What Can You Make With Barbeque Skewers & Dental Floss?

BBQ skewers from the dollar store +
2 rolls of freebie dental floss from the dentist =
What??

I was reading the latest issue of HGTV Magazine on my Nook Sunday morning while watching the Steelers game and saw this decorative spiky ball thing. The article said it was $25 at zgallerie.com (though the price today on that link is $29.95). With school back in session and a ton of things to budget for with winter approaching, even that is not in my budget. But I really wanted that spiky, atomic-style ball. And that got me to thinking: how could I make one with stuff I already have? Lightbulb time! BBQ skewers and dental floss!

Crazy, right? I have an old tissue box almost full of sample containers of dental floss that I have collected over the years of taking the kids to the dentist, and I have two packages of BBQ skewers I got at the dollar store, and BBQ skewers tied together a certain way would look an awful lot like that spiky ball thing.

So, Steelers game over (Steelers won in a squeaker!), I grabbed a box of floss and the skewers and set to work. I tied the floss to one skewer right in the middle, and then started twisting the floss around more and more skewers at odd angles until I got this:

But it needed a coat of paint. I had purchased a can of chrome spray paint a couple months ago for another project and had some left, so I spray painted it with that, and the end result of an hour of tinkering with random objects got me this:

It looks great! It shimmers and shines in the light, and it cost me a grand total of $1 to make. Can't complain about that, and it looks AWESOME sitting next to my retro lamps. :)

Duct Tape Canister

If you've read my post about making decorator bins out of cereal boxes, you'll know that I am always repurposing stuff. I have had my eye on this cardboard bread crumb canister since I bought it, and I saved a couple of them, but someone threw them away. Anyway, I finished another box of these last night, and decided today - after I had run out of work stuff to do - to do what I was planning.

You see, I had purchased a roll of retro-ish decorator Duck brand duct tape, so I took this...

...and made it into this:

I don't know what I am going to do with it yet, but it looks pretty cool for a five-minute project.

Wax Lotus Flower

Last night, I went grocery shopping. (Pity me.) It was AWFUL.

But afterward, I got to watch Nashville and have some apple wine and white cheddar Babybel cheese. Shelby ate a lot of the cheese, which is why she is eating a lot of fruit today. Anyway, I saved the wax coverings from the cheese and made this while watching TV:

DIY Valentine's Scratch Tickets

So, for Valentine's Day this year, I did something I saw on Pinterest: I made these awesome, homemade scratch tickets!

They're actually really simple: Just print out some graphics with hearts on them onto cardstock, and write your "prizes" on them. While your ink's drying, mix up your paint, which is 1 part dishwashing soap to two parts acrylic paint. I used silver, but you could use any color, like pink or red or whatever. My mix was one tablespoon dish soap to two tablespoons silver acrylic paint, and that was WAY too much. I still have a jar of this stuff.

Anyway, the next step is cover every part of the Valentine card that will be scratched off with a layer of white crayon; in my case, I colored over all my hearts.

Then, paint over your hearts with a small paintbrush. The paint has to be pretty thick, but not abnormally so. I also found that the wax from the crayon kept the paint in place a little bit. But neatness still counts!

They have to dry for about an hour or so because the dish soap retards the drying process.

And it actually works! I'd show you how they look scratched off, but, well, the prizes are personal. :D

Decorator Bins From Cereal Boxes

So, the computer I use for all my work stuff, well, it's 7 years old. Things wear out. This was the case with my hard drive. Last Thursday morning, I went to to turn on my computer and the hard drive made a horrific grinding noise and then I got just a black screen with a blinking cursor. BIOS showed that the computer wasn't even seeing the drive. I have to assume that the drive is completely toast, though I will try to access the files there to make sure that all is, indeed, lost. Since I automatically save my files and work documents to an external drive, the only things I have lost are about a year's worth of emails (I know, I know: back these things up... but I am HORRIBLE about that, hence, the external drive) and a rather vast collection of fonts, neither of which I care a whole lot about, so, outside of the fact that I spent ALL DAY yesterday formatting and setting up a new hard drive, I haven't lost much.

