Braided chain bracelet

I was browsing through Craftster a few days ago and saw a super cute bracelet made by fellow poster milesapart714 that she made based off a $300+ designer bracelet.  Her version was $3 and, in my opinion, much cuter.  I just knew I had to make one.  The next day I drove off to my nearest craft store and headed straight to the jewelry section.  Everyone that lives around me must have had the same idea because all of the short chains suitable for this bracelet were sold out, so I had to settle on buying a 60" chain which was thankfully on sale!  After gathering all the materials; chain, jewelry findings, a charm and embroidery thread my total came to $7 bucks.  A little bit more expensive than milesapart714, but I now have enough materials to make a few of those bracelets and more if I really wanted to. Here are some pictures of the making of the bracelet:

All my materials gathered up.  I used a darker silvery chain because it matches more of my stuff.

I taped the ends of the thread so it would be easier to thread through the chain

Here it is, finished!

Some close ups:

All in all, I wish I got a bigger chain but I do like how mine turned out.

I had some of the embroidery thread left over that was already bunched up and ready for more braiding, but not enough for another bracelet, so I tried my hand at doing something small... a ring! Here's a picture of it:

I hadn't sealed the knots yet with glue or clear nail polish because the bracelet didn't seem like it needed any, but the ring is already starting to unravel so I decided to be safe and seal them.

Big props to milesapart714 and her awesome tutorial!  Check it out here: http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=356098.0 and while you're at it, swing by their blog: http://www.studs-and-pearls.com/

Sailor's Knot Bracelet

In order to get myself back in the crafting groove I've been doing some quick and easy things like making simple jewelry and little amigurumi.  When I finish my crochet project I'll post it here, but for now I have an awesome bracelet to talk about.  Almost a month ago Etsy ran a "How-Tuesday" where Simone Tan (a.k.a Groundsel) explained how to make a sailor's knot bracelet.  I actually saw this post a few days ago and as soon as I finished reading it I grabbed the first skein of yarn closest to me and started to knot.  Here is the finished bracelet:

It's kind of small and skinny because I just used normal yarn.  I wanted to make something chunkier so I headed to my local craft store and bought some thicker silver rope stuff and some even thicker cording.  Here it is with the silver rope:

This one is my absolute favorite and I've been wearing it every day since I've made it.  The silver rope makes it look more "fancy" so I can wear it when I'm being more dressy as well as just wearing it casually.

Here they are next to each other on me.  I think this style of bracelet looks better larger.  This brings us to the cording.

This stuff is really thick, and unfortunately I didn't get enough of it to make a bracelet so that's going to have to come later whenever I find the time to go buy more of this stuff.  Luckily it's only like .29 cents a yard!  I think I'll probably make a fabric bowl with this cording I have now.  I've been itching to make one for a while.

Sailor's knot bracelet tutorial: Here!

Fabric bowl tutorial:  Here!

Hey man, nice shirt.

I just made this shirt yesterday and I couldn't help but post it up here right away! My older sister is always getting me in to comics and graphic novels, and most recently she got me on Scott Pilgrim.  If you haven't noticed, they've made a movie based on this series - Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.  Because of my excitement for this movie, I decided to make a shirt from Vol. 6, Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour.  I had been wanting to make it after I finished reading that volume, but the other day I saw some footage of Comic Con where they were screen printing a whole slew of shirts, the one I had been thinking of making being one of them.  So obviously that made me get off my butt and make one for myself!

Ta da!

I'm in the process of making one for my younger sister.  I also want to make a Sex Bob-omb shirt as well.

Check out my other tutorial on how to make stencils for your own shirts!

Rwar, Dino-Necklace!

Okay, well this little guy is actually a dimetrodon which makes him a pelycosaur rather than a dinosaur, but we can just pretend.  I've seen this idea before, stringing up little trinkets and toys to create new jewelry, and for some reason I decided I needed a dinosaur necklace.  I was quite surprised at how hard it was to find small dino toys, but eventually I found a big pack of them for 3 bucks so I snatched it up.  Most of the dinos in the package are too large for what I wanted to do, so I need to figure out what to do with them.  There were, however, about 4 or 5 guys in the package that would work just fine.

Here's the little guy I picked.

I used Krylon Fusion spray paint because it's supposed to bond to plastic and I wanted the best possible chance of the paint staying on and not flaking off on me as I wore it.  I suppose I could have just used some cheaper stuff but I didn't want to risk it.

