Happy Birthday to My Twin Sister!!!

by ilene on April 2, 2012 · 6 comments

in sewing

(Photo taken by DT)

Happy Birthday to my identical twin, wombmate and favorite person in the whole wide world!!!!! (and yes, this means its my birthday, too!)  Every year on this day, I get to reflect on how blessed I am to have a lifelong, built-in best friend from birth.   The chances of being an identical twin is only 1 in 250 so we really cherish this special relationship that we have.  I’m so lucky to have a sister who knows everything about me and who shares so many of the same interests as I do!

Every year, no matter where we are living, we always make sure we spend our actual birthday together.  The day is a celebration of our sisterhood!!  Last year, we met up on the slopes of Breckenridge and this year, my sister, her husband, their dog and another good friend N drove up from LA to spend the weekend with us in San Francisco.  Jeff wins hubby of the year for planning a great weekend filled with all our favorite things- good girl friends, fabric shopping, sewing, ramen, boba, antiquing, indian food, crafting and pastries.  On Saturday, we went fabric shopping with a group of my closest girl friends and came back to my sweatshop my apartment to sew pj pants for everyone, including my friend’s 3 year old son!  (He was so happy to pic out his dinosaur printed flannel fabric!) We ended the night with a sushi-making pajama party.

(photo from my friend M)

I also got a cool birthday present that I’ve been pining away for!! It may or may not be another crafting machine to add to my collection! hehehe.  I’ll share about it tomorrow!

You might also like:

tagged as: birthday, pajamas, pjs, twin

{ 6 comments }

Serger Fail

by ilene on March 29, 2012 · 4 comments

in sewing

Remember one of my New Year’s Resolutions was to learn how to use my new serger? I wrote more about my serger aspirations here.  I excitedly and somewhat naively thought that once I got my serger, I would be churning out all sorts of apparel. I imagined myself making all these fancy shirts and cute dresses, I really thought that I would be an emerging fashion designer and all these people would be complimenting me on my fashion forward clothes as I walked the streets of San Francisco.  HA! Psh!  It took me awhile to even muster up enough courage to open the box and learn to thread all four spools of thread.  I watched the instructional DVD a few times but even with all the diagrams on the machine, there was one confusing thread that I just couldn’t get right.  My friend had to came over and threaded it for me and I was finally all set up.

For my first project, I decided to try to make a simple tank top.  I thought it’d be easy enough. I had some  yellow and white striped knit fabric leftover from my circle scarf and decided to trace one of my tank tops to make a pattern:

My plan was to just serge the bottom hem, then the sides and top shoulders together.  In theory, it shouldn’t have been too hard.  But what started as a loose flowy long tank slowly started turning into a short midriff as I kept messing up the bottom hem and cutting it shorter and shorter.  Then one of the needles hit a pin and the needle tip broke off. Oops!!!

I couldn’t find any info in the instruction manual on how to change out a needle or even what kind of needle I should get to replace it so I stuffed the whole machine back into its box and shoved the whole wretched thing behind a bunch of boxes.

And that was my first serging experience. Fail.

You might also like:

tagged as: knit, serger

{ 4 comments }

All You Need is Love Sign- From Scrap Wood

by ilene on March 27, 2012 · 1 comment

in upcycle, wood

I’ve been saving this 4 feet x 18 inch scrap piece of wood for almost a year.  It’s leftover wood from the back of this wood mirror frame that I made last year.  It’s nothing fancy, just a piece of cheap plywood, but I knew I could use it for something one day.  Jeff almost threw it away when we moved across the country last summer, but I insisted on bringing it with us to San Francisco.  He thought I was nutso (again) and because we had nowhere to store it in our small city apartment, it was stuffed behind our washer/dryer for the past half year and forgotten.   Because we are renting our apartment, I haven’t really put much effort in to decorate it all that much.  Our walls are pretty bare so I unearthed the scrap piece of wood and decided to try painting the scrap wood and hang it up in our living room.  It’d be a cheap way to decorate!   I decided on the words “All You Need is Love” because I thought it was a sweet sentiment.

First, I spray painted an even coat of white primer on the wood:

Since I’m terrible at freehand painting, I used my silhouette machine to cut out the giant letters for “LOVE” (with a giant heart for the “o”) out of black vinyl and stuck it onto the surface:

I wanted a distressed, uneven look so instead of using paintbrushes, I used a kitchen sponge to add more texture to the paint. I mixed up different shades of gray paint and just dabbed all over the surface, with darker gray around the edges:

Then I peeled off the black vinyl letters which left a white relief of the letters behind.  My handwriting is actually pretty similar to the font used for the “All you need is” letters, but I didn’t trust myself to paint it freehand, so I found a font that was similar to my writing and printed out the words on my printer. I taped the print outs all together, placed it where I wanted them to be and traced the letters onto the wood canvas using graphite paper:

The graphite paper leaves a pencil-like outline behind:

And then all I had to do was paint in between the lines:

I let the paint dry overnight and used wood glue to hang 2 picture hooks to the back of the wood and hung it up!

Ta-da!!  It’s not perfect but it makes me smile whenever I see it!  The whole project cost me $0 since I used materials that I already had. That makes me smile even more!!

You might also like:

tagged as: decor, love, paint, sign

{ 1 comment }

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →