The Fabric Floozie

Hello everyone!

I’m back from Vacation. It was a 2 week trek back home (up north) for my best friends wedding. YAY! We also saw lots of family and had a great time, but it really put a halt to all the projects we were working on.

So today we dove back in head first on finding great deals to help us improve our home.

And by the way, I found one heck of a deal that I didn’t get a blog about before we left town… I’ll be sure to share that one with you soon enough though. Just a hint? It’s a $2,000.00 deal. No joke.

But today my deal is a $70 deal.

We went to Lowe’s tonight to get some cement board screws to hang up some outdoor decor I purchased (also a deal, but will post about that tomorrow) and while there we saw a rolling rack with light fixtures that were clearanced. I found what appeared to be a display model of the Mitchell Vanity Mirror. It was in great shape! I told my husband that it would be perfect in our downstairs half bathroom which is very plain and booooooring right now.

In this boooooring half bathroom we have a totally basic frameless mirror, a pedistal sink, and one of these fugly temporary lights

Not very stylin, huh? So we snatched that pretty little light up and headed right home to install her!

Here are my horribly blurry, not color corrected quick photos I took after dark. LOL

Not a bad change for 18 beans huh?

Tell me about the best deal you’ve found recently for our home or crafting!

If you’re my husband, you can build an entire tool bench with $23.00. Including tax.

Yup, that’s right. He’s the man! I’m a pretty creative lady myself, but dude has impressed me this week.

This tool bench is ALL GREEN, ALL THE TIME. Every single piece of wood in this piece was salvaged lumber from another project. How great is that? No extra waste. No extra expense. The $23.00 was the cost of 2 casters, 8 bolts (for the casters) and a box of screws. We are going to paint it to get all the wood uniform, but we are waiting until another weekend to tackle that. In the meantime, my hubby has his first tool bench

If you follow my blog, you probably already know Ana White. You probably already read Knock-Off Wood, and you probably have either already built something from her site, or are int he process of buying materials for one of her plans.

She’s contagious. Really.

Ana is this gorgeous female carpenter who offers free plans on her website for dozens upon dozens of awesome furniture pieces that you could easily buy in stores…. for a markup that makes me want to cry. I don’t mean like “Wow, I saved 10% by building it myself”. I’m talking more “I spent $110 on this including paint instead of buying it for $3,000 in a designer furniture store”. She’s awesome.

My husband and I are completely addicted to her website and while the big kids picnic table here was our first project by her, we have several more we are ready to tackle after vacation.

I was a bad girl and didn’t take photos while we were making this, but here are some pics of the kids (and dog!) enjoying this table once it was finished.

A few months ago I was flown out to florida to photograph one of my best friends renewing her vows on the beach with her family. On the way to the airport, I noticed that our neighbor had this “pretty” little bench (snapped in half) out with their trash.

I told JR that I wanted him to snag it if it was still out there when he got back from the airport. As usual, he looked at me like i’d lost my mind, and said “sure”.
When I returned about 3 days later, the bench was stacked in the corner of our garage. I was excited and oh-so proud of him for listening, until he confessed. He didn’t pick it up that day. Then the next day, it was still there. And the next day, it was still there. When he walked out the door to go get me from the airport after my return flight, he’d realized it hadn’t been picked up yet, and thought “Crap, now I HAVE to get it, or she’ll be mad”. LOL. So he dragged it into our garage that day and I saw it that night.
But really, it doesn’t matter how it got there, it just matters that it DID get there. And now it’s beautiful.

I started by removing all of the bolts and screws and discarding the busted up and rotted wood panels.
I hit up lowes for what they call “craft boards” in the size I needed. They were pricey, but the right size (no cutting) and a hard, high quality wood.
I also grabbed a can of the “Red Elm” Gel Stain from Lowes. Come to find out, Gel Stain is one of the best things you can use on hard woods b/c it doesn’t need to soak all the way in to get a deep, rich color (soaking in is difficult on very hard, dense boards).
I picked up some Brown colored Spray paint Primer for rusted metal, and some Valspar Brick Red Spray Paint as my top coat.