Here he is, lookin' all shiny and new.

I have a tiny drill that I used to drill into the plastic to make way for the jewelry findings.  I actually messed up because the plastic is very thin on this guys fin so I ended up drilling right through.  That was fixed by a very generous glob of glue.

And finally strung up as a necklace.

This guy is pretty cute and I can't wait to wear it out!  Now I just have to figure out what to do with the remaining dinosaurs...

Tweet?

I'm finally going to catch up with the times and get myself on Twitter.  Unfortunately I couldn't have my good old name "Chezlin" because I was too slow to jump on the bandwagon.  Boo, oh well.  So if you people want to, you can now follow me @ChezlinTM. Keep a lookout for a new post coming up on Friday! :)

Drawing on mugs is fun!

So this post today is for two reasons.  First and foremost, I made some kickin' rad one of a kind mugs.  I got this idea thanks to craftster, roboarsonist.  She used a ceramic paint pen by Pebeo called Porcelaine 150 and used it to draw some designs on a few mugs.  Once I saw that I knew I had to try it.  I went to Michaels and grabbed myself one pen and then to Goodwill to grab up some mugs and then went to town on them.  Well, actually only two of them so far... and here they are!

I really like doing this, although I think next time I'll get the actual paint instead of the paint pen.. The pen kept getting clogged and it was harder to get a nice consistent line with it.  I'll post more about the paint after I get myself some.

So the second thing this post is about is that I finally started an Etsy store.  It's kind of baren right now because I've been busy with school and stuff, but stuff will slowly trickle in as I have spare time to make stuff.  I'm going to add these two mugs on it as well. :)

Here's a link to my little store:

chezlin.etsy.com

UPDATE: I moved my store from Etsy over to Storenvy! The new store is located at: http://chezlin.storenvy.com/

I still have a lot of work to do on it, but I thought it was time to show you all!

Oh my god, shoes.

I'm not even going to try to come up with excuses as to why I haven't posted in forever... I'll just get to the good stuff. My little sister had some shoes she didn't really care for anymore, and asked if I could re-cover them for her.  I had seen an article in Craft Magazine where they had done this so I knew it could be done.

Here are the shoes in question:

So following the instructions in that magazine, I whip out my exacto knife and start cutting.

Basically you cut all of the fabric off.. All of it!  Also, not pictured is me ripping out the inside of the shoe.  The bottom cushioned part.. thing.  Be careful when you do this though, because you'll need them later.

The remains of the shoes.  As you can see, I kind of rushed ripping out the bottom parts.

Next, I took the fabric she chose and used the old shoe fabric to make a pattern.  You might not want to use markers here to draw it out... I just usually end up grabbing the closest thing to me when I'm doing this sort of thing.

I also drew out and cut the pattern out with the inside fabric, shown here.  These are the tongues of the shoes. (I also cut them with the houndstooth fabric as well)

Sew those puppies up.  I used the old fabric from the shoe as a guide for the decorative sewing.

Sorry, bad picture.. Me grommeting the holes for the laces.

A crappy, blurry picture of the new pieces with the old pieces.  As you can see, I added a little more on the bottom of the tongue because I wanted to make sure I had enough.  I ended up cutting off some when I put it in, but I figured that was better then not having enough!

More unpictured steps are where I glued in the fabric.  I glued in at least 1/4 inch of the fabric all around the bottom edge of the shoes, glued the tongue in and finally the bottom cushioned part back in place.  If done right, the fabric for the main part of the shoe should be sandwiched between the sole of the shoe and the cushioned part that was glued in last.

I waited for the glue to cure and whatnot before I laced them up because I didn't want to accidentally rip out the fabric.

What I did though, was put the shoes on (unlaced) to put some weight on the shoes so it would be stuck real good!

Ta da!  All laced up and ready to go!

I'm hoping to take some better pictures of the shoes soon.  When I do I'll make sure to post them up!

That's hot. Seriously. Hot, fused plastic. Tote.

Man, I haven't posted in a loooong long time.. I had to brush the dust off of this thing before I started this post! Haha.  I apologize, I don't even have a real good reason, but I'll try to make it up to you with this post. I was trying to get myself out of this no crafting deal I had been having for a while by flipping through some of my old magazines for inspiration.. when I found just what I needed.

