11 January 2011

I Want To Quilt -- No, REALLY

I know I'm not crafting much recently, but I've been really big into drawing (another creative hobby) and playing Japanese video games (another gigantic and useless time suck that leaves me better able to determine that the Japanese are really weird, but kind of awesome) and baking cookies (third batch of royally iced cookies so far). However, I was just sitting at my computer, trolling through my feeds, when I came across a fabric line that made me want to quilt HARDCORE.

Anyway, there I was, innocently looking at sewing blogs when Bookworm Bethie attacked. All sweetly, she posts about how she got a charm pack of Sherbet Pips from Moda. I hit NEXT SEWING BLOG on my browser, but then, I stopped and went back. Were those people on scooters? Were they wearing scarves? Were the scarves striped? Was it impossibly adorable? Check, check, check, check.

This line is done in red, pink, turquoise, grey, and white! It features people on scooters in the winter. It features little girls swinging. It was possibly designed with me in mind. I'm fairly sure of it!

I tried to think of skirts or sleep boxers I could make from some of the yardage, but I knew what I really wanted to do. I wanted a quilt. A nice simple quilt with lots of white to offset the busy patterns. I'm pretty sure that as soon as yardage becomes available in April, I'm picking up several yards of various pieces so I can make my dream quilt. Then that fabric can sit with my neglected needles and sewing machine and they can all cry about the fact that I ignore them.

Still... it's so cute that I suspect that I will not resist.

06 January 2011

New year, new look for my chairs!

Many, many moons ago, my chairs were looking pretty grubby, and I hatched a plan to recover them (and Jenn hatched a plan for me to blog it.) Easy peasy, right? All you need to recover chairs like these are some fabric and a staple gun!

chair

WRONG. The fabric was easy to acquire. Jenn escorted me to Jo-Ann's, and we selected a lovely navy pattern... in 2009. And then it sat, and sat, and sat, waiting for me to do something with it. First, I needed to borrow a staple gun. Then, I needed staples. How long can this take? A mighty long time. Finally, the impending arrival of a new baby provided sufficient motivation for this long-overdue craft project.

For the first chair, I decided to remove the existing cover. It was also stapled in place, with a far more powerful stapler than any I have encountered. To pry that fabric loose took roughly 2 hours, screwdrivers, two people and quite a bit of elbow grease. Needless to say, the subsequent chairs have their original covers under the new ones.

"before" and after

The only upside of all that work? I could use the existing cover as the template when cutting the new fabric.

Stapling is a two-man job. You need a second person to hold the fabric taut while you staple. Additionally, I had to hammer the staples in a bit to get them fully flush. Each chair takes about 5 minutes, once you have your system down.

check my mighty staplework!

Once we finished the first one, though, the other 3 flew by. Before I knew it, my capable assistant was reassembling the newly covered chairs!

action shot of my capable assistant

So, over a year, 2 hours, 20 minutes and 9 months later, I think we can call both of our recent projects a success. And now I'm considering another, similar project... recovering my bed frame, that is.

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