Keep a lookout for a new post coming up on Friday!

Anyway, the point of this post is that my sister and I wanted to make shirts with this phrase on them.  We would always talk about it, but never really do anything, so randomly I decided I was going to make mine at least… I didn’t know what shirt she wanted to use, and I didn’t know if she approved on the final layout of the letters.

Here’s the printout.

Here it is after I got to exacto-knifing.

I spray-adhesived that sucker down.

Then I sprayed black spray paint everywhere.  Notice that I had to do some more masking off with tape to avoid overspray.

The finished product.  There’s a little overspray on the neck, but I can live with it.  I loved how it turned out anyway.

So that concludes my experiment with stencils and spray adhesive.  I’ve done stencils before, but I’d always just kind of hoped they’d stay in place… I finally got my hands on some spray adhesive and used it!  Since making the shirt, I’ve kind of abused it.  I just threw it into the wash and dryer without setting the ink or anything, and it bled and smudged a little, but whatever, I’ll still wear it.

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

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

My little sister wanted me to make a dress form of her, and I chose to use duct tape because the last time I had worked with paper-tape was pretty frustrating, and I didn’t want to have to deal with it.  Plus we already had some duct tape anyway.  So, here are the photos that follow our dress form making journey.

The shirt wasn’t long enough, so we used scrap fabric and just taped it onto the shirt so we could extend the dress form further down.  Also, on her neck we used toilet paper.

Overall we were pretty happy with the results.  Neither of us have yet to use it that much though.  Honestly, I’m considering doing a paper mache dress form just so I don’t have to deal with sticky pins from the residue from the tape.

I had a semester long assignment where we had to do a color study of 30 colors for each week of class. Of course, I put it off and had to do almost all of them during the Thanksgiving break. Yay, 300+ colors!

Here’s my final for painting… four paintings, inspired by different artists. I’m so glad to be almost done with this class!

On top of those, I have to print and bound a book and print around 10 more prints for my book arts class. There’s also the color theory assignment I have where I have to re-do an old piece that I’ve done where I’m not happy with the colors… twice. Oh yeah, and studying for my two other classes. Woo, the end of the semester!
Hopefully I’ll be crafting and posting in a week or two, when classes are done!

These are my materials:

a cassette tape, a metal purse frame (I’m not sure of the size because I just ripped it out of that wallet) and fabric.

And here is what happens when you throw all those things together:

And that’s it!  I really like how it turned out.. I want to make more but I don’t know where else to get those purse frame things… I’ll just have to keep searching!

I’ve done a few things between now and my last post.. one of the biggest things being attending the Austin Maker Faire.. and I know I’m going to be a few weeks late, but I’ll eventually post a few of my pictures from there.  I also made a duct tape dressform for my little sister and I’ve started a jacket.. which has been sitting in my room half finished for about a week.  Oh yeah, I just made these awesome earrings, but you’ll just have to wait for those pictures because this post is really for my… halloween costume!

I decided to be a wind up doll and I really wanted to put moving parts on it.. of course that would be the little key part on the back.  All in all, I made a corset-ish type top, a simple circle skirt and an awesome petticoat that I love.. and will definately use again.. but I don’t have any pictures of it because it’s pretty see through.  Last year I made a last minute petticoat with tulle and I just took a piece and gathered it so it was kind of like a tutu, but I really hated it.. it was uncomfortable and I didn’t like the way it looked, so this year I decided to put more time and money into one so hopefully I could reuse it time and time again.  I used this tutorial by sugardale but I shortened the length to fit the skirt.  It was somewhat time consuming, took up a lot of thread, but overall I’m super happy with the result and I know I’ll be saving it to use again and again!

For the skirt I also used a tutorial, but I cannot find the exact one I used right now, but there are pages and pages of circle skirt patterns when I searched google, so if you need one that’s a good resource.

I’m not too happy with how the top came out.. I really wanted it to be a corset, but I just wasn’t confident enough with myself and I just ended up sewing panels together and lacing up the back.. so it was somewhat like a corset.  I refused to buy a pattern and tried to make one myself, which I regret doing, but it was too late to go out and buy one by the time I was making the top, so I guess I just lived and learned

So, I’ve been building up the anticipation to see this costume I’ve been rambling on about, so I present now, the pictures!

