Make-It-Yourself Boutique

I hadn't been in a thrift store for months. But today I broke my junk diet and gave into temptation. I needed some broccoli sprouts from Shop 'n' Save, and Goodwill is right next door to Shop 'n' Save. How could I help myself! Lucky thing I went in, I don't know how I ever lived without this book. The author doesn't believe in patterns, and thinks that every mistake is a new design! My kind of gal! The inside tells you how to make Mexican Pants out of a man's old shirt, and then there's the Flower Petal Hat. Got to get back to reading it...

Smart Sewing, Stupid Sorting

I've come to the conclusion that if I'm ever going to organize the craft room annex to the Junk Dungeon, it's going to have to be done blindfolded. How can I possibly sort and discard if I keep running across cool old magazines like this one???? Because then of course I have to sit down for a while and admire great graphics and helpful hints. "A while" meaning about an hour. And then something within the pages, in this case the lined cardigan (what a great way to use my Liberty of London for Target kiddie sundress prints!), will make me jump up and start rummaging through my supplies and "create" an even bigger chaotic mess. Since I have a lot of similar reference material hidden in (highly disorganized) nooks, you can see where the day goes...

More Fun Things To Do With Catfood Cardboard

See how versatile Catfood Cardboard can be? I bet you never knew! I'd have to charge thousands of dollars for this Tool Kit on etsy to make a penny of my time back, but it was fun to make. The darling cotton dandelion print served as inspiration for the embroidery. I just can't resist darling fabric. I even bought some Liberty of London for Target kiddie clothes just to get my hands on those gorgeous floral cotton prints — the next move will be to rip them up and sew a kimono out of the pieces. I now have three big addictions: knitting, sewing, and listening to M. C. Beaton's Hamish Macbeth mysteries on the iPod shuffle while doing either of the other.

Catfood Cardboard, Part III

Front Cover, with Ugly Belt

Graphed Moleskine, Stork Scissors, Stylus and Pin Felt

Silk Ribbon and Carbon Transfer Paper

More Needle Felt and Transfer Patterns

Here's my latest Catfood Cardboard Craft Organizer. I found the elastic ribbon belt that holds it together at the Salvation Army, cut it to size and sewed the suede and clasp back on by hand. That seemed like a good idea while I was doing it, but it's actually Très Uglé, and I must find another closure. A vintage belt buckle? Aside from the belt, this is both useful and cute, although while making it I gouged the function key of my Mac laptop when the Exacto knife rolled off the table onto it. Craftiness has a price! (Tutorial of sorts here.)

Sew Darn Ugly

This has snaps, but that doesn't make it cute!

This has pockets, but they're not cute either.

Even tie-dyed felt can't make this cute, darn it!

It always amazes me how different an actual creation can be from a conception. This needle book was inspired by one I saw in the book Sew Darn Cute, but since I am congentially incapable of following directions, I had to come up with my own version. And it's not pretty. I suppose I could spend more time and make it cuter, add embroidery and such, but I think I'll just write it off as Prototypical Monster and go back to the (pink) cutting board. I'm not scared, because when I first started knitting I made one fugly thing after another. All that practice and horror eventually allowed me to make lace, which is by definition beautiful. So even though I've been sewing since childhood, I evidently need to put in the time to get really good at it again! Because I will upcycle my Catfood Cardboard into something uniquely amazing, or bust.

Spring Flowers

3 pink scissors, 2 pink workbaskets, and 1 pink cutting mat!

Daisies and blue skies will be here soon.

Crazy spattered wool felt ties these 3 fabrics together.

The yellow fabric is new, but the others are vintage.

Pink roses, with stains.

My new venture into embroidery has brought my passion for sewing in general back with a smash. Time to oil up the machine and get going! I have at least one full ton of old fabric, even after destash, but today I went to the fabric store and bought some more. Because a few half yards worth, just for fun, is a fast and cheap way to make myself deeply happy. And I will use it. I'm planning to make lots of booklets like the needle booklet in the last post, only with wool felt and two pages of pockets. Stay tuned for a tutorial: this will be a great way to use up all the Fancy Feast cat food cardboard I've been saving for something!

