Sparkles and Sticks

Birthday Party Crown Tutorial

Guess what?  Today is my birthday!  I turn 29 today.

To celebrate, I want to share a little tutorial I did for Mary Rebecca's Birthday Blog Party last month.  You can wear these fun birthday crowns at birthday parties, bachelorette parties, on tuesday nights... anytime you feel like celebrating!

Supplies: 

a pack of sparkly pipe cleaners in assorted colors.

strong scissors or wire clippers

Star Crown

 

 

Step One: Attach two pipe cleaners together to form a circular base for your crown.

Step Two: Make your center star.  Start by making a very small crease at the end of your pipe cleaner.  You are going to use this "hook" to attach the two ends of the pipe cleaner.  Then, make ten crisp creases in your pipe cleaner.  The 10 segments you make with these creases form the perimeter of your star.  Manipulate the pipe cleaner until you are happy with the shape of your star.  Make another small hook at the end of your star.  Cut off any excess pipe cleaner and hook the two hooks together to complete your star.

Step Three: Make four more stars (two medium sized, two small) as described above).

Step Four:  Attach your stars together and to the base of your crown by twisting small pieces of pipe cleaner around the pieces you want to connect.

Heart Crown

Step One: Attach two pipe cleaners together to form a circular base for your crown.

Step Two: Make your hearts.  Start by making a small crease at the start of your pipe cleaner- this bit will serve as a hook that will help complete your heart.  Bend the rest of your pipe cleaner into the shape of a heart.  Make sure the top humps a round and smooth while the center is a hard crease.  Make another hook at the end of your heart, trim excess pipe cleaner, and hook your heart together.  Make five more hearts, or however many you need to fill your crown.

Step Three:  Attach the bottom points of you hearts to the base of your crown by twisting small bits of pipe cleaner around both.  Make sure your hearts are evenly spaced.

Step Four: Attach the tops of your hearts together with small pieces of pipe cleaner.  Twist excess pipe cleaner into little circles for a pretty, royal effect.

Dresser Up Cycle Progress Report

Remember how I bought a dresser at a garage sale about a million and a half years ago (AKA, last July)?  And remember how excited I was to dress it up?

Well, six months later, I have finally started.

So far I have sanded the entire unit, primed it, painted one coat of paint, and done two coats of spray paint on the top of the handles.

I've also decided to take the project in a completely different direction, aesthetically speaking.  I'm painting the entire piece white (before I was going to leave the gold trim and add some baby blue around the drawers).  Once I discovered that the handles had already been painted and therefore were not originally gold, I decided to spray paint them silver, instead of trying to retore the gold.  There was a brief moment where I was all set to paint them purple, but I decided that the bold color and the scroll-y nature of the handles would be too much.  I reminded myself that simple is better. 

Next up: two more coats of paint, a sealer, a sparkly secret, a few coats of silver on the back of the handles and some pretty papers in the drawer.

My favorite part of this project: listening to the audiobook of City of Bones while I work.  I do love me some shadowhunters.

A Christmas Surprise from Vintage Jules (and my aunt)

Back in October, when I was spending pretty much every weekend at the Farmers Wife Barntique, I fell in love with a pretty pink apron that Vintage Jules made.  It looked about 100% just like the one I am wearing in the picture above.

One day, I came to the barn and it was no longer decorating the sewing mannequin that it usually did.  I was sad for myself, but happy for Julie for selling it.

Then, Christmas morning comes.  I open a box from my aunt.  Low and behold, what do I see in the box?  (Hint: I am wearing it in the picture above).

(This dude is my favorite character on this apron's print.  He just looks so... bored.)

Then, I remember that the apron dissapeared on the exact day that I brought my husband, bro-in-law, and probably-someday-sister-in-law to the barn.  And we ran into my grandma, aunt and cousin!  And my aunt is very good at being sneaky when it comes to buying gifts right under peoples noses.  And I was slightly suspicious at the time, but then proceeded to forget about it for the next few months.  So.... surprise!

Kudos to Jules for making such a pretty apron (did I mention it's double sided), my aunt for being so sneaky, and Lesley for being in on it and never letting on!

How To: Make a Merry Wreath

Want a little something extra to decorate your house this Christmas?  You can whip one of these pretty wreathes out in the time it takes to watch It's A Wonderful Life.  Or Elf.  Or Home Alone.  Or Love Actually.  Or basically, any holiday movie that you haven't gotten to watch yet.

Supplies:

Styrofoam wreath

two different spools of thick, fancy ribbon in complementary colors and designs*

branches, birds, doilies, fabric scraps, or other little pretties you want to use to decorate your wreath*

several straight pins

hot glue gun (optional)

* These holiday themed items are probably already on sale at this point!

Step One: Wrap your ribbon around your entire wreath.  Secure both the starts and the ends of it with straight pins.  You can use more straight pins through out the wreath if you feel it's necessary for the texture of ribbon you chose.  The ribbons I chose didn't need any extra help staying put.

(See the three tiny pins?  Be sure you insert all of your pins on the back side of your wreath so no one can see them.)

