Cozy Sweater Pillow

I love my living room, even if it is a constant hodge-podge of chaos. It's the one place where our tiny apartment feels like a house and is mostly coordinated. It's where the hubs and I had furniture that matched each others when we blended our little families last summer. Grad school is teaching me to be patient and appreciate what I have now rather than being on a quest for all new things. Except boots, but that is another story.

Despite the fact that I'm pretty happy with the room, it feels like we're swimming in a sea of neutrals, which I think I'm over. I need some color in my life, especially as the winter rains start to kick in and the only color I'll see outside for months is gray.

The hubs really likes blue and so despite my own aversion to it, I snagged this pillow on clearance at Target a couple weeks ago. I like the print and that it isn't beige, but it just seems a little lonely and plain on it's own. After dreaming up all sorts of color combinations that didn't quite feel right, I realized we both like orange and an idea was born. Then I hit the thrift store, found an old sweater, and the idea was realized. Don't you just love when that happens?

Now, I just have to say that blue and orange has been my least favorite color combination of all time. I blame it on my 7th grade English teacher who was in love with John Elway and taught us grammar using sentences about the Denver Broncos. Imagine my surprise when blue/rusty orange was the first color palette to get my heart all a-flutter for this room.

Now, there are a million ways to do this, and most of it comes down to the sweater you are working with. I'll show you what I did, but this is very much a do-what-your-gut-tells-ya kind of project. I planned on covering a 16" pillow form so at the thrift store I carried a measuring tape to be sure whatever I found would actually be big enough. True to form, the one I really liked was not big enough, but it had a lot of stretch in the weave so I bought it anyway.

After snipping it up the sides and removing the sleeves, I started pinning.

The ribbed detail made it really easy to sew a straight line, so I picked which rib I was going to sew along and matched it up with the corresponding rib on the back piece. I just pinned them together but didn't cut it yet.

After pinning the sides I measured how tall the cover should be and pinned it there. I chose to leave the sweater bottom mostly open (I did stitch it a couple inches on each corner) to shove the pillow in because I figured that the finished edge would be easier to hand stitch closed than a fraying cut one.

I didn't trust myself to sew the top straight without a guide so I just snagged whichever crayola marker was the closest and marked the stitching line straight onto the sweater. Using a zig zag stitch to preserve the stretch, I sewed along the three pinned lines and then cut off the excess.

Which left me with a funky rectangle I honestly wasn't positive would work. I started to get nervous that I'd banked too much on the sweater's stretch, but shoved the pillow form in anyway.

One reason I chose to do this -even with a sweater that was a bit too small- was that I really dislike loose, floppy pillow covers. I was not excited to cover a pillow with a sweater just to have it ill-fitting and lumpy looking, and I figure that the sweater having to stretch over the pillow form actually makes it more polished looking.

Voila! Thoughts? I like the color but think it's too small for the couch. I've got 20" pillows that came with the couch I plan to recover that will be a better scale. This one will go quite nicely a our brown leather club chair, don't you think? I'm happy with it, and love that it brings a little autumn texture into our home. Now to move things around and figure out where to put it!

Leather Headband

I have a cute friend who is always wearing headbands. Since I chopped 11 inches off my hair on Halloween I've been hesitant to wear hair accessories as I think they look silly on me. However, my hair has grown a couple inches since then and I can almost pull it back without looking grungy. Every time I see this cute friend in her cute headbands I think I ought to try wearing more accessories.

So I drew up a pattern and went for it. I made mine 18 inches long and tapered it from 2 inches wide at the center 6 inches to 1 inch wide at the sides. Confused? You can print my pattern here:

Micha Muses Leather Headband Pattern

About 8 years ago, I bought this purse and have loved it. Recently I've switched to something more colorful and this was sitting in the donation bag.

I loved the simplicity of it, and the fact that I could fit my Canon Rebel into it when we'd go to places. At first I hoped to use a plain strip of leather but because of the seams I didn't have a space big enough to do that. So I cut out the headband piece running across the seams and kept that detail which gave me a strip like this.

I completely admit to freaking out both when I cut into the purse I had loved and when I saw the curly-ness of the leather strip. But I went with it anyway.

Wrapping it around my head I estimated how long I'd want the elastic to be. I went with 4.5 inches. After we stitch it on it will be about an inch shorter and I didn't want the headband to fit too snug.

Overlap the elastic on the inside edge of the headband about 1/4 inch and stitch a line across the entire width to keep it in place.

Fold the Leather up so the end of the elastic is held inside.

Stitch a line across the open edge of the fold to hold it all in place. Great! Now stitch close to the bottom edge to keep it in place there.

That's all well and good, but lets stitch over it about 5 more times just because I'm paranoid about things laying flat and elastic fraying... and I like the look of multiple rows of imperfect stitching. Do the same to thing attaching the elastic to the other end of the headband and you should have something that looks like this:

AND... that's it. I chose to leave the cut edges of the leather as is. It won't fray and isn't bulky.

Verdict? Since the hubs told me I looked cute the first time I wore it, I think it's a winner.

Feather earrings on the cheap

I feel like I scored. Target clearance is one of my guilty pleasures in life and has been since at least high school, if not before. So many things I never knew I always needed have made their way home with me after discovery on the endcap of some aisle or another. Squirt knows the drill. We always walk behind the toy section and past the ends of each row to see if there are any glorious red "clearance" signs posted. Yesterday, while acquiring last minute Valentines Day stuff, I spotted this:

It's a little hard to tell since I used a busy background, but it's got a length of bead chain, a length of rhinestone chain, the 5 feathers, and a nice extender chain and clasp. This baby had been marked down from $12.99 to $3.88. Even better, I'd been planning on making some feather earrings but needed the findings that hold them at the tips AND I've been brainstorming a project that would need a rhinestone strand like this one. Double score. Don't you love when you find something on the cheap that fits with projects already in your head?? I sure do. Especially since I'm putting myself on a self-imposed craft spending fast. No craft spending til April 1- no fooling.

I hope I survive.

This was easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy. Using my round nose pliers (because they are the only ones I have for jewelry and I use them for everything) I opened the jump rings that held the feathers onto the necklace.

Stacked the feathers how I wanted them, and added them to an earring wire.

Then I pinched the ring closed and went to model them in the bathroom for myself. They highlight the new VS jammies The Hubs gave me for V-day quite well, if I do say so myself.

Talk about double bonus. These puppies were crazy cheap and crazy fast. Earrings comparable to these at Tar-jay are running about $8, and I like the black/white neutrality of these so much more than the crazy fake colored feathers they are selling now.

Have you ever scored something on clearance that was exactly what you were looking for? That sort of thing makes my heart happy.