Other – Page 2 – Hopefully Creative

Chair Improvements

When you are just a little too short for your chair, you may just need to add more foam.

I’m short. Most of the time this isn’t a big problem, but sometimes it can be a little annoying. Case in point, my lazy chair is too long (or too short?) for me. The foot rest at the bottom only has padding on the top. However, my heels just about protrude over the end when I’m sitting in it. This means that I can feel the edge of the wood under the padding. At some point it got too annoying and I removed the foot rest to see if improvements are a possibility.

I decided that it might be possible to undo some of the staples and add some extra padding to the front and reduce the annoyance. When I got my staple gun back this weekend, I decided to actually try it. Got a screwdriver and pliers to take the staples out. Then added a few layers of insulation foam to the front and stapled the fabric back. Screwed the foot rest back into the chair and it does seem to be a small improvement. At some point I may decide to find some actual furniture foam and try it again. However, it’s fine for now.

This chair is still one of the best purchases I’ve made. So comfortable!

Easter – solitary edition

As always, Easter requires the painting of eggs. Since we are in lockdown, I’m doing the solitary Easter this year – although we did do a digital Egg hunt via Discord in the front yard of my parents. It was glorious. We also had a verbal egghunt in a message that my mother had recorded, so we were Eastering away.

In preparation, on Saturday morning, I boiled some eggs, while at the same time making scones and preparing bread dough. I also had a dragon that needed finishing. Perhaps it’s not strange then that I put the eggs aside until about 22:30 at night before actually starting to paint.

First step, pinterest egg designs since my creative brain has gone on holiday and I cannot follow it. One of the first things I saw was a combination of black & white eggs with different designs (here). It really appealed to me, so I got out my paint and started on giving one egg a white base coat and the other egg a black coat. After waiting for them to dry, I added triangles to the black one and stripes to the white one. That’s it really. I quite like this minimalist design.

Buttons!

I’ve improved my crafting life with a simple ‘hack’ (clickbait much?). I’m very happy with it though. For a very long time, my sizeable stash of buttons has been living in a pouch in little plastic bags or in a box in little plastic bags. Effectively, every time I needed a set of buttons, I needed to upend a container, locate the buttons I wanted and then refill the container. This was NOT fun to do, I needed something better.

Since I have limited storage space and too many buttons my new solution couldn’t take up much space. It was hovering around Christmas and I suddenly had an idea, after pinteresting for ever. I was going to hang the little plastic bags up with Christmas ball hooks to some sort of rack. This would allow me to add more easily, sort them into corresponding colours and be able to see all of them at once. So I went to some stores and found a super nice rack, heavily discounted for €2. It even has birds on!

So off with the rack I went to set up my new project. I tied some rope to the top to be able to hang it on my bedroom door – my sewing room door has a mirror so it was ‘full’. Yes, it’s hanging on a Christmas wreath hook, this project is quite Christmassy for no apparent reason. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how many bags have fallen off it since it was put up (only 1 in 2 weeks). Ps. for those wondering, at my job we use USB-sticks that come in little plastic bags. I though it stupid to throw those away when I can use them for buttons, so I’ve been collecting them.

Sewing Space

Interrupting the three-piece suit for a post of which pieces have been in drafts since January of this year..

So, you may or may not have heard about the Sewing Space Tours of Tilly and the Buttons. Back when it was first announced, I got quite frustrated with the submission guidelines, especially this one:

10 gorgeous photos of your sewing space. Please take your photos in natural light, and save them for the web as high quality 650px wide jpegs, with no text/graphic/filter overlays. You may want to include an overview of the space, a picture of you at work, detail shots of your fabric stash, accessories, décor, works in progress or anything else that makes your sewing space unique or inspirational. The more beautiful, creative and inspirational the photos, the better! (here)

Now, I don’t know about you, but my sewing space only stays neat for about 0.1 seconds after I’ve cleared it up completely. This means that about 99.99% of the time, it looks like I’ve stashed 50 years worth of fabric in not enough boxes, with projects on every flat surface (including floor) and assorted bits and bobs everywhere else. This does not make my space inspirational.. It might be unique – I’m most likely the messiest person I know – but not beautiful.