I saw this bag on the right, and I knew I had to make one.  That bag, from Keen Footwear is actually made from woven rice paper, but I decided to do mine with fused plastic.  I used a tutorial from the Etsy Labs on how to fuse the plastic bags.  After that I just made a basic tote.. with some woven details.  Here's what was created:

I apologize for the kind of crappy pictures, my nice camera is out of commision for the time being.  Anywho, that's the bag.

Here's the back of it.

Here's some detailing..

Some more details.

The insides.

The zipper..

I usually just kinda put in the zipper without thinking about it too much.. which resulted in some not-so-pretty zippers.. but I found this wonderful tutorial on how to install zippers so they look oh so pretty, so now I use it all the time!

And that's it!  I will probably be making more of these, it's a great way to recycle plastic bags.. You could also make some reuseable grocery totes with this technique.. I saw some that they were selling at target... way over-priced for me though, considering I can make some myself!

Adventures in Bread Making.

I love to bake and cook, but I've never tried to make bread before.. that is, until a few days ago.  Unfortunately my first loaf turned out wierd and half unbaked, but I've since then redeemed myself.  The kind of bread I chose for my first ever to bake is challah.  When it came to the egg wash and the topping I changed the recipe slightly.  I'll elaborate on that when I get there though.. for now, I'll talk you through the journey!

Ingredients:

2 teaspoons yeast

1/4 warm water

3 1/2 cups flour sifted

4 eggs (only three go in to the dough, the last is for the egg wash)

1/4 honey

1/4 oil

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

Mix the yeast with 1/4 cup of the flour and the warm water and let it sit for at least 20 minutes.  While you're waiting, mix together the three eggs, honey, oil and salt.  When the yeast mixture is all good and bubbly mix your honey mixture into that.  Then dump in the rest of the flour (3 1/4 cups should be left) and mix it all up by hand.  When it starts to come together, dump it out onto a floured surface and knead it.  The recipe I used said to need for 5 minutes maximum.  I averaged about 3 minutes.  After you're done kneading take your little dough ball and put it in a bowl, cover it with a damp cloth and put it somewhere warm.  When I do this, I usually set the oven at a low temp. while I'm making the dough, and then when I put it in I turn it off.  Anyway, after that is the fun part!  The braiding.  I searched around youtube for a good instructional video on how to braid challah, and I chose to do the 6 strand braid.  Here's how it looked after braiding:

Pretty nice... except for that little area at the bottom, but whatever.  I figured I'd eat that end first.  So after you braid it all up, you get to have more fun waiting.  Another two hours.  Oh yes.  Cover it with a towel or plastic wrap and stick it back in that warm spot.  After two hours it should have doubled in size... but for me on my first attempt this did not happen.  It didn't even double in size after the first two hour wait.  Stupid yeast ended up being too old.  Oh well.  I'll show what it looked like when it didn't work and when it did, so you guys can kind of tell if you decide to try to make this.  Here's the stupid after the second two hour wait.. and how barely grew:

Stupid thing...

Anyway, I still tried to bake this thing.  Set your oven to 325 and get out that egg to prepare the egg wash.  Crack it in a bowl and mix it up and you've got your egg wash.  Brush it on carefully.. you don't want to push out any precious air.  Some places I've read that you're not supposed to put that much, but some places say to use a lot, so I'd just say go with what looks good to you!  That's what I do.  After the egg wash you top it.  Traditionally it's topped with sesame seeds, and sometimes raisins... but I wanted mine to be sweeter, so I topped it with cinnamon sugar... yeah, I cheated.. but it's delicious.   

Now throw it into the oven!!  Bake at 325 degrees for 35 to 40 minutes.  The recipe I used said to stick a pie pan full of ice cubes in there with the bread to keep the conditions humid inside the oven, but to take it out for the last 5 minutes of baking, to let the crust really get brown and harden.  Here's what I pulled out of the oven after 35 minutes...

Eww.  It looks wierd.  It ended up being so dense because it didn't rise.. that the inside was still dough.  It was pretty gross.  I still ate the butt ends though.  Yum.

On to the second try!

I got newer yeast and tried again the next day.  I meant to take a picture right after I braided it and before I let it rise for a good comparison shot, but unfortunately I forgot... I have a good shot of it after rising though!

This is with the egg wash and the cinnamon sugar.  My mom said it reminded her of chicken.  My braiding is pretty shotty for this loaf... this is a picture of the pretty side.. the other side is wierd and uneven.  I was preoccupied with the season finale of Lost.  You can compare the last loaf with this one... I used the exact same sheet pan to cook the bread, and you can see just how much bigger this one got.

