DIY: Sewing Room Studio Update!

 Hi, y'all! I'm so excited to share that I recently decluttered and organized my sewing room! It's been a LONG process and I'm so thrilled with the result. I can walk in, move around, LOOK around and see all of my supplies. It's amazing how much clearer the mind and work when there aren't piles of stuff to sift through. 

 When we first moved in to our house some 10 years ago, I already knew I wanted one room dedicated to sewing. I'd just started teaching myself to sew and was excited by all the possibilities of what I could create. Having a room dedicated to this was so exciting to me. Because I'm a collector (read: hoarder), I'd accumulated a ton of fabric and fun vintage finds like sewing notions. I thought it would be fun to dedicate one wall of my sewing room to display my inspirational finds. 

 Over time, I realized that this was a waste of precious space. I recently removed all of the frames and vintage notions within.

 And decided to make this wall a workspace. So all of the above came down. 

I LOVE my studio space and decided to create a similar space in my sewing room. I went to Hobby Lobby and picked up their biggest frames in the clearance section. Then I headed over to Home Depot and had them cut pegboard to fit my new frames. I also picked up a pegboard kit which includes the tools for hanging the frames. 

 And now I'm so excited! I have all of my embroidery floss, currently used patterns, knitting needles, embroidery hoops and more stored on this pegboard. 

 I'm super visual, I love to have all of my supplies on hand and on display. This kind of set up works so well for me. The same goes for my thread. These are actually table top thread displays that I found at Joann's. I simply drilled holes in them and hung them on the wall.

 Keeping this off my sewing table allows me to have so much more space to work. 

 Here's a look at my other pegboard. This one is a lot bigger than the picture shows and it holds so much stuff! I purchased the wire bins as a set from Home Depot along with all of the pegboard hooks. The yellow and metal cans are from Hobby Lobby. Currently, all of their metal containers that are colorful are on super duper sale, check their spring isle. 

The little round containers along the bottom are magnetic spice holders. My mom gave them to me but I feel like you could find those at IKEA or Bed, Bath and Beyond.

Pegboard Porn, y'all. 

 BEFORE! I had fabric everywhere! So much so that the room was very crowded feeling...and not fun to work in. 

 AFTER! I ditched the wire rack and a lot of the fabric that was on it. I kept what I liked and have decided to part with the rest. The giant mirror is from my bedroom which we never used. It allows me to see dresses as I sew them and really opens the room up.

 BEFORE! This is from a "clean out" a couple years ago...here is the AFTER result of that. 

 That time, I didn't really "declutter" as much as I just rearranged. I'm a constant sh**-shoveler, as I like to call myself. All I seem to do is just shovel sh** from one place to another. NO MAS!

 AFTER! This time, I really did declutter! My mom helped me out a lot. What I learned is that having a person help you is key...and it has to be a person who has no ties to the items you are looking to declutter. My mom does not sew or craft so she was all for trashing everything. Don't worry, nothing was trashed...just going in the donation/sale pile.

Love using shoe and sweater holders for scrap fabric, yarn and roving!

 Y'all recall that fabric stash of mine from the photo above? Well, the closet was also filled! My goal was to condense all of my fabric supply to fit in this closet. And I did it!

 I love having my fabric hung as it allows me not to have to root through piles of fabric. It also keeps it less wrinkled. 

There are still some things I'd like to do: make sure curtains, take down the old art you see above me and paint a happy picture...and organize the wire racks and make them more useful. But the bulk of the work is done and I'm so excited! 

DIY: National Donut Day Dress, Part 2

This past Friday was National Donut Day! Because I'm pretty much a crazy person, I decided to create not one but TWO dresses for the occasion (the extremes I will go to to avoid cleaning my house HAS NO BOUNDS, PEOPLE). The first dress I made was an ode to Krispie Kreme. This here dress was dedicated to all the other fabulous donut joints out there! 

I decided to pair my dress with the Donut Hat (er, fascinator?) that I created a couple of years ago at a workshop. I started the dress at about 11:30pm on Thursday night. I'm a total night owl and it gets really out of hand during my summer vacation time!

 I used my easiest dress pattern that I've repeated both here and here. I love this dress pattern because it really just involves to pattern pieces (not including the two straps): the bodice and the skirt! It's a vintage Vogue pattern, number 8571. When looking for vintage patterns, your best bet is eBay or etsy. Using the sewing pattern number makes the search a lot easier. 

I decided to opt out of the waist tie (I did that here) and just wear my big ole pink belt. I did go with a circle skirt (like I did here) which took me a bit longer. I didn't have enough fabric so I had to do some "tasteful additions" to one of the back panels. I'm not telling you which one, I'll let you see if you can figure it out! 

 With the pattern pieces cut the night before, I got up at 7am and started sewing. This dress took me until 11am to complete...not bad, I don't think! Adding pockets and hemming that beast of a circle skirt did slow me down some but I was happy with my time. Then I had to bust it to wear both dresses to all my donut stops!

