wienerdog tricks.

Ottoman Bliss

A Craft Debt '11 Update

I made the Ottoman Cover of My Dreams.

And I don't want to brag, [Oh no: I just lied. I do want to brag, but it's for something very specific], but two very smart things happened in this project:

1) I DIDN'T make the ottoman cover I had planned to. It was cut and sitting there and staring at me and perfectly ready to sew, but I just couldn't get myself to do it and [here's the part to high five myself in the air about] I NOTICED that I was feeling that way, and so thought, "Hmm. Why am I not sewing that?" and then I said to myself, "Oh. It's because It's Not Right." And as soon as it came to me, I threw the cut pieces into a pile on the floor, spied the black and white houndstooth folded in a bin right behind the waiting (now naked again) ottoman and started wildly cutting the one that I knew would be Right.

2) The OTHER seriously smart thing I did was USE DINGLEBERRIES. You know: those fuzzy balls that are already to be sewn in a string. And I just think that those little guys make everything happier looking. I'm sure you agree.

So Item #4 is El Finito [that's spanish for sewn and no longer staring at me]. Tackling the big bedroom pillows next (maybe with Vicki K's Genius Creative Conquistador Idea of using two smaller zippers to cover the distance or maybe with Michelle's sweet offer of Canadian Kindness to swap zippers from our respective stashae [that's latin for stash]).  [Yeesh, you guys are Smart AND Nice.]

And my feet have a zippy place to rest. So that's positive.

How I Hate to Wait for Things and How I Am Waiting for Zippers and How I Wait on Purpose

A Craft Debt '11 Update

I am at a bit of a standstill on two projects: both of the pillows for me [#5] AND the two bags [#2 & #6] that I swore a couple of posts ago were my First Priority Projects. And here's the thing: I'm not stuck creatively. They are all projects coming along swimmingly in terms of function and color and the weird combining of strange old pieces of fabric and such that any regular human would have put in a boat and floated off to some Other Country's Landfill long ago. But I heart them all.

I just don't have long enough zippers.

Go to the store and get them, You Say.

That's the thing: that's not how we roll here at WDT. We (and I mean the Royal We) wait until the pieces it takes to put a nifty something together all appear before we run to the store. Even when we are in our car tempted to pull into whatever Zippers for Cheap store may or may not be just a handful of blocks away from Our place of work, we keep driving. We don't go in. 

Instead, we dig through our Monstrous Stash of culled-as-we-go bits and pieces of notions and when we come up short, then we hit the thrift shops in high hopes of the Just Right zipper and when we go there and there is nothing but a Sea of 6" Closures, then we wait.

We wait because we have found that the tension of waiting and the tension of Only Using What We Find causes curious, interesting things to happen as we make. Sometimes the Just Right Zippers never do appear and so we tackle the envelope closure-d pillow or we start to experiment with snaps.

Right now we are waiting.

And in some ways it might seems strange, what with wanting to get those pillows onto my bed and cover up the fugly floral that is currently gracing the top of my (purchased with a christmas gift card) super expensive sheets, but that's how we roll.

And usually the commitment to just sit tight means that Oprah herself (or whoever IS in charge of the universe) drops in our lap the Zipper of Our Dreams.

Or at least a one-day haul like this:

You will be the first to know when when the zippers arrive. Right now we are waiting.

I Got Grandma's Buttons: Neener Neener*

K: Guess what came in the mail as a complete surprise and I about passed out in my kitchen (which would have been dangerous, what with the horribly hard tile floors and all) when I opened it? This: Two. Big. Ziplocs. Of. Buttons. 

Fifty years worth.

I called my Grandma. Me: "Grandma! I got the buttons!"  Her: "Oh __ (insert embarassing family name here), those are just the buttons we cut off the shirts we used for rags when we had the paint shop." Me: When was that? Her: Oh, since around when Carlo (my 60+ year old uncle) was about 5."

Then she proceeded to apologize that they are mostly shirt buttons. Gotta love her. 

I thanked her about 43 times and I think (probably from the fact that I was jumping up and down while talking to her) that she could tell I was grateful.

And then I set about sorting and cleaning and such. There was way more than shirt buttons: there was Treasures.

The sorting turned out to be kind of a Thing. So fun, though: sorting out the buttons from the pins and funny old screws and bobs of whatsit that were all wrangled together in those bags.

Not only did I get a 50-yr stash of squirreled-away buttons of all kinds, I got two big handfuls of rings that I can use to make more of these and also this funny little stack of keys that I'm going to do something with (not sure what yet, but you'll be the first to know).

I ran out the door Saturday afternoon to hit a thrift shop and managed to score my heart out with the Perfect Glass Jar for my newly sorted buttons.

Now they're sitting all together, all shiny and reminding me that I come from a long line of ladies who build stashes of things they might need for Just in Case.

Grandmas Rule.

* Really I am an 8 year old? Apparently. 

Craft Debt '11 No. 1: The Big Ol' Linen Headboard

This is a Craft Debt 2011 Update.

It's completed: the Linen Whale has gone on home. For better or worse, I delivered my pal's fabric-covered headboard today with a lot of "just sort of scrinch it over here and you won't be able to see that one part if the sun's out. . ." She is terribly gracious and was very thankful and happy. Mostly: we're both just glad to have the thing finished and in place.

It really is, actually, pretty cute. 

The Pumpkinhead "helped" as you can imagine.

This project was a re-do of a store-bought, fabric-covered headboard that my pal bought with the big hopes of a nifty, high-end upgrade. We headed out to a terrific remnant shop and she bought heavy weighted linen to give the headboard a cuter, more substantial, less fake-micro-suede look and feel. And then I took the original cover and seam-ripped the behookus out of it and used it as a pattern to make another, more attractive version of it from the gorgeous coupla yards of linen.

I love a project that involves me saying things like, "Sure! I can probably figure that out . . ." This one was only tricky because 1) We added piping. Piping we made. Piping that felt like being squiggly when we wanted it to be all calm and straight and 2) I went at it like I always do: fast and furious and (therefore) full of mistakes I woud later need to fix. I'd like to introduce: Me. Hi. Have we met? I seem to have one creative process only, regardless of the particularities of what I'm taking on. In this case, it worked perfectly (since I don't otherwise have the First Clue about how to Make a Fabric Headboard Cover). So I just dove in and tweaked as I went. Um, for a year.

Anyways, thar she blows. All delivered and in place and pretty much just the amount of wonky that makes it all made-by-a-friend but not the level of wonky that makes it on-the-way-to-the-Goodwill-once-the-friend-drives-away.