I finally came up with a good idea for the pin cushion. So for me, my problem is storage. I really can’t have little cushions cluttering up my work space and at the same time, I don’t want to have to go hunting for it when I need it. I saw one of Trixy’s little quilt squares and it was like “that’s it!” I’m going to make a little cube with a loop so it can hang on my tool rack. I’m going to put a little lavender in it too so it will make my studio area smell nice every time I stab it. If I had emery sand I would put that in there too, but I don’t so rice and stuffing it is.

Download the pattern here (pdf).

I am so happy with my little pin cushion and have some other sewing projects set for this weekend. So many fun things to work on. One of which will be dyeing yarn tonight for Green Prairie Fibers and then working on the Cat Hoodie so I can send it off for the first round of pattern testing. I’m so excited to start that up again. Oh which reminds me. I’ll be sending out an email to all those who were interested in being pattern testers tomorrow afternoon. Missed out on the call for testers? Just email me at CraftLeftovers [at] gmail [dot] com and let me know. You can read about Pattern Testing as well as other ways to support and contribute to Craft Leftovers on the Support & Contribute page.

And as always, check out the Craft Leftovers shop for great craft kits and little handmade goodies.

Have a great weekend and keep it Crafty and Creative! Have fun!

++ Kristin Roach ++

There are a lot of great qualities about my new old dresser, but there are a lot of bad things going on with it too. It has this great molding and wonderful little legs that remind me of Wallace and Grommet’s Holiday to the moon (the little moon machine with little wheel legs, I think only I would make this connection). Its the right size, with the right number of drawers. It also has water damage, interesting “art”, years of wood glue splatter and misused nails, chips, nicks and even chunks of wood missing are common.

This is what I started with today. Drawers. There were two reasons for this. One I can’t physically get the dresser out of the garage on my own and two I wanted some immediate gratification.

I gathered all of my supplies and started the processes of getting this dresser back into shape.

1. Take apart the drawers that are falling apart and remove all the random nails.
2. Take off all the handles and knobs so they don’t get paint on them. The best thing to do is to screw the screws back into the knobs after you take them off, then put them all in a bag so you don’t loose track of them.

3. Sanding. I started with my mouse and then finished off with sanding by hand. Nice long smooth strokes that follow the grain. Wipe it down with a nice damp rag.

4. Painting. I love this part. I laid out the paper and started with a nice thin coat. Then I moved back to the next drawer and started from the beginning again. By the time I put the first coat on the second drawer, the first drawer could take a second coat. And so it went until the last drawer. Now just the last two need one more coat and they will be ready to be put back together. With drawers, you only need to paint the front of them and the lip.

I’m thinking about putting some paper in the bottom of the drawers as a liner, but I haven’t decided yet. I was thinking of using some wrapping paper, which I’ve heard works well. I can’t remember where though.

In the next post I’ll show how to put things back together and do some minor repairs to the woodwork. I’ve decided I just don’t have the equipment to repair the huge chunk that’s missing out of one of the fronts. It will just be the bottom drawer.

This article on refinishing an old dresser was very informative, so if you are thinking about taking this on yourself, definitely read it.

Sorry about the late night posting again. I got sucked into the dem convention again, that and grilling. We had a late dinner and watched the convention and now here I am :) I think it was worth it though. There have been some great speeches going on.

Keep it crafty folks! See you all tomorrow with this week’s pattern!

Kristin

ps - I’m trying to clean out my stock over at Green Prairie Fibers, it’s 20% off all acid dyed yarns until midnight on Sunday, quite a few have already sold, so go check it out.

You may or may not be aware of my issues with embroidery. It seems that although I can follow a pattern just fine, my own pattern attempts have been, well, “okay”. Haha. The strange thing is that I don’t have any of these issues with crewel embroidery. Here, here, and here are some of my crewel efforts.

