Christmas is just around the corner, so what does that mean? It’s time to bust ass on your crafting projects so you can be done in time to give them out to all of your appreciative family and friends. I hadn’t knit anything in a while until recently when a friend asked me to teach them how to knit. I’ve been working on knitting projects every day since. I just thought I could write up a quick post and show you guys what I’ve been working on lately!
So Thanksgiving is a few days away, so what am I posting? My finished Halloween costumes of course! Sorry it took forever to get these photos, my sister took them and she has been quite busy with school so it took her a while to send them my way. Well, better late then never!
So I’ve been pretty busy with crafting especially with Halloween right around the corner, and thankfully I’ve actually managed to take some pictures for you guys to see! I was meaning to make this post earlier but time caught up with me so here we are. Sorry about that! To make up for that, this is pretty much going to be three posts in one! I have two parts of my costume I need to show off as well as a semi tutorial on how to make a wand for my sister’s costume.
So here we go!
I’ve been craving a leather purse recently, but they’re always too pricey for me, and I would feel too bad about buying a brand new leather purse when there are plenty of used leather things sitting at thrift stores just waiting for a new life. While browsing through clothes at a Goodwill while I was out of town last week, I found a jacket that I was convinced would work perfectly for the type of bag I wanted to make. My boyfriend thought it wouldn’t be enough material, but he was wrong – he should know by now not to doubt me. 
So here is the jacket I bought. A nice deep brown leather jacket. $13. Perfect.
I’ve actually been lusting over a specific purse, so I thought to myself that it would be good to use that bag as a rough blueprint for the purse I was going to make. Here is that purse:
The Lucky Brand Abbey Road messenger-type bag. It’s convertible. You can use it as either a cross body bag or you could tuck the longer strap away and use it as a hand held bag with the smaller straps.
And it’s $178.
So that was my mission, to make a similar bag with the jacket I got.
Look what I got in the mail today!
How exciting! About two years ago, I was contacted by Lisa Butterworth, Associate Editor of BUST, about putting a tutorial for my cassette tape coin purse in issue #61 of BUST Magazine. Of course I said yes. It was very cool to see my work in a big magazine like that. Fast forward to about 5 months ago and I was contacted by Debbie Stoller, Editor-in-Chief of BUST, about a book they were putting together that is a compilation of the best DIY, how-to and advice articles from the past 15 years of their magazine, and I was included! After the book was completed, they sent me a copy, and I received it today! Sooo pretty!
I’m really excited about it, and I plan on going through the book this evening and marking each project I’m interested in doing. Yay!
If you’re interested in buying the book (and helping me make a few bucks as well) you can buy the book here!
I’m planning on participating in a Warrior Dash next year, but I need to train so I’ll be able to run and do the obstacles in a decent time. A lot of people dress up as viking warriors for the race, and I thought it would be cute to just have horns, since there’s no way I would be wearing a costume or a viking helmet while running. I’d die. I didn’t want to make a headband with horns on it because I was worried it would just fly off during the race; headbands always fall off of my weirdly shaped head, so I decided some hair clips could possibly work!
I decided to make them now because firstly, they would make for a good addition to a costume that involved horns of some kind, and secondly, if I see them every day on my desk it will remind me to keep up with my training.
Here are the materials:
Need some gigantic eyelashes sometime soon, say, for Halloween, and don’t want to pay almost $10 for them? Well I got the tutorial for you! I found a tutorial on youtube on how to make your own false lashes with just a few materials that most people have around and got to makin’.
Materials:
For Halloween I decided I was going to be Poison Ivy from Batman. I needed green tights, and of course the one time I need them, there aren’t any green tights at all. Frustrated, I bought a pair of opaque white tights with the intention of dyeing them with food coloring. I had seen people dye yarn this way, what would be the difference?
Here are my materials: white tights, food coloring (I used green and yellow), vinegar, a stainless steel pot and a measuring cup.
I had never really thought too much about how I stored my pins. I’d keep them in the little plastic box thing that they came in and of course, whenever I’d open the thing, I’d pull on it too hard and end up tossing pins all over my work area. I would always tell myself I should really get better storage for them and finally I did. While lurking around on the internet I found a few examples of people taking dishes and gluing a magnet underneath so you could toss your pins in it with no worries. I thought it was brilliant and ran to Goodwill to snatch up a small dish to use!
Here are my materials. A soap dish, a very strong magnet from an old harddrive and my handy dandy E-6000.
I taught myself how to knit, so I've never been really adventurous with my knitting projects. I pretty much only knew how to knit and purl so all of my projects were scarves, and even then I can probably count on one hand how many of those I've finished. So what got in my head about knitting some socks? I think it was when I was digging through my yarn stash and came across a bag full of alpaca yarn that my boyfriends parents got for me while they were in Peru. To me it looked like it was the perfect weight for socks and I had just found a few sets of double pointed needles. It was obvious, I had to knit some socks. I had to. I only had sets of 4 dpns all in different sizes, but almost every pattern I came across called for a set of 5 dpns. Finally I came across Silver's sock class. Using this pattern successfully made my first sock!
Unfortunately it was a tad too big. I used the directions for sock weight yarn. I decided not to waste my time and yarn making a matching sock for that one. Instead I jumped right into another much more advanced sock making technique. I had heard about people knitting two socks at the same time, one inside the other on dpns, and I was determined to try it myself. I took some progress pictures along the way so I could share them with you all!
Humble beginnings.
