BEFORE:

I took out the beads which I hardly used and the scrap ones that couldn’t be used for many other purposes, mixed them up (still considering the compatibility of colors, of course) and laid out a basic plan to follow. The giant red oblong ones are actually shells (not 100% sure if they’re colored capiz) from a necklace that I didn’t particularly like.

I also pulled out my very, very old stash of embroidery threads and searched for colors that matched some of the bigger beads. For everything else, I just used white sewing thread.

Read more to view how it progressed from BLEH to :

Stage 1: BLEH. It’s the reason why I’ve only used this blouse once.

Stage 2: MEH. This is the stage which my mother didn’t like what I was doing and would try her best to give constructive comments and not to say anything negative… to which I responded, “You don’t like it now but you’ll like it when I’m finished.” But in retrospect, yes, it really wasn’t looking good at this stage.

Stage 3: HMMMM… Added the bigger beads first.

Stage 4: HEEEEEEYYYYY (in a positive way)… Added orange and yellow “broken glass” beads for color

Stage 5: All the gaps have been filled in with a mix of wood, plastic, metallic and seed beads! My mom loves it now!

I tried it on at this stage, and found out 2 things:

1. The knots formed by sewing all those beads are itchy.
2. It’s a pain to take the blouse off.

#2 is only solvable by taking it off veeeeeeeery carefully. #1, though, required a bit more sewing.

Here’s the problem: itchy, irritating knots galore.

Here’s the solution: I made a pattern of the collar shape and cut out a piece of cloth (from old stash, of course) with about 1cm allowance, turned the blouse inside-out and whip-stitched the cloth to cover the itchy knots.

Tadaa~! It’s finished! No more itchy, irritating knots!

Here’s a detail of the beads:

Yay! I’m finally finished! I wasn’t able to use up all the beads, but I’m sure I’ll find some other project for that. I don’t need a necklace for this one! After almost three days of work and a great number of needle and pin wounds, I’m very satisfied with it. I think it looks lovely. What do you think?

This is my Turtles box. My uncle gave it to me (unfortunately, without the Chocolate Turtles inside) many, many years ago and it has been the home of my magazine clippings ever since. But these aren’t the usual clippings. You won’t find any meaningful articles here. What I do is cut out words or phrases and pictures or graphics that I like and keep them here.

What do I do with all this junk, you ask? At first I didn’t know, I just liked collecting stuff, and these clippings have often funny, witty, or unusual words and phrases. Some are small illustrations that I just like. Most of these are from advertisements and article titles in old Fortune magazines. I even had a phase when I would buy old magazines from book sales just for this purpose. Some are cool-designed tags of clothes and other products. Some are packaging (see that Starbucks Tazo Mint wrapper?) and wrappers from Japanese sweets.

I think the first thing I ever made out of these clippings was this conceptual art piece in my deviantArt gallery made way back in 2004:

This blue box was the original home of my clippings, back when the collection was small. I found this “REALITY CHECK” phrase and the idea just popped in my head.

My next victims were my notebooks in college. In this particular one, I just took letters of interesting typefaces and spelled out quotes that I like a-la ransom note. I love that picture with the “THINK” encircled in red.

The next ones were the inside covers of another college notebook. Very obvious because it had “architects” (my degree) and “2001″ (the year I started college) on them. Here I started placing more graphics. Almost everything I stick on there have some underlying meaning about what I am and what I want to be. Some are just puns and fun stuff (e.g. the figure blowing wind at the building; and “I like lying down on the couch in front of the TV and leaving my brain elsewhere.”). Who would’ve thought that I’d find all these cool stuff in a magazine about entrepreneurs and finance?

This next one is also posted in deviantArt. It’s a freebie notebook I got from a box of Dove products. I added some stickers (which I also collect), and you can see that there are more graphics than words this time, but they all still tell something about myself or what I want. It’s my way of personalizing.

My latest collage project was my signature sheet for a college org. The front is what I think about the course (Interior design) while the back cover is a little more stuff about myself.

What do you think? I’m quite proud of what I do, and I’m happy that I get to use the stuff I’ve been collecting in a fun and quirky way. I’m also recycling stuff that would otherwise be thrown out or left to gather dust in shelves without being read. I hope to make more things like this, maybe not limited to notebooks. I’m not encouraging people to be a packrat like me, but if you have the luxury of space and the same “mental illness” as I do, and as long as you use what you keep, then by all means go cut up those old  magazines and make your world a little more colorful!

