Let There Be Light

When Steph and I moved in to our apartment two years ago, we despaired a bit at the huge expanses of white walls, and the fact that all our furniture was white and cream. We never really did manage to decorate much, and the apartment's nice but not really very homely. When Jade moved in a month or two ago she somehow managed to make her room this giant burst of colour, and one of the bits of it I envied the most was a lovely pretty lamp that she has. I'm a terrible copycat - when I see something I like, I'm pretty shameless and just copy it - so I've been on the hunt for a new lamp since she moved in.

Market Research: Finding Etsy

See Part 1: Fabric-a-brac Redux

After Fabric-a-Brac came two markets full of lovely handmade craft - Show 'n' Sell, and Finders Keepers.

Show 'n' Sell was a handmade market run by the Sydney Etsy Team that I went to with my lovely and crafty friend Helen. To be honest I can't remember how I heard it was on, but it was a little market run at World Bar. World Bar's in King's Cross, so it's not exactly the most obvious setting for a craft market, but they run an initiative called the Wall where they showcase different artists' work in the bar.

Market Research: Fabric-a-Brac Redux

It seems to be the season for funky craft markets. Over the last couple of months I've managed to stumble across three different market events selling a variety of crafty supplies and handmade items, and they've resulted in quite a few successful shopping trips. 

Seeing Spots

I've always envied people who can sew their own clothes. The idea that you can have clothes that fit you exactly and look just like what you want is ridiculously appealing to me. When I first got my sewing machine, I had a crafty night with my friend G and I watched in awe as she sat down with an old pair of jeans, some patchwork material and a pair of scissors and just whipped up a skirt. I've been looking for a longish black and white skirt for a while and haven't been able to find one (why is everything mini-skirt length these days?), so I decided to try making one.

Ice Cream Sandwich

My lovely friend Jade and I have been talking about moving in together for a while. It's been about a year in the making, but two weekends ago she finally moved in, and its been a blast! It seems, though, that having a new housemate is a good excuse to clean your apartment, and so for the last couple of weeks we've been attacking the kitchen and cleaning out the fridge and pantry. In the process I discovered that we have an overabundance of cocoa - apparently every time I've need to bake with it I've just bought some instead of checking if we have any.

Seeing all the cocoa made me want to bake, and we had some walnuts lying around, so I decided to make brownies. My mum has a really good Cadbury cookbook so I borrowed the recipe and a large baking tray and went to town with it. Unfortunately I seem to have taken too large a baking tray - the amount of brownie mixture that was made barely covered the bottom of the tray. The resulting brownies were dense and delicious but they were pretty flat.

Jade took a look at them and declared they looked like biscuits. She then decided that we should make ice cream sandwiches out of them, and my brain practically exploded.

I love ice cream. It's actually physically impossible for me to describe how much I love ice cream, because when my brain thinks about it it goes like this:

s;ahf;oaihefohkjsdlasdlfjkjlksoie!!!ICE CREAM!!!!sadkljhfo;hsj;adf

We'd discovered during our freezer clean-up that not only did we have ice cream in the freezer, but we had two flavours of ice cream. There was vanilla and chocolate with chocolate chunks (mmm, even more chocolate!). We ended up making two-tone ice cream sandwiches, and they were amazing. They're pretty easy to make, and we had fun mushing the ice cream into vaguely rectangular shapes. Next time we do it we might go to some extra effort and freeze the ice cream in square containers first, then cut actual rectangles out of it.

They tasted delicious, and I think I was still on a sugar high four hours later. You'll have to forgive me for the somewhat dodgy photos - I wanted to take some nice ones but I got too excited about actually eating them that I had inhaled them before I could be bothered to cleaning off the plates and lining up the shots!

Unmentionables

After being so excited at receiving my lovely sewing machine for Christmas, I suddenly got caught up with a few knitting projects. Mid March I realised that I'd had it for 3 months, I hadn't sewn anything yet, and I actually really missed it. So in a fit of (hopefully temporary) madness I upended my fabric collection onto my living room floor.

At the end of the night, I ended up with a very messy living room floor, and half a drawstring bag.

My lovely mess. Yes, that's a bottle of shampoo in the background.

