Project 391: Illustrated resolutions

Just a fun post. This week has been crazy! So I wanted to do a short personal post. Every year I set 5,6,7 however many resolutions I can think of and then by the end of the year some of them stick, some of them don't. But I post them on my fridge so that I can have them influence my decisions every day and even better, people comment on them and I'm held to account. So this year I thought I would do an even bigger broadcast of my resolutions and make them look good!

I wrote out all my goals and then did a rough sketch to work out what where to put each item. I did a couple of different lettering styles and added coloured pencil accents to make it a bit more colourful.  I'm really pleased how it came out, it looks even better on my fridge than my previous attempts. Who knows it may inspire greater discipline!

Project 279: The craft room gets a makeover

One of the joys in my life is having a dedicated craft space in my tiny southwest London apartment. For years, I just kept my craft stuff in a closet and when it was time to craft, I would spend about 10-15 minutes getting everything out and then working from my kitchen table, repacking things up at the end. When we moved 2 years ago one of my mandates was a place for my stuff to live permanently so I could come and craft as I pleased. 

My space is, unfortunately, shared as the guest room in the smallest room of the house. So small that  we have to rearrange all of the furniture to get the pull out bed to fit in the room with my craft space. Which means if someone is only coming for a night or two we don't put them in here, we put them in the lounge with the pull-out couch! 

We have a friend visiting over the new year break for a few days with her husband and I decided it was time to make the situation inhabitable for them. Therefore, today's headline shot is of my desk a bit unusable as I move everything around! 

I've also discovered that a few of my storage solutions aren't really that great or fit for purpose as my kit has grown (the crafter's dilemma: how to keep storage scaling with your stash) so I want to investigate some new solutions. 

I'll still be crafting over the next few weeks but wanted to let you know that it may be a bit patchy. 

Also - I want to celebrate with everyone as I've posted over 100 times this year! My new year's resolution for 2015 was to hit 100 and I'm delighted to have made it. Thanks for sharing the journey with me. x

Project 219: A bookshelf reclaimed as a dresser

I live in a characterful 1930s apartment building next to a gorgeous garden park and just 1 block from the Thames. Characterful, in London property terms, means small!

One of the challenges is that my old set of drawers was too deep for the bedroom, making it impossible to pull them out without hitting the bed.

I decided to look for something open that would allow me to have most of my clothes on a shelf and eliminate the problem. When I saw this bookshelf at a charity second hand shop I knew I could transform it. And for £12, the price was too good to resist! I paid almost 100% more for a £10 delivery fee, just to give them a bigger donation (and it was before I got a car).

The first thing I did was remove the AWFUL peeling vinyl paper. I replaced it with a green and blue drawer liner I bought for £4 at Tiger.

Next I painted it with green chalk paint to give it a fake antique patina. I think the paint was £4.50. The lighting is so bright right now I can't get the tone to come through in the picture but it's a nice minty sage green. 

I hunted for a while for good drawer knobs. These are from Anthropologie and were the most expensive component, coming in at £8 each! I actually liked the original ones as they were  ceramic but they were red and nothing in my room is red. I'll save them for something else.

Finally I bought these woven baskets from TK Maxx, £8 for the two bigger ones, and £6 for the smaller one. I'm evangelical about the KonMari method of folding and tidying and she recommends you fold things so they are vertical, rather than horizontal. That way you see everything at once and folding and storing is actually way easier.

I'm super pleased with the finished product and, at £84.50 for all the materials and parts, I don't think I could have found a better or more bespoke piece. Totally worked out as getting clothes couldn't be easier!

Project 137: WOYWW 248 First entry

I have been following Claire's submissions to What's on your workdesk Wednesday for months, and I have always wanted to enter. But I never had a workstation! Whenever I wanted to craft I would get my little buckets, boxes and bags of craft things and sit on the floor, or couch, or table and make the thing and then clear it all away. For years this is how I did it.

When we moved into our condo recently I asked (nay, insisted) that I have a craft desk in our spare bedroom and here I am, finally ready to play along!

So my headline photo is my long-awaited desk. I have my ProMarkers in little cups (until I work out my long term solution), two little plastic caddies full of bits and bobs, a pencil container, cutting mat, ATG just out of shot, and then the interesteing bits: some paper scraps, some Little Claire stamps I'm coloring in and then the sample of papers that come with the Little Clair subscription Claire subscribed me to for my birthday.

I wanted to share the rest of my little craft station as well as I'm just so excited:

To the left is my wall sticker, my paper storage unit, paper cutter and bit box of bling. To the right is a shelving unit that has everything that doesn't fit in the desk: stamps, inks, ribbons, bows and other tools. It's the first time I've ever had an area that is really my own and I'm excited to have done a few projects there already.

I thought I would share the first card I made after assembling my desk last week, a card my colleague commissioned for her neighbor's baby shower. Her neighbor, I should mention, is a professional dancer from the UK's version of Dancing with the Stars - I've purposely not put her name in this as my friend didn't want my blog to get picked up by search before the shower - but afterwards I'm definitely going to ask her to get a picture of her holding the card. My first celebrity endoresment!

 

The brief was to make it as blingy and fabulous as possible and so when I was in doubt, I added more bling. Purple leopard paper is from Claire, the flowers are from a Papermania collection and the image is one I've used before, on a previous "Knocked up" and fabulous card.

All in all, I'm so excited to be a part of the WOYWW crew, can't wait to have a nosy around your workstations! xJT

Project 58: Fun with candies

Happy New Year! I wanted to mention that yes, I will be blogging again this year, but no, I will not be committing to do one post per week. I aim to still craft every week but I’m hoping to be a bit more lenient with myself as sometimes it was a stress-point to get a post done.

