Tale of a Shooting Star…

I am so grateful for my crafting. It truly helps to keep me sane. As sane as I get, at least. That’s my brief Thanksgiving thought. I am thankful for my life, in general, but I am very thankful for my creative abilities, even if I don’t take the time to work with, work on or express myself using many of them. I have so many drawings in my head that haven’t made it to paper yet. I do write down the ideas in as much detail as I can muster and as makes sense, though, so that when I do finally take some time to work on realizing them, I won’t have lost these concepts that are so precious to me. I refine them over time in my head, so my notes get updated when I new thoughts or visions float through my head.

But I digress. This post was not about drawings that exist only in my head. I did a little bit of crafting over Thanksgiving. Yes, that’s right. We went nowhere and did nothing. Honestly, that’s the way I like it (uh-huh, uh-huh). I use the Thanksgiving holiday as a time to relax, refresh and get prepared for the upcoming holidays. This year, I did a lot of sleeping. A lot. Which is unusual for me because I tend to get pretty sore if I don’t get out of bed within a reasonable amount of time (8 to 9 hours). I chalk it up to my body needing the rest. Whatever. It did start a bad cycle, though. Because I awoke later in the day, I would stay up later, then sleep in later, then wake up later, and on and on. It’s gotten quite ugly, actually. But I’m turning it around. It’s a good thing I do most of my work from home right now, so that I could get away with getting up later today. I don’t actually have to physically go into my office until Wednesday, so I still have another day to finish weaning myself back onto a more normal schedule.

But I digress. Again. I desperately need to clean up my craft room which, after having been nicely organized and cleaned a couple of weeks ago, looks like a paper crafting bomb went off in it. When I was making the paper bookmarks for Nan, I had all of my different materials out, including a bunch of rubber stamps, my drawer of embossing powders and my tower of scrapbooking paper. They all need to go back to their proper locations. However, in order for me to do that, I had to create a couple of corner bookmarks for myself. Because I really wanted to. I ended up doing four of them. They aren’t the greatest. I spent hours up in that room for two days and became totally lost in thought and then completely lost my creative vision. So they are kinda… meh, but they’re for me and I really don’t care that much. I had a horrible, terrible time trying to get accurate representations of these blasted bookmarks. I photographed them and the photos were bad. I scanned them and the scans were better, but I still spent time in Photoshop fiddling with every single little nuance of color and they still aren’t right, but they are close enough.

The Swarovski hotfix crystal on this one is actually a pale pink that matches the pink in the decorative paper.

I just could not get the coppery gold metal look of the paper strip in the center to show up correctly. Plus, I learned exactly how not affix hotfix Swarovski crystals. There are two different directions on the back of the box. One works and the other doesn’t.

This one is a great example of complete overkill. Too many different colors and textures. It’s pretty much a pastel explosion with a butterfly on top.

The paper at the top goes better with the maroon daisies than it appears. Honestly.

By the way, I’m not sure if I posted the link to the tutorial I used for this corner bookmarks before or not, but you can find it here. Splitcoaststampers.com totally rocks. If you stamp, you have to check it out. I find a lot of inspiration there and I know others do, too. Oh, and another thought for you on these corner bookmarks. A lot of people tend to go really nuts and bling these puppies out with a bunch of layers, pop-dots, ribbons with bows, etc. Keep in mind, though, that these are meant to be used. In books. So you don’t really want them to be terribly thick. The hotfix crystals were pushing it for me.

Of course, I can’t put the supplies away yet. I have yet to stamp the bag(s) that will hold all of Nan’s bookmarks. *sigh*

I have been stitching a little bit, as well. I’ll take some progress photos and post them later this week. The little Just Nan design for my mom is turning out great, even if I had to frog a section that I stitched in the wrong color when I first started it weeks and weeks ago, and I need to get back to stitching the second stitched bookmark for Nan. They will be here on the 17th, so I have about 2 weeks to stitch that one and then finish the back. Oh, and clean up the spare bedroom, which looks like a sewing bomb went off in it (there are thread and fabric scraps all over the floor from the purse-making adventure).

can yield some strange results. It was a dark and rainy day here on Tuesday and I wanted to finish up a bookmark that I had started a week or more before. I had stopped because I was working on a bookmark consisting primarily of plastic necklace cord with beaded embellishments. I was stuck on what to do for a design and I had tired of the wire wrapping that I was doing.

I had originally pulled a green glass bead with colored flecks in it and some coordinating Swarovski crystals to pull out the secondary colors in the bead. With some finagling, I had been able to actually thread the bead onto the cord and that is about where I stopped. Correction, I had wrapped some wire around the bottom end of the cord, created a loop to hold a charm and added a heart charm. Oh, and I guess I had inserted some wire through the cord near the top to get ready for beading up there.