When I got home, I thoroughly cleaned the metal pieces and started priming them. Once they were primed and painted and dried, I re-assembled the metal and did a dry-fit of the wood to be sure it would work before drilling/staining such $$ wood panels.
Once I knew it would fit, I quickly stained all the pieces and re-assembled the bench using mostly the same hardware that came with it. Some screws were missing or just too rusted, so those were replaced.
And in the end, we have a new Bench… for around $55

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You’ve all probably seen Lily’s room in all of it’s pink and bead-boarded glory, but most of you haven’t seen Brendan’s space-themed bedroom.

For starters, Brendan is nearly 5 years old, and is obsessed with all things space and astronaut. When I say obsessed, I mean OBSESSED.  He was an astronaut for Halloween. His chicken nuggets are rocket ships blasting off. In fact, he’ll pretend ANYTHING he can get his hands on is a rocket ship… from toilet paper rolls to stacks of Legos, to spools to thread, to Tinkerbell dolls.

So when we were ready to do his room, the theme was a no brainer.

We started with a small-ish and very plain bedroom

To help you get an idea of room size, this is what the previous owners had in this room:

First things first, I knew Brendan needed a chalkboard wall. I also knew that chalk board paint is significantly more expensive than regular black paint, so I taped off the wall about 3.5 feet up and painted the bottom half chalkboard and the top half black

If you decide to paint using chalkboard paint, be sure to follow the curing directions to a T.

I also knew I wanted the top half of the wall to have some sort of space theme to it. At the time, Brendan was *really* into space ships and blasting everything off, counting backwards. So I googled rocket ships til I found one I was confident I could replicate.

Then I headed into his room with red paint and a tiny brush

Once the chalkboard paint was dry, I used 2 1×2s and painted them red, then attached them similar to chair rail over my tape line. This separated the two types of paints and well as provided a resting place for the chalk.

I had previously contacted Samantha of Goin’ Vinyl to place an order for the numbers “1″ through “10″ and the word “Blast Off!”

I had purchased coordinating bedding from Ikea on the cheap, and purchased matching colored fabric from Joann’s to recover some blue pleather ottomans i’d had for work.

While at Joann’s, Brendan spotted some space themed fabric which I knew he needed a pillow out of

And we hung the ikea circular toy net in red, and an ikea angled bookshelf in red

So here was his room at that point

This week, however, we made some changes.

After we added/moved some stuff:

For starters, let me address some of the space decor in the room.

The space stickies above the window are from Dollar Tree. Santa put them in Brendan’s stocking
The wooden space shapes above his bed are prepainted from Hobby Lobby.
The space patches on Brendan’s wall by the door are from TheSpaceStore.com
The globe is from Toys R Us.
The telescope is from Toys R us and I DO NOT recommend it.
The astronaut bear on the bed is from Hard Rock Cafe – Houston.
The letter B was purchased at a Burlington 5 years ago when I was pregnant with B by a friend of mine. I painted it to match his growth chart….

Which brings us to the growth chart itself

I, of course, made it the same way I made Lily’s. You can see my tutorial here.

The back of it was painted with leftover black paint from his wall (the top half). The rest was painted with paint pens from Hobby Lobby, excluding the earth which was painted with a brush using paint I had on hand. I recommend splurging on the paint pens (about $3.00 per pen) as it will make your life SO much easier, and it will give you a much smoother, more even layer of paint.

I do have more vinyl on the way for some canvas like panels to go over his dresser, and we do plan to eventually re-finish his dresser black. But that’ll be a while

So that’s Brendan’s room. Now you’ve seen both
What is your favorite room you’ve decorated recently? Do you have a bathroom that you’d love to hang out in? Or is the office your calm space? Include a link if you can

I guess about 2 weeks ago, my husband headed out to Vegas on a work trip. I was really upset at first because as much as I hate to admit it, my husband and I are a little codependent.