So straight in to today’s post – I have had a generous amount of craft bounty gifted to me for Christmas and as I had a few spare days before going back to work I gave myself time to really play with all the new kit.

I’ve themed this post candies as I realized about half way through my 2-day session that almost all of my cards featured them. Claire gave me a few new sets and a handy-dandy organizing set of really useful boxes so having them all sorted really inspired me to use them more. I see a candy-fuelled life ahead!

I started to write a short blurb about all of the cards but then I was getting bored so just the highlights (with new toys highlighted in brackets):

Headline card uses my Martha art deco scallop border punch on repeating papers. Takes ages. Never again. (Candies are new from Claire. All candies are in fact new for all cards.)

Simple divided layout using an embossed upper half, ribbon, patterned paper and stamped sentiment. (The green ribbon is from my stocking from my parents. My dad does a good job with ribbon choice. Also the green one uses a stamp that I have never found a use for before. Score.)

Next a gingham background using paper flowers, ribbon stripe in the middle, die cut and stamped sentiment.  (Some of the paper flower are new from Claire and features my new daisy-chain Martha punch from my parents.) 

A reverse-out flower punch with a very simple layout to keep the focus on the colourful flowers. (New punch from Joy.)

The only birthday card in the mix (I need thank yous for all the presents!) I made a hippie inspired card with a water-mark effect on stamps. (New tie-dye style stamps from my parents as well as the ribbon from my dad’s sale-bin-diving efforts.)

A butterfly layout where I fashioned an envelope by deconstructing a proper envelope. (no new toys other than the candies.) 

Another butterfly layout using a music stamp, butterfly punches and another stamp I have never been able to use before. (see above re: new toys.)

A card for my sister using the papers she gave me last year using an embossed thank you and simple layout. I tried to ink the thank you in light pink but it looked awful so I inked over it again in black. (as above) 

A stamped feature piece that I hand cut as I don’t have a die-cutter (yet!) using a complicated stamp and variegated gold paper. (as above) 

Finally this one is for Claire as this looks simple but was a major hassle. I put a strip of white paper down to highlight the red and white string and then managed to feed it through the double button and create the bow (15 minutes later…). The chipboard shapes were given to me by Claire last year in the $20 challenge and they were plain so I hand coloured the raised bits with a red felt tip pen. Then I stamped the sentiment. So it looks simple, but only a fellow crafter will see that it's more complicated to create. This one also does not use candies.Misleading for this post, I know.

I could have spread these out over two posts  but as I’m no longer tied to posting every week I’ll give you a bumper hit to make up for my 2 weeks of absence.

Hope you enjoyed the week of candy! 

Project 4 - Crafting hits the craft supplies update

Just an update on the organizing front – this week turned out to be a bit manic so I didn’t pick up the crafting the craft stuff project until Saturday morning. But here we are and I have great news to report: Everything now lives in a wonderfully self-contained box that is labelled with the contents and stored near like-materials. ‘Tis a thing of beauty now.

I also came up with an easy way of storing ribbons, wrapping anything small enough around an embroidery thread card and stored those away in a little plastic box . For bigger ribbons I tied an end to a canvas bag and then let the rest of the ribbon fall inside the bag. That way I can see what I have by colour and style and only fish out what I need by untying the end. I can’t say I’ve seen this before so I’m going to declare myself a genius for the innovation.

Once I start buying full rolls of ribbon (instead of saving the scraps from packages and presents like a hobo) I really want to do something clever like put them on a rail inside a closet or something. But we’re not there yet. One day my craft room will look like this.

Project 4: Crafting hits the craft supplies

This week I’ve decided that I need to do a project that will continue to give me happiness. I’m going to organize my craft stuff and call it a craft in its own right. Because, and I don’t start a sentence with “because” lightly, I think that if I’m going to continue to do crafts on a weekly basis I need to understand what materials I already have. If you saw my first post you know I love a list. If I could love any strategic thing more than a list, it would be compartmentalizing things. This is a new field of craft: the metacraft.

I thought that I had things pretty well sorted because of the following (and feel free to judge me when you see these “before” photos):

I had my very own craft shelf:

I keep all my papers in a blue plastic bag:

I keep all my card stock, envelopes, peel offs and tools in a blue bin:

I keep all my embellishments in a recycled laundry detergent bin:

And I keep all my ribbons in a bag:

For the record: I have not made these look worse to try to exaggerate the issue. I'm aware I was delusional to think this was a system in the first place. I have no idea where half these ribbons have come from as I rarely get to the bottom of the bag.

This needs to be split over the week because if I tackle this all on a Monday I’m not going to work tomorrow as I’ll stay up until 4am trying to crack this. Small steps before we run. Tonight we tackle paper, cards and tools.

I started with the paper and organized by colour and then size, smallest scraps to big 12x12 virgin sheets. I put these in A4 and 12x12 plastic files, sorted by colour.

Then I emptied the blue bin (I haven’t seen it empty in years) and filled this with envelopes by size, cards, stationery and peel-offs. I filled the sides with glues, tapes and foam pads as well as a bag of ready-made cards from previous adventures in craftland. There are cardboard labels to separate the sections but you can't really see them from above.

Finally I sorted out a box for stamps, one for ink pads and a bag for large punches and embossing folders.

Tomorrow I’ll do ribbons and embellishments but I’m feeling pretty, pretty, pretty good. (We’re going through a Curb phase.)