My Creative Space

Right now I have a one-track mind: sew, sew, sew.

I'm chugging along on the monstrous task that is the king size quilt, and I'm past the half-way point on the top. It's getting me motivated to go ahead and finish it. I've sewn the blocks of 16 out of 23 rows together, and I really think if I crack down I could (crossing fingers) be finished by Thanksgiving. Here's to hoping!!!

With the Christmas season rapidly approaching I really hope I DO get this top finished soon, because I have lots of projects on my plate to roll out. I want to sew my daughter a stocking for Christmas rather than buy one. I think it will add a personal touch. My stocking--I think--was handmade when I was a kid; either that or the mass-produced ones looked way better than they do now. I wanted to afford her the same luxury and get a little fun out of it for me.

I also want to make a scarf for my brother as a Christmas present. I'm torn between knitting and crocheting it. I really want to crochet it, because after practicing both I think I much prefer crocheting. However I want to get in some knitting practice beyond a simple knitted rows, and this would certainly be a way to do that. I suppose I have some time to do it.

I also have finally got all of the pictures in for this huge mixed media collage I want to make for my office. It is going to combine paint, photographs, beads, buttons, ribbon, and possibly some other things if I get ambitious, and my goal was to have it finished this year. With so many fun things I want to work on it's really hard to decide sometimes what to do.

Fabulous Lighting Idea

I saw this on CRAFT Magazine's blog, and I am so on this!!!

How-to: Pom Pom Light.


I've been wanting to do some new lighting in my office (aka, the Rainbow Room), and this is too neat to pass up. I absolutely love how whimsical yet modern it is. I could easily see this in IKEA, which is probably why I like it so much :)

A Hard Lesson Learned

I've been working on (what seems like forever) a huge, and I mean HUGE, quilt for my mom. It's an oversized king quilt measuring roughly nine-and-a-half by nine-and-a-half feet. Making it relatively easy is the fact that the pattern is very simple. She chose five fabrics and wanted the top to be squares alternating those five fabrics in the same pattern throughout. The overall effect is going to be that each fabric will be running diagonally throughout it.

Simple enough.

To make the quilt less heavy to thread into the machine, I sew five rows at a time and then connect them together. After regaining some motivation I finally finished the 6-10 rows and was ready to sew them to the first five. When I began to do this I noticed something didn't seem right. The squares were not going in the same direction. I decided to then sew four more rows and see if that helped.

Thursday I finally got the rows complete and again sat down to sew them all together and then had a nauseating realization. The rows didn't match up because I had sewn FIVE rows, each nine-and-a-half feet long, in the wrong orientation. In order to fix this I would have to spend the painstaking time ripping out the seams for these rows so that they could be sewn in the correct orientation.

Last night, after a total of more than two hours, I finally finished my repairs on the quilt. Which means that I'm at the exact same point that I was....a week ago. Fabulous.

Note to self: Take a better look at your quilt orientation before you spend hours of your precious time sewing in the wrong direction.

My Inaugural Post

I've had it in my head to make a craft-oriented blog for quite some time.

Ever since I was little I've always enjoyed making things and have been told I was good at it. I took art lessons when I was a kid, and I took art classes when I got to junior high. By high school I let me desire to excel academically take precedence over my art, and it ended up getting pushed aside for a long time. I consider it one of my life's greatest disappointments.

Well now I'm 28 and I'm ready to make up lost time. I want to make things. Lots of things. I want to explore different ways to create, from painting to needlecrafts to photography, and I want to have a record of what I've done.

Enter the blog.

Here I hope to accomplish lots of things. I want to showcase things I've worked on, the good, the bad, and the mediocre. I want to have a place to journal my inspirations. I want to find new sources of inspirations. Maybe I'll even meet a new person or two. No matter what, I want my renewed love of arts and crafts to be front and center, and hopefully the road I'm traveling down will have a wonderful destination.