However, at the start of the year I spent what felt like forever clearing up the monstrosity again. This resulted in a pretty decent area, so I made a little movie. It’s still not anywhere near inspirational or beautiful, but I do make most of my stuff in here, so that’s good.

I have since managed to hang my mirror in its original frame on the door and accumulate even more junk and put it any which where. The room is usually at its worst when I’m in the final stages of completing one (or more) projects or have just opened a box to search for fabric and have not managed to get all the original fabric back in said box. This is an example of how my room looked a week ago, amidst the three-piece suit project.

Perhaps I’ll learn how to craft neatly in the future.. but chances are very small. I’ll clean it up again, someday.

Easter 2018

As always, eggs needed to be painted for Easter. This time, I happened to be at my parents on the Friday before Easter, so we invited my brothers and their partners to come along too. After having dinner, I forced everyone who was still there to paint eggs with me. We boiled twelve in different colours and painted them with water paints afterwards.

My creativity was a bit lacking, so I only made two. This time, they were all not recognizable. I still had fun, and I think the others did too.

My one brother took 6 home because we wouldn’t be able to eat 12 with just the three of us. On Saturday, I was the only kid left. I still made my mother hide the 6 real and 6 chocolate eggs in the front yard, and my dad and I searched for them (we found them all!), before commencing with some cheater Easter lunch. I enjoyed myself and the streak of finding eggs is still going strong!

Chair, Now in Blue

So, years ago, I managed to liberate an office chair from Utrecht University (story is here) which has gone through two more moves and now lives happily in my sewing room. It had accumulated another patch but was again springing a leak. So I decided to take the plunge and figure out how to recover the seat. Adding another patch would not have made it any better I think.

So I got to work, taking out all the visible screws. I couldn’t get to a few so I googled my chair number and actually found a video that shows how to recover it. Thank you, Stof en Steen! So I mostly followed the instructions and managed to recover the seat of my chair in about 2 hours or so? The hardest part was getting the recovered seat back on the chair.

Now, the seat back is still perfectly fine, and I am lazy. It would also have more pattern pieces and harder patterns so I figured, I’ll take the multicolour chair. Red and blue go together, right? RIGHT?! I have found that it is more comfortable now since the hole is no longer there and my feet actually stay on the chair when I pull my legs up. I declare this a success (for now, at least).

Easter 2017 – Communal Effort

This year, my parents invited us all to their house for Easter, where we reinstated the tradition of painting eggs and trying to find them in the garden. I brought some water colours home and the whole family was convinced to paint the eggs. We also used some of those egg painting tablets in six colours to give our boiled eggs a base coat on Saturday evening while my dad was preparing dinner. There were quite a number of different types of eggs; sexy ladies, aliens, stripes, minions, cloudy ones, a hedgehog and other indescribable things. In total, 20 eggs were painted and on Sunday morning my mother hid them and the garden and we had to go find them. The neighbours, I think, found it very intriguing to see 5 adults walking around a garden and looking in and behind every plant. We enjoyed it and managed to find all the big ones, and 19/20 of the small chocolate ones. Hopefully we can improve on this next year!

The ones I made included one with two colours base coat and stickers, a striped one, one alien and a triple eyed minion. I have been more creative in the past, but it didn’t matter. We had an hour of fun and even my non crafty brother participated and managed to create some nice eggs.

Eggcelent 2016

Painting eggs with Easter is a necessity for me, you can see the evidence here, here, here and here. This year, I had my parents come over for lunch, so I painted 6 eggs. You will now be regaled with too many pictures of the eggs, good luck! In order of awesomeness

Minion egg

It’s a minion, clearly it’s awesome.

Minion egg

I added the googly eye, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to paint a nice eye. Also, googly eyes are the most fantastic things. They are currently also stuck to my laptop, phone and mp3-player.

Galaxy egg

Galaxy Egg

This was a very dark egg with some planets and stars on it. My mother was kind enough to hide all the eggs for my father and me to find. This one was the last one we found. The reason was that it was put into a glass in a black closet, completely camouflaged. Super awesome.

