buttons!

i made buttons last weekend!

my favorites: titanic, austin powers, mallrats, curious george playing drums, the guy from 'outside providence', third eye blind, a maple leaf, jack black, rob thomas, south park, and the amazing shirley maclaine.

i used silicone sealant to glue magazine clippings to aquarium stones and then to glue pinbacks or magnets to the back of the stones. magazine material worked better than cardstock. the titanic and third eye blind buttons were made from a magazine insert and they, very sadly, fell apart when i tried to put them on... sad sad sad :(

I love lamp.

Has it really been almost a month since I did anything crafty? Well no, I've been crocheting like a mad fiend, but it's just been the same hats and doilies. Everyone loved their Christmas presents I had hand-crafted for them. Besides the earrings I made my sisters, the hats I made my brothers, my boyfriend, and my boyfriend's roommate, and the doilies I made my mom and boyfriend's mom, I also (a while ago) made a baby blanket for my relatively new neice, Meryl.

The weeks surrounding Christmas were ridiculously busy and included a lot of traveling, then getting sick. But finally yesterday I got to do a real craft project, for the first time in aaaaages (that wasn't related to crocheting). My step sister and I asked my step mom if there was anything around the house that needed to be craftified. After listing off a few things that would have been far too ambitious for us to take on, she also mentioned an ugly lamp she had acquired at a thrift store that was currently sans-shade. And that's where we came in!

Article 1: The heinously ugly lamp.

It just screams "great aunt's house", but my step mom adores it. Yes, that is light pink and with gold curlicues. My step sister and I went to JoAnne's Fabrics to see if we could find something to work with it. After locating the lamp shades in the very back corner of the store, we went to work trying to find a fabric to match it, a far more difficult task than one would think. Any mostly pink fabric was too overwhelming, and most other fabrics didn't look quite right with it. We finally settled on a cream colored muslin. Then we went into the findings sections and found a stencil for curlicues, some gold piping, 9 gold buttons, and some tacky glue. The idea was to cover the (pre adhesived) shade with the muslin, trace the curlicues around the base of the shade with pencil, then sew on the piping in the pre-traced curlicue pattern, and finally sew the buttons around the top of the shade.

And our idea worked!!

Article 2: The finished lamp shade, on the lamp. Our craftiness definitely outweighs the ugliness of the lamp. Yessss.






















Article 3: A close up of the shade. You can't quite tell, but the border actually consists of two strands that curl around themselves and eachother.

Bam!