The Pink Workbasket

Every girl needs a Pink Workbasket!

I felt like a dork winding all these bobbins, but now all my floss fits on cup hooks!

The interior is lined with pockets for every purpose. Yeah, staple guns!

These pink scissors from Sublime Stitching were my unconscious color motivation.

Needle book made of cat food cardboard and scrap fabric.

Inside the book. Because you can never be too cute or too vintage.

When I was making this workbasket, I didn't realize my inspiration was the cutest pair of scissors I've ever seen (4th photo, click to enlarge), from Sublime Stitching. Credit where due. Pink is just a natural for embroidery! I considered decoupaging the inside lid of this basket with vintage ephemera, but that would cover up some of the color, so nix, nix. I love this with Pink Passion! What fun to turn Junk into Funktion!

Pink Picnic Basket!

After I lost my mind over all the color choices offered by DMC embroidery floss at the craft store, I picked up a can of spray paint there in ballet slipper pink. I need bushels of storage space for my new mania, and my mind flashed to an ugly dented old picnic basket holding bits of broken Junk in the Dungeon. It would look mighty cute painted pink, I thought, and it does! Pink is an instant mood lifter! I found the scrap of quilted fabric to go with the quilted basket top, and am going to line the interior in brown ticking with the pink roses quilt as pockets. First I have to plough through mounds of errands, but then I'm going to start creating the cutest pink picnic/sewing basket anybody's ever seen!

Old Bag Makeup Bag

Well, this was a time-consuming little bit of fun! I think I may be shedding a crafty skin — all of a sudden I only want to embroider. Knitting seems to be relegated to mere relaxation right now as my enthusiasm for this new old craft takes hold. I have a plan for a series of embroidered masterpieces, which I love so much I don't even want to talk about it, in case "someone" steals the idea. It involves something darkly perplexing I've been collecting for more than 20 years. But that's my only hint. Finishing this makeup bag was a pain, because I tried to put snaps on it, and failed, awfully. Why do directions always make tasks seem so simple and easy? You can follow the how to add snap directions with all of your heart and mind and still not do it right. So after tearing a hole in the fabric rim, I decided to go with a tie closure, to cover up the gaffe. The liner & back fabric is from a horribly poufy, ugly Laura Ashley type dress I found at Goodwill a long time ago. Loved the print, then saw the same exact cloth in a Cath Kidston book! I know class when I see it.

Workbasket Full of Buttons

My brother found this giant pile of The Workbasket at a book fair recently, and graciously bought the whole lot for me. Now I have the promise of countless hours of happy perusing through hideous 70s craftiness to bolster my spirits. The only thing better than free junk is uncovering a box full of buttons you forgot you even had.

Time to Fit in a Nap

I went to Nautilus today to try and get back into some semblance of a shape after weeks and weeks of inactivity. My fingers are super fit from knitting, but those are practically the only muscles in my body I've been using since the summer! It felt great to use other parts of the physique again — I even did 20 minutes on the tread-climber, an exercise in mind-numbing boredom unalleviated by music. Must bring the iPod next time. I'm determined to get my inner and outer strong lady back so I can not only lug the required 100 pounds of Ice Melter up and down our hill again this winter, but survive the mental stress of bad weather. After working out I felt super perky and even ate salad with sardines for lunch, but crashed shortly thereafter from the trauma of all those good intentions followed through on. Naps. I love naps, and am very skilled at taking them. So here we have the image of a crazy quilt from the Alton Museum of History and Art, to symbolize napping.

