Cross Stitching Fun

When a couple of friends and I were planning to get together, one friend suggested taking a class—like cross stitching. She sent a link to the class, and my other friend’s response was, “$60! For $60 each, we could get all the supplies and make our own class.” And that’s what we ended up doing.

One friend got some Aida fabric and embroidery floss from a thrift store. And when we met up, we went to a craft store to get extra supplies (just some hoops and needles). The grand total for everything was about $7 a piece.

I picked up a couple of cross stitching books from the library, and we followed their straightforward directions. And after a couple of early mistakes, we all got into the rhythm of cross stitching. It has to be one of the simplest crafts to do. I knew nothing, and after about 10 minutes, I was stitching right along.

My friends picked a couple of images online to replicate. I just picked these classic video game characters from one of the cross stitching books I had. Truthfully, I didn’t really care too much about what I was making, I just wanted to learn how to cross stitch doing something fairly easy. I followed the pattern to a point; I did alter some of the characters so they would align more vertically and horizontally.

It did take a good amount of time to finish, but I finished it over the course of a week. I liked cross stitching—it was very relaxing. The only downside is I’m not sure what to do with the finished cross stitch…I’ll have to think about it. But I think this might be a craft that sticks. It was pretty fun and creative and very low stress.

Vanilla for Christmas

This year I made vanilla for Christmas gifts. Since vanilla is super easy to make (just putting vanilla bean and vodka in a bottle), the packaging took the most time (and truthfully, I didn’t spend that much time doing it either). I kept it pretty simple. I just made a tag that said the ingredients and when it was bottled. And a label that said what it was—vanilla. I have yet to try it…so I hope it tastes okay.

Work Series: A Good Coworker is Someone Who Makes My Life Easier

Creamy Gochujang Pasta

I like to cook…mostly because I like to eat. But I’m a recipe follower, not a recipe creator. On the rare occasion I try to “whip something up,” I’m generally left dissatisfied by the results. However, this time I created something that I actually liked: Creamy Gochujang Pasta.

Some months ago I saw a pasta recipe online that used gochujang with milk and cheese (and a list of other ingredients), and while I didn’t make it, it did sound good to me. And the idea stayed in my brain…which brings me to yogurt.

While I can eat yogurt, I don’t particularly enjoy it—I’d rather just cook with it. I had bought a container of yogurt for a specific recipe, but had quite a bit left over and I didn’t know what to do with it. I recalled that cheesy gochujang pasta and thought I could just substitute the milk with yogurt to create a creamy sauce. So I did, and I liked it. It’s a quick recipe and takes about fifteen minutes to do.

CREAMY GOCHUJANG PASTA
1 serving

Ingredients
1 bacon strip
1 tbsp gochujang
1/8 tsp ground ginger
1/8 tsp ground garlic
2 tbsp water
¼ cup chopped kimchi
1 tbsp whole milk plain yogurt
1 serving angel hair pasta

— 1 —
In a nonstick frying pan, fry bacon. Once bacon is cooked, remove bacon from the pan and place on a paper towel to drain the excess grease. Keep the bacon grease in pan.

Once cool, break bacon into pieces.

— 2 —
Meanwhile, cook pasta according to directions. And drain pasta once cooked.

— 3 —
Add the water, gochujang, ground ginger, ground garlic and kimchi to the pan with the bacon grease. Over low heat, stir to combine.

— 4 —
Add the yogurt to the pan and stir to combine with the sauce. Add pasta to the pan and stir until coated with the sauce.

— 5 —
Place pasta on a plate and top with bacon pieces. Serve immediately.

Variation: Cheese
I also tried this replacing the bacon with cheese—mozzarella or cheddar works well. Cut a slice of cheese into 16 squares. In Step 5, once the sauce coats the pasta, add the cheese squares. Stir to combine as the cheese melts. Serve immediately.

Simple Red Dress

I wanted to sew something easy, so I picked this dress pattern. I decided on creating the shorter version of the pattern, but it still required a good amount of fabric. Looking over my fabric stash, I chose a red textured fabric that I had bought a long time ago. It wasn’t a fabric I loved, so I thought it would be a good test for sewing this pattern for the first time.

I tried to alter the pattern beforehand because I thought my measurements didn’t quite coincide with the envelope sizing. However, I tend to like my garments to have less ease than the envelope sizing, so in the end, I had to undo that pattern alteration because the garment was looser than I wanted. So that added some unnecessary time to my sewing.

Other than that, sewing this dress was fairly quick as there weren’t any complicated sewing steps. In the end, I quite liked my dress. I wanted a red dress (but I never seem to find one I like when I’m thrift shopping), so it was nice to make something that I wanted. I like the simple cut of this dress—which makes it quite versatile.

Navy Pullover Dress

I wanted to sew something easy with very little effort on my part, so I chose this simple dress pattern from 1981. It’s just about the easiest dress I can make: a pullover dress with an elastic waistband.