After hitting Krispie Kreme in my KK dress, where I picked up donuts for our school's custodial staff (and any other takers in the building!), I did a quick change into this number. These photos were shot by me with my self-timer right outside my art room door. Then I was off to Dunkin'!

So it turns out that Dunkin wasn't giving away free donuts...you had to buy a drink before you got a freebie. I bought a dozen donuts from there to take to my school's central office where the big wigs work. I work in a very small school district of just 8 schools and we're like family. It just so happens that they are less than a half mile down the road from Dunkin so it totally worked out. Everyone was so excited to get a donut and see my wild ensemble that it totally made my day. But they didn't eat all the donuts, I still had half a dozen left!

I remembered I had some banking to do which is also just down the road. I popped in there and delivered donuts to those hard workin' folks at the bank. Our bank is next door to our post office, right in downtown Franklin, so I popped in there too and delivered the rest of the donuts. Y'all. Folks were so stinkin' happy and excited...this was such a fun day! Who knew dressing crazy and giving away free sweets was so much fun? I really need to do it more often! 

DIY: National Donut Day Dress, Part 1

Happy National Donut Day! Earlier this week, when I discovered that Donut Day was approaching, I decided it was just the deadline I needed to sew up not one but TWO donut themed dresses. So, there will be not one but TWO Donut Dress posts on this here blog. Do'not even act like you are surprised. This is what happens when I have too much time on my hands! 

 For National Donut Day, Krispie Kreme is giving out one free donut! How super amazing is that. And those folks were working hard at the Kreme when I popped by there today. It was a madhouse! Who knew that folks would go so nuts over donuts?! 

 I've had this fabric in my stash forever...so long that all I can tell you is that I scored it from the thrift store years ago. I decided to pair the small print with a bid and bold polka dot. Two days ago, I started cutting into the fabric...well, the best I could...

 Every time I do, I gotta contend with this. WHY IS THIS A THING, CAT PEOPLE?! The moment she hears that tissue paper on the floor, she comes a running and a sitting. It's hilarious. 

 I decided to do the same dress pattern mashup as I used on this pencil dress but decided to ditch the button. 

 The red dotted fabric was leftover from my superhero dress. This means I actually used fabric already in my stash for this dress...that never happens! 

I have decided that there are three things I hate the most about sewing: 

1. PUTTING IN A SLEEVE. Ugh, I get stabbed at least 50,000 times but the needles holding the sleeve in place as I struggle to get it around the machine. Someone come teach me a magical sleeve sewing trick!

2. HEMMING A CIRCLE SKIRT. Thankfully, I didn't have to do that here. Because I literally feel like I'm pinning and sewing a circle skirt for DAYS...but they are my favorite!

3. PUTTING IN A ZIPPER. It's not that it's hard to put in a zip...it's just that it's usually the final step and it's at the point in dress-making where I just WANNA BE DONE and NEVER SEW AGAIN. So my patience is pretty much extinct. 

 But then I wear the dress and feel all proud and start thinking of the next dress Ima bout to hate making. 

 Look, maw! Matched up backside! 

 Also, POCKETS. All my dresses have them. It's mandatory. 

Stay tuned! I'll have another Donut Dress to share with y'all super soon!

In the Art Room: A Collaborative Painting for Field Day!

Disclaimer: Since discovering Instagram and my love for it, I've gotten super bad about snapping photos with my camera and simply using my phone. So what you have in this blog post are phone photos and for that, I apologize. If you'd like to see me overshare my art room happenings (as well as just my hot mess of a life), you can find me here. 

In my last post, I shared what we did for the art station portion of Field Day...when I thought it was going to be rained out. The night before Field Day, while I was head scratching what we could do, I thought creating a collaborative canvas painting would be fun (this is what happens when your brain is fried, y'all). So I pulled this giant canvas out of my closet and went to town. 

 I've had this canvas for years. I had started a painting on it years ago and never did anything with it. So I simply painted over it with a cream color paint (cuz that's all I had on hand) and used watered down black acrylic paint to create this. Why watered down acrylic? Because it has better viscosity that way. I began by sketching out four wavy lines across the canvas. Then I wrote out the letters of our school. Once I was happy with the placement, I painted it with a flat brush and called it a night. 

 Along with our other painting station, I let the kids go to town on this. My only "rule" was that one color go in one space...and TRY to stay within the lines. As you can see above, that was a struggle. But it was field day, we were wound up and I knew I could lean up the lines by simply going back over them. So no worries. 

 This was after the first day. I was tempted to leave it this way...and then I added the little pattern on the top and thought it would be fun for the kids to add patterns the following day. 

 Again, so sorry for the grainy photo. My only rule for the patterns was that the kids had to pick one pattern and color and stick with it. For the dots, they used wine corks dipped in paint (fave part of the day? A kid saying, "oh my mom has TONS of these!" Ha!) and thin brushes for the designs. Again, other than that, little direction was given. This was on the last day of school where I had free choice centers set up around the room. This just happened to be one of them. 

