Frosted Petunias Artful Bag Challenge: July

This month the Artful Bag challenge at Fosted Petunias inspired an Artful Bag Day at my house!

Two girlfriends, both of whom are amazingly creative and artistic, joined me for an afternoon with old bags in need of a makeover, wine in need of drinking and S'mores in need of eating (My Guy was kind enough to make some of these treats in our oven to share with one friend who'd never previously tasted a S'more).

Anyhow, let's get to the art details because I know most of you dear readers are here to see what we've created for the Artful Bag, not to read a bunch of bloggy blathering.

We have three bags that none of us remembered to photograph the bags until we'd already started sewing, painting and gluing so the "plain" photographs are the backsides of our creations.

The bamboo-style bag with the tiki men is my bag for July, and the black rhinestone-covered and tan flower-embellished bags are from my friends who shall remain nameless as I do not have their permission to include names (nor are they bloggers, so, sorry no links either).

The tiki men are painted with acrylics, then higlighted and detailed with Sharpie paint pens. The metal flower has embossed and folded layers coated in alcohol inks, paint pen and plain old marker.

We had a great time creating our bags, perhaps occasionally feeling the effects of a whole lot of toxic adhesive fumes, and definitely discovering a few things about one another.

The black bag is completely awesome, isn't it? Don't you need one for girls' night at the wine walk? And can you believe my friend did that beautiful work without any layout or "test" design? I know ... had it been me the rhinestones would be all wonky and ugly.

And the tan bag, all except one style of flowers here are handmade by another friend who pulled them together with scraps and random stuff from my leftovers bin. She is a native of Russia who has lived in the United States since about 2004, and said she used to teach kindergarten aged children to make things by hand.

I remember having pipe cleaners and old lace in the kindergarten craft bins, but I don't remember anyone showing me how to make something this awesome with that old stuff.

Ah well, the grass is always greener on the side of the planet where kindergarten crafts are serious business.

I hope all of you have had, or are having, as much fun creating your Artful Bags as we did! 

See you next month for the Frosted Petunias Artful Bag challenge!

Lace and glitter

Yet again I'm making it in under the wire for a Drunken Stampers deadline.

Today's project mixed a bit of their challenge -- lace and glitter -- with a project I needed to finish this week: A box to hold a care package for a friend who has surgery on Thursday.

Don't worry, it's unlikely she'll have any complications during surgery: I'm sure about this as she's also my boss so I'd have to kick her ass if she were out more than the scheduled week.

This box is cool with a good interior space yet still small enough to be solid even built from card stock.

Tomorrow I'll post more about where I found this SVG file box. UPDATE: Alright, honestly, I am as usual moving on to other things, but dropped in to add this link because the Cricut-cut box is not my design and the creator deserves credit: The Project Girl.

Have a fantastic weekend all!

Drunken Stampers Fabric Challenge

Check it out! It's odd that I've been doing so much summer-related stuff since I'm not a fan of summer.

But, this week's Drunken Stampers challenge calls for fabric ... which for me apparently had to be a picnic table cover ... I hope you like this card and this extra-short message.

Just had to make the deadline.

Wisdom of the Moon

Alright, I'll admit that the world of blogging still seems more than a bit odd to me. I'm impressed at how people share so much of themselves that it's easy to figure out which people you'd probably want as neighbors and who, well, you don't want to WISH bad on anyone, do you?

One of the Bloggers who I would happily live next door to is the writer and creator of Wisdom of the Moon.

I found her blog when I was searching for a pattern to create a reusable grocery bag. I'm a very low-skilled seamstress, on top of which I have a hard time comprehending what the hell I'm reading when it comes to instructions (no small wonder, then that I learn virtually everything by trial and error).

I need a LOT of photos and fairly detailed, step-by-step instructions. So, when I found her fabric grocery bag post I knew I had found a pattern to try.

As it turned out, I didn't try it immediately. First I saved it to my bookmarked sites for the day I had time to sew and looked around the remainder of her blog.

Between that first click and today we've enjoyed her Margarita Jello Shots and her homemade Granola. I've also discovered that knowing how to take a low-light photo is pretty much lost on me -- I really think I just prefer overexposed photos (read shiny!).

I finally got to make her grocery bags at Christmas -- as "Santa Bags" for my nieces. And I was correct, the grocery bag pattern linked above is EASY to follow and results in a wonderfully simple and usable item.

Now, if you're wondering why I'm posting this, it's for two reasons: First, my next post is about another project I stole from Wisdom of the Moon and, as almost everyone who knows me is aware, I prefer to support start-ups and locally-owned, non-chain businesses.

Wisdom of the Moon fits all of these criteria AND if you're looking for crafting ideas in a range of disciplines, this is a completely awesome place to go without spending a dime on subscription costs or destroying trees for printed materials.

I suspect if I did live next door to Wisdom of the Moon I'd be chided for my lack of responsible composting ... but I'm trying and learning as I go, I promise.

Let's get started!

Hello everyone! I've finally started a blog! I hope that this will eventually become a central meeting place for all of us to discuss the projects on which we're working.

I'll be making an effort to ensure we don't use this blog as a place to discuss the "not when we're drinking" topics -- you know the ones. They're the subjects such as politics and religion that can be dangerous after a beer and simply annoying when trying to have a bit of fun playing with paper or yarn or dirt or a new recipe.

In case you missed it, the previous sentence also describes our main topics: Paper crafting, recipes and food, sewing and fabrics and gardening. However, in case you're not a family member or old friend, you should be prepared to see everything from car care to woodworking, from metalworking to recycling and who knows what else -- My Guy and I are not especially skilled at limiting our focus.

Alright *nervous sigh* I guess we're ready to go ... oh, except for one last thing ... in this initial post I'm trying to describe an overall direction and blog outline. In the future please expect a lot less seriousness, proper grammar and correctly-employed punctuation.

Welcome!