Creatively Tinkering

 Today I snagged a bit of time to do something I'd been wanting to try for a long time! In fact I have an entire Pinterest board dedicated to ideas for repurposing/refashioning old or dated clothing. Luckily this particular project was SUPER easy and only took about an hour or two, I may have a had a little helper that was mildly distracting. She's such a good helper :-p  I've had an Old Dominion University crewneck sweatshirt kicking around for some time now and wanted to find someway to make it fun to wear. Low and behold there was a pin on my Refashioned Clothing board that was perfect for the challenge. Below is my inspiration: 17 Cheap Ways to Make Your Sweatshirts Cute AF Here's a photo of the back of the sweatshirt I started with, I was so excited to get started I forgot to take a picture of the front (womp womp). I began by finding the center of the sweatshirt and then cut that lovely line right up the back but stopped about 2-3 inches before ...

*disclaimer: I am not affiliated/sponsored by Twig and Tale*  Recently I made an adorable little puppy vest for a friend's little girl who just turned 1 year old. This vest is from a pattern made by Twig and Tale , its from their Wild Things collection. It is actually a fairly simple pattern and is pretty easy to make. The best part about the pattern for me is the variety of ways it can be used. It comes with instructions that show the many different ways that the pieces can be assembled to make quite a few styles of vest. Granted my favorite way to use the pattern is to make the adorable animal vests.  Vest all cut out and ready to sew together  The patterns are great because they come with a ton of sizes and can be printed out with the specific size you have in mind. This makes it so much easier than the traditional patterns one gets at the fabric store that are sold in size increments and are on tissue paper. Also the instructions are easy to follow and I...

Ahh this house, it's one of the big reasons I failed to get a blog up last week (other reasons include being a mom, working part time, and trying to maintain a work out schedule). It is my hope that I can utilize this blog to help inspire me to come up/follow thru with design/organization ideas for the house. When we moved in, a year and a half ago, we were filled with so much hope. Hope for the new baby that would soon arrive and hope to turn this house into our home. While the baby has provided endless fun and excitement the house has proven to be a stress inducing headache. There was/is so much wrong with this house, it is a fixer upper after all. We knew that going in but as any fixer upper is wont to do it has shown us to be more of a fixer upper than we thought it to originally be. Because of this my feelings toward this house change regularly and rapidly throughout the day. Honestly we need a fairy god-contractor to come save us, looking at you Property Brothers. Luckily a...

This will be short and sweet as I am on a family weekend get away. Lately I have really been wanting to do a crochet project but I've had this dog sweater project waiting in the wings FOREVER. It was a project my mom asked me to make for one of my parents' dogs. But every time I tried to make it I got confused by the way the pattern read and would give up. Lucky for me this week I was finally able to find a video tutorial on You Tube for the patteren. So now I am able to make some headway and make this adorable sweater for my dad's dog. Here's a link to the video:  https://youtu.be/YTJrFqoslaI And here's the work in progress: I am looking forward to finishing this so that I can start on a crochet project for myself.

Oooo first project post!! It was a very cold, very wet, and very dreary day two weekends ago. So instead of doing chores, because honestly who wants to do that, I decided to finally put together a Tee-Pee tent project for our daughter that I had been slowly cutting out through the week. The idea for this project was inspired by some friends of ours who have a cute tee-pee tent for their 2 year old son. We were visiting with them one evening and our little lady thought that his tent was so COOL! So of course I immediately started to ponder, "how hard could that be to make?". Off to Pinterest I went where I found a plethora of DIY instructions for making a tee-pee style tent. I came across an image that just showed simple measurements for the panels for the tee-pee and followed it to:  The Reinvented Housewife . Her directions were easy to follow and it took me about 3-4 hours to sew it all together (note: that does not include the time to cut it out, which was probably a...

Well it's been a long time... a very long time. But here I am, making a new attempt at blogging. In the last two years since my last post my life has had a lot of change, so lets do a little catching up. In the two years since my last post: The hubby and I decided to move out of our townhouse. We learned I was pregnant. We technically moved twice, we lived with friends while selling the townhouse, then moved into our new (fixer upper) home. (More on this later...) Our baby girl entered our world in Sept 2016 (a month after we moved into our new home). I got a new part time job Now that list is definitely the cliff notes version, but if I went into detail about everything, it would make for a TLDR style post. Anyway I am going to try my hand at this blogging thing again. I'm hoping to use it as a way to share creative projects, a place to come to terms with our fixer upper home, and help to reconnect me with my creativity as I feel I have allowed it to be shoved...

 Hey all!! Its the beginning of a new year (granted we're two weeks into the new year), time for new adventures and crafty projects. This month I might just stick to crocheting as my Crochet pinterest board is collecting lots of fun things to make. Back in December, I made two infinity scarves and a slouchy hat out of pretty yarn I acquired at yarn stores. So far this month I've started an earwarmer headband for my husband, made a scarf and another hat. But I'd like to try and make something maybe a bit more challenging, such as a sweater. Here are the following projects I'd like to try and make, let's call it a wish list: http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/relaxed-half-sweater-wrap--katniss--hunger-games http://www.lanagrossa.com/service/mdm/09_2010/index.html http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/gamer-jacket http://www.yarnspirations.com/patterns/tweed-under-wraps.html http://missneriss.com/2015/04/30/peek-a-boo-wrap-pattern/ http://www.ravel...

