Lucky Star Ombre Mobile

Here's my Ombre win from SYTYC.  I love that J now points to it at bedtime and says "Moon!" and "-Tar!"

I'm going to lose, or I'm going win.  Someday, I will get back to the business of blogging randomness, but for now, I'm just chugging along, another week, another craft :-).

I had seen photos of ombre mobiles on Pinterest that were made from paint chips, so I knew I liked the effect of the ombre in mobile form.  I had also seen pictures of lucky stars that were dyed and hung up in garlands, so I decided to put the two ideas together to create my Lucky Stars Ombre Mobile. 

Lucky stars are usually made with long strips of origami paper, but I didn't have the time nor the confidence that I was going to find exactly what I wanted, so I tried to make my own.  J has a big roll of craft paper that we had bought at Ikea, so I tried a Martha Stewart tip about spray painting an ombre effect on the paper using watercolors.  To be honest, that didn't work very well, except for the really color saturated bits.  For the light shades, it was easier to just paint on a light watercolor wash.

Then cut your now-ombred paper into strips.  There is some trial and error involved, as you figure out a good width vs length ratio to create a sturdy puffy star.  Sometimes, the strip was too wide and didn't have enough heft to "puff" out the star, and sometimes, the strip was too thin, which made for a super plump star and made it impossible to stick a needle through.  I think my strips were about 20 inches long, and a little over a half inch wide.  I painted several swatches of paper, cut them all out and only chose the shades that worked best with each other.

Once you have the strips, start folding stars.  Here's a great pictorial with more detailed instructions than I could ever put together.  Because you cut the strips along the gradient, you should have light to dark colored strips and therefore, light to dark colored stars.

Arrange the stars in columns the way you would want them to hang in your mobile.

Cut a long length of thread, tie a knot at the bottom and thread the darkest star in the column.  Give it an inch of separation, tie another knot and thread the next star up.  Continue tying knots and threading stars, from the darkest to lightest.  Once you're at the top, tie the thread around your mobile base; in this case, it was a 6 inch wooden embroidery hoop from Hobby Lobby.

Cut out two white crescents.  Sew them together and stuff lightly to make your moon.

The assembly in my case was a bit haphazard.  I hung the moon from a thread, and then hung 4 threads from the moon to attach to the embroidery hoop.  The embroidery hoop then had all the columns of stars hung from it.

As a final touch, I glued a silver ribbon around the outside of the embroidery hoop, for a little bit of bling (?) and to hide the thread ends.

It was a pretty simple project, and it was a great way to keep my hands busy while watching a chick flick!

Speaking of chick flicks, my new thing is Korean soap dramas.  Talk about time sucks!

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No-Sew Summer Basket Tutorial

Did I mention work is coming to a head?  Yeah, and J is headed straight to terrible toddler-hood.  And I still have to write up the awesomeness that is the gift exchange that I participated in, both of them.  And then there's the crafts for SYTYC - one a week, that's a serious schedule!  And I'm transitioning to a new laptop, which means I've got photos sitting on both, waiting to be edited and uploaded.  Oh, peace and quiet, we'll have to have a lunch date soon.

Here's the tutorial for a no-sew basket that I made for SYTYC - did you vote for it?

Like the Scrap Wood Lantern, the brainstorming process for this project took quite a circuitous route.  I was originally thinking about some summer placemats, but after Drew gave me a big THUMBS DOWN, I asked him for ideas, if he was so clever indeed.  We also had to take into account that we were going to be on vacation that week, so I wouldn't have access to my usual assortment of sewing and crafting and woodworking supplies.  My MIL gave us a spark of inspiration when she talked about handmade baskets in Williamsburg, and then Drew suggested that his dad cut me super thin slices of wood with which to weave a basket.  Are you kidding me?!  But then, I remembered the hot Pinterest pin of making baskets out of paper, and figured I can probably do it with fabric, so we went looking for the nearest Joann's store!

Materials:

2 yds of 60" wide heavy duck canvas.  I used 1 yd of each color.

2 rolls of 3/4" hem tape.

iron.

scissors + t-square (or rotary cutter/mat/straight edge)

hot glue

Beware, there's some math involved.

I was lucky that my brother-in-law had a 4 foot dry wall T-square sitting around in his basement, so I used that to mark off my strips of fabric, the long way.  So, for a yard of duck canvas (36"), I got 7 strips that were 5" wide and 60" long.

Fold each strip in half lengthwise, and fold in the rough edges lengthwise by 1/2".  

Iron your creases.

Follow the instructions for the hem tape to join the 2 hemmed edges together.

That whole spiel was to create 2" hemmed strips of fabric.  You could easily just sew it with a 1/2" seam allowance and turn the whole thing inside out.  Either way, you are creating 2" strips out of your 5" piece.

Lather, rinse, repeat for all your strips except one of each color.

(I have no pictures of the above because I was in the basement, ironing by the light of 1 light bulb, without realizing there were about 4 other fluorescent lights I could have turned on.)

Now you have a lot of long strips of fabric.  Decide which color you want to be the base of your basket.  Take 6 (out of 7) of those strips and cut in half to create 12 strips, now 2" by 30" long instead of the original 60" long.  Leave the others as is.

