I’m a big fan of Obsessive Consumption, both because I think her projects are interesting, and because her drawing style is really appealing to me. I only recently noticed that she’s been publishing a monthly zine, so I splurged (lol, irony) and bought all the backissues. They’re so pretty they deserved a slipcover, so I glued together another box with my precious thick felt I got in Switzerland last summer.

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A new wrap skirt with Joann’s sale rack denim and lined with a cute floral (you can see a peek at the bottom). The original plan was for double-sided, but the flower pattern is just too much for a whole skirt. I rather like it, except that it, uh, makes me look rather larger than I would prefer. I’m not sure if it’s all the fabric, or the length, or the cut, or what, because it does seem to fit. I’m going to have to consult my sewing buddies next craft night.

I used the free Dana A-line wrap skirt pattern from Fitzpatterns. I modified it somewhat: quite a bit shorter, longer ties, lined, rounded corners, and bias-tape-trimmed. The pattern was pretty painless except that I could not keep the waistband from twisting. It’s barely noticeable, and it actually makes one of the ties spiral in a kind of pretty way, so I left it after the third ripout-resew iteration.

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I got these fabric bins at Target in the 99 cent section. The original fabric was this awful nylon-y stuff with giant sports appliques. I disassembled one to reverse engineer the (rather ingenious) pattern and recovered it with this much cooler fabric. My craft room has been going in a tomato red + turquoise color scheme, so it even matches. The hardest part of the whole thing was sewing it onto the wooden frame, which required disassembling most of the foot area of my sewing machine to make a big enough space to slide the frame through, then reassembling it all and sewing around the wooden bits. Anyway, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. The other two should go much faster.

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Shinky dink flower I made mostly to see if I could get nice results with a bigger piece (pictured at actual size). It’s traced with sharpie from a pattern in my pretty Snow and Graham calendar. I think I might glue a loop finding to it and wear it as a necklace.

Posted while watching my favorite movie ever, Vertigo.

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I covered the craft room tack board with fabric the other day, and now it wants new pins too. The idea of gluing pompoms to plain old pins was stolen from a similar thing I saw in a shop somewhere (those ones had giant pompoms). The teeny ones are little dressmakers pins.

The googly-eyes tacks just occurred to me as a funny idea when I happened to see them near the pompoms at the craft store. I think I might glue some to magnets too and put them all over the fridge. They’re waaaaatching youuuuu.

Both use this nifty metal glue I found in the scrapbooking section of the craft store. In the past when I’ve glued stuff to tacks, it hasn’t stuck very well. So far the eyes seem really secure, though the pompoms pull off without too much effort.

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I think I might give up on knitting. I am just not very good at it. Maybe if I knew how to fix mistakes more easily it would be less frustrating. I was trying to do the Chevron Scarf from Last Minute Knitted Gifts, which totes has “last minute” in its name and the pattern is simple, but there is something about the knit-in-front-and-back step that I mess up at least once a row. I’ve watched all the little videos and I think I’m doing it right, but I must be twisting a loop or something, because I every once in a while get extra stitches. Then I can’t figure out how to fix it and end up unraveling the whole thing. Anybody know a good equivalent crochet pattern?

It’s a shame too because I really wanted to use my pretty vintage knitting needles I got in Australia.

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