But of course, something had to go wrong(actually, it's not too bad, it just makes it not as pretty as I hoped it'd turn out).. the oven decided to bake unevenly so the pretty side of the challah is a lot lighter than the ugly side.  The ugly side got as dark as challah's supposed to, so I didn't want to keep it in longer.  Well, that and because I'm impatient and I wanted to eat some.  Here it is:

There we go.. Looks MUCH better! 

Here is a picture of its insides:

Mm, so yummy.

I've heard that this bread is great for making french toast with because it's already sort of sweet because of the honey.  I'm totally going to make some sometime.  It's also good just by itself. Mmmmm.

It's time to dye some shoes.

A week or two ago, my little sister asked me if I could dye her shoes black because she didn't like the blue and red plaid.  I finally decided to do it and share the process with you guys.  This is my first time dying shoes, so I might have done some things strangely, so if there's any way I can improve, please let me know!

What I used:  shoes, dye, a container, gloves, cotton balls(not pictured)

You need rubber gloves unless you want colored hands for a while.. I got a dye concentrate, so I just poured a little into the container and got going.

Here I am, about to start the dying process.

Oh yeah, here we go.

Pretty much done!  And this is why you need gloves :)

Ta da!  A pair of black shoes.

Thanks go to my older sister who dyed the left shoe as I dyed the right.  :)

Again, I'd like to apologize for my absence lately.. End of school and whatnot has calmed down, so I should be able to start posting regularly again. :)

A skirt!

I'm so sorry for my disappearance everyone!   I had to run away to work on school work and whatnot.. finals week called for many projects, papers, etc.  but now I'm all done!  Yay!  My older sister is done with college too.. cept not like me.. I still have a year to go.  No, she's done completely!  We're heading to her school to watch her graduation today, and I had a skirt I was going to wear but when I was looking at it last night and decided that it looked too much like a work skirt.. so I decided to make something to wear.  I combed through my fabric stash and picked these:

I've had these for so long!

So I got to sewing and cutting.  I had just vacuumed my floor and now I have to do it again because of all the seeds I had to cut off of this fabric so it wouldn't break the needle in my machine..

Here's the finished product!

Don't pay attention to the green shirt, it's just what I was wearing at the time haha.

Kinda blurry, sorry :(

Again, apologies for the lack of posting.. I have a lot of things lined up, I just never had time.  I do now though! :D

Paper making tutorial

Sorry for the lack of posts recently, school is wrapping up so I've been busy with random papers, projects, etc. Hopefully soon I can start to post on a regular schedule rather than so randomly. Anyway, I finally had a little time to craft, so I decided to make paper. Exciting! Here are some pictures of my journey:

I took our paper scraps out of the shredder so I didn't have to rip up each piece of paper. I also soaked them for a few days... I meant to just soak them for 24 hours, but I got busy and I couldn't make paper for a while, so I had no choice but to let it sit there.

Fill the blender about halfway up with the paper mixture and then fill it up with warm water a little bit more than the paper. Blend. Pour into a tub that is already halfway filled with water.

Mmm, yummy!

Here's what you need now.. your tub of paper-water, a few pieces of felt, a sponge, a screen and a piece of plastic that fits in the screen. I just made my screen with an old frame and metal window screen.

Put the screen in at an angle.. kind of like you're going to scoop up the paper-water mixture.

Straighten out.

Pull the frame up slowly and as even as possible. Let the excess water drip out and put your plastic on top of the screen.

This part you would need two people.. You would really have someone holding the frame, and the second person putting one hand on top of the screen and pushing the sponge against it from the bottom to push the water out. Every few pushes you'll have to wring the sponge out.

Peel the plastic away from the paper. If it sticks at all then the paper has too much water in it still and you'll need to keep pushing it out. If it doesn't stick, and you get the plastic off the paper, flip it out onto one of the pieces of felt.

Like so. Put another piece of felt over this one.

Repeat and repeat and repeat until you're all out of paper pulp! I believe I got about 20 sheets from this batch. I put pressure on the stack of paper to get the extra moisture out. A lot of places recommend hanging up each piece with clothes pins at this point.. but I didn't only because I don't have any clothes pins :(

A stack of paper! ..wow, this picture is kinda green.

