This is a close up shot of the scarf I knit first.  I used a pattern I found off Ravelry.com but unfortunately even after digging around for it, I can’t find the exact one I used.  If I come across it later I’ll definitely post it. I actually messed up reading the knitting chart, but it still ended up working out.

I absolutely love how this one turned out.  It was my first attempt at blocking, and I think it worked out quite well.  I didn’t really measure anything out, I just stretched and pinned, so some areas are kind of wavy but overall it looks good.  I used the Tiger Eyes Lace Scarf pattern I found on Ravelry.  Personally I think it looks more like owls than tigers.

This is my current project.  I found the pattern on, you guessed it, Ravelry, but I actually couldn’t find the Ravelry link in my history- I could only find the direct link to the pattern.  So here it is!  It’s actually grown about two feet since I took this picture.  It’s quite a fast and easy knit.  I like how it’s turning out so far.

Here’s a close up of the knit.  It reminds me of rice.

I like to consider myself as an intermediate level knitter, I’ve knit some scarves, gloves, socks, hats… but there’s one thing that will always scare me.  Sweaters.  It is my goal to knit a sweater soon.  Here is the one I’m going to attempt to knit: Hundred of sheep, but I decided that I won’t start a sweater until after Christmas so I can use my time to knit more gifts for people.  Here’s hoping I won’t chicken out!

So as most of you know, I decided on Poison Ivy this year.  I dyed my stockings, I made my gloves, I made my boots, I made the leafy eyebrow pieces and I made some fake lashes to top it off (which I did wear for the party I went to, but I forgot to bring them to take pictures of the costume a few days later unfortunately). 

Full body shot

Close up of my face.

I ended up being invited to another Halloween party last minute, but I didn’t want to reuse the same costume (mostly for comfort reasons – those boots killed my feet) so I pulled out my old wind up key that I made for Halloween a few years ago and two petticoats I made – one for Halloween and one for a friends bachelorette party and a little flower ring I made – and threw a costume together.  I made the black circle skirt on a whim a few days before I was invited to the party and thought it would fit the costume perfectly.  I decided the color scheme would be black and pink because the belt, one of the petticoats and the ring were hot pink (my friend had a Barbie bachelorette party).  I poked a hole through the back of the belt and stuck the wind up key through it.  They day of I actually curled my hair and my sister loaned me a pair of pink and white socks.  I also had a different pair of black flats.  I went with contacts as well because the fake eyelashes were too big to be contained by glasses.

Here is a kind of crummy picture of the costume the day of the party so you can see my hair (kind of), the socks and the wind up key.

My sister needed a costume to wear at her extra curricular activities and whatnot and after finding some awesome fabric at the store she decided she wanted me to make her a simple cloak so she could be a wizard.  I also ended up making her a want too as seen in this post.

Here is what the fabric looks like with the wand.

I found a lot of patterns for “circle skirt” type cloaks but I wanted to do something fairly simple because I didn’t have that much time and I only had two yards of fabric.  I ended up finding this website that explained how to make a cloak very simply and with a maximum of 2 yards of fabric, yay!

And action shots:

I made the hood come to a point.

 The fabric flowed nicely and looked awesome when she walked around.

She just wore her street clothes underneath.

I actually really loved how the cloak turned out.  I’m half considering being something next Halloween that involves a cloak of some kind so I can make myself one!

So here we go!

I’m going to be Poison Ivy from Batman this year.  So first things first, for my costume I decided I wanted to wear some sort of heel.  I wanted to see if I could score some green pumps from Goodwill, but I ended up going home with these:

I decided I could just cover them with some leaves and be done with it, so I ended up with these:

Which look… okay.  I tried them on with my dyed tights, but I didn’t really like how they looked with everything.  I was just going to suck it up and deal with it, until one day I decided that I NEEDED some knee high super villain looking boots.  I looked up some tutorials for converting high heels into boots, and found a simple boot cover tutorial by Sarcasm-hime.  Easy enough!  I got green vinyl from the fabric store (it was half off! Score!) and got to boot-coverin’.  I’ve seen where people just sew the bottom up and leave a hole for the heel, so you can just slip the cover off and on, but I opted for a more permanent solution.  I used hot glue to secure that sucker down.  Here they are:

They ended up kind of wrinkly since the vinyl fabric wasn’t cooperating very well, but I think they’ll work out just fine for my costume.  This actually worked out a lot better than I thought it would, and I’m probably going to attempt to make more boots sometime.

