Color block jewelry for spring

This weekend I was so lucky to have a whole day to spend with two of my favorite creative ladies, Alisa and Staci. We spent 12 HOURS beading on Friday. When all was said and done, we'd created 36 pieces of jewelry. The above are all of the pieces I got to take home! I made all of them except the long coral and green necklace on the right and the ring on the bottom left. Staci made the long necklace and the ring is actually from our shopping excursion on Saturday to the Funky Zebra, but it fit the collection so nicely, I couldn't resist putting it in the picture too!

I just returned from a work trip to Alexandria, VA. I had some free time that I spent shopping on King Street in Old Town. I picked up three very pretty strings of beads at the Potomac Bead Company. The larger coral beads above were one of my finds. Coral and mint ended up being my theme of the day.

The other theme of the day was color blocking. I have been seeing these styles around and pinned a few inspirations. I saw quite a bit of color blocked jewelry out in DC and knew that I wanted to try my hand at it. I absolutely love all of these necklaces - and chose my outfits the last two days just to wear them! The mint teardrop faceted jade and the coral rose quartz (both on the 3rd necklace) were also from my trip to Alexandria.

I traded Staci for the long necklace in first picture that she made. The two sets of coral earrings on the right went home to Colorado with her!

I have been loving the faceted teardrop shape too so I made a couple of little wire pendants. It's been a long, long time since I attempted wire wrapping and the rose gold wire was very simple to manipulate.

I couldn't get enough of the jade beads so I made some earrings to go with the pendant and/or color blocked necklace. Since yellow slipped in the pallet of the collection in a couple of the necklaces, I just kept going with it. I adore both of these pairs of earrings.

These little wooden yellow beads caught my eye when I was digging for yellow beads for the earrings. With the ombré blue beads, it somehow reminds me of My Little Ponies...but in a good way. Ha!

Sorry for the horrible phone pics on these but I wanted to share what Staci and Alisa made too. For some reason, they didn't let me take of theirs home with me to photograph! The above photo is Staci's creations - 4 bracelets, 2 anklets, and 3 long necklaces.

Alisa is the real jeweler of the three of us and it shows! She cranked out so many beautiful pieces. 5 pairs of earrings and 7 necklaces. I'm not even 100 percent that's all she made! If you ever looking for one of a kind, handmade beaded jewelry, you can find her over a 4 Square Studios.

It was a fantastic day and Alisa is so generous to share her studio, home and stash with us. Thank you, Alisa!

Inkodye to die for

Have you heard of Inkodye? It's light sensitive dye that you can use on fabric, natural wood and so much more. My awesome MIL got me 3 colors and I've been having a blast experimenting with them.

For our first try, my friend Alisa and I decided to dye canvas and go with an art/sewing/crafting theme. I covered large pieces of cardboard with garbage bags and wrapped the fabric around, securing it with tape. Mix the Inkodye with water and brush it on.

Now comes the fun part! Place cutouts or found objects (the flatter the better) in a pleasing pattern on the fabric and take it outside to sit in the sun. I used buttons and Alisa used art supplies.

While the dye goes on clear, it starts to change color immediately in the sun. In full sun, the dye takes less than 10 minutes. On a cloudy day, a bit longer. We did ours in late afternoon (see how the items are casting shadows?) This is not ideal. Next time I'll do it when the sun is straight overhead. But our first try fabric still turned out really cute and we had a blast!

I'm calling mine "ghosty buttons." Because of the shadows the low sun cast, the buttons aren't as sharp as they could be but overall I still really like the effect.

Alisa's art supply inspired fabric turned out really cool too! Some of the smaller objects didn't work as well, but I love that you can see the markings and text from the clear ruler and triangle she used.

We haven't made anything out of our fabric yet, but we are thinking of making crafting utility aprons. I am also considering making a cushion for my sewing chair out of the button fabric, but the blue really doesn't go in my studio space. I'd love to hear any other ideas of what we should make - leave suggestions in the comments!