Okay, fine. I’m a little codependent. He’d probably fare just fine without me (although, he is visibly worn down and relieved every time the kids and I come back from a vacation without him), but I always get very upset and lonely when he’s gone.

With 2 kids to worry about, a house to prepare and a birthday party to do final planning for, I didn’t have time to be lonely. You see, my husband was flying home on Friday night at 11pm. At exactly the same time his mother was flying into town for our daughters birthday. So when he got home, he’d have his Mom with him. Which meant ALL the cleaning/organizing was left up to me, to be done before his arrival home. On top of that, on Saturday morning, our home would welcome a dozen family and friends to celebrate Lily’s 2nd birthday. Yikes. So much to do!

Along with the normal “clean bathrooms, vacuum, mop floors” to-do list that is inevitable when you have a get together at your house, I decided to give myself a few fun jobs to do. Things I’d WANT to accomplish, but also really needed to be done.

One of those jobs was to redo the kids bathroom. Their bathroom is a nice sized room for a secondary bathroom, and includes a tub/shower and single sink. It’s nothing amazing, but it is roomy and it had potential if we could just pull it from the clutches of the builder basics that held it hostage. Beige walls. Plain cupboards and counter tops. Big cheap mirror and ugly light fixture. Don’t get me started on the brass doorknobs (those will be the death of me in this house).

So I headed to Lowe’s, armed only with a shower curtain I already had on hand for that room, and 2 screaming children.  I picked out a color by Olympia called “Turquoise Mist” and grabbed a new pack of roller heads. On the way  home, my 2 year old informed me that not only am I mean, but I’m “not da boss”. Can you say “nap time”?

So we headed home, I tucked the kids into bed for naps, and I tackled the bathroom.

After painting all the walls turquoise (half of a $24 gallon), I rehung the shower curtain and liner (Curtain: Free from a friend who didn’t need it anymore. Liner: Already had on hand, from Ikea $3.99. Rings: Already had on hand, from Home Depot. $2.96).

I also applied some fun Vinyl I’d picked up at Hobby Lobby during a 50% off sale.  It went up okay, but nothing compared to the easy applications I’ve gotten from Samantha at Goin’ Vinyl (BTW, if you place an order with Samantha, tell her you heard about her through TFF).

Hit up the towel closet and picked out a mixture of bright towel colors that I had from my college days. LOL

Then I grabbed a green plastic bucket I got years ago filled as a gift basket, cleaned it all out and filled it with some basics for our house guests.

And Ta Da! The bathroom is done!

Overall, it cost me $34.00 to redo the bathroom, and I still have paint left over for other projects. Not too shabby The hubby was very impressed.

Thanks for following along!!

If you haven’t yet, be sure to enter this weeks giveaway! CLICK HERE to read all about it.

Last week my husband went out of town for several days, and I got a wild hair to make a toilet paper holder while he was gone. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know if it was a serious lack of anything better to do with my time (could that possible be it?), or maybe my inability to focus on projects I SHOULD be doing, when there are projects I COULD be doing… or it possibly could have been the anxiety i feel when I’m digging through stacks of toilet paper under the sink in any of the 3 bathrooms we have in this house. Ugh. Yeah, it was probably one of those things…

Anyways, this toilet paper holder can also be used to hold paper towels if you’d like to make something fun that matches your home decor.

My plan started out at Home Depot which, while functional, did not produce something as pretty as I’d hoped for. Nor was it easy finding what I wanted.

First I purchased a dowel to use as the actual holder. The dowel I purchased was 1″ in diameter (perfect size) and 3 feet in length (also perfect size).

I then purchase a 1×6 piece of wood, and utilized some 1″ wood trim I’d had left over from a recent project.