So next!  I wanted some long gloves to make this costume complete.  I had no idea on how to make gloves, so I started trying to search for some patterns online.  I found some really complicated ones, and I even found how to draft a custom glove pattern that I tried out (with muslin!) but I got some of the measurements wrong and I decided that those types of gloves would be too much work for a little Halloween costume that I’d wear once or twice.  I didn’t want to make gloves that were as easy as just tracing around your hand and sewing along that line, but I didn’t want to waste time doing the super complicated gloves, so lucky for me I found something that was in between those two.  I ended up finding a video that taught you how to draft a pretty easy pattern for gloves.  Click here to see!

So here’s my drafted pattern.  I messed up on marking the thumb.  The bigger curve is the correct one.  If you want to know how to do this, please watch the video I linked to above.  He’s much better at explaining it than I would be!

My master patterns!He recommends using tissue paper to draw your pattern on, so I grabbed the closest tissue paper I had around me.  Primary color polka-dotted tissue paper, ftw!   I pinned the tissue paper onto my stretchy knit fabric and started sewing.
When done sewing, you cut out the thumb hole and then just rip the tissue paper right off!  One finished glove!
And here’s what it looks like on.  Pretty wrinkly, but it will serve its purpose.

I actually liked making the more complicated gloves, but I’ll probably try those out again with better fabric and more time.

So on to the last part.  My sister wanted to be a wizard, so I ended up making her a long hooded cape and a wand.  I don’t have any great photos of the cape yet, but she will send me some soon.  I did, however, take photos of the wand.  So many, in fact, that it serves as a sort of tutorial!  So here we go:

It started with a stuffing stick.  I got it in a bag of poly-fil.  You could just use a dowel or a disposable chopstick or something.  If you use a dowel you’ll have to sand down one end to make it tapered.

I wanted to add decorative elements, so I whipped out my trusty hot glue gun!  You can do whatever you’d like.  The stick is pretty skinny, so I was limited, but I just added some bands and dots and stuff.

Here’s some of the decorations.  Don’t worry, it’ll look better I promise.

I wanted to make a sort of handle and I had left over leather strips from my purse, so I ended up hot gluing it to the base of the wand.  Lookin’ pretty snazzy!  Now pull out your paints! (You should probably wait until after painting to do this step, but I wasn’t thinking.)

I just used some acrylic paints I had laying around.  I didn’t have brown, so I mixed the primary colors together-red, blue and yellow, and it made a nice brown color for me.  Slap that paint on there!  I showed my sister the wand at this point and she thought I had carved the decorations out.  That means it’s coming along!

To make the decorations pop, I painted them with some gold acrylic paint.  I actually wanted to add some gems or something like that on the middle decorated part, but I had none so I just stopped there.  I was pretty pleased with how it came out!

Here’s the (folded) cape and wand together!  When she gets those pictures to me, I shall post a better picture of the cape.

Phew! That was a doozy of a post!  Sometime next week I’ll post photos of my completed costume as well as my sister’s.  I hope this post was helpful to you guys! If you have any questions just leave me a comment and I’ll answer it to the best of my ability!

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.

And I think I did a pretty damn good job of it for my first time working with leather this way.Front.  I used the existing pockets to my advantage.  You can never have too many pockets on your purse.The best part about making your own purse while using an inspiration is that you can put things where you want them.  In the original bag, the zipper was in the front and hidden by the folded over flaps, but I prefer the outer zipper to be on the back so it’s more easily accessible to me.