My ninja bread men will kick your gingerbread men's butts

As I noted here this summer, I am a Pinterest addict. I am up to almost 1,000 pins. Ridiculous, I know, but I LOVE it and it is so inspiring. Anyway, last Christmas friends gave us ninja bread men cookie cutters. They are hilarious. We don't really like gingerbread cookies or sugar cookies but I knew I needed to make ninja bread men. Then I remembered making gingerbread ornaments when I was a kid that smelled wonderful but lasted from year to year, but I needed a recipe. Pinterest to the rescue!

The "dough" recipe is from Martha Stewart via Pinterest. It's just 1 c. cinnamon, 1/4 c. applesauce and 1/2 c. white glue. Poke holes with the end of a straw so you can string a ribbon through. Then either let it dry for 24 hours or put it in the oven at 200 degrees for around 2 hours or until it's dried out. I did have to use a bit more glue and applesauce than her recipe called for. 

The "frosting" is homemade puff paint, recipe courtesy Delaware County Moms via Pinterest. It's just equal parts flour, salt and water. You can add food coloring or paint if you want it to be colored.

I know you are jealous of my ninja bread men cookie cutters, but you can make ornaments with any cookie cutters or just shape the dough with your hands. We used the last little bit to make ninja stars to go on the tree too! Hilarious!

Hello. My name is Tonya and I am an addict.

It's not drugs or alcohol or even chocolate. It's Pinterest. I cannot stop.

Wait. You don't know what Pinterest is? I don't know whether or not to gush about it and encourage you to sign up, or yell "Run! Run away and don't read on!" So proceed at your own risk and know that Pinterest is wonderful but it will steal hours and hours of your life.

In their own words, "Pinterest is a virtual pinboard. Pinterest allows you to organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. You can browse pinboards created by other people to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests."

It's a personalized, virtual bulletin board with beautiful pictures of food, clothing, home decor and anything else your little heart desires. You can categorize everything onto different boards. The best part is that it all links back to the original source, i.e. the webpage with the recipe, tutorial, online store, etc. I love that I can look at all my recipes at once.

I have been LOVING Pinterest for fashion and sewing ideas too. However this seems to have lead to a bad habit of clothing and shoe shopping online. Which makes my PayPal account sad but me squeal in delight when brown paper packages show up on the doorstep.

So what else besides recipe and fashion am I pinning? My 301 (yikes!) pins are on 20 boards including sewing inspirations, crocheting, tattoos and henna, travel, home decor, color combinations, graphic design, Halloween, gift ideas and products I want. Check them all out on my Pinterest page.

It also has a fun element where you can follow boards and people so your homepage has a cornucopia of ideas handpicked by like minded people you've chosen to follow. Pinterest will send you an email (if you want it to) to let you know when people repin your pins. I get a silly amount of pleasure when I get one of these with a huge list.

It's an ego boost. "They like me. They really like me!" Or at least my pins... But whatever. I enjoy it! Joining Pinterest is by invitation only, so if you're interested, let me know and I'll email you an invite. But remember - don't say I didn't warn you about the hours, days and weeks of your life that will suddenly go missing.

DIY wall art

I did this project a while back, but I get so many comments on it when people visit, that I thought I'd share how cheap and easy it was. Under $10 for a 3' x 3' piece for your wall.

First off, the squares are 12" square scrapbook paper. I just picked papers from two different sets that had designs I liked with colors that go in my living room.

I bought a couple of 1-by-2s at the hardware store. They sell for a couple dollars for an 8 or 12 foot piece. Cut them into 10" pieces with 45 degree angles. Put them together into a square and use a staple gun to connect them together. Wrap the paper around the squares and use tape or glue to stick the paper to the wood. Done.

One good trick to hanging a set of frames like these is to use a long level. I used a sharpie to make small marks on the edge of my level, transferred those lines into dots on the wall, hammered in small tack nails and hung them up. So easy and cheap, but they look really nice. Most people think I painted them because of the texture of the paper I used. Very few people realize they are paper.

Another idea for something like this, although it would not be as cheap, would be to use vinyl record frames to frame the paper. You kind of lose the three dimensional look of having the squares be 1" deep, but it's mostly the same effect. 