Sometimes a friend (or a friend of a friend) would be leaving to or arriving from where he his so we send each other small packages through them. Last week I sent him some clothes he requested (clothes are expensive where he is) and I added my surprise gift to him and an advanced anniversary greeting card (sorry for the crappy image, all I had was my phone at the time).

I bought it from the bookstore. The card is simple and the message inside is perfect, but not without a little modification. I always want my things personalized, so why should this card be an exception? The cover art had a dog and cat having a sweet picnic. The dog is nice because the boyfriend and I are dog people. I have nothing against cats, but the duck has more meaning for us because the boyfriend calls me bibe (i.e. duck) so I cut out a little piece of the excess wallpaper I had and stuck it on the cover. I outlined it in black and added little duck feet and an eye. Just a little detail can really amp up the meaningfulness of something to a whole new level, and no doubt would garner a smile from the recipient.

As for the inside, which is the main reason why I bought the card in the first place (reference to “Lucky” by Jason Mraz and Colbie Caillat, one of our favorite songs), I just added a few more words and another wallpaper duckling.

Whenever I go to a beach, I make it a point to take some time to scour the beach for seashells. But not just any kind of seashell, I pick up only interestingly-colored broken ones. Somehow I cannot bear to pick up whole shells because I feel like I am robbing little sea creatures (hermit crabs and such) of potential homes. Yes, I am caring like that. Hahaha.

Over the years I’ve collected quite a lot of these beautiful broken shells which I store in containers (only some are properly labeled as shown below). I unearthed some of these containers and figured I should do what I had originally planned for them as I picked them up off the coastlines: make them into accessories. One of the reasons why I like broken shells is that most of them already have their edges worn and have holes where I could thread a jump ring or chain through them without having to use a small jewelry drill (which I still do not own). I picked out a few shells and made them into pendants.

At the beach where the shells are all wet, they’re very pretty but when they dry up, they usually become dull and not so pretty anymore. To give them that shiny wet look again, I gave the shells a coat of clear lacquer (clear nail polish, in this case). After letting them dry, I took out my accessory-making stash (leather string, clasps and jump rings) and made necklaces.

Before coating with clear lacquer

After coating. See how shiny they are now?

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Here are the finished products. They’re very simple, really.  The brass wire connecting the two shells at the leftmost necklace is actually an earring hook I broke earlier. I couldn’t figure out a nice way of setting this triangular piece without covering up the beautiful spiral ridges, so it’ll have to wait until then.

The middle one is actually a coral. At the backside it has large grains of sand lodged in its pores. I love the color of that one with the orange peaks.

I wanted to make these two into earrings, but I couldn’t find similar shells that are the same size. So I combined them in one necklace instead.

I imagine these could be bought in those little stands at a beach front. I don’t have to buy them now

This is the bag that I posted in my 365 blog, which I decided to hide from my mom until I give it to her on Mothers’ Day (made with love, of course). You can find more finished photos and the link to the fabric flower tutorial there, but here’s the work-in-progress pics so you’ll see how I made the padding on the handles. The original handles were made of braided natural fibers of some sort and they’re rough and itchy if used as a shoulder bag, that’s why my mom wanted it to have some sort of padding on the handles in the first place. Of course, when my mom wants something like this done, she makes me do it for her. I forgot to take a BEFORE picture, but it didn’t really change much besides the yellow padding on the handles, so… yeah.

Materials (it’s practically free because I have all this stuff already):

- Thin rubber foam, about 2mm thick (the stuffing inside bags my mom bought in Bangkok. I told you I keep everything) but any padding would do, even fiberfill or cotton or extra layers of fabric.

- Yellow fabric to match the original bag color (free sample swatch from a fabric supplier)

- Yellow thread (leftover DMC embroidery thread from ages ago)

- Super glue, needle, and clips to fasten stuff with

The How-to:

1. Cut rubber foam to size just with the width just enough to wrap around the handle with about 1cm overlap. As for the length, I was limited to the existing length of my material, which is just slightly shorter than the fabric I had. It was fine since it looks as if the yellow was an accent to the handles which serves its purpose as a padding while not totally covering the braided part which looks good as well. While holding the rubber foam in place, get some extra hands (i.e. my dad) to put super glue in the overlap. Clamp and wait for it to dry for a few seconds.

2. Cut the fabric to the length and width enough to cover the rubber foam with a overlap. Clamp (or pin) the fabric to hold it in place then sew with a blanket stitch. I used same yellow for the thread but as I was doing it I realized I should’ve used a different color, like yellow-green or turquoise like the other colors on the bag. Either way, it’ll look good.

