Junkin' on a Wednesday

Well I decided to go thrift store shopping the morning, but got a little lost on the way to a new one.  Anxiously turning down unknown residential streets, in a not so sparkling neighborhood, I came upon a heap of items thrown out in the front of a house. There were some big ticket items like a ban saw, a table saw and some other extremely large wood working tools.  It would have taken two Incredible Hulks to lift and load those items so I focused on the stuff I could carry myself.

I found these ramps.  

This small cage needs to be cleaned out!

I also found this pen.  It's in great shape, but has a few unwelcome inhabitants; SPIDERS!!!  Luckily a neighbor came out to help me load it.  He said he was happy to see the pile get smaller. He also told me that the house was in foreclosure.  He never cared for his neighbors because they were "strange".  In fact, he said that in the large pen these strange people had kept a defanged rattle snake.  YIKES!!!! 

Overall, I am happy with these free items, but my husband may feel differently........

Upcycled Bed Sheets Become Blinds and a Braided Rug

Last summer I purchased three king sized, white, flat bed sheets for two dollars each.  That's a bargain especially considering the prices of new fabric these days!  I thought I could use the sheets in various sewing projects. 
I was making a set of blinds for my dining room and needed a white backing fabric.  The sheets worked perfectly, or half of one sheet worked perfectly. The blinds were super easy to make.  I just cut the inner and outer fabric pieces to size, sewed them together, sewed two ribbon ties for each blind and sewed a pocked for the tension rod.  I found the tension rods at the Thrift Center for $1.99 each.  Not bad considering they are $6 brand new.  The black and white fabric was given to me by my very generous mother-in-law.  In the future I plan on using sheets for the decorative fabric as well.  

The total cost of these blinds was about $5 altogether!

There is no fancy dancy system to lower and raise these blinds.  I simply roll them up to the desired length and tie them up with the ribbon.  It works just fine.

One up, one down :)

Both up, the usual position.

The color scheme for my dining room was to be black and white that way the accent colors could be changed with the seasons.  I had the blinds made so the next order of business was a rug.  Well my dining table is a small, round, black table with four black chairs.  I decided that a round rug would be really cute in the small space, so I started pricing rugs. YIKES!!! Rugs are expensive. 

I researched the web for easy rug ideas and found a tremendous amount of information and inspiration.  I decided to make a braided rug out of the remaining sheets using  this tutorial from craftpassion.com. Check it out if your interested.  It is much more informative than this post :)  I ripped the sheets into two and a half inch strip that ran the lenght of the sheet.  Then I braided all the pieces together.  I ended up with a small, heavy bundle of braided sheet. 

The next step was to sew the braids into a circular rug. I started sewing the braids together by hand, but in the middle of a Florida summer that is a HOT job, so I used my machine for this and I doubt it will ever forgive me :)  My shoulders were also very upset.  The bigger the rug gets the heavier and more cumbersome it becomes. 

I broke the sewing up by doing just a little bit each day. 

The rug is not finished because it does not cover all the floor space under the table. 

It has been a long process because I was hired for a very demanding teaching job while working on this project and it was put on the back burner for months.  I hope to finish it this summer.  I need at least two more sheets to finish the rug.  In the end I will have spent maybe ten dollars on the whole project but a whole lot of time.  This doesn't bother me because I am more than happy to have more time than money :)

Other helpful rug making sites: http://www.modabakeshop.com/2009/02/braided-rag-rug.html

http://www.sugarbeecrafts.com/2010/02/rag-rug-tutorial.html

http://vintagechica.typepad.com/the_life_and_times_of_thi/

Paper Clip Bookmarks!

It has been too long since I've posted anything because I've been so busy with my fourth graders.  I decided that enough was enough.  I needed to craft.  So instead of writing lesson plans, I made these cute bookmarks for my students. 

Most of the materials were after Halloween sale items that were 80% off the original price.  I paid less than $5.00 for all the supplies and that's including the jumbo paper clips.

The bloody eyeballs, bats, and moon & stars were all stick back felt shapes. This made the project super easy and quick.  

Only one bag of eyeballs are shown, but I actually used two, and made over 30 bookmarks! 

I have been teaching my students about advertising and marketing.  We recently read Boss of the Plains a biography about John Stetson.  We discussed that marketing made his hat successful.  I decided that I would do a little marketing of my own and created slogans and paper tags for each bookmark.  The bloody eyeballs' tags read: EYE wan to READ, the bats' tags read: BATTY for BOOKS!, my husband suggested; Bat's My Page! I nearly fell out of my seat laughing, but wasn't sure my students would get the humor, so I opted for the less creative slogan.  Finally the full moon with stars' slogan is Reading Superstar.  It's not very original,  but it will do. 

My class is mostly boys, so these should be a real hit.  The girls will like them too, but my boys love Goosebumps and these bookmarks will be great page savers.  In fact students are supposed to record all the pages they read in a day.  These bookmarks can clip on from the first page read to the last making recording easy; no more remembering where you started.

If the girls don't want anything as gruesome as a bloody eyeball or scary as a bat, they can choose one of the full moon & stars markers. 

The bats are my favorite.  I, along with several students, am reading Guardians of Ga'Hoole by Kathryn Lasky and the bats fit right in as do the full moons.  Don't want to get moon blinked!

These were super easy and very inexpensive to make.  They make great hand made gifts especially for a class full of students. 

Better get back to writing those lesson plans....