 Just thought I'd share some fun nail art for the holidays. Nail art is something that allows me to quell my creative desires when I don't have the time or the energy to start a more involved project. Granted depending on the complexity of the design, it could take a significant amount of time to do the nail art. However I find the process to be soothing and the outcome to be totally worth the time put into it. Anyway I was looking for something fun and Christmasy to do on my nails, after perusing my Funky and Fun Nail DIY board on pinterest I ended up combining elements from a couple different inspirations for my nails (check out my pinterest boards here: https://www.pinterest.com/Cr8tivelyTinker/ ). It also helped that my mother in law recently got me a gift set of OPI nail polish in many different colors. Can I just say, I'm in nail polish heaven right now! Here are the nail looks that inspired me, all of these were found on pinterest and can be seen on my Funky and Fu...

 Well hey there! Long time no see or, in this case, write. Its been nearly 3 months since my 'woes me' post about adulting getting in my creative way. While I really and truly want to make this blog thing work, I think I needed the time that I didn't spend on it to regroup myself. Truth is its very easy for me to put WAY too much on my plate. So since that post a plan/schedule has come to fruition in order to allay my fears of not getting all the things done. Whether those things happen to be housekeeping, exercising, gaming or crafting. Its been a subtle and gradual change but so far it seems to be working. That skirt I cut out, what feels like months ago, is very nearly done. Its a shame though, because I didn't think to take photos of the process. Mostly because it was such a pleasure to be making something in that moment.  Now it was mentioned in the last post that pictures had been taken of some nail art I had done as well as some peach cobbler that I had made. Af...

 Well its been almost two months since last I posted. Yeah, so much for that trickle of blog posts, it turned into more of a dead stop. That has a great deal with the fact that being an adult is wickedly time consuming, especially if you're an adult with a 40 hour work week. Add to that the incessant and nagging voice of my inner adult telling me to do my household chores before I do fun things and the fact that my job sucks out what little motivation I may have had to even perform my adulting duties when I get home.  Its been a bit rough for me the past two months if you can't tell. Been having lots of trouble working out time management. There is just sooo much I want to do, and what feels like so little time to do it. Its a struggle to work on making time for everything, but at least its a work in progress. It is starting to get a bit better though. A lot of my issue stems from needing to make myself a schedule to do all the things I want to do. Granted this kind of works ...

 It is done! It took two weekends but the cleaning and reorganization of my sewing/craft room is finished. Let's start with the status of the closet. As you know it was a hot mess of crazy and inefficiency. In my previous post I only managed to get it part way done because a few more storage supplies were needed. After a trip to Target, more storage bins were acquired and organizing began again. Take a look at the before and after photos below: Before Midway through process After  At the beginning there was a terrible mess in my closet, midway through it was looking better and the finished look is fantastic! The Pinterest idea of using 5 tiered pant hangers works so well for me (you can see it in this post: I heart Organizing ). Now all the fabric I have is visible, tagged with the length and width of the fabric and its all easily accessible. Which of course made me want to immediately start working on projects. But I reigned myself in...

 So this weekend I finally got a chance to start in on the crazy that is my sewing/craft room. Below you'll find some before pictures that show off the sorry state my room is in. I'm not sure how or when my sewing/craft room got like this, but I'm relatively sure it correlates with when I started doing conventions. The methods employed for maintaining organization worked for my occasional projects here and there, but then more supplies, fabric and notions started filling every nook and cranny whenever there was a convention to prep for. Before I knew it I was inundated with a whole mess of stuff. My cubby shelf that needs some work. View from the open door. My sewing/crafting table.  From the pictures its a little hard to get an idea of the size of the room, let me just say that it is not big. I don't know the exact measurements, never bothered to measure or ask the hubby what size the room was. Just to give you an idea though, the cubbie shelf you see...

 With Awesome Con done and no other Cons coming up its time for me to sort out my priorities. My sewing/craft room is currently in rough shape due to the piles of scrap and project fabric that have been accumulating. Also there is a desperate need for better storage and organization in there, no joke it kind of looks like a tornado went through that room. Lucky me there's the oh so addicting site that most everyone knows about, Pinterest. Through Pinterest I have found quite a few pins for sewing/craft room organization that I plan to put in to use in my little room. There will probably be a post involving the reorganization and which pins helped out or worked the best for my small space. Then there is the fact that I feel I've strayed from my creatively tinkering ways, what with getting hyper focused on making convention specific items. So while reorganizing is a high priority so is diversifying and expanding on the things that are posted in my Etsy shop. Aside from the reor...

 Wow, so apparently the last time I made a blog post was for MAGFest 2014! I am truly sorry about that, let me try to fill in the time missed and bring everything to the present. After MAGFest 2014 Donna and I had a booth at AwesomeCon in DC. Sadly I didn't plan well and did not have too many new items for the con but it was still a fun convention. Made more fun by the fact that I was able to get a picture taken with Sean Astin, sadly in my photo I had super crazy fan girl cheese face. Check it out below :   One month after Awesome Con 2014 I got married <3 Our wedding was so wonderfully beautiful, surrounded by family and friends. We got married on the beach with our toes in the sand and had a reception overlooking the water at a wonderful restaurant called One Fish Two Fish (if you're ever in Virginia Beach, I highly recommend checking it out). After all the wedding excitement died down, I began prepping for Video Games United (VGU) , which was an interesting experien...