In fact, the inability to do any "real" work actually gave me some time to complete another project I saw on Pinterest: making decorator bins from cereal boxes!

I have been saving cereal boxes (much to the dismay of my family, who can't figure out why I won't throw "garbage" away) for a few months now, and, when I saw my opportunity to make these, I even stole a couple more boxes even though the cereal wasn't all eaten yet. The bags inside the boxes work just fine as containers, you know. Anyway, I started by cutting the front and back panels from the boxes I'd saved:

 I had enough panels to make two boxes: one that was 13 inches long by 10 inches wide, and one that was 10 inches long and 8 inches wide. My next step was to measure the angles so that the bins would have a nice slanted stance. For this, I measured one and half inches from the bottom corner of the side panels and drew a nice slanted line from the corner above it:

For the short front and back panels, I measured in two inches on the bottom corner and drew my lines. I also ended up cutting about two inches off of those panels, so that the whole thing would fit nicely. This meant a lot of matching up lines and corners and whatnot to make sure everything would fit together nicely.

Then, I cut everything out a little wide, measured again, and trimmed to fit. Now, I had all my stiffening panels:

Next, I laid out the pieces on some fat quarter quilting material I had. I had worried that I wouldn't be able to fit all the pieces onto a fat quarter, but they almost all fit. The only piece that was different (and only on the smaller bin) was the bottom piece, which I cut out of a leftover piece of drapery fabric in a nice, contrasting orange stripe.

And then I repeated the layout and trace routine for the lining fabric:

Now, time to sew. First I sewed all the outside fabric pieces to the bottom panel piece:

And then I sewed all the lining side pieces to the lining bottom piece:

Next, sewing the outside to the lining, which was tricky, because I was sewing a BOX. The important thing here is to pay attention to what gets sewed to what. This means turning fabric this way and that sometimes, inside and out sometimes, etc. So, anyway, I sewed three of the four corners of the outside to the lining:

And then, before sewing the last corners together, I slid in the bottom piece of cardboard into the pocket I'd made:

 Before sewing it shut, sewing the last corner together, and then repeating all of the above for the larger box.

Now, in the instructions I linked to above, it says that you can sew right through the cereal box panels. I tried this. It worked okay for the first two sides, and then I got halfway through the third side of the first bin I was closing up (the big bin), and my sewing machine grunted and then broke the sewing needle. Without a backup needle (silly me), I had to enact a backup PLAN.

Sewing machine needles with cases - Pack of 48 (Google Affiliate Ad)

Now, someone a little more experienced with sewing projects would probably grab some fusible interfacing tape and iron the top seams and border pieces together, but I am not that person. No, I didn't have any tape like that (I do NOW, though), so I got out the hot glue gun and carefully seals the tops of the bin sides and then adhered the trim pieces the same way. (Luckily, I had sewn the edges of MOST of the trim pieces before I tried sewing the damned cardboard.)

Thermoweb 101642 Heatn Bond Hem Iron-On Adhesive.38 in. x 10 Yards (Google Affiliate Ad)

So, after much aggravation (as is typical for me with sewing projects), I had two finished decorator bins:

Despite the problems, I am actually sort of pleased with how they turned out. It helps organize the baby's toys and they look good in my office, where all her toys are being stored until her room gets built this summer.

Nook Tablet Case

So, I think that, with everything in life, it is just as important - perhaps MORE important - to talk about our "failures" as well as our successes. Today's post is about one of those failures. Though this was not a complete disaster (complete with cussing, hair pulling, frustrated moping or anything), it didn't turn out the way I envisioned in my head, probably because I am just learning to use a sewing machine and I don't know a whole lot about seam styles, techniques, or even how to adjust thread tension, which has been a constant sore spot with this sewing machine.

Anyway, I have wanted a case for the Nook Tablet that my Tommy Lee bought me for my birthday last year for quite a while now. But I couldn't find a case that I really liked and I knew that I could make one if I put my mind to it and ever found the time. After spending the last two weeks armpit deep in a graphic design project for a joke writer in Las Vegas and prepping to go into full-on production mode on a friend's book project, I decided to take a day off. So, this lazy Sunday afternoon, I decided that I would finally make the Nook case I had been planning in my head for almost a year. 