So, when I picked it up again on Tuesday, it was dark in my crafting room and my mood wasn’t terribly bright and sunny, either. I still had no idea what to do with the stupid bookmark and I was feeling annoyed with it because I just wanted to finish it so that I could clean up my beading materials.

I got the idea to wrap the colored beads over the large glass bead. So, I did that on two opposing sides. I then wrapped the remaining wire around the top of the cord above the bead, with the intention of doing who knows what with it. I had a bunch of wire left on one side and just a little bit on the other. I thought of cutting it off, but then I just started wrapping it around one of my pairs of beading pliers. It turned out kinda funky and with my mood the way it was, I decided I like it, so I twisted it a little bit and let it be.

Of course, at this point the heart charm at the bottom really no longer suited the funky direction in which this bookmark was proceeding, so I removed it. In looking at the top of the bookmark, I decided that it looked like some avante-garde runway model. You know, with a totally bizarre hat or hairdo. The large glass bead looked like a torso, with the beads wrapped around the sides forming her arms, with her hands on her hips. So, what else could I do with the bottom but hang off some legs?

Here’s the result:

The full view:

Head and torso:

Dangling legs:

I realize that not everyone will see what I see in this, but I am strangely pleased with the results. The only bummer is that the cord ended up not being long enough for larger paperback or hardbound books. It only fits the mass market paperbacks and then it hangs way out over because it was just shy of fitting larger books. I suppose I could cut the cord shorter to better fit the smaller books and re-hang her legs. Maybe. Probably. Now that I’ve come up with the solution, I will likely implement it soon.

Yes, it’s finished! My first attempt at the Two-Hour Tulip Purse. I’m pleased with how it turned out, especially with all of my modifications to the lining and pockets therein, but it’s too wide for me to use. Bummer. I think the front and back panels fit what I’m looking for, but I will need to heavily modify the side panels to cut them down to 2/3 or 1/2 of their current size. I will, however, use this one for a while first and see what other modifications it might require before I take a second shot at it.

I quite enjoyed playing around with this pattern, fiddling with all of the inner pieces and then putting it all together. In fact, since I finished the purse on Saturday, I felt quite annoyed on Sunday that I didn’t have any of it to work on anymore. I guess that’s a strong indication of how much fun I had with it. 🙂

Here are some photos for you. The colors aren’t quite accurate in most of them, but it is quite hard to reproduce them correctly. These are pretty close, though.

The front:

A bit of the side:

Credit card slots inside the inner back pocket:

A pocket in the right side lining for my new iPod Nano:

There is a similar pocket diagonally across the purse, in the left side lining, for my earbuds. And here’s a shot of the bottom, so that you can see how the four tulip-shaped pieces came together:

All in all, the pattern and assembly were fairly straightforward. There were only two questions I had when putting it together, both of which were easily answered by Terry. One of them was due to not reading the instructions carefully enough and the other was just an inability to clearly conceptualize the construction in three dimensions. Terry is excellent at three-dimensional visualization and manipulation, so he, of course, understood immediately. I am not worthy. 😉

If anyone is interested in trying this pattern (I would highly recommend it) and my modifications, you can see most of the pocket additions that I made in the above photos. In addition, I did add strips of the heavier outside fabric to the top of the lining to accommodate the magnet, as I had said I would. That worked out quite nicely, though I would really advise that you use a taller strip so that the magnet pieces aren’t so close to the seams. I had to do sections of the topstitching by hand because I learned the hard way that I couldn’t sew that closely to the magnet sections. I snapped a sewing machine needle off quite cleanly in the attempt.

I did not end up using the purse feet due to the way that the points come together at the bottom. The bottom center bows out so I think that the fabric would end up touching surfaces that it sits on anyway, even if I had put purse feet in the approximate corners. I’ll see how it wears while I’m using it. The other thing that I have not yet done on this purse is to sew darts into the sides so that the purse will fold up nicely and reliably when closed. I think that I may reproduce a bit of how my current purse is sewn, which includes darts in the sides, as well as reinforcement of the outside corners as they lie when the purse is closed. I think that will help it to keep its overall shape. If I feel so inclined, I will share photos when that portion is done.

I do have to say that it seems quite boring to me in looking at the front of it. It needs a little decoration of some sort, but I haven’t quite figured out what. I have buttons that would go nicely with it that I might be able to sew on in some sort of configuration. It really needs some sort of decorative strip to break up the expanse of fabric, maybe about 1/3 of the way down from the top. I could potentially stitch some sort of swirly pattern that complements the paisley pattern in the fabric and tack that on. I already know that I have a shade of DMC that perfectly matches the brown lining, as I used it to tack the lining down.