I'm planning on making a book out of some of these pieces of paper.. They just take forever to dry if you can't hang them! Making paper is pretty fun, you can experiment with different colors of paper, different consistencies, etc. Mine has a few random flecks of color and text dispersed throughout the paper, but I didn't really mean for it to happen.. I figured that after soaking for forever the paper would be broken down enough that it would be mostly gray. I'm happy with the result though.. it was a happy accident. :)

Oldie but Goldie: Boo table

When I was a freshman in college, my mom bought me a table to somehow fit into my tiny dorm room.. It was ugly and white, and my roommate and I knew we had to do something to make it fit into our room better. See, we were both artsy people so a plain white table in our colorful room would not do. My roomate brought a carpet one day and after situating the table on top of it, we knew what we had to do to the table. Here's a blurry picture of what we did:

(Thats my messy ass side of the room) We used electrical tape around the side of the table so it'd be black instead of that weird brown.. it made it look more finished.

But it doesn't end there!

I went home for the summer and the table came with me. My roommate and I decided to room together again that next year, with the addition of our next door dorm neighbor, and the apartments we chose had outdoor patios so I got super excited and decided to convert the table into a nice patio table fit for college students.

Here's my sketch:

It's Boo! I used precut glass tile things from Hobby Lobby for Boo, and I used broken mirror pieces for the area around him. (They from our dorm... they weren't originally in the room, we brought these mirrors... no destruction of their property, I promise!)

Here's an in progress shot:

My older sister and I working on the table.

Before grout and inside.

After grout and outside.

So, after I made this, we went up to Austin to get our keys for the apartment and discovered that our particular apartment didn't come with a closed off patio.. we just had a kind-of-big-but-not-really area at our front door.. which I didn't feel comfortable leaving my table out at. So the tables ultimate destination that year was my sisters boyfriends apartment in his nice closed off patio. And now the table is sitting outside of my room with a nice fake glass bonsai tree sitting on top of it. I can't wait for the day that I can actually use it as an outdoor table!

Baby quilts galore!

Well actually, not galore.. because there's only two, but you get the idea!  When two of my friends told me they were pregnant, after the initial shock wore away, I got excited to make them baby quilts.  I was hoping that at least one of them would have a girl, so I could make a cute girls quilt, but I had no such luck for they were both having boys.  That didn't stop me from making two cute quilts though!

Here's the first one:

My little sister is holding it up here.

All ready to give away!

Here's the second one:

The colors are a little off here.

Close up shot of it folded up.

All ready to go!  I think this one shows the true colors the best.

As you can see, they're not perfect, but they're good enough for me!  These were the first quilts I've ever done.. and although it's kind of frustrating and time consuming (even when I did these super easy ones!) I think I'm hooked.  I want to make a quilt for my bed but I'm kind of scared I'll never finish it, haha.

Cassette tape tutorial

A few days ago I posted about my cassette tape wallet and how it's held up over the past 10 months, and I promised a tutorial. Well here it is!

First you need to get your hands on a cassette tape. For my first wallet I already had those at my house, but for this one I ordered them from American Science and Surplus. These ones were screwed together, so it was super easy to take them apart. My first one was glued together, so I had to carefully pry the pieces apart with a flat head screw driver. If you have to separate your tape like this, be very careful. I cracked one in half because I was trying to rush it :( Some are glued up pretty good.

Here are the pieces together. The zipper is 9 inches and I just placed the two pieces of the tape over the inside fabric to see how big it had to be. Like so:

But you still might have to cut it down a little more than that, so it fits snug inside. I actually ended up using a piece of red felt for the inside rather than this hot pink jersey material. The felt was thicker and I like how the thicker fabric looked better than the thinner jersey.

Take some pliers and go to town on the little pieces that stick up on the inside. Be careful as you get to the pieces close to the edge, you might end up taking a whole chunk of the outside of the tape as well. I almost did a couple of times! You could use a Dremel tool to do this part.. It's what I used for my first cassette tape wallet, but I wouldn't recommend going that route, because it resulted in many tiny burns all over my arms and whatnot from molten globs of plastic that shot at me from the Dremel.

Now here's the fun part.

Take your zipper and slowly start to glue it to the inside of the tape. I use the glue E6000. I'm pretty much in love with that glue, it works so well. Some people have recommended using hot glue because it doesn't take as long, but I don't think it'd hold as long as the E6000 has.

