Making a Head band Out of Scrap Materials

Making a Head band

Out of

Scrap Materials

What’s great about making headbands is that it doesn’t take a lot of material.  A person can take what would otherwise be a useless amount of material and turn it into something useful.

For example, when I took apart my daughters halter top dress to change into a skirt I was left with the halter top afterwards. What can a person do with so little fabric?
                                    

One thing you could do is make matching headband for the skirt.  It came from the same source so it already coordinates perfectly. I also had elastic left over from when I took the dress apart so I didn’t even need to buy any. Here are two videos of the two types of headbands I made from the halter top.

Headband Type #1

Headband Type #2

Finished Headbands for 

"Future Author" and "Little Fish"

Materials Cost

Elastic- came from the dress I changed into a skirt 0.00

Fabric-left over halter top               0.00

Thread- left over from another project       0.00

Total Cost

3 matching headbands             0.00

DIY Shoes

Broken Shoes

We were walking into church when I felt a thunk, thunk, thunk against the bottom of my foot as I walked. I stopped, looking around and then looking down to see what was hitting my foot.  The sole of my shoe was hanging on only at the toes.  I thought this was hilarious, it had been one of those mornings where one more thing going awry was not surprising, I expected it.

There was no good way for me to walk with it hanging on like that so I slide my shoes on the carpet like I was ice skating till we could sit down in the chapel. I then took my shoes off and asked my husband to ripe the sole the rest of the way off and to make the other shoe match.  He looked at me with an expression that seemed to say, are you sure?  I nodded for him to go ahead and rip them off.

 

For the rest of church I walked around in my new flats smiling to myself. I was so excited that my shoes broke.  I have been aching to try making a pair of shoes for myself but I couldn’t justify the time because I had shoes that still worked.

I have wanted to make shoes for myself for a couple of reasons. I can’t normally find shoes that fit right. I usually have to buy shoes that are too long to get shoes that are wide enough. So sometimes I wear shoes that make me feel like I am child walking around in my mother’s high heels. My toes are shoved to the front of the shoe. I am gripping with my toes to keep my feet inside of the shoes while my heels pop out of the back of the shoes. It’s not fun. 2. Wide shoes are not wide enough for my feet. I have seen people wear out the toe of their shoes. Not me, I wear out the sides where my toes and edges of my feet have been rolled up the sides.

 

See how my toes and sides of my feet don't fit.

This was my chance to make shoes that were actually wide enough for my feet.  I was not going for cute shoes this time; I hope to try to make cute sandals for myself this next summer. I wanted to make warm shoes that were comfortable so my feet would not freeze this winter when I went to church.

Side note: my little sister, I have more than one I will call her ”Pinkie Pie” bought me cute strappy shoes that would be great for church. IF I was not chasing my youngest in the hallways at church or sometimes other little kids.  In my opinion if you work with little kids cute shoes are not going to let you catch the six year olds.

So I started thinking practical; I needed to be able to run and be warm because I get cold easily in winter.  Leather outsides and velvet lining was the result. 

Velvet lining

Leather outside

 

Lining inside the outside. It is nice and soft.

 After I finished them I tested them on the snow when I took out the trash and my feet stayed dry.  I am not sure how long my feet would stay dry but it was fun to try them out.

No, they are not cute. Ha ha 

but they don't squish my toes or fall off my heels.

I am looking forward to trying out some ideas I saw on line, some people have cut out rubber soles from old bike tires. Others have used jeans, old button up shirts, silk and old workout mats.  It should be fun to see what really works. I am eagerly waiting for my everyday shoes to wear out the rest of the way so I can experiment again.

Materials                          Cost

Leather- left over from a couch I tore apart       0.00

Velvet-left over from another project           0.00

Upholstery thread-left over from another project 0.00

Jeans- for interfacing out grown jeans           0.00

Thread- left over from another project          0.00

Buttons- from a torn shirt                 0.00

Elastic- left over from another project          0.00

Total Cost

                                    0.00

Changing a Dress into a Skirt

Changing a Dress

into a Skirt

 

When “Future Author” was given this dress I thought it was perfect; loud, busy, colorful, and light weight material.  However, after she wore it one time she said matter of factly ”It’s Weird!”.

 I noticed how the shirt she wore under it would bunch up and move like crazy eventually ending up out of the dress she was wearing.  

 (all kinds of funny bunching)

To me there also seemed to be some redundant sewing decisions in the construction of the dress none of which worked. Which I didn’t notice until she said something.

( why elastic and a something to tie it with?)

