makes a very rough and irregular surface, which would be hard to paint over if you were putting it on a wall.
Plan B was to attach magnetic strips to the pieces. Mom had picked up quite a pile of magnetic strip at garage sales, so we thought we were set. Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough, and some of the strip was so old that the adhesive wouldn’t stick. Mom made a late night run to Walmart to get more strip. Unfortunately, the adhesive on it wasn’t any better! Out came the glue gun as a last minute rescue.
By this photo, we’re nearly done attaching magnets! The emergency chocolate helped get the project done.
Putting the puzzle together at the rally was fun and chaotic, and I hoped everyone learned something about the agencies and about the support the United Way provides in the community. The completed puzzle will be displayed at Logansport Memorial Hospital, starting on Live United Day, September 16th, so check it out. And if you don’t already, consider giving to United Way so you can touch lives throughout Cass County.
—Loryn
I’m still up to my ears in markers. It turns out that there are all different kinds and I want to try them all. These are permanent markers and I use them a lot with colored pencils. I like to lay down the broad areas with the markers and shade with the pencils.
I was having a hard time finding a suitable place to put them while I was working. The rose bowl vase and BBs work with the longer watercolor markers but the shorter markers are swallowed whole by the vase. Not to mention that I would have to go buy more BBs and that doesn’t fit in with my ‘make do’ doctrine.
I found this charging dock at that great garage sale Cheri and I went to last week. I’ve always wanted one of these for my electronics, but it turns out that nothing I have now really fits very well. I think things are slimmer now, but larger overall.
Since I wasn’t using it for charging, the dock was sitting on my table until I could decide what to do with it. I needed to shift the markers from the side table next to my recliner to the large table in my studio and I shoved them in the dock for temporary transportation. And voila, marker holder extraordinaire! I am able to see the color of the markers and it is easy to take them out and put them back in. The cord port in the back holds the pens I am using the most at the moment and there is still room left to park my phone while I am listening to an audio book.
I always love those ‘aha moments.’ It’s great how things work some time and it’s even more fun to never know when an idea will come along.
-Lynne
So I got bit by the crochet bug about a few months ago. I have always done some crochet for years (one day soon I will blog about the best hotpads in creation), but this was something more. In the last few months I have made a couple of shrugs, have two in the making and have just started another project, the winter sweater. The winter sweater is a singular and wonderful item. If you can manage to find one in a store to buy, cherish it. I have not been so lucky.
I was inspired yesterday by this absolutely gorgeous Cascade wool yarn I found in this great yarn store, In a Yarn Basket, here in Bloomington, Indiana. It is Ecological Wool which is 100% Peruvian Highland Wool and I picked up four undyed skeins. As anyone who crochets know, you have to have quite a bit more yarn for your projects than knitters do, which can really hurt your pocketbook (I will show off my $100 Noro wool shrug one of these days too).This yarn is gorgeous and comes in 478 yard skeins. I hadn’t really thought about it, but that is a lot of yarn and I bought 4 of these skeins. I started laughing hysterically when the store owner brought them out after balling them up for me because man, those balls were huge!
The other yarn in the photo is some glorious 100% baby alpaca also made by Cascade called Pure Alpaca and will make a wonderful lace shrug. It is a smaller weight yarn and comes in 220 yard skeins which is a more average amount of yarn per skein. The difference in the two cracks me up though. Here is a link to the sweater I am making, it is a Caron pattern I found from the Crochet Pattern Central which if you haven’t been to yet is a wonderful site (they also have a Knitting Pattern Central too) that has links to thousands of patterns across the web (only the free ones) all at your fingertips.
Caron Asymmetrical Jacket Pattern
I also have to showcase a YouTube video I found on a crochet stitch that I have just found out about. It is called foundation single chain and I really wish I had heard about this one sooner, but hey, sooner is always preferable to never.
Crochet Foundation Single Chain
The video is a good tutorial. I will have to post pictures of the sweater as I go. I am currently working on the collar and have a long way to go. Good thing it is still summer.
– Kristin
I am a collector, and when I say collector, I mean collector. I love to collect things, such as rulers, hand mirrors, pins, old rusty latches, skeleton keys and rocks. You might laugh at the rock part, but that is truly the one item I have collected my whole life. I don’t know what clicks in a person to make them look at a rock and say “I really love that rock, that is one of the coolest, prettiest, loveliest, most interesting rock I have ever seen”. Since my very first rock I was hooked. I can look into a pile of rocks and find the one I really want, it is almost like it speaks to me.
In my elementary science class I had to do a rock collection, and I thought to myself, I have this one in the bag, or so I thought. It turns out that my teacher did not want to see my pretty rocks, he wanted to know the geological names of them. Talk about disappointment, I really thought I had found a kindred spirit with my rock mania. And really, I don’t care which part of the earth they came from.
I have since found a few people that share my rock fondness, but I do believe that we really are a rare breed. I thought maybe I would take a photo to show how I have displayed some of my prized possessions. So, feast your eyes, my fellow rock hounds.
–Cheri
the crafty sisters 