**see below for how to make this without 1×6 and trim**

First, cut a square off the 1×6. My husband says that a 1×6 is actually 5.5″ wide, so in that case, make it a 5.5″x5.5″ square.

Using a Miter Saw, cut trim that will fit around all the edges (this is just for looks). Using a nailgun, attach the trim pieces along all 4 sides.

Cut the dowel to a 12″ length (I cut mine into 3rds so I could make 3 of them).

Paint dowel and trimmed square.

Using coordinating scrapbooking paper and mod-podge, cover the top of the base and the entire dowel with paper. Consider spraying with Rustoleum Gloss Coat when it’s dry, to stop any tackiness the mod-podge might have. Using a 2″ (or longer) screw, and the coordinating drill bit, drill a hole into the center of your base and into the center of the dowel bottom. Run screw up through the base from underneath and into the dowel. Tighten down. I predrilled a little too much on mine, and it was still turning and not quite getting tight. If you have this probablem, a dab of wood glue onto the threads of the screw and onto the bottom of the dowel will help.

Apply no-slip sticky furniture pads to the bottom of the base to keep it from getting dinged up, or dinging anything else up.

All done! Just slip on some TP or Paper Towels and enjoy the decorative holder you just made for under $5.

Lemmi tell ya, that’s HARD. TO. FIND.

* as a side note, if you care to bypass the wood cutting, just hit up your local Hobby Lobby and go to the wood section. You can get decorative circles or squares (with pretty curved edges) for under $1.50 each. I went and got 2 to use on my next 2 I’ll be making, b/c the trim work was more than I cared to do for something so small

And totally off topic, and a little personal, but I’d like to ask my readers to say a little prayer for my Brother in Law as he prepares for a 6 months deployment.

Last night I made my first reversible reconstruction. I don’t mean reversible as in “the inside is one fabric, the outside is another”. I mean, it can be worn forwards or backwards with 2 slightly different looks.
Now, for most people, it wouldn’t really be worth it to take the extra steps to make something forward/backward reversible JUST to have two “slightly” different looks. BUT here’s where it comes in handy:
When you have a toddler who is growing at breakneck speed and you are trying to keep her in clothing that will last a while.

That’s right, this will fit her at 2 different stages.

Backwards it features a squared neckline, puffy elbow-length sleeves and a flat front empire waist with a slightly higher neckline (perfect for young toddlers with narrow shoulders).

Forwards, it features a mitered square neckline, puffy elbow-length sleeves, and a gathered empire waist front with a slightly lower neckline (better for older toddlers/young kids who fill out the shoulder straps more).

As usual, I started with a size medium women’s shirt (handed down from my mom) and went to town cutting it apart.

I started by removing the sleeves at the seamline

Then I cut the framed neckline at the 45 degree angle in the bottom 2 corners, both on the front and back.

Cut up the sides of the garment along the seam lines, making a front panel and a back panel.

Taking the shoulder straps that you removed, cut off the serged area, plus about 1/4″ of fabric to scale them down for a smaller garment.

Using measurements from your child, measure out the chest of the garment (for Lily, it needs to be 20″ around for the chest) and mark the fabric.
Cut front panel using your measurements.
Do the same for the back panel.

Taking one strap, lay it face down on top of the front panel. Line the top-stitched edge up with the neckline of the dress and pin at a 45 degree angle where you want to attach it to the garment (for Lily, I leave about a 5″-5.25″ neckline), then stitch down at 45 degree angle.

“unfold” upwards, and top stitch. Do the same on the other strap.

For the back, you can either do the same, or do a simple squared neckline like I did by laying it flat under the back neckline and top stitching. To make it reversible, do not line up the front and back necklines up exactly. Instead, stagger the back a few inches (1-2″ max) higher than the front neckline.

Serge up the sides of the dress while inside out.

Serge hemline and hem to your desired length (mine was 16″ from the center neckline).

Take the sleeves and cut them down (on the seamed side) to the width you need. Consider the sleeve lenght you want, and cut, then serge, inside out.