Here’s what it’d look like if I were to be holding it with the smaller straps.  I made the short straps just long enough so I could put it over my shoulder if I felt like it.  I believe the straps aren’t long enough to do that with the original bag.Adjustable length straps.  Even though I’ll probably only use one length every time I use it, at least I’ll have the other option.And opened!  You can probably see some parts where I could have put it together better, but I wasn’t sure how.  Example, the stitching along the top, on the lining.  It was to attach the top piece of leather with the straps.  It was kind of a “plan B” thing.  I originally wanted to attach it by folding the leather in and doing a nice top stitch across it, but I didn’t cut the piece long enough and I didn’t have enough left over to cut that shape again.  So thought I’d just leave it with the raw edge and do a nice decorative stitch over it so it wouldn’t look too bad.  Good idea, not very good results.  My sewing machine didn’t appreciate trying to do decorative stitches with thick-ish leather.  Oh well.  I just sucked it up and dealt with it.  I was getting too frustrated with it and didn’t want to take it all out and try to redo it because it would poke too many holes in the leather and I was worried it would make it too weak there and possibly tear.Here’s a close up of my little tag I made.  I have tags made out of ribbon, but I thought it wouldn’t match the purse very well.  In the original bag they have their logo stamped out on leather.  Unfortunately, I don’t own a leather stamping kit.  I decided to do the next best thing, which was to burn my name into the leather.  I don’t know what happened to my wood burning tool, so I used my soldering iron to do this.  Very. Carefully.  You can’t see it very well in this picture, but the letters are slightly recessed which makes it look very nice.  This is probably the part I’m most proud of.

And here’s an action shot of it so you can see how big it is and where it sits on the body when worn.

Aside from a few little things, I love how it turned out.  I love that I was able to upcycle some leather and make a decent bag out of it, and I think I’m addicted now.  I’m already getting ready to make another upcycled leather bag for my boyfriend’s mom.

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 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:

• Felt
• Hair clips
• Needle & thread
• Stuffing

I cut out four horn shapes from the felt.  Not pictured, I also cut out four triangular shapes- two to help shape the horn better and two for the bottom of the horn.

Here I am sewing up a horn.  I sewed up the sides and two edges of the bottom and then flipped right side out, stuffed it and sewed closed.

Sew onto the hair clip.

And ta da!  Clip in your hair!

And there you go!  They stay in very well, I shook my head and ran around trying to gauge how well it would stay and it didn’t budge at all.  We’ll see how well it stays in the race though…

You could definitely make different kinds of horns or animal ears or anything like that with hair clips, they’re super cute!

Materials:

• Another fake eyelash (this is just to give you a guide at how long you need to make the lash.  You could also just take a small piece of paper and measure your eye that way)
• Eyelash glue (Not everyone will have this item; I didn’t, but it’s fairly inexpensive for a bottle of some, especially considering just how many eyelashes you can make with one tube)
• An old makeup brush (Mine had really stiff bristles so I would never use it because it poked my face all the time.  Be sure to wash it before using it!(Thanks MissVass on reddit.  I assumed this would be common knowledge but better to be safe than sorry!))
• a plastic work surface (I used a tupperware lid)
• Something to help you manage the bristles when you inevitably get glue on your fingers (I used a disposable eyeshadow swab thing.  In the video she uses a spatula.)
• Black eyeshadow(not pictured)
• Hair spray(not pictured)
• A curling iron
• Scissors
• Any little things you want to add to it for  decoration (feathers, glitter, sequins, etc.)

Using the other eyelash as a guide, draw a line of eyelash glue.

Take a little bit of the makeup brush and snip it off at the base.

Spread it out carefully with your fingers and place the cut edge into the glue.  Use your “bristle managing” tool (in my case the eyeshadow swab thingie) to hold the bristles down so you can let go of them without taking too many back out.  I found that the bristles kept sticking to my fingers, so that tool was very important.  Repeat this a few times until you made them as thick as you want.

Use your tool to really press the bristles into the glue.  You’ll want to wipe down the tool every once in a while because as it gets more glue stuck to it, the bristles may want to follow it.

Once it’s dried for a few minutes, put a dab of glue on the end of your tool and carefully coat the top of the edge of glue.  Let dry.

Once dried, CAREFULLY lift the eyelash up, holding on to the edge of the glue strip.

Powder the front and back of the strip of glue with black eyeshadow.

Cut off excess glue strip.  Be careful not to cut of too much, you’ll lose too many bristles!

Trim the lashes into the shape you want.  In my case it’s shorter towards the inside of my eye, and thicker towards the outside.

