Little Stacks Everywhere

All around my apartment are little arrangements. Preparing for this craft show or, more accurately, my booth at a shopping market, has turned my little crafting life upsidedown. And I'm not kidding when I say there are little collections of projects sitting out everywhere. Above you see a collection of Mexican bingo tiles with fresh coats of a kind of plastic lacquer that will make them hard enough to stand alone on necklaces. More details on that to come.

And here are some vintage/random buttons gathered together. Also awaiting their turn at the chopping block, or so to speak, when they'll be turned into projects. All of them have polished, flat backsides so they are ready for use. Sanding a hundred buttons is like a dream come true. (I've never gotten into sanding; if it could be skipped, it would be.)

And, yep, some more future projects. It's amazing to think that I've made any progress at all, since looking at these pictures reminds me that all I've done is set up more work for myself to do later. Yikes. Two weeks and a trip to Chicago thrown in... I better get busy!

And finally, here's a completed project. Woohoo! But like all the others, perhaps a bit difficult to explain. I'm just happy that there's one thing that I'm done with. I guess I do still have to worry about the packaging... I doubt this post has shed much light on my current bevy of projects, but it should let you know ... colorful, found objects...

Get Out Of Craft Jail Free

Spray paint, a power drill, safety goggles, a Phillips head screw driver, a level, a diamond-blade rotattor drimmel bit, rubber gloves, three types of scrubber brushes, chisels -- and a wedding! This was a very busy weekend for me, with lots of crafting tucked in to the free parts. And as you can see from this outdoors shot, I had some choice weather to work in. I'm working on a couple of little projects for a baby shower that takes place next weekend. Can you tell it's for a boy?
I'm really excited about a lot of the projects that I completed this weekend. I stress the word "completed," because I'm pretty often starting things without finishing them. I'll have to take a look back at the ATCKLTC archives, but I think that completed a project over the weekend that I started this time last year. Seriously. That's procrastination.
And that's why I titled the post the way I did. I feel a sense of freedom in completing these projects, even if I worry that my to-do list is dwindling to pretty low levels. Plus I love to use a Monopoly reference whenever I can.

Wallpapered Wine Crate

I collected a trio of wine crates last fall and, for no apparent reason, I've not started turning them into amazing shadowboxes until now. I'm lucky enough to live about a block away from two of Dallas' trendiest wine bars (though I haven't ventured into Crush to beg for castoff winecrates just yet) and getting the wine crates was pretty easy. The man who runs Chateau Wine Market seems to keep stacks and stacks of crates around the store and he let me take my pick of some pretty exotic looking crates. The one pictured above has a lovely French brand on one side.
This is a sneak peak of how the shadowbox will look when it's finished. The "walls" have yet to be papered with this retro 70's lounge paper I bought at Old Navy (of all places to get funky paper??) a couple of years ago when it was sold as gift wrap. I bought the Nubian Prince (or so I'm calling him) at an antiques shop over the weekend. He's really cool. The bottom of the bust says he was made by Margaret in 1954. Other than that, he's a pretty anonymous fellow, though I very much admire his choice of headware.
I got the idea from the DIY section of designsponge (the bestest design blog out there, for my two cents). In their instructions, they recomment you carefully measure the inside walls/back of the wine crate and cut your paper to fit. I decided to take the back of the crate off so that no part of the wooden crate would show through and to minimize the wrinkles of the paper. It turns out that removing the back of a wine crate isn't a tough chore at all (though you will have lots to sweep or vacuum up when you've finished, the wood likes to split into delightful flying splinters!). I'm sure my neighbors will love it when I re-install the backs of the crates and add the hanging hardware so that my shadow boxes can live on the dining room wall.

All Start and No Finish

This has been a not-so-hot week for this crafty girl. Not that it hasn't been a fun week, it just hasn't been a super creative week! I did start a couple of new projects (the photo montage above was made using Paint, the saddest of all photo manipulating programs, so please don't judge critically... I tried... ), but so far they are just started projects and not really nearing the finish line. I thought I'd throw a post up anyways, because I hate to think that my poor readers have nothing to read about! And there's not much to say about this, especially as one is sortof a secret-ish kind of project. And the other, well... it's got a long way to go before it is used.

I'm off to New Orleans tomorrow and I hope to be so inspired by beads that I do something ridiculously crafty and useless with the stash of beads I'm sure to bring home.

UFOs

Last night on Channel 11 News, the lead story was about a small town a few hours west of Dallas where UFOs have been sighted, well at least supposedly sighted. They had a bunch of (very cliché if I may say so) country folk talking about lights zooming around the sky. I'm sure it won't be long before conspiracy theorists suggest it is anyone from the ghost of Abraham Lincoln to Dick Cheney's third cousin that is causing the supposed UFOs, and alas I digress.

My post is not supposed to be about the UFO sightings in Stephenville, Texas as that hardly fits the self-imposed limits of this blog. Generally, when I say UFO, I'm not talking about flying dishes from Mars--I'm talking about those projects which disrupt one's feng shui, sitting around for years rotting and waiting to be used, I'm talking about UnFinished Objects. And this weekend, I came across my ultimate UFO. I was fishing around the boxes on the top shelf of my closet and I saw this poor bundle of cloth, half sewn, half pinned together--a project I started the summer after my freshman year of college. As a reference point, shabby chic was brand new then, and I hadn't heard of Anthropologie yet. So I vowed to finish the thing. Ordinarily, if a sewing project of mine isn't completed within a year, it meets it's demise in the form of a date with the garbage can. But this project is special for a number of reasons. First, my mother thinks its the most beautiful thing she's ever seen and the best project I've ever done, with the exception of a painted piece of glass that (hopefully) I'll be blogging about next week. And my mother would be really sad if this project bit the dust. Second, looking back, I do think it's pretty impressive that I did the whole thing without a pattern. I just started free sewing and I created something that looks pretty good. And third, I really love it too. I don't know what caused me to put it down, but I would guess it was left in Texas when I went back to Virginia for my sophomore year of college.

And some details about the UFO: It's an apron, with a hand stitched "H" across the front in both pink and green (as can be seen at the top of this post). I hand sewed the ruffles without a pattern (at right, the fabric really looks good on film, you get quite a sense of the textures at play). I figured out a pretty cool way of creating ruffles evenly using my fingers as the markers for where the ruffles belong. It's not an exact science by any means, but I don't mind because it all fits in with the "shabby chic" mentality I had going on when I started this project. And at this point, I've all but finished the top half of the apron, and the bottom half is also done (but not pictured yet because it desperately needs to be ironed. Seven years at the bottom of a box did nothing to make the skirt part photogenic). All that's left is some spot hand sewing and for me to attach the top part to the skirt part (a process which will require a trip to the sewing store for some fresh navy blue thread, I'm all out at the moment). Hopefully the whole thing will be revealed here quite soon!