Step 2: Decorate the bottom inner portion of your wreath.  Since I used birds in both of my wreaths, I decided to make my bases look like little nests.  I found this to be the most time consuming step in my wreath making- mostly because I kept rearranging everything!

Look #1

Star by placing a doily over the bottom of the wreath.  Pin it into place by using pretty/vintage sewing pins.  Fold a piece of wired ribbon into a pretty shape.  Pin it into the wreath with your straight pins.  Attach some sparkly branches either by bending the wire base and poking it into the wreath, or by hot glue gun.  Attach the real branch with the glue gun.  Attach the bells by twisting a small piece of wire around the top loop of the bell and poking it into the wreath.  Position birds and attach them either by hot glue gun or by their wire bases (if applicable).

(Top view.)

Look #2:

Attach the sparkly branches either by wire or hot glue gun.  In this case, I wrapped very long sparkly branches around the birds to create a little "nest effect."  Attach the birds as mentioned above.

Bow: To add a bow to the top of your wreath, start by wrapping a piece of ribbon all the way around the top of your wreath.  (Check out the image above to get a good idea of what I am talking about.)  Pin it in place.

Tie a big, pretty bow with two long tails.  Then, take another small piece of ribbon and wrap it around the front knot of the bow.  Pin these two aspects of the bow in place.

Mold your tails into a pretty shape.  Attach them to your wreath with.... pins!  Are you seeing the pattern yet? ; )

See how you can hide the pins under the folds of the ribbon?

Step 3: Hang, and enjoy!  I made my green wreath "hangable" by pinning another piece of ribbon to the top back of the wreath.  I hang it by stapling the ribbon to the top inside of my door- a technique I learned from Elise last year.

Tips:

If you are attaching something by the "poky wire" method, make sure the wire is not so long that it will go straight through the wreath.  Trim if necessary.

Make sure that your base arrangement looks good from several perspectives (straight on and from slightly above)

Let some of your branches fall off the back of the wreath as well as the front for a more dimensional effect.

Babushka Designs and Late to the Revolution at Renegade Craft Fair!

On Saturday, I spent a very giggly day with one of my BFF's. 

Seriously.  Sometimes I forget how much that girl makes me laugh.  At one point we were singing a song about waffles.  To the tune of 'Tom's Diner.'  Because we were watching Parks and Recreation.

But I digress.

The real mission of the day was not to write songs about delicious breakfast foods; it was to go and visit our friends at Renegade Craft Fair.

It was in a new building this year.  I think I have been to every Renegade since they came to San Francisco, and I was oddly disturbed by the idea of it being in a new building.

It turns out that the new building worked just fine.

We came to visit Tatiana with Babushka Designs and Traci and Patrick of Late to the Revolution, but since we managed to start at the exact opposite end of the building, they were one of the last booths we saw.

(We finally found them!)

(Celebrating the fact that we all got the "wear an off-white, lacy top today" memo)

Personal bias aside, theirs was definitely one of my favorite booths.  It was so colorful, so cohesive, and so organized.

Tatiana makes beanies, and super cute and comfy slippers.

And Late to the Revolution makes the coolest headphone covers I have ever seen.

I bought some dark green slippers from Babushka Designs, and I've spent the last bajillion minutes wishing I had bought the Hello Kitty looking headphones from Late to the Revolution too.

Sunny San Francisco days, waffles, giggle, bursts of bright yarn... these are the things Saturdays are made of.

Night Life at the California Academy of Sciences

Dear Gentle Readers,

I will forewarn you know: there is a moral hidden in the contents of this wee blog post.  You will find it mainly in the blurriness and sparsty of the photos.  Can you guess what the moral is?  Scribble your answers down as you read through the post, and find the answer written upside down at the bottom of the post...

(The Welcome screen in the Planetarium)

On Thursday Night Ashley and I went to Night Life at the California Academy of Sciences.  The Academy does Night Life nearly every Thursday night, which means the museum is open especially for 21+'s from 6-10 PM.  The regular exhibits of the museum are open, but there are also cocktails, music, and dancing!  The aquarium turned into a very cool disco, but I did feel a bit bad for all the fishes!  They couldn't have been enjoying the vibrations of the thumping bases.

Night Life's are themed too, and the theme on Thursday was Bazzar Bizzare!  Crafts + Science + Cocktails = one evening of geektastic bliss for Jaime.

(Ashley was my date for the evening.  He had lots of fun too, but managed to keep his cool a lot better than I did.  The second we walked in the museum I was like an anxious kid at Disneyland who had too many icecream cones and wanted to make sure she went on EVERY RIDE.)

Highlights of the evening:

-Meeting two cute (and very smelly) Reindeer.

-Watching a show in the Planetarium.

-Buying the prettiest headband ever from Feather Light.

-Getting freaked out by the albino alligator.

-Being delighted by Eunjung June Kim's magical illustrations (pictured below).

-Walking around Suess-like trees, waiting for an indoor snow party that never happened.