Must go to MOMA, very soon

When I went to NYC last year, my favorite place was the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). I never wanted to leave. Seriously, I could live there. Now MOMA is having a Tim Burton exhibit.

I. Love. Tim. Burton.

My favorite movie is The Nightmare Before Christmas, but I love almost his entire list. Sweeney Todd, Edward Scissorhands, Mars Attacks (We come in peace!), Big Fish, Beetle Juice, Batman and Frankenweenie. Love them all. I cannot wait for Alice in Wonderland to come out. I was even the Queen of Hearts for Halloween this year (and was Mrs. Lovett from Sweeney Todd last year.)

Here's a little promo video and then a "Behind the Scenes" with Tim. I will go to NYC before April 26th, no question.

Des Moines Sculpture Garden

I don't have much to post today, so I thought I'd share some more pictures from the sculpture park that we took yesterday.

The top photo is looking up into the letter sculputer. I admit as a graphic designer I have a font/letters fetish, but I really think this a great piece of art. The bottom photo is a compilation of 20 photos taken 360 degrees from the hill in the center of the park. Windows Live put them all together to creat this panorama. It's so tiny on here, it really doesn't do it justice, but it's really amazing. If you click on the picture, it should bring up a larger version, which is better but still not big enough. To give you an idea, the actual panorma is 75 inches wide!

And then it all went down hill

In Iowa the high temp for the year and the low temp for the year are always over 100 degrees different. We experience bitter cold, below 0 temps, sometimes for weeks at a time. We have sweltering, humid summers that make your hair impossible to tame. We also have beautiful, sunny 75 degree days. But those are almost never in November, especially not the second week of November. Today was one of those rare, picture perfect days.

We filled enormous travel mugs with tea, packed up the camera and headed to the Des Moines sculpture garden. It was fairly busy with Iowans making sure one of the last nice days before 5 months of winter was enjoyed outside. Here are some pictures I took of the sculptures:

My favorite one is the first one. I like that the spider looks like it might start crushing downtown at any minute.

After spending a couple of hours roaming around the park, we went to the East Village just to wander and see if any shops were open. We went into Found Things, a funky little antique store. They have so much stuff in there that I think you could spend weeks and still not see everything. I bought metal printing press letters to spell our last name, a brass "T" stencil and a couple of old photos.

There was an entire book shelf full of albums of old pictures. They were labeled things like "Hats" (all the photos had people wearing hats in them) and "Automobiles" with photos of cars, people and cars, and everything to do with cars since the beginning of cars. The individual photos were for sale. I've never seen a store go about it quite like that, but I really loved it.

After the East Village we went to the capital complex. The capitol itself is an interesting building (I'm afraid it has lost some of its interest for me since I have meetings there on a regular basis now). I like to stand on the steps and turn my back to the building. That's the more interesting view for me. You can see down Locust street across most of downtown.

I took 2 pictures, then it all went down hill. The camera died. With no camera and the need for a bathroom, we decided to head home. Then it all went down hill so fast I think we fell off the hill all together.

As I was driving to the freeway, we go stopped by a red light. I looked down at the dash and watched the engine temperature gauge go from a normal 150 degrees into the red danger area at 280 degrees. Houston, we have a problem. I didn't panic but I was thinking that the engine was actually on fire. I pulled over before the on-ramp and, upon under the hood inspection, we found the serpentine belt shredded and off track. Yippy. To make a long story short, $75 for the tow truck, we annoyed a friend by having her pick us up (thank you Meredith!), $600+ for the repairs because when the belt shredded, it took out another belt and a pump and we needed two new tires (we already knew that part.) Awesome. Thankfully, the beginning of the day was so fun and put me in such a good mood, that not even a broken down car and pricey bill got me down. Thank you Mother Nature for the beautiful day.

I also made two more totes since we got home. They match and remind me of the "Red Hat" ladies. Both are already sold. I do have enough fabric to make one more to list in my shop, so let me know if you're interested.