Anyway, as you glue it in, only apply glue to about an inch and attach the zipper, and hold it for a few minutes. Make sure the zipper foot has enough room to easily zip and unzip. Rinse and repeat until you've made it all the way around. If you don't hold it down and wait for those few minutes, the zipper and tape will come apart and result in much frustration and glue-fingers. As you see here, I have quite a bit of zipper left over, so I just ended up making it go a little further onto the bottom of the tape. On my original tape the zipper ended up fitting perfectly, I don't know what the deal is with this one! You should do this step with the zipper unzipped or else you'll end up having to really carefully unzip the stupid thing when the glue hasn't cured all the way.

Here it is unzipped. Glue on the other side of the zipper to the other cassette tape half.

Here are the two sides all glued in.

Slather your glue of choice all over the inside of the tape and apply the inside fabric. Press it down with some pressure and hold for a minute or two, and that should be fine.

Now, I recommend not to touch this thing until at least 24 hours have past. If you don't you'll regret it because if you don't give it at least 24 hours for the glue to cure, it will probably fall apart a lot faster.

Here's the finished product. I painted it with enamel paints :)

I ended up giving this one to my little sister. She's had a good birthday weekend. If anyone has any questions about this tutorial, please feel free to ask!

Makeup bag tutorial

Sorry I haven't posted in a long time! It's been a busy few days. It's also been a while since I've said I was going to do the makeup bag tutorial, so I put it together today! For all of you who don't remember, or who haven't seen, my first post was about a travel set that included a makeup bag.  I kinda had to wing it on the bag because I knew the style I wanted it to be, but I couldn't remember where I had seen a tutorial for it a long time ago.  I promised I'd make a tutorial for the makeup bag according to how I made it, so here it is! :)

All the pieces.

You'll need to cut two pieces of fabric this way. An outside fabric and an inside fabric. This is my outside fabric on the wrong side.

For the lining:

Fold it up where both 10 inch sides are touching, and sew up the little tabs along the white line.

Fold the hole so it sits flat like so. See what my fingers are holding? That's the part I had just sewed up.

Should look something like this.

Sew along this line.

Take one of the top flaps, line it up and sew in 1 1/4 inches in. Repeat on the other side.

Repeat these steps on the other side, and then repeat everything again for the outside of the bag. The only difference is that for the first step you take your thin strip of fabric* for the strap part, fold it in half, and sew it into the tab, where the ends of the strap stick out. ( Sorry, it's hard to describe this stuff sometimes :( ) I had to draw this step because I forgot to take a picture of this.

*For the strap, take a piece of fabric measuring 6 inches by 2 inches. Fold it in half, the hot dog way so the wrong side is facing out, and sew along the open side. Flip it inside out.

Here's the diagram of how you put the strap part in. This is the only difference for the outside of the bag.. everything else is just like how you sewed the liner together.

You should have the outside and the inside all sewed up. Here's mine sitting next to each other. You'll need to flip the outside part so the right side is out, but keep the liner with the wrong side on the outside.

Stick the liner on the inside. Now on to the zipper!

The zipper I got is 9 inches long. You can get any size zipper but you'll have to adjust the size of the length of the bag so it's 1 inch longer than the zipper size. Example: If you made a smaller bag, with a 7 inch zipper, instead of making it 10 inches long, it'd be 8 inches.

You don't have to do these two steps to the zipper, it's just habit for me.. I think it makes them look more finished.

Take a small piece of fabric and sew it along the line. Make sure to put the right side of the zipper so it's touching the right side of the fabric.

Here's how it looks when it's sewed up. (on the left) For the little tab to the left, I took a piece of fabric that was 3 inches by 4 inches, fold it hamburger style, (right sides touching) and sew up the two sides. Turn right side out. Stick the zipper into it and sew it up. Like so. It doesn't matter which way you do these two pieces. On this bag I did it so the tab was on the side where the foot sits when it's closed, but with my original bag, it's the other way around.

Sorry.. it's another crappy drawing.

Pin the zipper in place. Generally I make it so that the little tab from the zipper is on the side opposite of where the strap is. Sew up carefully.

Here it is with the zipper all sewed in. You can see where my sewing machine didn't like me at the bottom. You can see where I still have a pin at the other side of the bag.. I had to hand sew the ends to finish this one off. You might not have to.. I didn't have to for my first one, but ended up having to for this one because the zipper was slightly off.

And you should be done!