NOOK Tablet HD 16GB BNTV40016GB (Google Affiliate Ad)

Lately, I have really been into recycling cardboard boxes that have been building up since Christmas. I don't want to haul them to the dump or burn them since most of them are sturdy shipping boxes, so I have been making things out of them, like a set of three toy boxes out of diaper boxes, a project that took a few hours a couple weeks back:

From This....

...To This!

But I digress. Anyway, so this project, too, started with a cardboard shipping box:

I just put the Nook on it and drew around it to make a template, and then cut out the cardboard I needed.

I had a couple bundles of quilting fabric in awesome Atomic Age, retro prints, so my baby girl and I chose what pieces we'd be using:

Fabric Editions MDGPC-262 Novelty and Quilt Fabric Pre-Cut 100 percent (Google Affiliate Ad)

After deciding what pieces went where and for what purpose, I figured out my measurements, which are as follows:

• 4 pieces, 6"X9" (cover fabric and lining fabric; I used two different prints, so, two of each for me, but if you're using the same fabric, then you'd still need four, just all four the same fabric, obviously)
• 2 pieces 5.5"x3" (pockets)
• 2 pieces 5.5"x1" (pocket trim)
• 1 piece 3"x9" (spine)
• 8 pieces 1"x6" (cover and lining trim pieces for top and bottom)
• 4 pieces 1"x9" (cover and lining trim pieces for side edges)
• 2 pieces 1.25"x3" (pieces to hold the Nook in place)

A side note here: my spine was a little too wide. if I were doing this again, I would cut it at 2.5" x 9".

So, anyway, I started cutting fabric, just using my cardboard templates as a guide and giving my self about half an inch on all sides for seam allowances:

Then, I started laying out the pieces, starting with the cover fabric and spine:

And then laying the lining fabric and pockets on top, just mocking everything up:

And then mocked out the trim pieces:

And then cut out the fabric for the straps that would hold the Nook into the case:

Though these are bright orange, in the end, when it came time to sew them in, I swapped them for the brown patterned fabric, as I liked it better than the orange.

Anyway, next, I started sewing the trim pieces on first, folding the trim pieces in half and sewing from the outside (showing) side:

 I just folded the trim pieces over so the seams wouldn't show. Then, I trimmed the pockets:

And hemmed the raw pocket edges:

While doing this, it occurred to me that just the cardboard inside the fabric might be a little hard, so I grabbed a piece of thin packing foam I had saved and cut out pieces to put on both sides of the cardboard:

Next, I sewed the pockets onto the left-hand lining piece using a zigzag stitch:

With all the pockets and trim sewed to the lining, I started assembling the thing, and this is where, dear readers, you're going to get fewer pictures of the process, as I realized that this project wasn't going to look quite the way I envisioned. Anyway, before sewing, I ironed the pieces so that there wouldn't be any wrinkles and so the the trim would lay flat while I stitched it together:

And then I started sewing the outside to the inside:

Once I had two pockets fully assembled and the holders for the Nook sewed on to the right-hand lining, I stuffed the insides with the foam and cardboard, making a cardboard sandwich between the two layers of foam:

And then I started sewing the thing together, and it was then that I realized several things, all at once:

1. I had cut the spine too wide;
2. I had allowed too much for seam allowances on the edges of the cover and lining fabric;
3. The way I did the trim around the outside was COMPLETELY wrong;
4. I wasn't sure I liked the contrasting orange thread showing.

So, I stopped taking pictures of the process and just focused on getting the thing put together. After sewing the two covers to the spine, I hand stitched a brown ribbon closure to the outside edges and stuck the Nook inside:

In all honesty, outside of the fact that it is a little larger than I anticipated, and it looks handmade and not professional - what can you expect from a beginning seamstress making something without a pattern while learning to use a sewing machine - it's actually not all that bad. I actually really like it - still like it a lot better than the covers you can buy - and I am pretty proud of myself.