For a bit of backstory, Steph asked me a while ago for a small laundry bag with a picture of lingerie on the front that she can use when she's travelling. I figured it'd be nice to have a plain bag with the detail on the front matching the lining. The fabric I'd picked up from the Fabric-a-brac late last year seemed to be just the right size and sort of pattern, so it all worked out pretty well.

Matching lining!

Usually I just dive straight in to these things but I'm glad I actually stopped and had a think first this time round. I ended up cutting out stencils of the underwear before I cut the material, and it's a good thing I did because it took a couple of goes to get the sizing of the undies right compared to the bag.

Sewing the design onto the front of the bag was actually surprisingly doable thanks to the new machine - it has a setting that my old one didn't have that lets you sew small things a lot more easily. I didn't want to fiddle with folding the edges under, so I ironed some interfacing onto the back so it wouldn't fray and just sewed close to the edges of the shapes.

It ended up taking me a few nights and a bit of thinking (making the loop for the drawstring to go through took some thought!) but it was pretty fun to make in the end. In hindsight if I were to make it again I'd probably make it out of thinner material so it'd be easier to wash. I'm pretty sure Steph likes it, though, which is probably the most important thing :)

An Exercise In Patience

The company I work for is obsessed with t-shirts, to the point that one of our customers once joked that we were a t-shirt company masquerading as a software company. Most of the shirts we get made are fairly elaborate and designed in-house for special occasions, but one of our lovely designers decided to draw up unofficial plain text-based ones of memorable things people had said around the office. I really liked the designs, so for Christmas last year I asked her partner which ones they each liked the best, and took a crack at making them.

The original shirt designs - courtesy of @samthebridge

Luckily I found a couple of plain t-shirts at Giordano (although they didn't have a dark blue male one so I had to settle for green), then I wandered off to Lincraft to find t-shirt transfers. There were two types - for white and coloured backgrounds - so I grabbed a pack of the coloured ones.

I started out by printing out a couple of draft versions of the text to get the sizing right. It turned out that choosing the colour was also somewhat difficult - at first I thought a really light grey would be good, but when I tried it out it was too dark. Light cream ended up looking a bit closer to white so I just went with that.

Experimenting with colour and positon

When I bought the transfers, I had assumed that the coloured background type would be a clear sheet that you just printed your design on to and then could cut around roughly and iron on the shirts. To my horror, when I opened the packet the whole sheet was opaque white! I have no idea why they were for 'coloured backgrounds', but it left me with no choice but to cut out all the letters individually.

Oh. My. Goodness. In general I'm not a patient person but I usually get a bit pedantic with getting craft projects perfect. This was really pushing it though. I think all up for the two shirts I was cutting up letters for at least 2 or 3 hours - at least I can say I have excellent cutting skills now. The worst part was the letters like 'e' and 'b' that had bits that needed the middle cut out, and the one 's' I had to cut out was terrible. Whenever I hit an 'l' or a capital 'i' I was over the moon.

I'm about the same size as Sam, and I'd bought myself a shirt along with the two presents I'd gotten, so I was able to position the text in the right place by trying on my shirt with the draft copies I'd made earlier. I just sort've guessed for the other one!

I had a bit of a mishap with the green one - I stuck some paper over the letters and ironed them like the instructions said, but I didn't read all the instructions properly and took the paper off too early (it has to cool down before you peel it off, oops!). Some of the letters came off, so I just grabbed the practice copies of the letters and used them as stencils directly against the t-shirt transfer. It meant that some letters were cream and some were actually white, but given that the shirt said 'Suboptimal', it sort've made sense! I'm glad I did it first though - if I had done the blue one first and lots of letters had been ruined I would've cried.

I'm actually really happy with how they turned out. The edges of the lettering aren't quite perfect and some of them came out a bit wonky but it made the t-shirts feel a bit more personal than if it'd just been printed out by a machine. Plus, while the letters were a huge pain to cut out, not having large expanses of clear t-shirt transfer stuck to the shirt was awesome. As a finishing touch I put our company's logo on the back of the shirts where it appears on our official shirts - it was much easier to cut out than the letters were!