One Yard Wonders: Wine-Lovers' Special

Just a quick note for all of you who follow me through Google Reader - I slipped up and published at least one post too early last night - clicked publish instead of schedule to publish... oops!  Even though I deleted the post it's still showing up in my reader, so if it doesn't make sense where it is, just stay tuned.  It will be published in it's correct place soon enough!  Now on with today's scheduled post...

I love wine!  If I had to choose my favorite drink (of the adult variety) it would be red wine!  Pretty much any kind of red wine, unless it is a super nasty one of course.  Or sweet.  I don't like my alcohol sweet thank you very much.  Unless it is a fruity island drink...

Ok - back on track!  I love wine, especially drinking wine with my friends, so when my BFF graduated last may I knew I wanted to give her a bottle of wine.  As a bonus, Stephen is my designated wine picker, so he would get to have a hand in the gift too!  Being the crafty crafter that I am, I decided to cute the gift up a little bit with my One Yard Wonders book, and make the wine bag and coasters in the Wine-Lovers' Special.

My apologies, but  I didn't take any "in process" pictures of this one.  However, you can trust me when I say this is super easy!  The wine bag takes like 5 minutes - at first I thought the ribbon tie was just a lazy excuse to not have a drawstring, but in the end, I think it looks much nicer to have the ribbon tied around the top in place of a scrunched up drawstring neck.

The coasters were a breeze too!  Personally, I think the coasters are a little doofy - I've never needed a coaster for my wine before, much less one that slides over the bottom of the glass.  But I figure they were fun and easy to make, and they could be used for regular drinks too - I made mine a little bigger than the book said to, since I have some really BIG wine glasses, and I made a set of six, so I would NOT be able to get 2 bag/coaster sets out of my one yard of fabric.  I zipped through the coasters assembly line style, and ended up finishing the whole thing in a couple of hours, I probably would have finished faster if I hadn't been watching TV intermittently.  I think the set turned out great!  Don't you Tommy?

Fabric Flowers: Probably not what Waterford had in mind...

Seriously everyone - you need to check out the Polka Dot Pineapple blog.  I LOVE IT! There are so many wonderful flower crafts on there and everything Lettie makes is adorable! (plus she lives in Hawaii!  Can it get any better?) I've only tried a couple of her tutorials but the results have been great.  The first one I tried was her Wire Edged Fabric Flowers.  Since she's got the tutorial laid out so well on her site I won't go into it here.  I've made several bouquets of these things already and always got great compliments on them - a STRANGER even approached me one day when I was making them to say how cute they were.  If only I were creative enough to come up with ideas like this on my own!  Take a look at some of my pictures of the process!!

I've had this fabric for YEARS!  I made a skirt with it when I was probably 14 or so.  I knew there was a good reason I hung on to it for so long - it's perfect for these flowers!!

The colors in this fabric are so close together that I soon learned that it was easier to cut the fabric pieces apart before I glued the wires down.  I got stuck with wires a lot less this way...

Then I learned that my petals wouldn't tip over if I weighted them down with clothes pins!  I do learn new things when I practice (with Tommy's help of course)!!

This is the best new technique I learned with this tutorial - wrapping a piece of tape around the nozzle so the stream of glue is really thin!  I can't believe I didn't think of this before!

Smell flowers?

And here's the finished result!  A beautiful bouquet of flowers! And look! Some of my glass marbles got a new lease on life.  Now they have something to do while they wait to become magnets.

 Aloha!

Tommy loves flowers! No watering required, but dusting every now and again couldn't hurt.


 

The Tommy Bag: Oops I did it again!

This is a story about my second attempt at making a grocery bag. Let's begin...

I love stuffed animals. I have always loved stuffed animals, and I probably will always love stuffed animals.  Right now I have one stuffed animal sitting in the chair with me, there are 3 on the coffee table (granted, they are mice and tiny) and 2 sitting on the TV. And those are just the ones I can see right now.  Anyways, my newest stuffed animal is Tommy the sea turtle.

Tommy comes from Barbados.  He likes swimming and going on cruises and taking naps in the bed.  His favorite singer is Rihanna, but he also like Bob Marley.  Here is a picture of Tommy and me swimming together in his home waters.

(Tommy is the one on the right)

Anyways, I love everything about Tommy.  I love his floppy arms and legs, and his fuzzy snuggly shell.  That is why when I saw this great Tommy belting at Joann's I just knew I had to have it.

It was calling to me, like a beacon in the night. 

I knew I wanted to make a Tommy tote bag/grocery bag with that Tommy belting, but it took me a good couple of weeks to go back to Joann's and buy it (I think I was waiting for a good coupon).  When I did I also bought some blue denim and some cute green lining. I was all set for success!

"This reminds me of the beautiful blue waters of my homeland"

I worked out a pretty simple pattern.  I made a bag similar to this a few years (5 or 6) back, although it was much much larger, but I did have a plan for the whole thing before I started, which we know is a very good idea!  So here I am, sewing along and BAM!  There goes another pin into the depths of my sewing machine!  I can't believe I lost another one in there!  What is it with grocery bags and pins getting stuck inside that darn machine??  (At this point Stephen is telling me "Ummm, don't you think maybe you should start doing it that other way you talked about on your blog?" I still haven't changed a thing)

So like last time, I kept sewing along, hoping for the best but about an inch or two later everything jammed up.  Uh-oh.  I pulled my fabric off of the machine and lucky me!!

 

That pin worked its way out of my machine all on it's own.  Hooray!!  The rest of the project went off without a hitch, and turned out GREAT!

I love my new house!!

And I LOVE Tommy!!!!