 Once dry, I went back over the black to once again clean up the edges. Then I thought it might be fun to add some white highlights to make the letters pop. Look, even the edge got painted!

The admin had no idea we were creating this painting. When I was sharing it with them, our school librarian saw it and LOVED IT. It was decided that this painting would go in the library for everyone to see. AND I'm really excited to share that now the librarian and I are collaborating to create an entire ALPHABET WALL in this style! The kids will kick off the new school year painting a canvas for each letter in the alphabet to showcase in the library. Y'all I'm so stoked! This project was so easy, colorful, happy and fun. I'm looking forward to making more. LOVE to hear if you give this a go! 

In the Art Room: A Giant Painting Banner for Field Day!

This past Monday was our school's field day. There was a 90% chance of rain and thunderstorms for the occasion (of course!). I was in charge of the Art Station which was a new thing last year. In the past, I'd always been in charge of the Face Painting Station with parent and student volunteers. Last year, some changes were made and I was given a box of sidewalk chalk and told that was my station. Y'all...I don't know if you've ever sat outside all day in the blazing sun while kids rotate every 15 minutes only to write words like "fart" on the sidewalk and then ask when they can go to the next station but I can easily testify that it is NO BUENO. I decided to do something different this year...

And this was NOT it. My grand idea would have involved being outside (I'm keeping it a secret in hopes that I can make it happen next year!) and Mutha Nature was given me a big fat "no" with those impending storms. So I arrived at school at 6:30 am to start plotting what my Art Station might look like. I created a video to kinda walk you through what we did:

 I already have several "stations" or centers in my art room that the kids are familiar with as they are my Early Finisher Centers. In addition to those centers, I also created two painting stations for the kids to explore. This HUGE banner was one of them and what we created on canvas I will share in an upcoming blog post. 

 These banners are about 18' long. I simply rolled out huge pieces of bulletin board paper, laid it across three tables and went to town with my good ole bingo dauber. I'm about read to retire this set as we've used them a lot this year and the tops have lost their fuzzy marker-ish-ness. But they work so well for big posters!

 As soon as the kids walked in my room from their outside activities (I have an exterior door making it easy for them to come in), I invited them to take a seat on the floor. I was concerned the kids would be bummed that they were inside (cuz, y'all, IT NEVER DID RAIN!) but they actually loved it. 15 minutes in air conditioning with a chance to go to the restroom if needed ended up being a good thing. I told their teachers, who were rotating with them, to take a little break and come back in 15. It was a good moment to relax for everyone. 

Once everyone was seated, I reminded them of their centers choices and talked to them briefly about the banner. Then I released them. 

 I told the kids that they could rotate to a new center if they wanted but first had to leave the old one as they found it...or even better. 

 Painting friends were reminded to slap on an apron as leaning over the giant banner could get paint on clothes.

 I gave no instructions when it came to painting other than be sure and clean your brush between colors. To clean it up a bit, I painted over the whole thing with my black outline and added pops of white once it was dry.

 And now we have two huge banners to decorate the halls when we come back to school in August! I'm so excited as our hallways are usually so sad when we return. 

Have you ever done anything like this? Love to know what you did in your art teacherin' world!

In the Art Room: 2017-18 Art Show, 3D Displays Part 3

Here is the final installment of the 3D tour of our art show. Our school-wide art show features every work of art created by every student. The halls are filled with your 2D pieces (future blog posts on those displays!) while the art room showcases our 3D creations. You can see Part 1 and Part 2 of our art show tour of 3D works. Our art show was Superhero themed (tho you'd never know it by this display) and the kiddos were asked to dress the part. You can read more about that here. 

 My fourth graders stitched up these massive Pizza Pillows this spring and I knew I wanted a fun display for them. I had thought about creating oversized pizza boxes to put them in like we did with these clay pizzas created a couple years ago.

While they look cool, they only are impactful if you are standing right over them. So I got this idea to create a Pie in the Sky display!

I started by painting and hanging one paper panel and pizzas in front of it, just to see how it looked. I immediately loved it and decided to make the whole display this way. 

If you are interested in more details about this project, here's the video I created last summer. In this video, I am creating a variety of pizza plushies. However, for my kiddos, we went bigger. That's really the only difference.

Complete lesson here and here. 

Here's a terrible picture of how I hung the paper. I put a strip of masking tape across the back. Then I created a tab of masking tape by folding a piece of tape in half. From there I used two paperclips linked together. One went thru the tape tab and the other was stabbed into the ceiling tile. 

 To hang the pizzas, I simply used fishing line. I fed the line thru the pizza and hung it also with linked paperclips. To prevent the pizzas from twirling in the wind, I made sure they butted up against the paper so they would not rotate. 

This was definitely a show stopper...and the younger kids were all asking "when are we making THOSE?!" That's when you you know you got a winner!