Weave those shortened strips into a 6x4 pattern, which gives you a basket base of 12" by 10".  Since your strips are 30" long, you should have (30 - 12)/2 or 9" leftover on each short side of the basket and (30 - 10)/2 or 10" leftover on the long side of the basket.  These leftovers will become the part of the walls of the basket.  Glue the pieces in place to prevent movement.

Now grab a strip of the other color, hot glue the end to one of the blue upright pieces, and start weaving your walls around the base, gluing as you go.  It sounds complicated, but it's just weaving.  And since you're using fabric, you can manipulate is any way you need to in order to glue the pieces together.  An extra hand may help.  

(I ended up hanging the basket over the corner of the table in order to have a good gluing surface.)

You should be able to fit 4 full strips (8") of your coordinating color to the basket and then have about an inch or 1 1/2" leftover sticking out the top.  Fold those rough edges down and glue them in place.

Then take one of your uncut, un-hemmed strips of fabric in the color of your choice and use that as the binding on the top of the basket.  Glue glue glue.

To finish, grab some scraps of strips to make the handles.  Try to tuck in the rough edges into the basket weave, and glue in place.  Then you'll want to just go back around and add some dots of hot glue here and there to clean up any rough edges or seams.

Since I made this basket way out in Indianapolis, it did not come home with me.  It is now decorating the room of my cutie patootie nephew, housing all of his plush friends in canvas comfort!

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Scrap Wood Lantern Tutorial

Here's the tutorial for my wood lantern, in case you have an armload of scrap wood you'd like to use up!

The brainstorming process for this project was a little bit crazy. Once I decided I wanted to use wood, I googled "wood scraps" just to look at some pictures.  Originally, I looked at some segmented wood turning projects, but pretty much got shot down by my wood working friends (and Drew) for being completely off my rocker.  So, finally, I caught a glimpse of a wood lantern somewhere on the interwebs, with no name, no title, no instructions, just a glowing image of a wood "thing" with holes in it.  I figured since there were no rounded edges, this was at least "do-able"!  

So here we go!

1.  Collect a bunch of wood - preferably already square.  By square, I don't mean the shape, I mean, the that the sides and corners are not crooked.

2.  Cut, rip, sand your pieces into assorted shapes and sizes.  I didn't have a plan, so I just cut enough wood to half fill a plastic bag.

3.  Start piecing your wood blocks together.  Do it on a table so the inner side is flat.  Try to keep enough variation in color, texture, wood grain in the design, and you can also try to piece it so that you never have to depend on an exact sizing.  I pieced mine together so each piece sort of depended on the piece before it, and everything was slightly adjustable.  Also, it is helpful to create a 90 degree frame to build up against, so you know your panel will be square. Ooh, also remember to take a picture of your panel before you take it apart to start glueing!

4.  Start clamping and glueing!  This took up the most time, since for every piece glued together, you need to wait 30 minutes for the glue to dry.  I used a combination of several C clamps, quick grips and normal orange clamps to keep everything flat and square.  It helps to clamp directly to that temporary frame to keep things square.  Oy, how many times will I use the term "square"?  Only later did I find out that being "square" is pretty much the stuff of nightmares for wood workers!

5.  Once all 4 of your panels are glued together, you'll need to take the whole panel through the table saw and ...square it off!  This is the step where you ensure all 4 panels are the same size and are completely flush on all sides.

6.  Cut 8 top/bottom frame pieces.  These have to be the same width as each panel.  Glue the frame pieces to the top and bottom of the panel, and again, use the table saw to make each side flush.

7.  Now, time for the lamp!  I used a basic lamp kit from a hardware store, and followed the directions on putting it together.  The whole assembly was drilled into a wider piece of wood that would sit at the bottom of the lantern, between two facing panels.  The lamp base doesn't need to be thick, and it definitely shouldn't be thicker than the bottom frame pieces you just glued on.  The length of the lamp base is the same width as the panel.

9.  Cut your 4 posts.  I made them a little thicker - a little over 1 inch square.  My panels were approximately 6 inches by 8 inches, with the addition of the top/bottom frames, so my posts were about 14 inches long, I think.

10.  Final assembly.  Measure on two posts how far up you want a panel to sit, and glue the panel to 2 posts.  Do the same with the opposite side.  Then, glue the remaining side panels into the structure.  It gets a little tricky here because you also need to glue in the bottom piece where your lamp sits.  This step is easier with 2 people and a lot of clamps!

11.  Once everything is put together, you may need to make minor adjustments due to wobbliness or un-square-ness, sand off some dried bits of glue or add a clear stain.  Or just plug it in and turn it on!

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Lantern Tutorial at SYTYC

Seriously, when is life not crazy?  Blogging sometimes gets pushed to the back burner.  But, fantastic news!  I won the Scraps Challenge at So You Think You're Crafty with my Wood Scrap Lantern!  I started the contest with almost no expectations, just hoping to get not voted off the first week, but now I'm all nervous about staying in the game!  And it's quite the competitive game, these projects being shown are creative and impeccably done!

Anywho, my wood lantern tutorial is up on So You Think You're Crafty today, so take a moment and go check it out.  If you miss it, no worries, because I will repost here in a couple of days, while I go work on the  challenge project for next week!

Oh, and of course, there is voting as well, on the SYTYC sidebar.  I'm seriously just hoping to survive this week.  I think I thought of my one and only good idea and now I'm spent.

I'm technically on vacation and work is ..well, coming to a head, so things on the bloggy blog will be a bit spotty for a little while.  

Click here to see where I party!