Turn dress inside out and place sleeve in through sleeve hole right side out. Serge to dress body

Do the same for the other sleeves, then turn right side out. (Shown “forwards”)

So that’s step by step of how I made Lily’s latest dress.
For the time being, she’s in it “backwards” as the lower neckline is just too low for my tastes. Once she’s a little bigger/taller and fills out the shoulders better, she should be able to wear it either as a dress forwards, or even as a tunic top

You think she likes it?

A few weeks ago I commented on a post on a cool website called CraftEvolve. CE encourages green crafting through up-cycling, re-purposing and usage of local organic and sustainable crafting resources.  I submitted a project of mine to them through their contributor link, since it seemed right up my alley, and the response was “Hey, can we interview you?” to which I, obviously, answered “OF COURSE!” (with exactly that much enthusiasm, too. I promise.)

The one amusing part of it all was that they wanted a photo of my crafting space. If you’re on my facebook fan page , you’ve already heard this comparison… but it was a little like being asked for a photo of my panty drawer. LOL. You know, tiny, crowded, and way messier than I want people to know it is.  We were actually in the process of seriously unpacking our bedroom from the move (that’s always the last room to be finished, isn’t it?) so I took the photo once everything was gone/out of the way. Not as embarrassing as I’d thought it might be, but at the same time, kind of inspiring. Because my craft space is SO very small. No joke… it’s one of these and a 2nd little matching tower stand that they evidently no loner carry. It’s tiny. It’s cramped. It’s cluttered. But it’s the most I’ve got right now. So let that be a lesson to all you crafters: You don’t need some big, beautifully decorated, dedicated crafting space in order to get stuff done!

Check out the link to my interview below and please take a moment to leave her some comment luvin’s to help me thank her for featuring my site! Thank you so much!

http://craftevolve.com/2010/01/innovator-the-fabric-floozie/

Earlier this year, our family gathered at my Mom’s house to say Goodbye to my Grandparents before they headed home to California from their holiday vacation.

While there, my aunt said that she’d brought a coat that she had and could not longer wear. She asked if I’d like it to make something for Lily. Of course, I said “yes!” and got excited thinking about what i could do with it.

The piece, to start with, was a Style&Co (Macy’s brand) Off-White Suede outer, faux-sherpa inner button down coat. It was a size XL in womens.

Since the coat was constructed using a patchwork design, I decided that to salvage as much material as possible, I would disassemble it using only a seam ripper. It was surprisingly easy and fast, and it allowed me to really focus on how each element on the coat was completed, giving me ideas for how to reconstruct it later.

Once the coat was completely taken apart, I started piecing together a pattern. Since I knew in my head what I wanted it to look like, I took all of Lily’s measurements and wrote them on a piece of paper with a diagram of a body. This allowed me to keep better track of EXACTLY where each measurement started and stopped. I drew out each pattern piece i’d need on separate pieces of computer paper with a sharpie. With sweat on my brow and fear in my heart (was I going to trash this perfectly lovely jacket that didn’t NEED to be taken apart in the first place, and not even end up with something wearable in the end?!) I began cutting pieces of suede to match the pattern pieces.

I utilized the existing button holes and buttons, as well as later using the existing collar piece. Pretty much everything else was just cut using random shapes of fabric that didn’t apply to the new coat pattern.

As the project went on, I was more and more excited with the outcome. As I told a friend of mine, I NORMALLY like what I make. I’m RARELY proud of what I make. And I’m *really* proud of this jacket. It came out perfectly. More perfect than I’d even hoped for. And it was so easy to do (from disassembling the XL jacket to sewing the buttons on the final product, the project took me less than 1 day).

Since Lily’s 2nd birthday is coming up next week, it was time to take her out for some birthday photos anyways. So one of her outfits for the photos was her new homemade coat. *swoon*

Check them out below (Hat by beaniesbystacie.com)