Autumn Leaves Bouquet

When I saw this post on Design*Sponge last fall I absolutely itched to try it out.  I love autumn, and having grown up near Gatineau Park, I have learned to appreciate the beauty of watching a large forest slowly turn from green to a million shades of yellow, orange, and red.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t really happen in St. John’s.  In the autumn here, we have green leaves on the trees, and then we get storms like Leslie, and all the leaves fall to the ground and go dry and crunchy and brown almost immediately.

So when I knew I was flying back to Ottawa for a weekend in September, I came determined to carry out this simple project.  The problem is that even in Ontario it’s too early for most of the trees to have made the change.  Cait kept me updated with leaf reports leading up to my flight, and her reports all said the same thing: the leaves are all green, dude, it’s not going to work out for you.  As I flew into town, however, I could see a few orange and yellow trees dotting the Greenbelt, so I knew that with a bit of searching, this thing could happen, despite Cait’s protests.

So one afternoon, after Teedz and Tego had made it to town, Tego and I took a stroll in the nearby park to see what we could come  up with.  Lo and behold, there were two big old maple trees whose leaves had just started to turn and fall to the ground.  They weren’t totally orange or red, but the splashes of green I think added to the character of the thing.

We started gathering, picking up maple leaves of different sizes and shapes.  You need probably 10-12 maple leaves with stems for each flower, plus a variety of thin, relatively straight sticks to use as stems.  And floral tape, which you can buy at any craft store.

You start with smaller leaves at the centre and get bigger as you move outwards.  Take a relatively small leaf and fold down the centre and two outside points towards the middle of the leaf.

This gives you the basic shape for a petal.

Roll that tightly up to form your “bud”.

Now take another leaf, fold down the points, and wrap it around your bud.

Keep repeating that, rotating the flower the whole time so it looks natural, until you get something that is a size you like.

Tego and I found that if we weren’t careful our buds started to stick out past the reaches of the other petals, so you want to make sure to keep that sucker tamped down inside.

When you get something you like, pinch the bottom of the leaf where the stems are and start wrapping it up with floral tape.  Take one of your sticks and lay it at the base of the flower and keep wrapping, taping the stems to the stick.

We learned that floral tape is not actually sticky.  It sort of relies on tension to stay stuck to stuff, so make sure that you pull it tight.  We found that once we got to the end, if we wrapped the tape several times around itself tightly enough it wouldn’t unravel on us.

We kept on until we had a full dozen, then Tego trimmed the sticks so they were approximately the same length — you don’t want them exactly the same or the bouquet will look weird, but you don’t want them to be radically different either.

Then we tied it up with ribbon and gave it to our cousin as a hostess gift.  Everyone thought we had bought them at some fancy craft fair, and were super astonished when they found out that we’d made them ourselves during a walk in the park!

As they are, I think the leaf bouquet will last about a week or two, depending on the freshness of the leaves themselves.  If you want them to last longer (if, as Cait suggests, you have an autumn wedding coming up and you need time to make a large quantity of these suckers), then you can dip each flower individually in gel medium (which you can get at art or craft stores) or even spray the bejeezus out of them with hair spray or another form of lacquer and they should last you several months.

I’m also interested to try this with non-maple leaves to see if I come up with a different shape.  I will let you know if anything comes of that.

***EDIT, 30 January 2013***

The florist who supplies the flowers at work did this to dress up a bouquet. Very nice, don’t you think?

Make Your Mail Literate

When I saw this project on Curbly a while back, I thought it would be the perfect gift for one of the older members of our family to keep cards and pictures and memories fresh and out in the open.

It’s a very simple trick.  You take an old hardcover book (again, being a law librarian, I have tons of these), and working in batches you fold all the pages in the book in half towards the spine.  You can use as many pages as you want in each batch (you want enough that the fold will hold itself but not too much that you have trouble folding it).

Use a bone folder to get a sharp crease.

It gets harder to get a good fold the further in you are in the book.  You really need to jam the edge of the page towards the spine as hard as you can.

