Think Crafts Blog – Craft Ideas and Projects – CreateForLess

Returning Guest Blogger, Gillian, from the blog “Dried Figs and Wooden Spools”.

A few years from now, I’ll be teaching my daughter Evelyn how to sew. We’ll embark on stitching tiny dolls clothes or making a skirt out of fabric that she chooses herself. I’ll teach her about buttons and zippers and seam allowances and seam rippers. Probably a lot about seam rippers. Like me, she’ll choose a pattern with too many tiny pearl buttons and cry with frustration when I won’t just do it for her. She’ll skip steps and I’ll make her go back and rip out seams and iron them before proceeding. I might even make her prewash her fabric, even though I hate doing it myself. I have all that to look forward to.

But I also think it’s important for boys to know how to sew. When my husband and I were dating, I taught him to sew a Hawaiian Shirt. Other than the sleeves that I had to put in because he was beyond frustrated and the fact that he cut half of the fabric out upside down when I was setting up the machine resulting in the left half of the shirt’s palm trees pointing down while the right side pointed up, it turned out OK. And I can rest easy knowing that he knows how to fix a seam, sew on a button and even mend a sock in a pinch. Not that he does anymore, he’s more likely to hand it off to me. But at least I know he can. So along those lines, I decided to teach Briton, my son, to sew this week. Well, let’s say I started to teach him to sew.

Briton's first sewing project

Knowing that Cabbage Patch Kids clothes or lacy dresses weren’t going to be up his alley, I let boys be boys and we set out to make an, um, interesting, stuffed animal. I let him flip through the book that came in a Plush-O-Rama kit, watched him weigh the benefits of his favorite specimens (he decided to make it for a friend who’s birthday was coming up, a girl, so it had to be a little girlie) helped him trace out a pattern and away we went.

Plush O Rama - Curious Creatures for Immature Adults

Being green and crafting green created quite a buzz at the recent Craft and Hobby Association Winter 2009 Trade Show.  Here’s some photos of the Designer Green Gallery.

This lizard was made from recycled materials and was just beautiful.

One designer cut the same flower from dozens of different materials and wrote a book about it!

Get out your button jar, this purse embellished with buttons was amazing.

Designer Helen Bradley displayed felted items.

Patty Donham designed this necklace from recycled paper for Simplicity

Share your recycled craft ideas here, and enter to win a $100 CreateForLess Gift Card!

Welcome Guest Blogger, Jenny Hart, founder of Sublime Stitching.

Vintage Lamp Hoodie

So, by now you either have the new patterns in your stitchy little hands, or are anxiously awaiting them. Wanna project idea? How about this one using the Vintage Lamps and Glow-in-the-Dark thread? What a bright idea…

x – x – x – x – x

Who: You!

What: Hoodie w/ Vintage Lamps and Glow-in-the-dark (GITD) thread

When: Right now! Or, when you have time. Give yourself 1-2 hours

Easiness Level: Beginner to Intermediate

You’ll need:

 * Vintage Lamps patterns

* GITD Thread (optional, but nice touch!)

*Floss in Pastel Palette (or your choice)

* Stabilizer (optional)

*Basic embroidery supplies of needle, hoop and scissors

* White hoodie, light-colored cotton jacket
(or a shirt you like)

Vintage Lamp Pattern

A transfer tip: The best results for getting a pattern on knit fabrics is with an iron-on transfer or transfer pen. Carbon transfer paper, while great for smooth fabrics like cotton weave, just doesn’t take too well to spongy, soft surfaces. Dangit!

Oh and: I worked with a hoop on this project. When working with stretchy fabrics on a hoop, be careful not to overdo (overstretch) it. if you really stretch the crud out of your fabric, your work will scrunch up in a way that will make you go boo hoo when you take it off the hoop. There will be no boo’ing and hoo’ing. 

INSTRUCTIONS
x – x – x – x – x – x

Instead of going over the instructions for getting a transfer pattern on fabric (those instructions come in each pack) or the basics of embroidering, I’m going to show you how to do whipping for the glow-in-the-dark accent. Let’s whip it! We’ll whip it good! (You had to see that one coming.)

