September 22, 2012

Travel Treasures




Country Living Fair
I've been traveling lately and brought home more stuff I couldn't live without.  My friend Susan and I drove to Columbus on Sept. 14th for the Country Living Fair.  It was a fun day trip but I can't imagine spending 3 days...yes, their were 3 day passes available.  I did come home with:

 
And a great wipe clean bib for my grand-daughter.
 
I was especially excited about the Provencal placemats.  If you love this fabric as much as I do see www.lacigale-usa.com                       
 
The very next day hubby and I flew off to New York City for 5 days and 4 nights. If you want to know what else we did you can check out my travel blog at http://cheryl-susan.blogspot.com/
 
Our first full day in NYC started with a visit to Hell's Kitchen Flea Market.
I collected this:

 
I plan to copy the decal images in my scanner. They are so retro/in right now. They got a bit messed up from being stuffed in a suitcase so I will have to clean them up a bit, too.
 
I saved the trip to Fashion Ave. for the very last afternoon. The first stop was M&J Trimming.  If only this store were close to home.  It was hard to know what to buy. I tried to only go for the stuff I knw I could use and not just drool over.
This shows less than half of the place
 
 
          Then it was off to MOOD! If you are a fan of Project Runway you know all about MOOD. My only photo I took turned out blurry, but it looks exactly like the show and the staff was extremely nice.  If you ever go there it is easy to miss because you have to enter a hallway from the street and then go up an elevator WITH an operator to the 3rd floor. There are stairs to the additional 4th floor level.
 
This is what I bought. Two yards of a heavy cotton with a little stretch. The plan is to make a tunic.

I better get busy soon.  I seem to be more eager to shop than sew!



 
 
 
 
  



September 3, 2012

Dealing with Doo-dads




Sewing and crafting makes for a general mess because I need all kinds of stuff around to inspire and fulfill my projects.  The lucky thing is that I have a room of my own to do all this in.  In a normal home this room was meant as a dining room, but we have a perfectly wonderful large open area in our kitchen much more suitable and formal dining is not our thing.

The room is great but what do you do with all the fabric, ribbon, lace, paint, glue, buttons, etc. that need a place?

I took the dresser from my daughter's vacated room and moved it downstairs and somehow thought that it would be sufficient. Think again!
It filled up in no time.

Then I found a little shabby $10 baby dresser at a garage sale. Sturdy but ugly.  I got out my Annie Sloan Chalk Paint in duck egg which I still have a LOT of after painting a jelly cupboard and quickly spiffed it up. But the best part are the Omni Gel transfer method I learned here .

 
I used the lovely oval ornate frame from the Graphics Fairy and added my own text to create this and others with equally silly names.  I didn't want to have to be specific about what went in each one!

 
Next came the knobs.  The original wood were a real mess and I needed a fairly large coverage for some damage I didn't want to spend time on.  I found these at Hobby Lobby.
 

BUT, I am not really happy with the look so this is still a work in progress. 
 
 I want to find some pretty glass knobs.  What do you think? If you have a suggestion, please leave a comment. Maybe rubbing a little color on them would help.  They are already not solidly white. Please leave a comment if you have a suggestion.