Showing posts with label diy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label diy. Show all posts

Friday, December 2, 2016

Watercolor Cards


I miss painting!
I miss when I had instructors telling me to draw 5 things every day and turn in my sketchbook at the end of each week. Prompts focus my creativity and when art is "work" it makes focusing on homework a whole lot easier. Not to mention all that work made me really good.

Now I have no time or any excuse making me work on artistic endeavors, so keeping up the practice in any little burst always makes me feel better.

Small sketches matched with washi tape make great simple cards. I get to practice some simple images and actually have some way of using them!


Friday, September 30, 2016

Leather Kindle Cover


Something outside of paper today, a case for my kindle!
Working with leather at school has its upsides, especially when I get free time to do some personal projects. So I started with a pieces of leather (probably about 14" x 8", but I cut it down from that so it's not very important). I originally picked up a pack of leather remnants from hobby lobby for a different project but it had a lot of good, large pieces in it so it was really worth the $9 compared to leather shop prices.

Price breakdown: (technically free because all things were purchased for a different project, but here goes anyway)

  • $5.40 leather*
  • $1.50 elastic chord*
  • the thread was actually free, it's been a fixture in my mom's sewing stuff for years
  • $4.99 string of beads
      *The elastic chord was on sale from $3, and I used a hobby lobby 40% coupon for the $9 leather.
     
      = $11.89 (it's worth mentioning I think this is the 4th thing I've made out of all these items)


I made a paper rectangle the size of my kindle (4 5/8" x 6 5/8") and used that to cut out the leather. That being said, it's a very tight squeeze and even though I left some wiggle room it was not quite enough. I used a heat gun and warmed it up to stretch it a little and that helped a lot.


I trimmed the leather to 7 1/2" x 12 1/2", I folded the short side over the paper rectangle and stitched the two lines about 7" apart. Next time they would be about 7 1/4" apart. I hand sewed the elastic and the beads (and extra reinforcement on the top of the machine stitches. I waited until I was finished sewing to trim down the sides. That's how to get stitches so close to the edge on leather very easily.