I told my mom about this interesting embroidery issues and she said how she used to do crewel and told me a really funny story about it… Her and my grandma and great grandma went to a crewel embroidery party, kind of like a pampered chef party except with crewel embroidery (so freaking cool!) and my Dad saw this huge tiger set (pictured above) and insisted my mom could do, could make it no problem…. so she did. My great grandma got a simpler kit for herself (which I don’t have a picture of). Well when it came down to it, my mom couldn’t do it, and so they switched kits. My mom said that was a labor of endurance and just took forever for my g.g. to make, and my mom said she was a pro. There are a lot of subtle color changes and it was huge! I mean huge! Like 24 x 32 inches or so. I remember seeing it as a kid and being so creeped out and amazed all at the same time. Those emerald green eyes stared at you no matter where you were in the room.

I did some of my own crewel work as a kid, it was so easy. I remember even thinking “this is easy” and I can’t even remember how old I was… i think 10 maybe younger. It was a little fisher boy.

I still have him around here and think he’s pretty cute. I had forgotten about my crewel beginnings though. That was until I was in dekalb, my first year of university, and I saw this great book at the library. It’s called The New Crewel. It sparked my interest in crewel all over again. I thought I had never seen anything like it. It’s funny how I was really surrounded by it my whole childhood. This great little piece (about 8 x 10 inches):

And then one for my sister that was a hippo. She named him and has him to this day (hence no picture). And of course the instances listed above. It’s strange how it turns out that I’m actually at least the forth generation of woman crewel embroidery lovers!

Back to the point. The The New Crewel: Exquisite Designs in Contemporary Embroidery. If you haven’t heard of it before, it’s worth a look. It’s a smaller book, but it’s backed full of great contemporary designs and on top of that, it has all the information you need to get started, and finished, working with crewel embroidery. It’s one of the few books that met my “three checks buy it” rule. (If I check out a book more than 3 times, I should just buy it, haha).

It covers the type of yarn to use, fabric, stretching, and many types of projects to use it with. Not just mounting it (which is one option), but also a skirt redo, pillows, mason jar lids, lamp shades, and quite a few others. The way the book is set up is really nice too. They make it easy to use any of the designs with most projects and honestly, the designs are really great just on their own.

I’ve been cleaning out my apartment one space at a time. Today was my studio. After collecting up all the half skeins of Nature Spun I have floating around I was confronted with a whole shopping bag full of random colors. Some people may see this as overwhelming, depressing, challenging (what to do with all these random colors)… well… honestly… it filled me with childhood glee! You see, Nature Spun Sport or Fingering are both great for crewel… and all those random colors? A painters palette! Be on the look out for some new crewel embroidery patterns coming straight from that bag :)

I’ll see you all tomorrow! This is pretty fun posting two days in a row.

Keep it creative and crafty folks!

Kristin Roach

After cramming my apartment’s and studio’s stuff into an already occupied one bedroom (large one bedroom) apartment the decor is bland, messy, crowded, and bland. We have okay stuff, just too much and not nice furniture. I hodge podge of old-roommates’-off-the-curb-hand-me-down-thrift-shop-standard-just-graduated-college-and-have-no-money furniture. It’s so true. Our small stuff is great, it’s the big stuff that’s the let down. We are missing key pieces too, like a dresser for our bedroom for one thing. Our socks and underwear are in a perpetual state of laundry basket shifting (clean to dirty to clean) which just adds to the overall feeling of clutter.

I’ve taken on the mission of getting this place into shape. I’m creative. I’m good with color. I have some design sense. What’s stopping me? And for the first time, I have time too. Not a ton mind you, but more than none, which is what I had before.

How to clean, declutter, and redecorate your space into a home you can enjoy?

The first step was cleaning. I’m still in that step, and it’s an ongoing thing. But yesterday I did The Big clean. Deep cleaning. Like take everything out of one room and clean the whole room, get rid of half the stuff, and put it back in an organized way cleaning. Today is day two of the Big Clean. Then starting tomorrow it’s more maintenance and back to work as usual.

