Bag Lady

I've been having lots of fun making purses lately. This is one I made a couple months ago for my roommate. She says people come up to her on the streets downtown and ask where they can buy one too. It's from Amy Butler's pattern "Sophia Carry-All"

I just finished another purse last week for my friend, Hannah. It is from Amy Butler's "Frenchy Bag" pattern. It went together so easily and in only a few hours. I added the freehand applique to the front to spice it up a little bit.

(Looks kind of like an "H" for Hannah :)

Welcome Spring!

This is actually the result of last month's craft challenge. We were given the pink fabric, pearls, easter eggs, ribbon, and buttons.

I had a wreath that I had been wanting to decorate for spring, so the two ideas merged together to fulfill my need to decorate my previously boring and drab apartment door.

I added some scrapbook paper I had and made some funky flowers with the Easter egg halves as the flower centers. It was a really fun and easy project, plus I just used twist-ties to put everything into the wreath, so I can still change all the pieces out for the next season!

Beading Through the Storm

The past few days have been rather rainy in the afternoon, despite the gorgeous weather in the mornings. I get all excited to go out for a bike ride or a walk later in the afternoon, and then it starts to downpour (and even some hail yesterday!!)

Instead of letting the weather get me down, I used the colors of water as inspiration to create this fun 7-strand braided bracelet/anklet.

This is the beginning of the braid...much more complex than the braiding I did on my Barbie dolls when I was younger!!

And this is the finished project once the ends were attached.

It turned out to be a bit larger than I expected, but this way it will fit as an anklet too!!

Inspiration Board

So I'm a part of this monthly craft challenge sponsored by Christy Nelson. Basically, every month, I get sent a packet of all sorts of random crafting-type things. You have a couple of weeks to use these products to create a single project and you must use at least a little bit of each item in the packet. After your project is finished, you post a picture online and then hopefully people vote for your product because then you get the following month's packet for free!

This month, I received: burlap, green felt, 4 green paper circles, 2 clothespins, 10 sequins

And to those supplies, I added:

cardboard circle, styrofoam circles, sewing pins, cardboard

I tossed around a lot of different ideas at first. I always try to figure out something that is useful and practical as well as something creative that is uniquely mine. I finally settled on making an inspiration board. I've been wanting a small bulletin board to pin up little fabric swatches, magazine clippings, etc. for quite some time and this seemed like a perfect opportunity.

I put the styrofoam circles inside the cardboard circle, covered it with the piece of burlap and stapled it in place. I cut up the felt to make a strip that surrounded the base.

After that was finished, I put my piece of cardboard through a handheld machine to corrugate it and glued that to the top, to cover up the staples.

I took some of my old flower-head sewing pins, bent the tops back and added sequins for some sparkle. Finally, I wrote the words "inspire" and "imagine" on two of the circles, glued all 4 of the circles to the main piece and I was finished.

All that was left then was to tack up my little inspirations with the clothespins and pins!!