Owl in tree egg

Tree owl Tree owl back

It’s an owl in a tree, I know, it’s not the most obvious one, but then my painting skills are lacking at the best of times. I still quite like it.

Duckling egg

Duckling egg

This is the duckling egg, where I attempted to create a baby duck or baby chicken. My mom hid this one between my rubber duckies on the window sill, and my father eventually found it after I missed spotting it about four times. (This may explain why I can never find anything..)

Pig egg

Pig egg Pig egg Pig egg

It’s a little piggy, I managed to put his tail on upside down.

Landscape egg

Field egg

This was where inspiration ran out. So I painted a blue sky with green grass and flowers.

All eggs

The crew made a good egg salad.

For this occasion I also made some egg-cups by cutting up an egg carton, spray painting it with the only spray paint I owned (black) and adding three layers of varnish. Some have one long pointy bit, others have two rabbit ears. I quite like these also. After the three coasts of varnish, they are now quite sturdy, and according to the packet should be able to handle some water, but I haven’t tested that.

Egg cup Egg cup Eggs in cups

Colours!

This will be a double feature involving two projects with a lot of colour! Let us start with the obligatory Easter eggs. As you may know, I have this ‘tradition’ of painting hard-boiled eggs for Easter, proof can be found here, here and here.

This year was a little different though. I was not at my parents house for Easter and I therefore couldn’t force my mum to hide eggs in the yard. I was also alone and would not be able (or willing) to eat an enormous amount of eggs to facility my painting habits. Moreover, I didn’t have time (or energy) on the Saturday to paint my eggs. So Sunday morning, when I woke up, I put my laundry in the machine and boiled two eggs. I let them cool in a pan with cold water and after 15 minutes or so, I took them out to paint.

What to paint on my two glorious eggs. I googled a bit and decided on the classics, polka dots and stripes. I used my (new-ish) watercolour paints and dotted the first egg with some nice colours. The second egg was made with different colour stripes. Tadaaa!

I also ate them approximately 3 minutes after taking the picture.. Egg salad on pita bread (empty cupboard and shops closed for Easter), it was nice though!

—- Part 2! —-

The second project was based on a suggestion by my mother. She said that I should make a poppy (more information here and here) from my left over pyjama fabric. So I did. As the fabric is so differently coloured, the poppy is red on the from and blue on the back. I chose to make the little hat in green/yellow. I like it.

Here it is sitting up.

So these were my two colourful projects. I liked them, and I hope to keep the eggs tradition alive. Someone needs to paint for the Easter bunny, right?!

Easter!

I interrupt the backpack journal for a message: HAPPY EASTER!!

As known (here and here), I celebrate Easter by having my parents hide painted and chocolate eggs in the yard. Yesterday I painted the eggs, this year, 6 eggs were chosen (since we were only with three). Only one egg split, so that had to have some alternative colouring. I had fun, even though it took a while for my water based paints to dry between coats. Hereby, I present to you: Easter Eggs 2014!

To start, welcome Ladybug/Turtle into your heart. She is half ladybug (red with black spots and a black head) and half turtle (green with brown stripes). She’s a bit ambivalent about living quarters. Sometimes she just wants to fly while at other times that is a bit too fast. Most of the time she manages to find a spot that is *just right*

Next up: Deep in the Sea! Blue with fish (some have run a bit, but I still love her). Deep in the Sea prefers the more aquatic of environments. Its occupants like to show off and don’t mind some water pressure one little bit.

Followed by: Garden (flowers, grass, butterfly and the sun) and its good friend: Stripes! Stripes often joins garden when they lay around in the grass absorbing the sun’s rays and generally enjoying life.

The split one: The Man! He was created with a permanent smile in his face, a pretty bow tie, blue hair and dotty clothes! He’ll never be unhappy but might be a little mischievous.

Last but not least: Dotty Beachball! Quartered up into different colours with dots in the previous colour. She likes to sunbathe and smell some sea every now and again.

Here they are all together. They would like to wish you a happy Easter too!

Category: Other