Detail of the blanket stitch (barely visible). The rubber foam is about 1cm shorter than the fabric on either end.

One handle is done! Now repeat the same thing for the other side and you have lovely banana-looking handles comfortable enough for your mother’s hands and shoulders

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P.S. My mother loved the bag (especially the chocolate that came with it) and carried it around the house for a while, drinking water and even calling on the phone while it’s still on her shoulder. <3

I have a bunch of wallpaper swatches stashed around with my other material swatch loot bags (with ceramic tiles, wood mouldings, fabric, etc). After organizing my fabric swatches, I was looking around for ways to store the wallpaper such that I could browse through them easily when I need to without having to rummage and have them flying all over the place. What I did was to cut off the ripped parts of the wallpaper to make them all square-cornered (for aesthetics’ sake), punched a hole in one corner then placed them in the 1″ metal rings I had lying around (I have a complete office supplies store under my desk. LOL). Here’s the result:

After all that, what should I do with the rest of the scraps? There were a lot of odd-shaped ends that I couldn’t use as swatches. Out of the blue, I started punching out holes in them and collected the circles. I had a bottle with similar circles punched out of glossy flyers, so I figured I should add these wallpaper circles to that.

My dad passed by while I was punching holes and asked what I was doing it for. I was actually thinking of using it for some mixed-media art piece, but all I was able to say was, “I don’t know.” I just knew I cannot bear to part with the scraps knowing that I could still make something from them. *packrat mode*

Well here’s more to add to my stash. At least they’re pretty to photograph, don’t you agree?

Plastic Crochet

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Beaded Slippers

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Hardbound notebooks

I got my prizes in less than a week and tried the dress on immediately because based on the measurements, I didn’t expect it to fit me. If it didn’t, then I’d probably give it to my younger cousin as a gift. But it did fit. The sleeves weren’t too tight and the length was just right. It was perfect except for one tiny thing: the slit between the buttons at the bust area is a gaping hole. Wow, I never thought that my chest would ever be too big for anything. LOL.

Because I was a crafty little devil, I thought up ways of how I could fix that tiny problem. A pin would’ve been the easiest, but it would only be temporary, and I didn’t have any good nice brooches I could use. Plus, it’d look odd if I had a brooch right smack in the middle, right? I also thought of making a necklace with a huge pendant but that doesn’t work because I don’t prefer wearing those and I’m very active and the slightest movement would reveal the gap. So what I did was cut the garter that was the root cause of the hole and replaced it with something to tie a ribbon at the back so that the shape of the dress would still be the same. Here’s how I did it:

I rummaged around my stuff and found a big piece of cloth with the perfect shade of cream (lucky!). It’s just like making piping for upholstery and clothes: I cut a long ribbon out of it (about an inch and a half wide), folded it in half lengthwise and stitch along its long side (I have yet to relearn how to use our ancient Singer sewing machine so it’s all hand-stitching for me), making sure it’s thin enough to match the width of the existing garter but wide enough so that a mid-sized safety pin could fit inside.

See how perfectly the color matched? It’s providential, I tell you.

Starting my sewing. See how my stitches changed from long to small? No, that’s not distortion due to perspective. I realized that the weave was too loose for large stitches so I made them smaller.

After sewing the entire length of the ribbon, I cut off the excess cloth which could make it harder for me to turn the “tube” inside-out. Here’s where the safety pin comes in. I secured it to one end and inserted the safety pin until it goes out the other side. Finally, I closed off the ends with a blanket stitch. I made two of these of equal lengths. The length was dictated by the size of the fabric I found, which was about two feet long.

Cutting off the excess

Safety pin in action

The piping is now turned inside-out

At the side seam of the dress I cut a small slit to reveal the garter. I shimmied the garter and cloth around so that the front would be slacker than it originally was, then sewed one of my cloth pipings to secure the garter and close off the slit. I did the same to the other side. My sewing is a bit messy, but it’ll do.

The garter pulled out from the slit

Finally sewed on the piping.

The gaping hole is now… a smaller hole. After all that trouble I still wasn’t able to close it off. In the end I just sewed it shut because I didn’t really have to unfasten the buttons when I wore or took off the dress. Even though the cloth piping didn’t serve their original purpose, I still like how it looks. It adds a bit more sweetness to the already sweet little icing of a dress.