I'm giving this one to my sister. She desperately needed a makeup bag, haha. I hope I wasn't too confusing with this tutorial.. if anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask!

Cassette tape wallet, then and now.

About 10 months ago I made a cassette tape wallet after I was inspired by some that I saw online. They were on sale for $43 and the first thought in my mind was, "I can make that for less!" So that's what I did. :) Here's some pictures of it when it was freshly made.

The point of this post wasn't just to show you all my wallet, but to show you guys this wallet after 10 months of use and abuse from me. I had my doubts whether it would stay together because all I did was glue everything.. the zipper, the fabric.. I figured the first thing to go would be the zipper, because of the constant zipping and unzipping that this thing would have to take. Fortunately, to my surprise, this thing has kept up pretty well. :) It's showing a little bit of ware because of some minor cracks at the bottom, and the text on the cassette tape has been rubbed off.

Here are some pictures of it now:

You can barely even tell text used to be there!

Another angle.

Unzipped, with all my goodies inside.

Showing the inside with my grubby, dirty art hands.

The ugly bottom of it. The glue shows, but that's just because I was impatient when I made it, and I didn't take the time to make it less noticeable. You can also see how some of the edges are cracking.

This one shows the cracks the best I think.

And thats it! For those of you who want a tutorial, I will be posting one soon (Posted!), after I post the tutorial for the travel set I made.

Oh! Don't forget to vote for my zombie protection kit on Craftster! Voting ends on the 12th this month so be sure to squeeze your vote in!

Oldie but goldie: Towel pool bag

Summer is approaching, so I thought I'd share a project I did a while back which would be used at the pool or beach. Basically it's a beach bag, but it's also a towel! It folds up into itself (much like a quillow) but it has handles that make it into a bag. You can throw in your sunscreen, flip flops and other goodies you'd bring to the beach and/or pool. Here's mine:

Like any cat owner knows, if you spread out something on the floor and then try to take pictures of it, they come and lay all over it. That's my cat, Ewok.

Here it is folded into itself.

Here's the other side.

Tutorial!!

You need a beach towel, and another towel. I don't think I had a regular towel.. I grabbed a towel that wasn't as large as a normal towel, but it was bigger than a washcloth. If anyone knows what it's called, please educate me! :)

Here's where you cut it up. I believe the strips 2 and three were about an inch and a half to two inches.

After everything is cut, stick the biggest piece, number 1 on top of the beach towel, with equal distances on each sides, and sew up the three sides that have the red zig zags on. Also, you may want to hem the two handle pieces at this point.

Attach the two handles wherever it's comfortable, and sew them up!

And your towel bag should be complete! to fold it into itself the "correct" way, flip it over so you can't see the other, smaller towel, fold up the two sides towards the center, and then fold up about the same size of the smaller towel from the bottom. When you get to the top, flip it inside out. (like a Popple, haha)

Sorry if my folding instructions aren't that great.. it's kind of hard to explain. You could just stuff it in without all the neat folding.. which is what I usually end up doing.

Now, you may say, "Hey, but after I get out of the water and towel myself off, my towel will be all wet! What about transporting my stuff back home?" Well, if you think about it, almost everything that you carry in your bag gets wet, from sunscreen to sunglasses, so as I see it, it doesn't matter if you throw those things into a wet bag. As long as you take everything out, unfold it and let it dry when you get home, it should be fine. :) For those of you who take magazines or anything else that would not fair well under moist circumstances, then I'm sorry, this craft may not be for you unfortunately :( But you can still make them for friends! :)

Late night crafting: Part two!

Well, I showed my little sister my new billed beanie hat, and she fell in love with it. I found her wearing it a lot after I had made it, so I decided to make her one today! (It's her birthday)

Here are the pictures! I took shots on my progress, so this post will look strikingly similar to my other late night post.

Dammit, I hate flash. Here's the sweater I cut up to make this hat.

Here are the pieces. Freaking flash... the blue isn't this saturated in person, it's more of a midnight blue.

Here she is wearing it. I don't think any of the pictures show the true color of this hat.

As you can see, I added a little more to this hat, which I like a lot. The sweater was a military sweater, so it had those little flaps on the shoulder, which I cut off, sewed together and sewed along the brim. I think it turned out pretty nicely. :) She already pinned on a bunch of pins we grabbed from the Maker Faire last year, but when I tried to snap a photo, my camera decided it hated me and died. (After I had stuck brand new lithium batteries in)