Hungering For A Messenger Bag

On the evening of March 22nd, I went to the movie The Hunger Games with my friend Brooke and posted about it here.  I promised a tutorial on how I made my Hunger Games messenger Bag and I am finally following through.

 So, here is the sizing I cut my fabric up in.  The fabric by the way was a thick canvas with a thick plastic backing.  I used the plastic backing as the lining of the bag.

You can add a 1/4" seam around it, I didn't.  So, my actual bag came out a little smaller than the measurements here.  I pinned the front piece and the side pieces canvas side's together on my first stitching and sewed them together.  

I then turned this piece right side out and sewed the bottom of the back piece on.  

Now, this is going to sound confusing, but I turned the bag right side out again and sewed the two sides of the back piece onto the bag. 

After this, I cleaned up the flaps edges and folded them under and sewed.  

bag finished without straps

For the strap I folded it in half and ironed in on the canvas side....and yes it was ok to iron, even with the other side being plastic. Then I folded it again (quartered it) so that the sides were touching in the middle and ironed it again.  Keeping the sides touching in the middle I folding the whole thing in half and sewed along the edge.  

I used gromets to attach the strap to the bag.  Then using the fabric transfer paper I transfered my image (google image search) onto the front of the flap.  

And it was complete!  Keep in mind this can be done for anything.  It can be left plain for everyday or different themes for children.

Sweater Dress Reconstruction...Sort of

It has been so long since I have posted anything and a super long time since I have sewn anything.  And I know this because when I was trying to reload my bobbin, I couldn't remember how to do it.  It could also be that I have been in school for the past couple of months and I have a little bit of brain fry.  But either way, I do have a new reconstruction for you!  Sort of.  Unfortunately I don't have much time for a long, pretty, witty post.  So, here is my fast and the furious reconstruction. 

About a month ago, I went to the Goodwill and pick up a really cute sweater dress.  I loved the color and the scalloped bottom and sleeves.  The unfortunate part was the armpit area was extremely huge and baggy.  So, I did a little bit of thinking,  a little bit of cutting, and a little bit of sewing. 

can you tell how big the armpit area is

I love the scallop on the bottom

sketched out where I am going to cut

I went about a fingers length in

on both sides

after I cut off the sleeves I used a zig zag stitch to finish off the sleeves

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 With the boot sock and leg warmer trend, at an all time high, how could I resist making my sleeves into matching leg warmers.  And of course, I will have to wear a cardigan with the outfit.  For some reason, I don't feel right in the winter without layers.

Book Club Gifts

As much as I would like to be creative, I am willing to be crafty.  I say this because over the last couple of weeks I have done a bunch of crafting, but it has mostly been coping great ideas off of pinterest.  But, I am ok with that (for now) because there are some awesome ideas on there. 
Two of the great ideas I have found off pinterest were these babies.

For website, click here

For website, click here

These were perfect for the book club I am in.  This was all I needed.

Bag of cheap Gummy worms, plastic baggy, staples, and cardstock with saying on it

just "ONE" book, tape, hot glue gun and sticks, and some type of ribbon/yarn

There really is not a lot of explanation needed for the gummy worms.  Pretty much stick them into a bag and staple the saying on the top to attach it to the bag and to close the bag up.

For the ornament, I will not lie, each ornament took me a good hour or so to make.  So, yes they were time consuming.  It was a lot of trial and error to get the size I liked.  I recommend cutting the page down in halves three times for the bigger outer layer and four times for the inner layer.  You roll each section into "cones" and tape to hold in place.  I then made a square out of a page of the book and glued the larger cones to it.  I only have pictures of the first one I did (and for some reason I used tape to adhere the cones to the square and it was much much bigger) but, definitely use glue.  It is so much cleaner and doesn't weigh as much.  I made a whole on the back square piece and threaded the "ribbon" through it and made a knot.  Easy peasy.

This is only halved twice.  I have each of these again for the outer layer.  Then halves that sized once more for the inner layer. 

Roll them in a "cone" shape

tape the "cone" in place

in this picture, I taped the cones down.  But, in the ornaments I gave away, I hot glued them down.  Plus, in this picture I used a larger piece of paper than the piece of paper I used in the ornaments I gave away.

Once you get into doing this, you will come up with your own technique to glue them into place. 