Learning from my many previous mistakes, I measured the pattern first to see if there were any glaring size issues that might screw me over later. And I’m glad I did, because the top portion was going to be too long on me. My torso isn’t so long, so I always have to shorten dress patterns, and I did so before cutting out my material (this time).

For this dress, I chose a navy with white polyester fabric that I thought would drape well. Sewing this dress was a very smooth process. Although it was a new pattern for me, I didn’t run into any problems (as it was somewhat similar to the Comfy Gray Dress I made recently). Everything was pretty clear cut. I think if I really tried, I could have done finished this dress in a weekend, but instead I doled it out over two weekends.

I’m satisfied with the finished dress. It’s super simple and comfortable, and it’s my beloved navy color. The one negative thing is this pattern didn’t have pockets and I didn’t add them in, and I have to say: I miss pockets! If I make this dress again I think I’m going to add pockets because I love pockets.

To add a bit of interest to this basic dress, I used my thrifted navy and white belt that I bought recently. Because the belt is quite long, I tied it in a way that allows it to be fitted on my waist.

First, I used the belt normally, putting the end through the first and second loop.

The end of the belt is quite long, so I threaded it through the first loop again, and then tucked it underneath the belt.

Then I twisted the belt around so that the metal pieces are on my back. Done.

Comfy Gray Dress

I felt like sewing something that wasn’t going to be too hard, so I chose this easy pattern from the 1980s. It’s a pullover dress with an elastic waistband, and because of its looser fit, it’s more forgiving of my sewing abilities.

There weren’t too many pieces to this dress, but it still took me some time to sew and alter. [Shakes head in disapproval.] I keep forgetting to measure the sewing pieces first so see how large things are before I cut and sew it together. [Sigh.] I thought I was pretty close to the sizing on the pattern envelope, but maybe I was wrong or maybe I just like things to be more fitted than they’re intended to be.

I was swimming in this dress. I couldn’t believe that the waistline was sitting on my hips. I had to shorten the waistline on the top by about 2.5 inches and bring the shoulders in about an inch on each side. So through belated trial and error, I fixed the fit and sewed the dress.

I also had to refresh my brain on a few things since it’d been a while since I’d last done it. Like I did a blind hem on the skirt, which is a much cleaner finish than I can do by hand, but it took some time and practice to do. Or putting in buttonholes, which isn’t hard (with my buttonhole foot), but I still had to recall how to do it.

This dress was fairly straightforward to make. The one thing I’d never done was creating two buttonholes for a single button. I thought this was a pretty interesting solution on the cuff; it makes it more fitted and allows the button to be seen, but I didn’t have to create a more complicated cuff that’s generally found on a traditional button-down shirt.

Although it wasn’t part of the pattern, I decided to sew a sash as well because I think it’s a nice option to have (if I don’t feel like wearing a belt). Overall I’m pretty satisfied with this dress. It probably took about a month to sew (since it was mostly just sewed for a few hours on weekends), and it didn’t cost much [maybe around $5 for the fabric (from an estate sale), thread, elastic and buttons]. It’s a very comfortable dress and it has pockets (which is always a plus in my book).

Super Simple Shirt

A while back I got this very simple top pattern from 1991 at a thrift shop. It looks like a loose T-shirt (except not made with jersey). Looking at the drawings of the shirt, I knew it was going to be voluminous and ill-fitting (since much from that time period seemed to be over-sized). However, since it had kimono sleeves, I thought it would be an easy pattern to alter.

The shirt looked too long and too wide; I decided to trace the uncut pattern onto Swedish tracing paper so I could alter it. I traced the pattern as-is and made marks to indicate how much I wanted to shorten it. That was the only change I made before cutting out my fabric. I knew it was going to be too wide on me, but it was hard for me to visualize by how much so I left the shirt with its original width.

I sewed the front and back pieces together, sewed the neckline and then sewed the sides together—and the shirt was way too big. Not truly shocking. The length was okay, but the width was huge on me. So I sewed in each side by a couple of inches, and cut off about four inches off the length of the sleeves. I’ll admit, I wasn’t quite as precise as I could have been (as I sadly realized as I hemmed the sleeves that one sleeve’s circumference was about an inch less than the other’s). [Sigh.] However, the overall fit was better than it had been before.

This purple shirt is not perfect, although I don’t think it’s horribly noticeable. I like the color and I think it’ll be good for warmer weather. It’s an easy shirt and didn’t take long to make—two afternoons (since I’m not a fast sewer and was fixing things as I went along).

About a week later, I decided to sew this shirt again with a blue and white patterned fabric. I used my altered Swedish tracing paper pattern of the shirt, and this time it took a lot less time to sew. This may become a pattern I sew often because it’s just so easy and quick to do.

Simple Pleated Skirt

Not long ago I picked up some blue fabric and a vintage pattern, Simplicity 2433, from a thrift shop, and I used them to create my new skirt. I used this pattern as a starting point, and changed things according to what made sense to me.