When you hit your last section, fold the pages in the opposite direction, so that all the edges are tucked inside.

And then you’re done.  It can hold all your mail that needs to be looked at.  It can be a compact way to display holiday greeting cards or letters from friends.  It can also act as a photo stand so you can look at your whole family in one go.

Then I decided to dress it up a bit.  I used newspaper to cover the covers of the book and stuck a roll through the spine to protect it and then spritzed some copper spray paint on the page ends.  This way you can still see the words on the pages, but they have a gilded appearance.

Actually, it looks kind of like a heat sink for a computer.

Then I masked the edges of the covers.

And used chalkboard paint on the white part.

So now it’s also a message board as well as a mail holder.

Not a bad little organizer for a book and a bit of paint!

The Pleatherversary

Holy crap — we’ve been married for three years now.  When did that happen?  (As an aside, happy first anniversary to Jordan and Brian of Project: Nest!)

We haven’t really put much emphasis on our wedding anniversaries so far.  The Pie and I agree that they will probably only become more significant to us when the number of years we have been married is greater than the number of years we were together before we got married (which is five, if you’re counting).  So until then, our real anniversary is still the night of our first date, which was September 19th, 2004.

After nearly eight years together, we’ve faced down our share of financial, emotional, family, scholastic, and health problems, and we’re stronger for it.  We know that we can assemble a barbecue (and/or IKEA furniture) without fighting, and that I am way better at folding laundry than the Pie will ever be.  For his part, he has really good taste in dogs, and Gren is the best wedding present we could ever have hoped for.

I mean, come on. Even with his legs in the air and looking ridiculous he’s still the awesomest.

Because of our current financial situation (broke-ass students), we have stopped exchanging gifts on birthdays, Christmas, and special days like this.  Instead we spend time together and cook the other person dinner.  In the interests of having something to blog, and because the traditional gift for a third anniversary is leather (doesn’t THAT sound kinky), I decided to break that rule and give the Pie something practical that I upcycled from something else.

He recently bought himself a new tablet, the Asus Transformer Pad, and it’s a real beauty of a machine.  Not the cheapest machine either.  So I thought I would make him a little sleeve to slide it in for protection.

I have this jacket.  It’s not real leather, but it’s pretty convincing.  I bought it at Value Village a few years ago (surprisingly, it was my mother who pressured me into the purchase).  I think it’s really neat, but it’s one of those items of clothing that I always feel very self-conscious wearing.  Plus it jingles every freaking time I move.  And the Pie was always a bit jealous of it, anyway, because it made me look like a badass female Wolverine.  So now he can have it.

Because I’m doing this in secret, I have this lovely ancient text on social science field research methods standing in for the size and the shape of the tablet when the Pie leaves the house and takes it with him.

I’m measuring everything around that, and of course I’m not being scientific at all.  This is less of a DIY post and more of an inspiration to you to upcycle stuff you like into other stuff you like.

I could also only work on this on Sunday nights, when the Pie was out playing Street Fighter with his buddies, so my pictures aren’t all that great.  Sorry in advance.

I had lots of ideas involving using bits of zipper and pockets to make it look way more badass but then reality broke through my manic mind and told me that I wasn’t that good at sewing so I should keep it simple.

The first thing I needed to do was dismantle the jacket, which involved taking out the lining and cutting along the seams of the pleather.

And the elbows had this annoying fuzzy stuff sewn in that took forever to remove.

I used the back of the jacket as the main part of the tablet sleeve, as it was largest and flattest.  I kept the bottom end of the back for visual interest, as you can see these two snaps here.

I debated between these two linings.  I originally wanted something less than geometric because I knew that my sewing and measuring skills would make sure that fabric with straight lines showed all my mistakes.  But the other fabric I had that would have worked wasn’t quite right for this particular project.  So I went with the lines.

First I reversed the outside and the liner and sewed them together in a big rectangle with one open side, and then I flipped it inside out.

