random.on purpose.

If You Have to Earn a Living

...it's nice when the projects have an element of fun to them!  Behold part of this week's output:

Hard to look at those and not cheer up a bit, no?  They are for the black park benches outside one of the stores I sew for.  There are two benches (one on either side of the door), so there is a second set of pillows exactly like these.  Who doesn't love pink (which is not quite so shockingly bright IRL) and green together - especially when you throw in some zebra stripes and a bold black-and-white floral with them?  And ruffles?  Yeah, these were fun to make!

They've also sparked a change in direction for my studio decor.  I was headed toward red (my passion for a long, long, time), but as I sewed these, I kept noticing that my file cabinet and the base of my table are black, my toolbox is pink, my Big Shot is black and pink...  These colors make me happy...  Yeah, I think I'm headed a black/white/pink/green direction now.  Good thing I never got around to making the window treatment or reupholstering my chairs, eh?  Everything happens for a reason...

I STILL haven't done a test-run of my Big Shot, if you can believe that!  There's been so much... "house" stuff that had to be done (we have to "winterize", inside and out, here in upstate New York), and I've been decorating for Christmas and starting other holiday preparations and working and all the rest of it!  I also got this "purge" bug, and hauled stuff to Goodwill and The Boys and Girls Clubs of America and am still sorting through and weeding out and dropping off and just generally making messes and cleaning up messes and carrying on with life in general, and - so far - it hasn't included Big Shot time...

I plan to make a few decorations for my tree that will be good practice on the new toy, though, and I'm hoping that today's the day!  A little later, though - it's only 2:36 am currently and I'm going back to bed in a few minutes.  I was already there once for a few hours, but woke up for some inexplicable reason and decided to do this whilst awaiting the sleepiness to return...

And so, with that, I'm signing off and giving it a go - g'night! (or morning or whatever)

The "Day Job" Doesn't Always Suck

While the majority of my days are filled with things that "have" to be done, rather than things I "want" to be doing, sometimes the project(s) I work on have an element or two that make it kinda sorta fun.  I've made the pillows for Hannah's room, and it was fun to figure out how to use the scraps from her "memo wall" to make decent-sized pillows:

Hannah is mostly into giraffes (as opposed to the other animal skins), so I used bigger pieces on the wall, which meant smaller scraps to use for the pillows.  One answer was to use a strip of it with two smaller strips of the cheetah for a neckroll (made from a strip of batting left over from another job rolled into a "tootsie roll" and whip-stitched together), with taffeta cording and buttons.  A 17" strip of the iridescent taffeta was fashioned into a shirred, round pillow with button tufting.  I had a big piece of the tiger left over, so it became one side of a 24" square  pillow.  The other side is pieced together with a giraffe square surrounded by mitered cheetah strips, with taffeta cording between:

I used larger welt cord to make the cording for the outside edge of the pillow.  Hannah's comforter is solid brown, so these pillows should look pretty good against it.

In other news, I finished my coffee-table-turned-patio-bench:

It's hard to see because of the lighting (or lack thereof), but the bench itself has several coats of black spray paint, followed by a couple of coats of "hammered black" spray paint.  Here's a better look at the top of the cushion:

And, since it 's reversible, I'll show you the other side, too:

Not bad for FREE, eh?  (Well, almost - I did have to buy the webbing to support the cushion and the spray paint)  Next up: staining the Adirondack chairs.  They're going to be RED - the stain color is called "Sangria" - I'm pretty excited about it...

And that's pretty much all I have to share with you today!  Something a bit different from the paper creations you're used to seeing, but I'm trying to share more of all of the different things I do, not just cards and such...

I'm delivering Hannah's pillows today and faux-finishing the walls of the sunroom at the same house, so I doubt I'll be back around later.  Have a fabulous weekend!

I'm Not Dead Yet...

...despite my loooong absence from my blog possibly indicating otherwise!  LOTS going on this summer, and we're still adjusting to our new roomie :)

I haven't been doing much in the paper-crafting arena, but I have been doing some creative stuff work-wise and other-wise.  I just put the finishing touches on a teenage girl's bedroom.  I'll apologize now for the horrendous pics (taken with my phone), but maybe you can get an idea.  The wall has bamboo shades (the matchstick kind) removed from the mounting and rolled horizontally across the lower wall.  The upper wall is a collage of memo boards covered in animal skin prints:

Above is the view looking in from the hall.  Here's a closeup of the upper wall:

You totally can't tell the correct colors or anything - there is almost zero natural light in this room.  There are three animal prints - cheetah, tiger and giraffe - and one accent fabric that is on some of the smaller strips and blocks:

 

I used the trim in the above pic along with a button covered in this fabric to tuft the lid of her storage cube (which is actually the color of the above photo, not the color below):

My daughter Jessica has been visiting this past week (hooray!), and worked with me on this project.  We were brainstorming what to give Hannah (the girl whose room this is) storage for her make-up-y stuff, and Jess came up with this:

Hard to see in the pic, but there are rounded cubes above and below the full-length mirror on this little strip of wall by the door (the ONLY available space in this tiny room).  I still have to make a few pillows for the bed, but otherwise I'm done here.

In other news, last weekend I helped my friend Sherry with the baby shower for her daughter.  I was in charge of the cupcakes, which I totally never took pictures of, but Sherry did:

The theme was pink and lavender and teddy bears, so I made little "bassinettes" out of the cupcake papers (they look more like bassinettes from the side, which there isn't a picture of - sorry!) and put a teddy bear and rattle in each one.  The non-bassinette cupcakes just had three teddy bears around a rattle.  The teddies are Teddy Grahams, and the rattles are from Dollar Tree.

I'm still looking out for snippets of time for other pursuits, but so far I haven't found any.  Oh, wait!  I totally just lied!  I managed to make - and photograph - something for the Jingle Belles challenge two weeks ago to use scraps, but failed to upload or link up - BUMMER!  Here's what I made:

Only ONE little "to/from" stamp (Stampin'Up! Holiday Woodcuts) used here!  I used scraps from some older papers from DCWV and The Rob and Bob Studio (Provo Craft).  The other "leftovers" were from my stash of business cards from a previous "day job" - they're red on the back -SCORE!

I have an oversized corner punch from EK Success that is wide enough to enable me to slide the card in and punch it to make the tag top, but it left "shoulders":

so I used my trusty scalloped scissors to round them off, like so:

I used a couple of different border punches (EK Success and Fiskars) and a couple of Martha Stewart punches (tree and snowflake) and some free-form cutting to put together the tags, along with some ribbon and twine.

And that's what's been going on over in my corner of the world!  Still haven't finished my coffee-table-turned-bench yet, but we did score some assemble-it-yourself Adirondack chairs on clearance, so Greg and I put those together.  Now I need to make some cushions for them, too!  Not necessary, but definitely more comfy.  Off to fix breakfast and get going on the day - have a good one, and thanks for stopping by!