Backlit Paintings

So, I mentioned in my previous post that I had handmade most of the Christmas presents I gave out this year. With the holidays past us, I can now share this process with you. One of the things I made for everyone on my "big presents" Christmas list were these back lit, 3D paintings.

Now, I have started spending more time than I really care to admit on Pinterest, and I see a LOT of things that I want to try doing. That being said, I'm a creative sort, and I always try to make my own spin on whatever I try to do.

So, I was on Pinterest this past spring, and I saw this really cool cloud painting:

...which I ADORE. Then, later, I saw another backlit painting, but this one had cutouts that let more light through. It was made out of metal, which is something I am not capable of working with, but it was so pretty that I knew that someday I would have to do it.

Nearing Christmas time, I saw on the 30 Days of Pinsperation feature on Pinterest that someone else had tackled the metal backlit painting, but done it smaller and with cardstock:

That's the original metal backlit art on the left and the cardstock version on the right.

The little wheels in my head got to turning, and I thought: "Why not combine the two paintings?"

So, I did.

First, I found a deal at Michael's (the craft store) for 7 canvases for $20, and then I bought 6 sets of battery powered Christmas lights from the Dollar Store. My original idea was to have the paintings battery powered so that they could be hung anywhere, not just in close proximity to a power outlet. You'll see why this changed momentarily.

Next, step: I printed out a bunch of designs onto pale green cardstock I had lying around:

Next, I cut the main images out of the cardstock:

Then, I made double-stick tape out of masking tape (just rolled it into little cylinders) and stuck the cutouts onto the canvases. Then, we (well, my auto painter husband) spray painted them bone white so that light wouldn't shine through the bulk of the painting:

So, now, you can see that light only shines through where the cutouts were taped to the canvas.

Originally, I printed out two copies of the designs, because I wasn't sure how well the cardstock would handle the spray paint. It turns out that the cardstock cutouts for MOST of the were fine, so I went ahead and cutout additional pieces from some of the painted cutouts, and some from my gray cardstock copies:

This created not only areas where more light could shine through when the painting was turned on, but also made a 3D effect that would make the painting look pretty even when the lights were off, especially after they were painted.

Next, I stuck the cutouts to the canvas using photo mounting tape so that the cutouts would sit above the areas that hadn't been spray painted:

And here's what the Desert Highway painting looked like at this stage:

As you can tell, my printer was running out of ink at this point, but it wasn't going to matter, because I painted over the cutouts next:

Finally, I started putting the lights into the canvas frame using furniture tacks:

Now, you can't tell from this shot, but, by this point, I had realized that the battery powered lights weren't going to work. I suppose that, if I wanted to spend $7 - $10 per string of the party grade, fancy, LED, battery powered light strings (like I got for my wedding and used in my Christmas wreath this year) that the battery powered ones would have worked. Unfortunately, I am on a budget, and this meant that I had to go the cheap-o route. The Dollar Store battery powered lights were VERY cheaply made and the wires and bulbs kept trying to fall out as I hooked them to the canvas frame. Also, they were not powered by AA batteries as I expected, but, rather, C size batteries, and that made the battery box too large to fit into the canvas frame.

So, I went looking for short strings of outlet powered LED Christmas lights. This, also proved to be a struggle, as most stores don't carry 10-20 bulb strings of white Christmas lights anymore. The more common (and more pricy) 50-100 bulb strings were not going to work, either, as my canvas was 9" by 14", and that many lights weren't going to fit in there.

Eventually, though, we found 35-light strings of COLORED LED strings. My husband took these strings all apart and made each string (mostly) one color strings: red, orange, yellow/clear, and green with a couple of blue bulbs (we'd also found two strings of clear, 20-bulbs strands). So, now, all six paintings had lighting, and I inserted these into the canvas frame. Here are shots of the finished products:

Desert Highway - Backlit Painting by Charity Luthy

Acoustic Guitar - Backlit Painting by Charity Luthy

Dark Clouds - Backlit Painting by Charity Luthy

Lighthouse - Backlit Painting by Charity Luthy

Butterfly Flowers - Backlit Painting by Charity Luthy

Wildflowers - Backlit Painting by Charity Luthy