Yart Sale starts tomorrow, June 10th!

What is a Yart Sale?

It's an Artistic Slant to a traditional Yard Sale: Yard + Art = YART

Tons of etsy shops are participating so drop by and shop your little hearts out - it promises to be a lot of fun! And there are loads of bargains and who doesn't love a bargain? Plus you'll be supporting handmade!

Visit my shop and search "yart" to find the deals. Then be sure to browse around and check out the other participants too. Have fun! :)

Easy cell phone cozy from eco felt

Uh-oh...your cell phone is ringing. Can you actually find it in the bottom of your purse in time to answer it? Has everyone in the store become familiarized with your ringtone yet? Oh if only you could just grab it and answer the thing!

Yeah. That's my mom. Which is why for her birthday I made her a cell phone cozy from incredibly affordable eco felt and grosgrain ribbon.

I could have bought her one, but she uses a pretty big purse and I wanted one that would hang safely inside, long enough she could zip her purse and not have problems. Plus I just like making my gifts. :)

I've never made a cell phone cozy before, didn't have a pattern and didn't have a clue how to blanket-stitch but that was the plan! Here's how I did it:

I started by stealing her phone and measuring its size on my selected color.

Then I cut out two equally sized pieces using all my handy rulers, grids and a rotary cutter. I made sure to leave a little extra room on all sides to allow for my stitching.

One side of the pocket would have to be short enough to see the top of the phone when it was inside otherwise you wouldn't be able to grab it easily, so that side is trimmed. In the photo I'm indicating where I decided to trim mine. The other side would have to be much longer so I could create a loop that would hold the ribbon, so that side is not trimmed.

I knew I wanted an embellishment on the front of the cozy so to get that started I freehand drew on regular lined paper one of my favorite things - a flower!

Using a Sharpie I traced around my pattern onto the felt and cut them out. I figured the flower would look better with a little depth so I cut one of the flowers smaller and cut a small round for a center.

I glued them together and onto the front of the cozy using a glue designed for felt projects. This will keep your design in place until you are ready for stitching.

The felt glue takes quite a while to dry, but it works pretty well. Of course, not well enough that I would trust everything to stick together while being banged around and squished inside a purse so I put a single stitch through the flower middle and the middle of each leaf.

Next I used pins to secure my two sides of the cozy together and followed this tutorial on blanket stitching to hold the sides of my pocket together.

For this part I didn't divide my embroidery thread so I'd have nice, thick stitches and I also chose a color that would disappear to hide any mistakes, haha! But I think it's customary for this kind of stitching to choose a color that complements and yet stands out.

Also, be sure to cut a large enough piece of thread to take you through to the end!

It was actually pretty easy!

Then I needed to make my pocket for the ribbon. I folded the felt over enough to accomodate the ribbon and blanket stitched along the edge.

Um...don't look too closely at the stitches on this part, it gave me some troubles.

Then I used a small crochet hook to push my ribbon through.

I cut a small piece of velcro and stitched it to the ribbon ends, careful to secure it and not tear up the ribbon. Using some Stop Fray or something similar would probably be helpful at this step to prevent the ribbon from coming apart on you.

And make sure you get each side of the velcro on the correct side of the ribbon!

And there you have it!

My mom loved it and also loves not having to dig around her purse for her cell phone when it rings!

It's been an interesting week.

It started out so nice, you know? We had mostly sunny skies although we did get some weird clouds...

Even so, it was hot and humid and the flowers and plants were LOVING it...

The first indication of something weird was from the honeybees.

There's a honeybee nest in the oak tree... (inside that lump)

They apparently got too big for their oak lump or there was a bloody coup because they swarmed...

Difficult to see, but notice how the sky has that "film grain" look? Those are all bees. And no, I'm not a crazy person and I don't care if they allegedly won't hurt you when swarming; I took this photo through a window.

Once they calmed and clumped I ventured outside to snap this one. A solid clump of bees is pretty darn freaky. Pretty much any small thing en masse is pretty freaky though.

Thankfully they didn't all leave, there are still bees going in and out of the oak. With all the problems wild bees have been having lately I'm very grateful to have my very own hive to pollinate my garden and flowers.

Thursday I went to visit my friend Karen and her just-weeks-old daughter (whose middle name is Molly...after me!) and while there was treated to a freak lightning storm and a tornado warning. Tornadoes are incredibly rare here so I was freaked. out. Can I use the word "freaked" or "freak" a few more times in describing this? You bet! But I won't. :)

And tomorrow my babies are graduating. They were my first real class and I had them three different years on and off since they were about 13 and now they are graduating from high school. *sniffles galore!*

*sigh*

Here's hoping next week is a little more calm.

An answer to a question - the headband version!

Most of the time my projects start out as "I don't know what I'm doing but I'm going for it!" And lucky for me they usually turn out. My pin-up hair clip seemed to catch quite a few eyes (I know I was pretty happy with it!) but I had a question about doing something like that on a headband. The Y and R Lady and I emailed about flowers, bows, and feathers so I came up with a plan to do all three.

Ages ago I bought a three pack of thin headbands and they have been sitting in my bathroom cupboard pretty much since. I think I wore one or two of them a couple times. I decided to dust one of them off for the flowered headband but I still have two left! So I dug out another. The pattern was not so much my favorite but there's bound to be one of those in every multi-pack. Just fine since I planned to cover it with ribbon anyway.

I chose a grosgrain ribbon just wider than the headband. I prefer using grosgrain ribbon for a lot of my projects because it seems to handle gluing and such much better.




I only put glue in a line down the middle of the headband; it will squish out enough to the edges you won't need more than that.





It may still get a out of line (if you apply it by looking at it from the back it helps) so if you place your fingers in this position:


And lightly run your fingers along the ribbon edges while the glue is still very much wet, I found it straightened out just perfect.


While I was waiting for it to dry I prepped a rose to go on by clipping off the back, which connected it to the stem, removing the greenery (it just wouldn't stay on), and applying a piece of ribbon with tails.





Then I had to wait for both things to dry so I made a bow.

If you loop your ribbon like so...





trim the tails and glue and hold...

wait until dry and then loop a small piece around the middle and glue...

It makes a cute bow.

Which I oddly didn't take a photo of when it was finished...erm...next!


When the bow and flower were done drying I decided to...

This is a little crazy, just to warn you, but I had so many ideas to work with!


...add velcro!

You'll notice I cut the tails off the rose ribbon. If I were ONLY attaching the rose, I would leave the tails on and wrap them around the headband and glue to secure. Simply gluing the flower directly seems like it wouldn't have enough stability.

I also added velcro to the headband (duh) - please make sure you put the same side of the velcro on the embellishments and the opposite side on the headband.

Now you've got options! Albeit they are kinda weird but I wanted to try both and didn't want to glue things onto my last remaining untouched headband.

Don't feel like a bow today? How about a rose? Riiiiiiiiip!

Tada! Crack me up.



Of course if later you wonder, "what was I thinking?!" you can glue a feather into the velcro and wrap that spot with ribbon and you won't even see it.

(Feather courtesy of my neighbor's peacock's molting) If you actually do it, and not just pretend to like I did for the photo, it will look better, but you get the idea.

Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday Mom!

Isn't she too cute in that photo?

Yes, on June 2, 19*coughcough* the little girl was born who would one day be my mom and the woman who taught me to be crafty and creative.

And she must have some good kind of birthday wishing because she got the rain she was hoping for out of a completely dry forecast!

The cake plate catch-all I made her was a hit and I will show you her other gift a little later this week!