But the number one, absolute best thing about Night Life: looking at Jupiter through a telescope.  Jupiter is my favorite planet, and it was amazing to look at it with my own eyes.  I could even make out its sandy stripes!  It's one thing to visit planetariums, or watch pretty documentaries about stars and planets (which Ashley and I love to do!) but its another to actually see such a massive beast hanging in the sky with my own eyes.  It was represented in a tiny, peaceful magnification that probably doesn't represent its true character at all, but it was really, really there.

˙ʎɹoʇɔɐɟsıʇɐs uɐɥʇ ssǝן ǝɹɐ sʇןnsǝɹ ǝɥʇ  ˙ǝɯıʇ ǝɯɐs ǝɥʇ ʇɐ ןןɐ boןq ɹnoʎ ɹoɟ soʇoɥd ǝʞɐʇ puɐ'sɹoʇɐbıןןɐ ouıqןɐ ʇɐ ʞooן 'spuɐqpɐǝɥ ʎʇʇǝɹd ʎnq 'ןıɐʇʞɔoɔ ɐ ʞuıɹp oʇ ʎɹʇ ʇ,uop :ʎɹoʇs ǝɥʇ ɟo ןɐɹoɯ

A Cozy and Sparkly Hat Upcycle

My favorite thing about winter fashion is this: all the clothes suddenly become very cozy (to compensate for the chilly weather) and very sparkly (to celebrate the magic of the season).  Cozy and Sparkly: these are two of my favorite words! 

I put together this little upcycle on a whim, and in a matter of about twenty minutes.  It's a great way to spice up your existing winter wardrobe, and it would also make a great holiday gift for any other sparkly lady in your life!

Step One: Gather a plain hat in a color and pattern that you love, a piece of pretty ribbon or lace that will tie all the way around the hat and leave two tails that will drop to your shoulders, and a pretty vintage brooch.  I used a plain hat that I knitted a few years ago but never wore, a piece of ribbon from my grandma's old sewing kit, and a vintage brooch that decorated the flower girl's basket of petals at our wedding.

Step 2: Weave your ribbon around the base of your hat.  Choose a consistent weaving method to make your hat look aesthetically consistent.  I wove my ribbon in one stitch, on the top row, every third rib pattern.  You can make the size of your weaves different, depending on how you want your hat to look.

(Above: a view of the weaving from the inside and the outside.  See how the ribbon goes under one stitch?)

Step Three: After you have woven your ribbon all the way around your hat, even out the tails so they are roughly the same length.  Put your hat on your head, look in the mirror, and make sure you are happy with the tension.  Adjust it so it doesn't look too tight or too loose, and make sure the ribbon does not twist anywhere.  Tie the ribbon in a knot when it is at an appropriate tension.  Then, take the hat off, tie the ends into a pretty bow, and trim the ends.

Step Four: Attach your pin.  I suggest pinning through both your ribbon and hat for maximum security.

Step Five: Wear your hat around town.  Gather compliments.

Star In Progress

I started making this blanket a few months ago, and I intend to give it as a gift next summer.  It is about halfway done.  I love the pattern, I love the colors, but every few rows I start to look very closely and I want to rip the whole damn thing out.

There is an odd bump in the green center.  One of the inward angles goes at a slight diagonal and I started doing the peaks of the points slightly differently after the purple stripe.  I wish I had made the center teal rather than green.

I can't really see many of these errors from a distance- when I look at the blanket the way a spectator would rather than the creater, or the future owner who may draw her finger along the line of the star when she talks on the phone or procrastinates goals with worry.

Mistakes.  Mistakes that I thought I could live with right after I made them, but as I loop further, as I start to do things slightly differently without even realizing it at first, the whole starts to look wrong.

Start afresh?  Or build on the significant, though somewhat flawed structure that is already there?  How closely should a star blanket be judged? 

How closely should the maker judge herself?

Sparkles and Sticks Confetti

I love the little scraps of yarn, fabric, and sometimes paper that lay around my feet after a long "making marathon."  I have a theory that if the cast off pieces of a project look juicy together, then the finished masterpiece will too.

Confession: I don't clean these scraps up until my production goal is reached.  Sure, I gather them into little piles so it doesn't look like A New Years Eve Confetti Storm hit the house, but I still keep them.  Somehow the little pile of sparkly eye candy makes me feel victorious and productive.  "If I can make a pile of scraps that big and beauteous, what can't I do?!?!" I ask myself.  Then, I knit faster.

The real problem starts when the project is done and I have a giant pile of bits of yarn (or fabric, or paper, depending on the project) that I don't know what to do with.  And since I have kept it so far, I feel that I must do SOMETHING with it.  It would be so wasteful not to.

Solution: Confetti.  From now on I am going to cut up all the little bits I have left after projects into smaller little bits.  Then, when it comes time to celebrate something Sparkles and Sticks related, I am going to throw the confetti ALL OVER THE PLACE.

Then I will pick up all the little bits, and begin again.

Sparkles and Sticks is going to Homespun Craft Fair!

See you there?