(I should have had a before picture, but this is the after. There was cat litter all over the floor and there were just boxes of stuff piled up. I took everything out of the room, cleaned it out, then added this little rack and put the pet stuff on two shelves and my shipping stuff on the top in a rubbermaid. It’s soooo much better now. Not perfect no, but much improved.)

The second step is purging. It kind of goes with cleaning, but it’s a catagory unto itself. I’m happy to say I have 3 boxes of misc and 2 bags of clothes on their way to the salvation army. I also have a huge rubbermaid of fabric that will be finding itself on ebay soon. More purging will be happening today.

Now that I have a somewhat cleared out space I started planning my new space out. Step 3. This is important. Utility is important to me as well as design, so I made a list of what I wanted in a home, what was missing from ours now, both in psychological space and furnishings.

1. Eating space - right now it’s the couch all the time, every meal, I hate that. We have an extended counter top with stools that are too tall and it’s always cluttered, that’s my target area for a new eating space. New (to me) stools, keeping it clutter free.

2. Relaxing space - we have a couch and a tv, but it feels cramped and uncomfortable. Some color changes, well placed pillows, rearranging furniture a bit will help it open up and settle down all at the same time.

3. Work space - I have work space, but Jason doesn’t. Sure I work out of the home and “need” a studio space, but he needs a space to work on the things he loves too. I’m carving a space out for him where he will have a work table, cabinet, and chair.

4. Craft Cave - as my studio has been called, is a clutter magnet. It needs an overhaul in a way that it will look neat and tidy after I clean it, not just “okay”.

5. Bedroom - new mattress, dresser, maybe a reading chair. It feels like a storage unit where a laundry mat exploded, no good.

And that brings me to today’s post’s point. The dresser. Where to get furniture, which is expensive, for cheap or free? I decided that the first piece we should get was a dresser. It would get the clothing off the floor and help with the bedroom. I’m starting easy and working to the hard stuff (my studio/garage/kitchen). I also wanted to get one before summer was over so I could refinish it while it’s nice out. With my budget for furniture (which is about $20 a piece) I just figured I would need to redo whatever I bought.

I started by looking on Craig’s List. A great resource for all sorts of things for really cheap. Just look up your town, then furniture, then whatever it is you want. I also search in the free section. I found two I liked and emailed both, no reply. Oh well.

Then I went to Freecycle. I love this site. I joined the Story County group and the Des Moines group. I didn’t find anything. Yesterday morning I looked again. Nothing still. I decide to post “WANTED: Upright Dresser” then I put a description of what I was looking for (4-5 drawers, solid wood, can do minor repairs/refinishing no problem”. Within a couple of hours, I would say by noon, a woman had replied. It was just what I was looking for and Jason and I picked it up after he got off work.

It’s a fixer-upper to say the least. I added all the pictures to flickr with descriptions of what needed to be done within each shot, what I liked about. Go check that out to see right now. Thursday I’m going to post about the first phase of redoing a wooden piece of furniture (which is pretty much outlined in the flickr descriptions which is why I said to see right now). Then it will just be like one post a week about it, or maybe, gasp!, I might just start posting 5 days a week and this will be my tuesday/thursday posts for awhile. That sounds good.

So here is the plan. I’m guessing this project is going to take me awhile. Sanding, repairs, repainting, rebuilding, putting together. I’ve decided I’m going to post about the process in a series. And in fact it will be part of a larger series, the apartment redo. I’ll include the different phases of the redo with before and after pictures and all the steps along the way. Maybe even some projects for curtains, pillows, and other home furnishings. That sounds good to me. Plus it will keep me working on it and accountable to you for getting this place whipped into shape.

I have a post planned out for tomorrow, but I’ll be back on Thursday too to post an update on the dresser.

Have a good day! Keep it creative and crafty!
Kristin

I was going to post today but a few things came up and I have a fun post planned for tomorrow instead. I need to take some pictures and it was too dark by the time the thing I wanted to post about found its way back to the apartment.

See you all tomorrow around noonish!

Kristin

ps - vacation was great! It’s sooooo good to be back though!