Dragonfly Duct Tape Clutch

There are thousands of duct tape creations out there in the world.  I've made roses, wallets and even a dress form from duct tape.  On a shopping trip to Michael's with my friend Amber, we discovered this leaflet that provides direction on how to make a duct tape purse. 

Click on the picture to enlarge it, so you can make one too! 

You don't need all the materials listed other than duct tape.  For the other things just use whatever you have around the house.

I wasn't so impressed with the leaflet, but the actual example was displayed and it was great. I especially liked the stickers that were used to personalize it.

Luckily for me my mom recently gave me some duct tape.

Since my mom gave me the duct tape, it is only fair that the clutch should be made and personalized for her.

I thought using lightweight cardboard would make the clutch more substantial.  It seemed like a good idea at first. Don't use anything thicker than printing paper.  This cardboard made the clutch stiff and it was impossible to attach a snap closure.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  I covered the cardboard on the front and back and added a purple strip in the middle. 

I trimmed the edges of raw duct tape and took the piece to the measuring board.  The fold seemed correct at 3.5 inches so after it was measured off, I used a straight edge to help get a good top and bottom fold. I used purple duct tape to trim all the edges of the clutch.  After the edges were trimmed, I secrued the bottom fold with another strip of purple duct tape on either side.

Next, it was time for the personalization.  Using clip art from Windows Word was the easy way to approach this.  A dragonfly was selected and transferred to Paint.

Clear packing tape works well to adhere the piece to the clutch.

I used a seam ripper to slice an opening in the top fold's crease so that the handle, which was constructed by putting two pieces of duct tape together-sticky side to sticky side, could be pulled through. One strip of duct tape should be an inch longer than the other so that it can stick to the clutch.  Here the purple is on the outside and the lime is on the inside of the strap.

The finished product looks ok, but looks can be deceiving.  The snap in non-functional, and the purse is too stiff to put much inside.

I decided to try again and not use the cardboard.  Instead, I used a sales paper cut in half.

I covered it the same way as the first one, but instead of the strap being in the middle, it is on the side.

Also the personalization was made a bit more personal.  I used a combination of the Paint application and Microsoft Word to create a nameplate for the clutch.

Using clear packing tape, I added the nameplate to the back of the clutch on the middle strip so that it would POP!

Then it was time to add the strap and the closure.

The strap was the easy part.  It was made the same way as the original, but it was applied to the side.

The snap was also much easier than on the original clutch.  The prongs were able to penetrate less material with ease.

I decided to add an inside pocket using just four strips of duct tape.  The duct tape on the inside of the pocket is an inch or so shorter than the duct tape on the outside pocket.

This clutch opens wide and is much softer and nicer than the first one I made. It even looks good on the wrist.

Give this project a try if you have a little bit of time and a couple of rolls of duct tape.  It is quick and easy! 

I did not provide step by step instructions because it's kind of a trial an error project, but if you have any questions, please ask.  Have fun!

p.s. Mama, I will give this to you the next time we see each other.  Keep it out of the heat because that will make the sticky stuff ooze out.

Made another one....Who could I give this one too?  Umm?

Crepe Paper Roses

The crepe paper rose video tutorial on this cool blog is so fun, and it makes these little boogers seem so easy to construct that I had to try to create them in blue for Tosha's Baby Shower :).  The good lady @ http://www.filthwizardy.com/ whips these things up lickity split.  I just knew I could do it.  I didn't realize that I would have to re watch the video so many times before I got a proper understanding of the mechanics.  I made several wonky roses through out the project, but that's okay as long as they're not compared to other more perfect roses.  It's funny these roses are much like the ones found in nature.  They are all very unique in shape and size.  I started by cutting one roll of streamers into 18 in. strips.  One roll yeilded about 50 strips.

Each rose had its own challenges.  This was a time consuming endeavor.  My best efforts only produced about 10 roses an hour.  In the end one roll of streamer made about 50 roses.  I made 100 roses using 2 rolls of streamer.

My favorite roses were those that ended up in full bloom.  Like this one.

You can see the variation in sizes in this picture.  After all the roses were made, I had to decide how to use them for the baby shower. 

I decided to cut a heart shape out of a piece of foam board. Maggie is presenting the board like a Price Is Right Girl.  We need to work on her enthusiasm!

I poked holes in the foam board so that the stems of the roses could be pulled through and secured.

In the end, I did not like the results.  The heart shape was cut too big.  100 roses only covered the boarder.  I guess I could have decorated the inside of the heart in some manner, but I just didn't really like it enough to do so.

Although not visible from a distance, there were gaps in the roses that allowed the backboard to show through. 

I had to think of something else.  I had several months worth of saved vitamin bottles and wanted to use them in some way.  So I took off the caps and covered the bottles in tan tissue paper.  I tied brown ribbon around the bottles and tie 6 to 8 roses into a bouquet using bread ties. 

The finished product looked pretty good, so I made as many as a could with the supplies I had on hand.

There were only 8 made, but I think that will be plenty for the baby shower.

I'm not sure where we will use them.  Maybe Holly can figure that out.  One is cute all by itself.

Or they could be grouped, which is also cute.

The roses took some practice to get right, but really your total monetary investment is about $1.00 per 100 roses so no great loss unless you don't have the time.  The time factor is the most significant.  After practicing on the first 50, I could make about 10 roses and hour, but it's easy to do while watching television. 

Give this project a try if you have plenty of time :)

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