Collecting Things.

There's something so comforting about collecting things.  I've gone through phases of collection items.  I used to collect rocks when I was a kid, and I had a hand-painted, smelly egg carton to put them in.  Then I started a key collection of old, useless, rusty keys.  Soon I switched to buying skeins and skeins of yarn of all kinds:  Fluffy, fuzzy, furry, stringy, barf-colored variegated, neon pink, scintillating green.  It was a disease.

Then there's my obsession with all things paper.  I keep every note I've ever been written, and I have this thing about writing notes to people and never actually giving it to them.  I also just love types, weights, colors, and textures of paper.

But my new collection obsession is fabric. The problem I have now is that I've been slowly buying more and more without actually using it up.  I have visions for them all, but with all of my schoolwork and work work, I have to keep pushing it off until I get some free time.  I keep all of my newest fabric piles in a stack on my desk so I can smile at them while I'm doing homework late into the night.  Somehow something silly and small like this just helps make doing all of the hard stuff that much nicer.  There's just something about the aesthetics and personality and imperfections about making stuff for yourself or for others that makes this world unarguably better.  And that's why I love collecting things.

Collecting anything is soothing and such a commonly-shared human trait.  It's when you collect something too specific and odd that gets you into trouble.  A hair from every girl you've ever dated?  That's weird.  Probably anything that is from the body is a little different to collect.  Not that I'm saying you shouldn't collect spleens if that's your thing....Do what you need to do, I think.  This is venturing into some weird territory, now.

Anyway,  I bought these lovely new fabrics recently:

And these ones:



A lot of them are connoted with particular people because I have them in mind when I'm shopping for fabrics and thinking of presents I'll eventually get to making when I have the time.

And I used a small plastic storage tote to store my fabrics, which works out so nicely.  I'm kind of loving the look of them all together.  Plus, seeing them all like this makes me realize that I need to slow down on the purchasing.  At least I don't really care about clothes or anything else.  This and N64 games lately dominate the spending habits of late. 

What do you collect?  

Reupholstery Tutorial: Part II.

This weekend I was finally able to finish up that office chair reupholstery project that I started last week.  It's kind of made me want to reupholster every piece of furniture in my house.
Here is the second part of the reuphosltery tutorial which includes redoing the seat cushion and finishing up all of the chair's details.  In case you missed it, the first tutorial is here. 

Let's get started!

Reupholstery Tutorial: Part I.

When I was 13 or so, I picked out an office chair with wheels for my brand new desk.  It was a bold aqua color.  At least, I think this color is aqua...Whenever there is some combination of blue and green, I don't ever know how to define it.  I mean, I know a handful of terms that define a mixture of the two colors: cerulean, teal, turquoise, blue-green, green-blue, aquamarine, aqua, seafoam, etc. But, I'm lost when it comes to the actual concentration of blue and green in each of these colors.  Is this just me?  I think we need a scale like the one in all science books for wave sizes (infrared, radio, x-ray...).
Regardless of its actual color, this chair has gotten pretty dirty.  And, since I painted my room "Avocado", it's a blaring clash of colors.  So, I decided to reupholster it.  There are some great reupholstery (or upholstery, I think it's just common to add the prefix re- in front if it's not the first upholstery for this object) tutorials out there including these ones: here and here.  Every furniture item is going to be constructed differently, so all you can really do is take the essential ideas and apply them to your own!
Here is my own reupholstery tutorial for an office chair!  Enjoy!

Introductory Piecing.

I recently went purchasing (as we now call "shopping with a purpose") at an admittedly adorable store in Gardner Village: Pine Needles.  It's a fabric, quilting, and embroidery store and it was setup in such a way that it felt like every nook and cranny you looked in you'd find more piles and baskets of fabric.  I kind of felt like hugging every piece of fabric in there.  Somehow, I managed to only buy half of the store and frankly, I'm pretty surprised that I've never heard of this place before for fabrics.  Any ideas?  I've only been to large chain retailers before like Hobby Lobby and Joann, so I don't exactly have the widest range of experience here, but this place was unbelievable. 

With the help of Google and lovely internet bloggers who post free tutorials, I decided to learn a little bit of quilting and piecing and paper piecing techniques and freezer paper techniques.  About 15 youtube videos later, I decided to go for a simple geometric design (I love engineering paper for this stuff).  The plan was to measure out the pieces directly onto the fabric, until I arrived at an SAS (side-angle-side) problem.  And for those of you who remember your Laws of cosines from trigonometry, good for you.  I know I could have looked it up on google, but since I had already done a bunch of right triangle trig, and it's Fall Break, and it's just 5 pieces for a simple block, I got lazy and just cut pieces out of paper and pinned them onto my fabric. 

So, I picked the fabrics out for a good friend of mine whom I am making a project for.  My first experience with piecing turned out not to be a huge disaster. 

All in all, life is good.