Mother's Day Sewing Projects

First let me start by saying Happy Mother's Day to all those awesome moms out there. Two moms especially deserve a great big happy mother's day and that's my mom and Jose's mom. They have put up with a lot over the years as well as always been there. Just for fun here's a pic of us with the two of them.

So I have been at my sewing machine again. I am happy to report the yelling and temper tantrums that normally ensue when using my sewing machine have slowly dwindled. There are only a few times now that I have to step away because I am getting frustrated with the good ol' singer. Anyway I just wanted to share with you guys these cute clutches that I made my mother and mother in law for mother's day this year.

It all started with wanting to hand make them something meaningful but use able. Both moms are the type that tell you they need nothing when asking what they want for gifts. So you have to get crafty (in either sense of the word, sneaky or literally crafty). I chose the latter and decided a handmade clutch would be the best option for both of these awesome moms. My Mother in Law already received her clutch. My mom has not so I guess, surprise mom, here's your gift! Anyway once again Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there, hope you had a great one and got to spend lots of time with family.

What did you guys do for mom this year? I would love to hear...

"The SHRED"

So I am at it again, the Shred, that is. I have gone through this on two other occasions and have seen my body do amazing things but convincing my self this time has been hard. I think the difficulty comes from knowing that I have been actively on a "diet" for the past four years. FOUR YEARS! That's a long time to feel restricted and to be actively losing weight.  It all started when Jose proposed and I as most girls turn into this bridezilla that has to lose hundreds of pounds before I will even consider walking down the isle. I did manage to lose twenty pounds before our wedding in 2009 and was told to stop losing weight or my dress would fall off. (it had to be safety pinned to my bra...) Over the next three years I dropped another 20 pounds and have just had this last 15 pounds to go. I know four years sounds like a long time to be trying to lose weight and it is but I took it in stride. I did really well in bursts and then I would get tired of it and binge on french fries and brownies. So I tell you all of this to say that I am going to need a swift kick in the buttocks to get this last 15-20 pounds off and would love any words of encouragement/motivation you would like to throw my way!

What about you guys...anyone been dieting for what seems like forever? What about being in that maintenance phase, any pointers there are appreciated as well?

Long Time No See and a Oopsy

So as usual I have been horrible about posting, but I intend to turn over a new leaf (for real this time). I have a bunch of exciting projects planned for this summer. I have also gotten more into sewing and will hopefully be showing some of those projects very soon as well.

But first just a little mishap in my decorating world. I am almost done decorating our living room to where I would like it to be. Just need to complete a few more projects and hang some pictures on our bare walls and it will be "complete". Until I decide to change it again. Anyway one project that I had finally worked up the courage to tackle was sewing drop cloth slipcovers for the sofa and chair. You see I have been drooling over this Ikea karlstad sectional for months but it's not really in the budget right now so I must improvise. Well on Sunday I finally conquered my fears about dyeing fabric and attempted. This is the part where I would love to say that it went smoothly and I have gorgeous gray fabric just waiting to be sewn.
You see I started with this:

and instead of gorgeous gray fabric I now have this:

a great splotchy mess!
I followed the instructions for HE washing machine dyeing to a tee but I am guessing the dyeing gods were not on my side with this one. Oh well. I have decided that our current navy blue slips are doing a wonderful job and why fix what isn't broken (at least not until we can afford the karlstad sectional.). So I just thought I would share a blunder of mine in this decorating ride that I am on. I am guessing my lesson learned is that sometimes what we already have works just as well as trying to change things.

What about you guys. Anyone have a terrible dye job in their past? Or maybe you are a dyeing diva. I would love to hear about that too.

Sewing Machine+Drop Cloth= Amazing DIY Slip cover

        So in attempts to pick back up on posting things. I recently (read two weeks ago) made a slip cover for the chair in our bedroom. I found the idea on none other than Pinterest (for those of you that know me feel free to insert eye rolling here). I have been spending way too much of my free time house cleaning/ studying time surfing Pinterest. For those of you that have Pinterest I know you understand me when I say that it just sucks you in and you do not realize that three hours have past, (but I do feel super creative when I finally pull myself away...even though I have just been clicking re-pin for three hours.)

      Anyway, Pinterest is not the point of this post, my slip-covering abilities are. In all my surfing of Pinterest the one thing I kept looking for were easy DIY slipcovers. Not just throwing some fabric over a chair and calling it a day but truly slip-covering a chair. You know like the really nice Sure Fit ones you can buy online. Well call me a cheapskate or impatient but I just could not wait/ afford to get a new slip cover for this chair and I did not want to wait until I could save the money (hence impatient). So in my Pinterest time killing I ran across several tutorials that had made slipcovers from none other than Drop-cloths! You know the ones real painters buy to not mess up floors (unlike me who never fails to lightly step in the paint and unknowingly track it through the house). Well I was skeptical at first but I thought what's to lose, they are cheaper than fabric (since I have yet to find a great cheap fabric store around), and worse case scenario they get to be actual drop-cloths for my next painting project. So I am going to attempt to do a tutorial on how I made my drop-cloth slipcovers. 

the chair before

         Well my project started out with a quick trip to Lowe's for the drop-cloths themselves. This was a slightly confusing trip as I forgot to write down what the other person used on her slipcovers. Anyway I confidently guesstimated the amount of fabric needed. And amazingly I had just enough fabric to cover my chair and the ottoman. Once home with my new fabric selections I immediately washed one of the purchased drop cloths. I was secretly wishing I had too much fabric and would be able to return one     (did I mention that I am a cheapskate). So two hours later the drop cloth was clean, dry, and ready for me to begin the slip-covering process. 