Then I turned up one end and sewed the thing into a pocket.  I also installed the bottom snap while I was at it, which meant I had to make sure it would line up properly later on.

I still need a flap to make the sleeve into a sort of envelope, and I want to make use of these big white stripes.  I was originally going to do two stripes coming together to form a chevron in the centre but then in my mind that looked too much like a ladies’ clutch purse and I didn’t think the Pie would like that very much, so I’m just using one set of stripes.

It actually took two attempts to cut the triangle flap so it fit properly on the pocket.  I wasted the other sleeve by cutting it too small.  I hope it will come in handy for something else some other time.

I got lazy and didn’t add any extra lining fabric on the flap, other than what was already there, so you can see it ends rather abruptly right at the snap.

But there you have it — it fits the tablet perfectly, with room to spare on the side for the charge cord, if desired.

I can definitely see myself picking up other leather jackets in thrift stores, just for the ability to use the fabric itself.  Maybe the next thing I make will be a little more genuine in that respect.  I guess that’s something to consider for anyone who likes to upcycle — second-hand clothing is not just for wearing.  Where else are you going to get such awesome fabrics for cheap?

Heeere, Piggie Piggie!

Isn’t this cute?  I made it for my new baby cousin.  I have another one in the works for Doodle’s new nephew, but I didn’t get it finished before we went to Portland so I will just have to mail it.  I also didn’t finish Atlas and Krystopf’s blanket before their wedding, either.  Seems deadlines are not my thing this summer.

Also whenever I hear the word PIG I think of that scene in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure when Napoleon is at the Ziggy Piggy restaurant and he finishes off that mammoth sundae and the servers present him with a special badge and they chant “zeeegy peeegy, ZEEEGY PEEEGY, ZEEEEGY PEEEEGY!” and then they oink a lot.

I love eighties movies.  Fashion, movies, politics … all those things really sucked in the eighties.  But the movies?  They were choice, as Ferris Bueller would say.

This is a Martha Stewart pattern, and I followed her instructions here.  You may remember the stuffed chicken I made from this same project a while back.

This one was a little trickier to sew than the chicken, what with all the limbs and all.

Plus there were pipe cleaners involved.

And I stuffed it with scraps of felted wool instead of cotton batting.

And I think I messed up the ears.

But it’s cute, right?  You might recognize the pattern of the wool from the “keystone” in Doodle’s afghan.

Doodle’s Afghan, Stage 3

Doodle’s wedding is coming up in just a few weeks (almost exactly a month from the date on which I am actually writing this post), so it’s crunch time in terms of getting her and the Cyclist’s afghan put together and sent off in the mail (I am not hefting a giant blanket all the way to Portland in my luggage).

We have our old box spring set up in my office, and, when our new mattress arrives (hopefully any day now), we will be adding the mattress on top and our guest room will be ready to go.  For now, however, it serves as a handy surface to work on that is safe from corgi incursions.  So here are all the piles of cut-out squares and rectangles, all in the basic order in which I want them to be.  The piece in the middle is my “keystone”, and has many of the colours of the rest of the blanket in one small square.

So we started at the keystone, laying things out so they spread from the middle out towards the edges.

The Pie did most of this layout on his own, because he’s better at Tetris than I am and his arms are longer.

Although the corgi did help a bit.  By keeping our pieces of wool warm until we needed them. Honestly, no matter how small a piece of fabric is, be it a sock or a giant duvet, this dog will find it and lie on it.

And here it is in all its glory, almost exactly the size of the bed itself.  It will of course be significantly smaller once we take the seam allowances into account.

So now all that remains is to sew it all together, which is what I’m working on now.

I’ve been removing the sections of it that form discrete blocks on their own — that is, in these sections there are no pieces sticking out, and they form their own squares or rectangles when put together.

I figure it will make it easier to sew the larger blocks to each other when it’s ready to go.

I used a zigzag stitch on the machine, just to ensure that if there were any gaps in the wool the thread would still catch on somewhere.

So that’s the back of one block.

And the front.