The makeup:

And finally, the part I’m most proud of with this costume… the wind-able key!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7alUNLzpOyo

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdozzPiu9iU

So there’s that.  I hope you guys enjoyed it, unfortunately I’m the only one who enjoyed this costume haha, for the party I was going to attend didn’t happen, so I spent all night on Halloween playing Little Big Planet.

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!

Here’s the recipe I used:

1 tablespoon of beeswax

2 tablespoons of some kind of oil.  In this case I used coconut oil.  You can either go out and buy some, or you can buy a coconut and extract some yourself!  Here’s a post where I made some coconut oil.

a few drops of an essential oil.  I didn’t use any for this batch because the only oil I had smelled like orange.

Here’s the tablespoon of wax and two tablespoons of oil.

Heat that thang up!

After it’s all melted, I used a pipette to pour the melted oil and wax mixture into lip balm tubes.  Sorry for the blurry picture.

All done!  Just slap some labels on those things and you’ll be all set!

Here they are, all labeled and ready to be applied.

Oh, there’s more!

I also made two more batches, this time with extra virgin olive oil instead of coconut oil.

This one is orange sherbet.

This one is kind of wierd, orange and mint.

And those are what came of my random urge to make lip balm.. after I’ve had the materials for a few months!  I encourage you to try to make some.  It’s fun and you can customize it all you want!  I think my next batch will be some sort of chocolate flavor!

The first use! Coconut oil.  Here’s a bunch of pictures of when my mom taught me how to make coconut oil.

I apologize in advance for the not so great pictures.

Blurry picture of her cracking that sucker open.  She was moving pretty fast.

Mmm, this is a good coconut. Lots of meat.

You use this contraption, my mom called it a kudkuran, to scrape the meat out.  You sit on it with the skarp part stickin out between your legs.

Super bad picture, but the only one I have of me scraping the meat out.

After a little bit of scraping, here’s what it looks like.

Here’s a before and after.  I went a little crazy on that half, you’re not supposed to see that much brown.

All used up.

Time to start getting that milk out of this meat! Here we have a fine strainer, a bowl and the coconut meat.

Here she put in some water and started mushing it all around.

Take a handful and squeeze it over the bowl.

Here’s some of the milk she squeezed out.  After you have it all squeezed out, you can repeat the process again to get a little bit more milk.  You’d have to be careful with the water though so it isn’t watered down too much.

Strain the milk into a pan.

You can still squeeze a little bit of the milk out of this.

Crank that heat up!

Let it boil.  And constantly stir.

Eventually it’ll start to separate.

More separation.  The clear liquid is the oil… but wait, we can get more out of it!

Almost done.  Let those little bits get all brown and toasted.

All done!

Strain it all!  Save those little bits.  You can use them as a topper for ice cream.. or cakes.. or something.  You might want to toss it with a little bit of sugar though.

Further straining with a coffee filter.

Here’s the oil!  Yup.  A whole coconut made this tiny bit of oil.  You can use the oil for cooking or you can use it to make home made cosmetics.

Second use! As I mentioned in the pictures, you can save the little toasted bits and use them as a topping.

Third use! The meat that you extracted all that milk from is still useful.  If you like toasted coconut, you can probably spread out the meat in a thin layer and throw it in the oven for a while.. You’d probably have to toss it with sugar though.  (I haven’t actually done this, but theoretically it should work, haha)

Fourth use! A Philippine snack: Budbud (the “o”s are long.  Like Boo!  and then a d at the end…. I dunno, it’s hard to explain) also known as sweet rice.  Mm, a delicious dessert.

Here’s a recipe for budbud: Budbud recipe.  You can use the original coconut milk you extracted to make this.. or, if you made coconut oil with the original milk, you can extract milk from the meat more than once. To eat, you unwrap the banana leaf, dip the rice in sugar, or, like in that picture, dip it in coffee and eat it that way.  Either way is awesome.

Fifth use! If you wanted to, with one of the shells, you could clean out the remaining meat and dremel a hole in the side and have a sweet hermit home.  Either that or dremel some small holes on either side of each shell half and make a islander bikini top!

Like this!

So those are just a few ways to put a coconut to use.  I’ll admit, with the budbud recipe, it calls for more than one coconut, but hey, you can make more oil and toasted bits and whatnot!

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