Embroider the design completely. I worked everything in back stitch, which is so easy, but looks so, so…embroidered. After you’ve finished the embroidery, re-load your needle with GITD thread. I chose to match the color of the GITD thread to the color of each lamp for maximum stealthiness.

Whip It! Come up from behind your fabric just like you would to begin embroidering. Then, pass your needle and thread under and over your stitches, always keeping your needle to the topside of the fabric (not piercing the fabric). Your stitches will wrap around the worked embroidery like so:

Check out EarthHour.Org!

We are asked to turn off all our lights from 8:30 pm to 9:30 pm. According to the website, 538 cities in 75 countries have committed to participate in 2009.  Imagine that!

The news caught my eye because my husband Ken told me his goal for 2009 is for us to use less electricity.  Although I try to be as green as possible, my first response to him was to ask if our electric bill had gotten too high.  He said no, but it was important not to waste energy.  Well shame on me! 

We are going to participate and turn off our lights during Earth Hour 2009 and I hope many of you will also participate.

Don’t forget that today, April 22nd, is Earth Day!

Returning Guest Blogger, Gillian from the blog “Dried Figs and Wooden Spools”

My grandmother had a rack of spools over her sewing desk in the spare bedroom of her house when I was growing up. Every summer I would spend a few weeks at her house and every summer she would take me to the fabric store, almost as soon as I arrived, to pick out a pattern and fabric to learn during my visit. I spent hours each summer in the room affectionately known as the waterbed room with it’s green and white butterfly papered walls, it’s wall size shelf of family photos, and my grandmother’s sewing table. When I wasn’t in the kitchen learning how to stew figs for drying or experimenting with pudding and gelatin or out in the back yard trying to work up my courage to attempt my aunts famous “death drops” off the swing set, I was in the sewing room working on increasingly difficult patterns and never fully understanding the valuable skills I was acquiring.

The sewing room was a haven from the Redding, CA heat. The shade from the house next door, the dark walls, perhaps even the waterbed itself made the room cooler than the rest of the house. In the cool quiet I could pin and cut and stitch, or lie on the undulating mattress of the waterbed, or in my tween years, watch Days of our Lives on the tiny black and white Television that was perched on the bedside dresser.

Sometimes in a fit of teenage self-righteousness I would do nothing but spin the spools of thread on their wooded pins or finger the gold stork handles of the delicate sewing scissors that hung from a ribbon on a hook. The wooden spools were always my favorite. It seemed she had hundred of them, but it was probably no more than a dozen, plastic spools were already taking over by then. When one of the wooden spools ran out of thread we made them into dolls or furniture or animals or spool crochet sets. My grandmother’s imagination was endless and she always had something new to make, to teach, to show.

When she moved out of her house after my grandfather died, a pair of wooden spools was among the treasures I took away with me. I have carried them across states and oceans and they now sit in one of the mason jars of thread on my sewing table, a reminder of the lessons of those long hot summer days of my childhood. Of sewing dozens of tiny buttons down the front of a dress and sneaking dried figs out of the freezer in the family room, of my grandmothers dried apple kitchen witch and the thumping of the dough hook on her beloved mixer beating away at her bread.

My Grandmother, who now lives in a second floor apartment and uses the Internet and has a Judi Dench haircut, continues to amaze me, to inspire me. And every time I sit down to sew or slide dinner in the oven, or set out on a new project, I am reminded of those summers, the rows of wooden spools and the cool of the waterbed room, and of my grandmother.

So what crafts have been handed down in your family? And what skills do you plan to pass on to the next generation?

To read more of Gillian’s blog, click  here.

In honor of Earth Day on April 22, CreateForLess is celebrating by giving you a chance to win!  Do you have a great craft project idea using recycled materials?  It can be using anything from household items, such as CD’s and bottles to natural materials like rocks and sea shells.