This is after the first cut

This is the back view

            To begin I just draped the drop cloth, right side in, over my chair being sure it fell into the seat as well as continuing onto the floor in the front of the chair. In order to hold it in place I just used straight pins and directly pinned it to the chair leaving a 1-2 inch seam allowance. This worked for me since I was not worried about messing up the fabric underneath. Once this was securely pinned to the chair I started cutting. I cut off the excess fabric that was draping over the side of the chair. Now this step I will admit had me nervous I did not want to cut and then have too little fabric or too much fabric left on the chair. So once my hands stopped shaking and the cut was made, I then took the fabric from the cut and started pinning it, right side in, to the back of the chair being sure that it left enough on the ground to hem a finished edge later. I just continued in this manner draping and cutting the fabric until I had the whole chair covered in fabric and pins. Then came the fun/pain in the buttocks part...baste stitching the whole thing together. Baste stitching is just a fancy way of saying a loose stitch, just tight enough to lightly hold the fabric together without pins. Once this was complete I held my breath and took the slipcover off my chair. I do not think I have ever been that gentle with something other than babies in my whole life! Now came the fun part, using the sewing machine. I am a very novice sewer so to me the use of my sewing machine leads to tears, screaming, hitting, and the occasional expletive. However the singer and I got through it and I did a simple straight stitch around all my baste stitches still leaving that 1-2 inch seam allowance. Now I know that most seam allowances are 1/4-1/2 inch but as I said NOVICE sewer here and I wanted to be extra sure I would be able to put this baby back on my chair. 

            Now here came the scary part...putting the slipcover back on my chair! Once I had sewn all the seams, I turned the slipcover back right side out. The with extra care, because I did not have the greatest faith in my stitches I placed the slipcover back on the chair. And would you believe it fit! (and looked half way decent too). I know this has been a super long post but if you managed to hang in here with me you have now seen how easy not horribly stressful it can be to make your own slipcover.

the basting stitches

The almost finished slipcover..I still need to hem the bottom.

         And to make it even better when the hubby came home from work/class that evening he said that the drop cloth slipcover turned out wonderfully and he really liked the color and texture it brings to our bedroom. (well those may be my words but I am sure he said something about liking it better than plain white fabric, you know in a really manly way!) 

             My next attempt is to use the drop-cloths and die them a grayish color to go in our living room over the brown couch and gray/black chair. Have you guys attempted any grand Pinterest projects lately? if so I would love to hear about them. Or are you one of those people I envy and you do not need Pinterest to come up with these ideas. I would love to hear about those too. 

Fighting the Big Red Monster

Okay so Jose and I created this blog in order to chronicle our adventures in home ownership and so far we have fallen behind on actually updating this thing. However this weekend we attempted our first interior big project as homeowners. (We redid the yard a few months ago and I will hopefully post about that soon) We remodeled the bathroom! (emphasis on THE bathroom, as in the only one in the house!) In my head before we started I just knew this was going to end in utter frustration and in a flooded bathroom. We, however, managed to conquer our bathroom remodel with only minimal flooding and frustration.

For those wondering why we would need to remodel our bathroom here is a before picture:

I do not know about you guys but that red was just not going with our mission of beachy and relaxing.

You cannot see it very well in the picture but the pedestal sink was also not very handy for storage or even both of us getting ready. So we decided to rip out the sink to opt for a more space saving option with storage. We also replaced the toilet for a more eco-friendly and more manly version. And of course we painted the walls!

So we started by hoping we could just rip out the sink carefully in order to sell it or donate it, since we like to reduce, reuse, and recycle when we can. However the sink had different plans. Apparently the previous owners had gotten a little over zealous with attaching the faucet and the only way to remove the pedestal was to break the sink. So break away we did, with a hatchet none the less. The pedestal decided as we were removing the sink to come crashing down onto my leg. (so there was my battle scar for the bathroom remodel) After removing the sink we removed the old not eco-friendly, and kinda grungy toilet. We then primed over the entire red bathroom in order to put our new milder paint color on. This is what our bathroom looked like at the demolition stage:

As you can see the toilet was really grungy, no amount of cleaner was getting that job done!

Anyway our next step was to start putting our new color on the walls. We chose Valspars Neon Mint for the new wall color. The fun (and I mean sarcastic fun) part of this was it had to be done by flashlight because our bathroom only had one light that had to be removed for painting purposes. All in all however it turned out pretty well without being able to see perfectly.

During our paint drying imposed waiting times we began assembling our vanity and medicine cabinet (I thank God for Ikea and their small space solutions but there was lots of assembly required.)

This is me almost done with assembling everything (please excuse the messy living room, it became our workstation for three days)

The next step was to put it all back together again as quickly as possible (a very important step seeing as how this is the only bathroom in our house). This step proved to be much easier than demolition and painting. We only ran into a few hang ups, such as the Ikea sink and vanity not quite matching up plumbing wise to the old sinks pipes. A quick trip to Lowe's fixed this problem.

Without further adieu here is our new clean spa like bathroom. I love it so much I could almost sleep in there!

Well I hope you enjoyed seeing our bathroom remodel. We couldn't be happier with it!

Jose wanted me to insert that our toilet is man-approved (since he picked it out it better be)