A few weeks later she asked me if I could make it into a skirt.  I looked at the dress, analyzing the seams in further detail, taking it apart in my head and came to the conclusion that I could, so I told her yes. 

Into the mending pile it went. When I pulled the dress out to fix it I wanted to see if I could make a video of the steps I took to alter it and make it less weird.  I also recorded making matching headbands from the scraps which I will post later. I hope this is helpful or at least gives you ideas. 

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Materials                     Cost

Dress- hand me down     0.00

Thread- already had            0.00

Elastic- from out grown pajamas 0.00

Total Cost

                              0.00

Water Color Painting With “Spiderman Jr.”

Water Color Painting With

“Spiderman Jr.”

 When I set out a coloring paper for "Spiderman Jr." to try water coloring painting on I didn’t expect him to love it so much. When he went to look at the home school bookshelves like he normally does in the morning to see what could happen that day he exclaimed “I get to PAINT today!” Then I got lots of Mom I want to do home school now.  I told him we had to get his siblings off to school first. This explanation resulted in him trying to get them out the door really quickly.

So while was getting his siblings ready for school he decided that he was not going to wait anymore. It was taking forever. Since I had already put most of the supplies and tools needed on the tray he set it up by himself and proceeded to paint.

After I had gotten his siblings off to school I went to find where he had gone.  Sure enough he was at his desk and was just finishing his first painting.  It was wonderful; he had colored in the whole picture with paint.  Understanding that an image might look better if fully colored in is a fabulous stage to reach artistically.

He wanted to do another painting so this time I gave him instructions.  I pulled out an identical image of what he wanted to paint in.  I talked about how to get enough paint through adding enough water to the paints and the importance of cleaning out your brush when you want to change colors. I also explained how to clean the brush without ruining the brush, how to spread the color, and how to get a lighter color. We talked a lot about being gentle with the brush. We talked as I showed him what I was talking about as I did it and he would try to do what I was talking about as I was doing it.

         Spiderman Jr. while receiving instruction                             Mine

At the end I was so impressed with how well he listened and did his best to follow instructions. The next day when he wanted to water color paint again I was even more impressed with how much he remembered of how to paint with the water colors. The only thing I had to remind him about was to be gentle with the brush which is not that bad considering all the things we talked about and the questions he asked me.

 

      Spiderman Jr. while recieving istruction,                     Mine- far more boring

     I love the creativity of adding cannon holes

              and bombs exploding in the air

Side note, yes I know these are not fine art water color paints but everyone who gets into art usually has a medium that they try and then fall in love with using. He has tried coloring with crayons, markers, colored pencils and even some acrylic paint but watercolor painting he can’t seem to get enough of.

"Spiderman Jr."

Independent work

These experiences with water color painting with my son have been fun for the both of us. I don’t know if his interest in this will stay but it has been positive and I am grateful for that memory I can keep.

Material             Cost

Water color paints x2 2.00

Paper-already had    0.00

Water- from the tap  0.00

Total Cost

                     2.00

Redirected Down Spout

 Redirected 

Down Spout

In our front yard we have a down spout that does not work because the ground is sloped so badly that when it rains the water doesn’t go up the concrete slab. It fills up at the back and spills over the into our driveway which results in a mini pond of ice or water in our drive way.  This can be very dangerous in the winter when its ice and it’s no fun to get out of a vehicles into a pool of water, when you don’t feel like jumping in puddles.

I have also thought about what a waste of water this little pool is just sitting in our driveway. I have thought about that many times when watering our plants.  I wish I could have all that water that spills out a few feet away from our house, if it could only be somehow poured into our garden.  I think plants thrive far better on rain water than on water from the hose.

So I looked around on-line to see if anyone else had a solution for redirecting water.  I found some really neat ideas on using rain water but nothing that fit our situation.  I did find inspiration from some people’s ideas of making what looks like a little creek bed at the bottom of a down spout.

If I could somehow make something that not only compensated for the slope in our yard/driveway but could also send the water the other way, that should prevent some dangers for our driveway and better use the water.

The project slowly evolved as we added more and more elements to make the redirection of the water more effective.

Attempt#1

We piled up a lot of dirt where the concrete slab was in an attempt to see if we could make the water run the other way when it rained.

When it rained the water did pool in the pile of dirt but then the water broke through the dirt.

Attempt#2

We decided we needed something to help hold the dirt in. So we added some wood around it.When it rained next the wood held the dirt together better but when it rained a lot the water spilled through.