Revitalizing Junk

One day this last July I found out I had both a suspicious mammogram and a soccer ball-sized pelvic mass. As I drove down the River Road for further CT testing, I thought I was a goner, and examined the worthiness of both my life and this blog. I vowed (as those about to meet their Maker are wont to do) to make both more worthy, should I escape imminent death. I would rub my chihuahua Bridget's belly with extra diligence, and write about people, not mere things. Though I always presume the worst of everyone, and would generally rather knit than socialize, I'm no misanthrope. I find humanity quite fascinating, and not just in a horrified train-wreck watching kind of way, either. (Poor lil Lindsay Lohan though, huh?!!) Someone, as in an actual human being, has to design, make, use, and discard all the cool junk I score in thrift stores, after all. So I thought it would be worth the effort to write about people, and not just junk. If I survived.

But the problem with people is that they are elusive. Junk is not. It's right there on the shelf at Goodwill, and you can buy it and bring it home. The first person I want to write about is Eunice Smith, and since she's been dead since 1955, it's not easy to get info on her. But even if I could get all the facts, how could words capture her essence? I was once addicted to biographies, but nonetheless always felt a bit stultified when I finished reading one, like I'd been crammed into a packed elevator. Spirit is limitless; persona is confined — and people are both.

I had a lumpectomy for the suspicious mammogram, and that was just a benign fibrocystic change. Then I had good old-fashioned slice and dice surgery on the ovarian cyst, which also turned out to be totally 100% benign, though rather large. I spent two days in Alton Memorial Hospital watching every inspiring episode of "From Wrecks To Riches," where a middle-aged grease monkey takes GTO etc. junkyard husks and turns them into Super Muscle Cars, then sells them for big bucks. In retrospect, the one thing I would most recommend to anyone undergoing abdominal surgery is to not eat for at least a week beforehand. (Let's just say that all the seaweed salad I inexplicably binged on two days prior to the procedure was a mistake.) So here I am, able to wear jeans again instead of drawstring pants, and feeling good. I knew I was fully recovered when this morning I had that classic trio of irresistible cravings for: a Diet Pepsi, some Jolly Ranchers, and a thrift store score. You see here the score, a complete Time-Life set of The Art of Sewing, © 1973-5. The covers are covered in fabric! The content is detailed and comprehensive, and the photos are cheezy the way only 70s photos can be.

I took the utter magnificence of this score as a sign that Junk Is Worth Blogging About!

Buckle Up

If there's one thing I like, it's a good old buckle. I've got lots! I'd love to figure out some way to turn these vintage gems into shawl closures. Something lightweight that doesn't hurt the lace. That rules out the big moky brass buckle in the upper left corner of the second photo!

Comfort Junk

I'm just finishing up with a miserable cold, and today I have the time for full recuperation: lemony tea, soup, and browsing through comfort junk. The ultimate in comfort junk for me is The Workbasket, a magazine that was published during all the fun decades of yore. I have a huge stash of these, because people don't seem to value them as much as I do, and they rarely go for more than the original cover price shown here: 25¢. The magazine reminds me of my grandma's for some reason, probably because she was so crafty. When I flip through its pages, I can smell the percolator coffee and Raleigh ciggies of her pea-soup green carpeted house. My grandma would have abhorred the workmanship of that orange pantsuit, though. Tear your eyes away from the scary hairdo long enough to check out those puckery seams!

Slipcover Smartness

Evidently, upholstery is a very hot subject in the blogosphere, even more so than amateur knitting, because yesterday my readership jumped from 30 to 300! Wha? I feel like one of the Three Bears: who's been looking at my blog? And for God's sake, why? It's gotta be the new upholstery angle, so for all you porridge-hungry Goldilock eyes, here ya go. The thing about trying to learn any skill from a book, is that the words, if you can decipher them, always make the tasks seem so easy. The instructions never address the slog and hand-eye coordination that goes into mastering anything manual. This Home Sewing book, for instance, makes slip-covering sound like breezy slam-dunk fun, when I know for a fact how hard it is not to make a lumpy mess of things. Sewing, like knitting, is one of those crafts that requires 10,000 hours of practice before the hands and eyes shake on it and make up. But I am committed. I even bought a smelly pink cutting mat and a cool wheely-type cutter. True bias strips? A snap!