I think the skirt portion of this pattern is the simplest thing ever—it’s just a rectangle that is pleated across the top of it. That’s really the only part I used from this pattern. I used a waistband from another skirt (since this pattern had a very narrow waistband and I prefer a thicker one). I also used a zipper instead of snaps as the main closure.
 

And finally, I decided to use a button (instead of an eye and hook) for the closure at the waistband. I thought this would be a good project to finally use a button. I chose a simple plastic button from my jar of buttons I got at a thrift shop. 

Painted Umbrae Card

I created this simple thank you card with some paint I happened to have on hand. I used a sky blue, colbalt blue and black (which I combined with the cobalt blue to create navy). I just used a paintbrush to layer the colors onto the paper, starting from the lightest color to the darkest color to create an umbrae effect.

At first I thought I could just paint the paper (that was already cut down to a greeting card size) and then I would be finished. But the paper I was using just wasn’t strong enough to hold up to the wetness factor of paint and water. The paper started to curl on the ends and paint seeped onto the other side of the paper (which wasn’t very attractive).

So instead, after I let the paint dry, I cut the painted sheet to the size I wanted. In this case, the greeting card itself (which I just made myself) is 5.5 inches wide and 4.25 inches high, and I cut the painted section to 5.5 inches wide and 3.5 inches high. I used double-sided permanent tape to stick the painted paper to the card, and then in wrote “Thank you” in pen. And it was done.

Label Me

I keep more stuff than I ought to because I often see an item’s “potential”. I generally look at something and think, “I can use this in some way…someday” [although, to be honest I usually don’t get around to using those items any time soon and they just sit around waiting to be used. (Sigh.)] But I finally got around to using some spice jars that had been accumulating.

There are basically two ways to buy spices: in prepackaged bottles or in bulk. I have bought prepackaged spice jars, in part because of the options available in a store and in part because of convenience. There are plastic bottles and glass ones, and while I’ve bought both in the past, I like the glass ones and tend to keep them. Since I’ve accumulated some glass jars, I now feel more apt to get spices from the bulk section of a supermarket that I can refill my jars with.

So I washed my old spice jars out and removed the labels. Then I used a piece of black linen tape as my base (to create a border) and placed a white piece of artist tape (with the name already written on it) on top of it. I think I should be able to remove the white tape if I need to re-label the jar (or at the very least I could just put another piece of tape on top of it).

Besides using empty spice jars for spices, they’re good for holding other small items, like paper clips, tacks and beads—pretty much anything small or sharp that you want to keep a lid on.

DIY: Tiered Paper Fan Flower Ornament

This tiered ornament is based upon the Paper Fan Flower Ornament and can be used as Christmas ornaments or as party decorations.

DIY: Paper Fan Flower Ornament

This ornament is based upon the Paper Fan Flower I created for packaging decoration. It’s simple and can add a pop of color as a Christmas tree ornament or as party decorations hung on the wall or hung from the ceiling.

DIY: Glitter Christmas Ornament

Used gift cards are made of a sturdy material so they’re a good base for glue and glitter. This is a simple and inexpensive Christmas ornament to make and I think the glitter helps make it feel quite festive.

DIY: Paper Circle Christmas Ornament

I realize that Christmas is still somewhat far off (and I know have complained before about how early Christmas paraphernalia starts showing up in stores), but I’ve decided to post a Christmas project anyway (because sometimes you can’t control when you have ideas).

This is a very simple flat circle paper ornament that’s easy to make and easy to personalize.

DIY: Spiral Wire Necklace

Looking at a spiral notebook one morning, I thought the spiral metal rings created interesting shapes that I could create jewelry with.

DIY: Hex Nut Beads

I thought I create jewelry using hex nuts as beads. The easiest way is just to use the hex nuts as is and not paint them, but paint them if you want a pop of color.

DIY: Wire Rope Necklace

While at a hardware store I came across some wire rope that I thought was an interesting material and thought I could create jewelry with it.

I got 10 feet of 1/16 inch size wire rope at 26 cents a foot to experiment with. Regular cutters didn’t work on this wire rope, so I had to get special wire rope cutters (which weren’t particularly cheap), but they cut through the wire rope easily.

Fun With Decorative Tape

Buying crafty items on a whim that I might use “someday” is not uncommon for me. I try to resist, but sometimes I think something is interesting and just want it. That’s how I happened to buy a set of decorative tape with different number designs on it; I bought it over a year ago and it just sat in a drawer unused until I finally got around to using it.

Infinity Scarf

I can’t seem to help but buy fabric. Even though I know I don’t need it or even have a plan for it, I want it. The only plan I have is to use it…someday. I keep collecting fabric, which is a problem as I have little room for the fabric I have, let alone any new fabrics I might pick up. It’s just that there are so many pretty fabrics out there and I have a desire to use them, the only problem is I can’t seem to sew fast enough to use them all in a timely manner.