Here is one of my completed ornaments I gave away.  I tied the ribbon (that hangs the ornament from the tree) to the back "square" piece

Christmas Craftapaloosa 2011

My friend Brooke, is one of those people who will come up with the best ideas.  Sometimes she comes up with the craziest ideas.  And sometimes she comes up with ideas where you just don't know if you want to go along with them.  I have learned to just go along with any of her ideas.  Because even if something does not sound fun....it some how always ends up being a blast.
On Saturday,I did not doubt the fun to be had. She planned a craftaploosa.  She found three great crafts (that she found on pinterest, got to love pinterest).  She invited friends and family.  And being the organized super mom that she is, set up organized craft zones, pre-practiced the crafts, and simplified the crafts.  Once again, I am not going to reinvent the wheel, but I do want to tell you what we did to prepare and some of the things we tried that didn't work out.    So, to start off, we did the snowflakes from toilet paper roll ornaments.  Here is the inspiration and the website we tried to copy.

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  This was a really easy craft.  The hardest part about it was painting it.  The other day Brooke and I practiced the crafts and we tried to spray paint the snowflake.  But, it was kind of a pain in the arse.  So, we decided to use acrylic paint.  Which actually worked fine.  It may have just been us, but it was hard to get enough glitter on without making it look all splotchy.  But, after looking at the inspiration picture right now, we obviously didn't use enough glitter.  So, here is my finished snowflake.  It turned out cute, but definitely needs more glitter.

Also, I obviously suck at cutting paper because my 5 pieces were not the same size which made it look like a 4 year old made the ornament.  I will still put it on my tree though.  As you can see we added a little something to the middle.  We did this because after assembling our practice ornament, it was not looking very good in the middle.  So we decided to add something to cover up the middle.  But, the lesson learned here is, you can never have too much glitter.
The second thing we worked on was the glittery ornaments.  Here is the inspiration and the website we copied.

This was probably the easiest crafts and came out exactly like the inspiration.  We tried the small glitter flecks that was used in the inspiration and the bigger flakes of glitter and I will agree that the small flecks of glitter looked better....for the most part.  Here is ours.

Brooke pouring the Mop N Glo into the ornament and swirling it around

gotta let it drip out

Adding a TON, TON, TON of Glitter.  The important word here is TON

some of our completed ornaments. 

this one had the bigger blue flecks and the smaller black flecks of glitter combined

The last craft was the most time consuming, but I think the prettiest one.  It was the letter with the berries glued on it.  Here is the inspiration and the website we got it from.

Personalized Coasters

Back on May 30th, I posted about doing coasters as presents.  Well, we decided that since we were going to be making wine glasses and mugs for my husband's parents, we might as well make them some personalized coasters too.  There are craftier ways to do this such as these three sites, but I wanted to do something quick and easy.  So, we purchased some transfer paper which is made for pretty much everything, especially tile, for $19.70.  If you would like to purchase the same kind check out my amazon store.  We also purchased the follow items.

• 24x48 Cork Roll for 9.99
• 25 Rialto Beige tile for $0.37 with ended up being $9.25
• 3oz. bottle of Contact Cement for $4.97
• 11.5oz can of gloss Helsmman urethane for $9.09
• We had a can of satin already on hand

So, the total for everything for this project is going to be$33.30.  We have made 6 coasters for my husband's mother and 6 for my husband's father.  We made 4 coasters for my mother and 4 coasters for my sister.  Then we made 4 coasters for a friend and we had purchase 1 extra coaster to test out the whole process for ourselves.  We of course still have a bunch of cork, contact cement, urethane, and transfer paper left over.  The first thing we did was find a font that we liked from this website.  Then we sized it to the size we liked on our paint program.  From there, we printed them onto the transfer paper using the instructions on the package. Then cut them out.  There is one thing we would do different next time.  We would cut the letters out and do it the size of the tile itself, that way you can't see the edges of the transfer paper.  

Then we got a bowl of water and put it in the water for 60 seconds.  It was so fun watching them shrink up.

please ignore the mess in the background. 

After that we peeled the white backing off of the paper and placed it on the tile.

Once the transfer paper dries it will turn white and you will need to spray it with urethane.

While the urethane was drying we cut the cork and I just want to show you this huge pile of cork!

Once the urethane dried, we used the contact cement and glued the cork to the bottom of the tile.

Here are the completed tiles.  What do you think?

The coasters we are giving to a friend.  He is a Bangles fan