Attempt#3

We took bricks we had gathered and built a damn like thing to hold the dirt. This worked even better but when the dirt got saturated enough the water slowly seeped out but it was another step in the direction we were trying to go.

Attempt#4

We cemented together the bricks. This had even less leakage. It was just along the bottom. I was again encouraged because each attempt resulted in less water in the driveway and I was closer to redirecting the water to our trees in the front.  I figured I might as well send the water to something useful.

Attempt #5

 

At this point I had watched some videos from the pond digger and wow do they do cool stuff. No I didn’t want a pond in my yard. However, I did learn that if I added some plastic that I would probably fix the last little bit of water leakage.  So I added some plastic we had left over from our green house. Then there was the problem of having enough rocks.  So I used the cement that was stuck around posts I had taken out of the ground when I removed our front fence. I took a sledge hammer and hit the cement till it was in smaller chunks and added my smaller rocks around it on top of the plastic. Nowhere near as pretty as the pond digger but it worked.

Attempt#6

 

This was almost what we wanted. However our down spout was not attached and the water from the gutters freely blew which ever direction the wind blew. So our latest design only worked when the water was not being blown outside of the hill we had built.  So we reattached the down spout but shortened it a little and it works very well now.  Winter is not quite here so I have not seen the advantage in no ice yet but I have seen our trees receiving the extra water that was redirected towards them.

I like this so much I am trying figure out a way to tweak this design to redirect our down spouts in the back yard to our fruit trees in the back yard. More water should hopefully mean bigger fruit.

Materials                       Cost

Dirt- already had                 0.00

Bricks-already had               0.00

Cement for bricks

-given by family who had left over 0.00

Plastic sheeting-already had       0.00

Cement chunks-from posts        0.00

Total Cost

                                0.00

Painting a Volcano

Painting a Volcano

(I didn't included my friends name or picture of her 

since she is not comfortable with that)

  

A friend of mine called me to tell me she had to get a set painted really quickly because the play it is for was in about a week and a half.  Anybody who has painted sets before knows that a week and a half is not normally enough time for painting a set.  It takes a long time to cover that much surface. I was really grateful that for a change I was not booked back to back on a Saturday so I said yes I would come out and help that day.

I asked her what the scene was and she said that it was set in Hades. She then told me a little bit about the play which sounded interesting. I had never heard of this play before which I guess is not very suprising since I am sure there are a great number of plays out there that I have not heard about before.  She then asked if I had ever painted fire, lava or volcanoes before. I had to laugh because I have done a far amount of landscape work in the past but I had only lightly touched fire and never done any work on lava or volcanoes. 

So I looked around to see if anyone had done a tutorial or demo on that kind of work.  I found a couple of artists. The artists work I liked best is called Robert Thomas.  In the videos I saw he talked about his work and why he does it while he worked on some pieces of art. The videos that was taken were done at a fabulous angle for seeing his brush stroke technique, how much paint he uses on his brushes, the types of brushes and how he applies his paints.

It was eye opening for me as I watched all of these things. I love blending and shading and often have a hard time with art that goes directly from one color to the other with no blending when it is not a stylized piece of work.  However when I saw him do this in combination with how he applied his paint and created the picture I was in awe of how it worked. His lines and the not subtle changes in color in places was wonderful, it added to the beauty and quality rather than detracted from the piece.

I watched his videos a few times till I thought I could imitate his style enough considering the deadline ahead.  When it came to application I had few difficulties because of my natural tendencies in my rendering.  At first I was very conscious of going against my normal techniques and styles. Then after a while I slipped back in to my habits of bending colors slowly. 

When my friend and I stepped back there were some problems.  It was very clear there were two different artists who had done it. The parts of the set where I had not blended it looked like it could be the same artist but where I hadn’t restrained my need to blend it looked very different. What was worse it didn’t look as much like lava.  My friend who did not have these tendencies or habits didn’t have to change anything.   So I had to swallow my pride and admit that just because I like certain techniques doesn’t mean they are always best and I needed to bow the style of the artist I had found and liked; that truly knows how to represent volcanoes so well.

I went back in and fixed it. At the end it looked like it could be done by the same artist and looked well put together.  I had a good laugh at myself with my friend which I think can be very helpful when any artist is trying to learn from their mistakes. Otherwise mistakes as an artist can eat at you like disease can the body.

Hogwarts House Scarve

Sewing Experiences

As part of my kids Halloween costumes we sewed house scarves together. It was very interesting to see parts of their personalities come out through their sewing.