My recycled craft idea is making picture mats out of wallpaper, or use it to add color and shapes to a scrapbook layout. Other ideas with wallpaper are lining a drawer, covering a bulletin board, or make decorative placemats. From a step by step craft project to a helpful craft tip, let’s see your ideas! Get creative with recycled stuff and you could win a $100 CreateForLess shopping spree! 

Limited to one entry per person.  Drawing deadline is May 4, 2009.  The winner will be randomly chosen and will receive a $100 CreateForLess e-gift certificate.  After the drawing ends, some of our favorite ideas submitted will be showcased on CreateForLess.com.  Submission of an entry into this drawing grants CreateForLess permission to use the submitted content for promotional purposes. 

Click here to enter your Recycled Craft Idea.

Congratulations to Gail W from Parrish, FL who was randomly chosen as the winner of our National Craft Month Drawing! She will receive a $100 CreateForLess shopping spree.

Her helpful craft tip was… 

“I’m awash in craft magazines and ideas I’ve made copies of from the internet. Once a year I go through all my magazines tearing out the ideas I think I’ll do and sort copies. Then I organize them by craft, i.e scrapbooking, knitting, etc. putting a colored paper divider between them. Then I sort by topic, i.e. pets, birthdays, shawls, etc. and put dividers between those. Finally I take the stack to my local Staples store and have them comb bind it. I can tear out the pages to go to a scrap or knitting group. I feel accomplished as the book of ideas gets thinner”. 

Here’s some more of our favorite craft tips submitted by customers. Thanks to everyone who entered!

“When I am using my Cricut, in order to save wear and tear on my mats and to make the most of every sheet of paper, use this tip…make extras of the letters or shapes that you use the most. Then, later when I am scrappin’, I can pull out the extras and complete most pages. Saves time and there’s no waste!”
Jo M.
Barberton, OH

“Working with the new slice machine I like using spray adhesive. No drying time. Tim Holtz distress inks, I use the white paper that comes with the page protectors and make my own pages by, wrinkling the paper and rubbing the ink pad over the paper, spritz it with a little water, and then I iron the page. Turns out really cool, try using different inks on one page”.
Robin M.
Prescott Valley, AZ

“Favorite Craft Tip: Taking time to organize…I know some might dread the horror of organizing that craft room but once it is done everything is easily accessible and can make your craft projects go a whole lot quicker! Favorite Organization idea…taking old cereal boxes and turning them into magazine file organizers. Cut and Cover with fabric or fun paper”.
Debbie A.
Starkville, MS

“Scrapbooking – When you are doing a mosaic, run your picture through a Xyron Sticker Maker first. Then cut the picture into 1 inch strips with a paper cutter instead of a blade, and then cut your picture into 1 inch squares. Peel the paper off the back and stick on your sheet. This makes making a mosaic easy. Happy Scrapbooking!”
Susan W.
Stockbridge, GA

“Any quilting tip is always welcome. But my favorite is, when cutting for a large quilt stack as many pieces of material as you can on top of each other and using the 65mm rotary cutter, you will be able to cut a lot of pieces all at one time. This saves a lot of time, as well as your arm and the cutter blade”.
Lynette B.
Butler, PA

“I use floss threaders to thread yarn through needles and beads. Makes the job much easier than anything else I’ve tried and they are quite inexpensive and flexible”.
Marilyn G.
Hixson, TN

“When using embossing powders, before stamping your image to emboss, wipe your paper with a used dryer sheet to keep the static off of your paper, thus being able to keep the embossing powder on your stamped image instead of all over the page, when you shake the extra embossing powder off”.
Heather S.
Atwater, OH

“When I get ready to start a new project I often make a (very) rough sketch to get an idea of the materials that I will need and use it to make a list of everything I am going to need. Then I go “shopping” in my stash of materials–fabric, glue, paint–whatever I need for that project. I put everything into a clear plastic shoe box, or if the project is big I use a sweater box. I add the items I purchased at the store and keep everything together until the project is completely done. Then I take a picture and add it to my sketch for a permanent record of my creativity.”
Nancy S.
Phoenix, AZ