And then that block can be sewn to another block.

Like so.

And so on, and so forth.  The sewing is actually coming along really quickly, despite the challenges of sewing different thicknesses of fabric together.  I started yesterday (which is the 13th for me), and I’m over half done just sewing different blocks together.  I’m starting to run out of discrete oblongs and I’m going to have to venture into the more complex polygons at some point shortly.  Then it will be a simple matter of putting them all together.

I have plenty of pieces left over from the original cutting-out of shapes, and because this sewing is going so well, I think I will end up making the backing out of a random assortment of the same.  Stay tuned!

Crystal Cascade

My niece vacillates between wanting to be President of the United States and wanting to be a princess. She can probably be both. She’s a smart kid. A smart kid who likes things that are pretty and sparkly.

So once I can figure out how to package this properly, I’m sending it off to her for Christmas.

You’ll remember that I experimented with cutting rings when I learned how to use my glass-cutting kit a while back.  Of course, I broke way more rings than I succeeded in creating, but finally I managed to make enough to have this work out the way I wanted it. I have some rings from a ginger jar, a salsa jar, some beer bottles and two wine bottles.

My first step was to gather my gear together: the rings, some sturdy fishing line, a pair of scissors, a strong stick, a towel, and a bowl of warm water and vinegar.

The water and vinegar help to remove any residue on the glass from my cutting process.  Gets rid of fingerprints, too.

So now I have arranged the rings in the order in which I want them.

And I used the scissors to score some lines on the stick, to hold the fishing line in place and keep it from sliding off under the weight of the glass.  I will put a dab of glue on each knot afterwards just to be on the safe side.

Now to tie everything together.  I used reef knots, to ensure everything was super tight.

Then I attached it to the stick and looped some more fishing line on the top to use as a hanger.

The full deal, though the light could be better.

A cascade of pretty colours!

Frosty Lights

We never decorate this early for Christmas.  We’re more of the put-it-up-a-week-before-Christmas-and-take-it-down-New-Year’s-Day kind of people.  In fact, because the Pie and I always travel home to Ottawa for the holidays, we don’t decorate at our house in St. John’s at all.

But there is snow on the forecast tomorrow, and we decided we wanted to enjoy a little bit of the holiday spirit while we were still home.  Just a little bit, of course.

I was practicing my glass cutting technique and I had three jars with no tops.  What was I to do with them?

I like lights.  Why not make little hurricane lamps out of them, but without the prospective fire hazard of sticking a candle inside?  Yes.

I also remembered an idea that Karen over at The Art of Doing Stuff had, and worked from there.  If you don’t read her blog, you should.  She’s hilarious.  I discovered her site when she stole one of my photographs in the middle of the night.  Sneaky lady.

So here’s the plan.  I have these jars, and I have these LEDs that I can stuff in the jars.  You get the picture?  Good, because we’re not done yet.

I wanted these jars to look frosted, like someone had frozen three jar-shaped ice cubes and left them melting on my mantle.  So it’s time to haul out the etching cream.

You can get a full how-to on etching glass from a previous post here, but I’m going to remind you again to observe all the safety rules and wear the proper equipment: goggles, mask, and gloves.

And because my sink is ceramic, I needed a plastic bucket full of baking soda in which to rinse my glass, to neutralize the acid.

I used a different cream this time than I had before, because when I needed it Lee Valley had temporarily stopped selling it.  So this stuff looked like peanut butter with salt crystals in it, and it smelled much stronger than the other stuff I was using.  But it had the same results.  I didn’t want an even coating of frost, so I only applied a thin layer of cream and I only did one application.  I was hoping that some spots would remain un-etched, and that my brush strokes would show through.  And I was right!  That doesn’t happen very often.

So here are the jars after frosting and rinsing.  You can see that they look really like someone has just steamed them up on the inside.

Stuff some lights in them, however, and they go from steamy to frosty.

Up close, you can see my brush strokes in evidence.

Lined up on the mantle, with other things seasonal, it’s quite cozy.