Use a hot curling iron to shape the lashes.  BE CAREFUL!  I was using tweezers to do this at first to keep my fingers safely out of the heat, but I misplaced them as I was taking these pictures, so I’m using my fingers to show what to do.  Luckily my fingernails are long enough.  After they’re curled as much as you want them, generously spray some hairspray all over them.  Of course by the time I was taking pictures I had run out of hairspray, so I have no pictures of this process, sorry.

And here are your lashes!  In this picture you can see the difference between the hairsprayed lash(left) and the un-hairsprayed lash(right).  They keep their shape much better when they have a good coat of hairspray on them.

This is also the point where you would add decorative features if you want.  Maybe some glitter along the glue line, feathers glued onto the bristles, the possibilities are endless!

Here are some action shots:

All in all, I really liked making these, and I plan on experimenting with more materials.  Definitely going to make some that fit the theme of my Poison Ivy Halloween costume!  The best thing is that you can trim them down a lot to make false eyelashes that you could potentially wear on less costumey occasions.

If any of you guys decide on trying these out, I’d love to see!

xoxo-chez

Here are my materials:  white tights, food coloring (I used green and yellow), vinegar, a stainless steel pot and a measuring cup.

Pour water in the pot.  It varies for how much you’re dyeing.  I used about 4 cups.

From what I read about yarn dyeing, people added about one tablespoon of vinegar to each cup of water.  So I used 4 tablespoons.  The vinegar makes the color really stay in the fabric.

I put the tights in some water to soak for a bit while I mixed and heated the dye bath.

Add your food coloring to the water/vinegar mixture!  I wanted it to be a very greenish yellowish and I was worried the tights wouldn’t take the color so well because of the material it was made of, so I used a lot of food coloring.

That looks about right.  Now heat it on medium heat until it simmers

Squeeze the water out of the tights and throw them in the simmering dye bath.

Make sure to get all of the material submerged.  This was kind of hard for me because the fabric kept floating up to the top.  You’re supposed to stir it every once in a while as it dyes, but I overestimated just how long it would take to take the color, so I didn’t get to stir it at all, which caused an uneven color.  Fortunately that’s not a big deal for my costume, but if you want an even color, make sure to stir it every few minutes.  I’m pretty sure I could go back later and re-dye it later anyway.

You know when it’s done dyeing when the water is pretty much clear.  You can kind of see in this picture, the water is significantly clearer than before I added the tights.  It’s a pretty bluish green color.  I probably could have left it in longer to get more color but I was satisfied with what shade it was so I turned off the heat and let it cool.

Once cooled enough for you to touch, rinse it with water and a tiny bit of dish soap until the water runs clear.

Rinsing!

And here they are!  You can really see how uneven the dye job was in this picture.  Overall I’m super happy with the results, and I’m planning on dyeing more and more tights and things.  Hopefully with time I’ll get better at achieving an even color.  Maybe I’ll even be brave and attempt an ombre sometime!

I will eventually get an action shot of these tights, but it will probably come after I get the whole costume done.

xoxo-chez

Here are my materials.  A soap dish, a very strong magnet from an old harddrive and my handy dandy E-6000.

I had originally intended on getting a dish with a foot that was sunken in more so I could glue on the magnet and have the dish sit flush, but there weren’t any dishes like that available and I wanted to make it NOW!  So I grabbed this soap dish will the intentions of cutting out the bottom with a dremel tool.  However, to my surprise, the magnet slid right in!

I somehow got the magnet back out and squeezed a good amount of glue inside the hole and put the magnet back in.  Using another piece of metal on the top of the dish, I guided the magnet into the middle.

So here is the finished product!  I love it, and the magnet is so strong I don’t have to worry about the needles coming off at all!

One thing I like about not having to dremel out the bottom of the dish is that I can later hang it on the wall using the two holes.

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.

Working on the gusset.

Here I've flipped the other sock out to show that I really am doing two at once, one inside the other.

Toes!

Instead of trying to do the kitchener stitch with both socks on the same needles(I knew I'd probably accidentally sew them together) I moved the stitches around so each sock had it's own pair of needles. I stitched the inside sock, then the outter sock.

Yay socks!

I've been thinking about dyeing them though. They look a little too ketchup and mustardy to me.