Which reminds me, that’s one other addition that I did. I hand-tacked the lining to the outer fabric along all four seams, from the top to the bottom points. It was tedious, but the lining lays so much more nicely that way.

So, if anyone has any recommendations on decorative touches for the front and/or a free border pattern that I could stitch onto cream/tan fabric with brown thread and then tack onto the front, I would greatly appreciate it.

Anna raised a good point in her comment to my last post. Yes, I will finally be able to invite people into my home once I have finished cleaning up. That will be a first in many, many years and is long overdue. I still have the dining room that I will need to clean up before Christmas anyway. I have products for my ONS spread everywhere that desperately need to be entered into my accounting software and the storefront. Unfortunately, the accounting software seems to have gone bust and won’t do anything with regards to reports (I was trying to check my sales tax liability so that I could file the return for last quarter) without crashing. I’m afraid to try any other functions. I’m going to have to try to reinstall and see if I can just limp it along until the end of the year when I will officially switch that business over into QuickBooks. The Microsoft Small Business Accounting package that I’ve been using for years was giving me fits and is so overly complex that when they decided to stop supporting it earlier this year, it was a good excuse to move to QuickBooks. QuickBooks now supports multiple currencies, which is why I chose MS Accounting in the first place, so it will be nice to switch to an industry standard accounting product for small businesses.

Oh, and to answer Von‘s question, yes, I will post pictures of the reorganized office, including the nice new desks, once we’ve finished cleaning up. Which will hopefully be soon!

Anyway, I got off track. What I really meant to blog about were my sewing endeavors yesterday. I didn’t include it in yesterday’s weekend report, even though I spent hours on it yesterday. I really should have been stitching, but I had the irresistible urge to sew. You see, I have been trying desperately, in vain, to find a purse to replace my existing one. It’s nice and little, but I have outgrown it by about an inch in the tall dimension. Plus, it has arm straps, not full shoulder straps. The hunt for a commercially produced bag that small has been completely futile, though I certainly tried really hard. So, I decided to make my own. I found one that I think will fit the bill and I found it pretty readily, which was lovely. With one Google search, I quickly found PursePatterns.com, which is an amazing resource for purse patterns. I chose the Two-Hour Tulip pattern, as seen on the front page of twohourtulip.com:

I then went out to Joann.com and chose two heavy home decor fabrics. Luckily, the home decor fabrics where on sale. One was only $5 so I pulled that one for a test run and a more expensive ($13 a yard on sale) pattern that I liked a little bit better for the real thing. Add in a total of three lining fabrics because I wasn’t sure if the colors that I picked were going to work once I put them together in real life, plus magnet closures and purse feet and you have the makings of a purse!

Here’s the less expensive fabric:

And the more expensive:

I bought a dark brown lining (the color is called potting soil) for the first one and a fuchsia lining for the second. Incredibly, both worked out quite well. I bought antique gold feet and magnetic closure for the first and gold ones for the second.

Of course, you know me. I can’t just follow the pattern. No, I’m heavily modifying the inside. The outside will look the same (sans pocket: I hate outside pockets), but the inside will look more like my current purse. Not only am I putting pockets on both the front and back of the inside, but inside the one pocket, I am putting staggered credit card pockets. It’s exactly like what I have in my current purse and I love them. I’m also sneaking in a small pocket on one of the sides for my new iPod Nano. And maybe a matching one on the other side for the earbuds. I just thought of that. See what you made me do? 😆

At the top 1.5″ of the lining, I am putting a strip of the outside fabric, both for a little extra interest and to hold the magnetic closure. I see all sorts of bad things happening if I try to attach the closure pieces just to the lining fabric. Riiiiiiiiiiiiip! My current purse actually has a faux leather strip on the inside that serves the same purpose. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to add the purse feet at the bottom, due to the way that the purse is put together (four tulip-shaped pieces that come together at the points to form the bottom), but I am going to try my best. My current purse has faux leather on the bottom and I’d rather keep the fabric bottom of this one from sitting directly on surfaces.

Despite the title, I didn’t actually put many stitches in yesterday. The only things I stitched up were the shoulder straps. Everything else was a lot of cutting out and interfacing. It was time-consuming, especially since I was winging all of the little pieces that will make up the card holders and the Nano pocket. Today should see things starting to come together, I hope. So, a two hour purse project? I think not. Maybe if you kept it simple and stuck to the pattern and you were an experienced seamstress, but I did and am none of those. 😉

I will, of course, show pictures when the purse is done. And maybe during the construction process. Who knows…