 

I started with “Spiderman Jr.”  He was excited about being in Hufflepuff and wanted to be warm.  We spent two hours sewing this together. He carefully watched how I showed him to cut the squares the first time. Then as he cut the squares himself he asked if he had it right and when I said yes he would congratulate himself on being so smart. I could tell his hands were tired near the end from all the pinning because he started using different fingers to pin that were not his thumb and pointer finger to grab the pins. This is actually really good for him since he needs to work on his fine motor skills.  He finished his scarf and wanted to show everyone what he had made.

 

“Future Author” wanted to work on hers next.  She cut out each square with expressions of I don’t want to cut it wrong and me in turn telling her she is doing fine. Then when we came to the pinning she wanted to put them far away from the edge. The pins were so far away that they were almost in the middle of the pieces of fabric. I had to explain why she needed to have them by the edge of the fabric to get a better result. 

Then when she tried sewing on her own for the first time (I thought this would be a good first time since this scarf was simple) she sewed close to the pins at first then went far around them rather than remove the pins.

 So when she showed me what she had done I looked at it and had to think hard about how to explain that she had to take her first effort apart and try again. We talked about how she needed to not avoid the pins but slow down and take them out so that she could get a straight line and thus have the look she wanted on her seams. It was hard for her to hear that she had to take it out and redo it but she did it.

She was cruising along and them made another mistake and had to seam rip again but this time she put a hole in the fabric when she took it apart.  She was in tears now. This was not turning out to be the experience I wanted for her the first time she used the machine by herself. 

She was so upset that she wouldn’t touch her scarf again for a couple of days.  When she was ready to work on it again she wanted to still do the pinning herself (an additional skill she had gained with the project) but she wanted me to do the sewing. I accepted her terms, it was still progress in her sewing skills and it kept her from swearing off sewing all together.  When she finished she wore her scarf around all that day even though she is a naturally hot blooded person. I was very proud of her finishing the scarf when I know she wanted to give up.

 

When working with our “Little Fish” she needed verbal confirmation the first time she cut her pieces of fabric for her scarf then she continued working after that till she was done.  It took a few tries to have her do the pinning right and to put the pieces of fabric together properly so they would make a scarf. When she made these mistakes I showed her why that way would not work and she took it great. Her response was always something to the effect of “Oh is see.” When she was sewing the pieces of fabric  together she wanted to try on the scarf after each piece was added in the pattern to see how far she had come.  I could see her sense of accomplishment when she finished the last square.

 

For “Soccer Boy” it was a truly challenging for his patience. He often can see where something is going and will make logical leaps in his mind.  This benefits him in many areas of his life. However, he wanted to start working on his scarf when I was still helping “Little Fish” so I paused with her briefly to show him the first step.  I told him how to lay the fabric and cut right along the edge.  I didn’t think much of letting him do this. It had not been difficult for any of his other siblings even if they lacked confidence in their skills.

However,”Soccer Boy” took a logical leap with his cutting. This resulted in pieces that were not even because he cut where I hadn’t told him to and didn’t take the time to make sure the fabric was flat before cutting.

 As a result when he showed me his pieces of fabric that he had cut and they were not close to straight (we could of worked with a little off) or even more challenging close to even in size among the pieces of fabric. My face must have reflected that there was a problem with what he had done because his face fell. So I had to rapidly explain what the problem was with the pieces not being straight or even.  I told him I would give it some thought and see if I could think of a way to make it work.

I didn’t have much hope without making his scarf very small and I didn’t want it small and neither did he.  Then I remembered that I had gone back to the store for extra of the Gryffindor colors on a prompting for the Holy Ghost the day I bought the material.  I told “Soccer Boy” about this, he could start again from the beginning but this time he would need to wait till I could be right there to walk him through it.  He agreed to wait this time.

When we went through the process we were able to talk about what he had done and why sewing is not like math or predicting where the plot is going in a story; steps should not be skipped in sewing and working more slowly is actually faster because you make less mistakes this way.  He looked at me like I was crazy when I said “slower is faster in sewing”. I had to laugh at the look on his face.  So I was able to use his own work as an example because he had hurried and not been careful it was now taking longer because he had to redo the work again. I could see the light go on in his mind.

Then we had another learning moment when he sewed a piece the opposite direction of the others.  So we got to talk about checking that something is going to work before sewing it together. In the end he finished it and he seemed really happy to have his scarf but he was glad he was done sewing.

I don’t know if all these experiences I had with my kids that have the potential to be life lessons if my kids take it that way will sink in. However, I learned a lot about each of them and about how to correct my kids a little better when they make mistakes.