Saturday, March 13, 2010

Loopty Lu and her Crafty Corner

Anyone that knows me well enough is aware that I do love me some crafting! My friends and family have been feeding the fire by contributing to my addiction to the lovely JoAnne Fabrics with gift cards, large sewing reference text books (I call it the Bible) and subscriptions to DIY magazines this past Christmas and Valentine's Birthday. I know and LOVE how nerdy it is and all the possibilities that I can do with something so small as a button. And now that I have introduced myself to the blogging world, I have decided to welcome you into my craft room at home. I thought it would give me a chance to get my ideas in order and put them out there in hopes to inspire someone else as I'm always finding my inspiration elsewhere.

So to get my 'Crafty Corner' going, I'm setting this up as a post and not it's own section just yet because I'm still so new at this. I haven't quite figured out where and how I create this corner I speak of. So I guess this is a craft post AND a cry out to anyone that may have some suggestions for me. I'd really like to make a separate home for my craft projects and inspirations on our blog because I think and hope that my projects will continue to build and take over! With that said, I'm planning on needing some more space. So bear with me as I continue to build that portion of the blog and again, I invite anyone to help me out with suggestions from the blogger gurus out there.

For now, here is a little something that I would like to share as I was quite proud of the final product.

Before Christmas 2009, I decided to finally take the plunge and purchase my own sewing machine. So I asked my MN Aunt (sewing guru) to help me out with what brands to search for and what to walk away from. In the end, in keeping with my budget, since these lil guys don't come cheap I learned, I bought my very own Brother: Innov-is Project Runway Limited Edition sewing machine. Now for those of you that do NOT follow Project Runway, now airing on Lifetime, shame on you, but there is time for you to catch up! I didn't plan on bringing home the goods with Project Runway printed in pink all over it, BUT it does kinda make me smile and remind myself... "You're a nerd, Lauren."

My very first sewing project was going to be small and something that I could figure out on my own as I was so eager to get that needle going, but I ran into a small issue. No fabric to work with that night and I wasn't about to wait for the next evening to arrive after a long day at work. So I ran down to my "donation" pile of clothes that I had been collecting down in the basement and low and behold, I found a few beautiful, but shrunken sweaters. They were in such great shape, just not size so I ended up cutting them up and....



...voila! Sweater Throw Pillows! My favorite part about the final project is the GAP tag (R pillow) and Abercrombie Moose tag (not shown, on L pillow) I saved and sewed it in as a design element. Silly, but a reminder that they were sweaters at one point. The button you see on the left was from a button collection that my MN Aunt had been holding on to until I started drooling over them one day and she told me I could "Have at it!" I tried to keep the original seam at the bottom of the sweater on the L pillow and just ran a stitch right threw the bottom without turning it inside out to keep the original look.


And here's the best part about my nerdy project... I later found this couch display in Pottery Barn's February 2010 issue. Buttons on pillows! Needless to say I came up with this little ditty back in December of 2009, so who's nerdy now, huh?



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