Lifecycle of Leggings

Got a pair of cute, comfy leggings, that you can't seem to give up on, even as the knees get stretched and baggy? Or a new pair, that you just don't seem to wear much?

Either way, it's time to give them a new lease of life. As a top!

My leggings were so old, they had holes in the knees. They had to go. So, before chucking them in the bin, I decided to test this weird diy craze of turning them into a top. I didn't expect success, so I didn't even take photos of the process! But it's probably the easiest top you'll ever make.

Materials:
Leggings
Fabric scissors
Chalk
Optional needle and thread or sewing machine

Step 1: Lie your leggings on the table with the legs spread apart so the crotch area lies flat. Use a lil piece of chalk to draw where you'd like to cut- just to make sure it's symmetrical. I cut out a small V, but you could do a round neckline if you prefer. The key here is, it's gonna stretch A LOT, so don't cut out too large a hole! Try to cut away a piece of fabric about the size of your fist, and know that you can always cut away more if you want to. Snip snip!

Step 2: Try it on! It probably already looks pretty cool. Use your chalk to mark if you want to alter you neckline at all. Also mark how long you want your sleeves to be, and snip them off.

Step 3. Fine touches: for my daggy old leggings, I had to do some sewing. I sewed along parallel to the seams on each leg to make the sleeves slimmer, since it was quite stretched. Otherwise, it was perfect!

Easiest top ever!

Squishy Sticky Sandy

Kinetic Sand!!! It's heaps of fun and feels super cool, whether you're a kid, or a kid in an adult costume. (I'm the latter.) This recipe might not make sand quite as good as the commercial one, but you can make it with ingredients you probably already have, and the whole process is fun! I also have a tip at the end for how to turn it into a science experiment when your kids get bored of playing with it.

 

Ingredients:
Bicarb soda
Baking powder
Dishwashing Liquid
Sand

See? Pretty darn simple! Let's go!

Step 1: Go to the beach and get your sand! If you haven't already, of course. Preferably take a cute dog with you, as illustrated.

If you want coloured sand, I've read that the way to go is to pause at this step, mix through some food dye, and let it dry in the sun before continuing. (If you don't let it dry, it will stain your hands.) I didn't bother with this because I was really keen to play with the sand and wasn't keen to wait around.




Step 2: Mix 2tbsp baking soda with 1 tbsp baking powder. This is a method I read, before altering the recipe to suit the kind of sand I wanted, and I'm not actually sure if it makes a difference. I'm sure 3tbsp baking soda would work fine. Then mix in 1tbsp of dishwashing liquid. If your dish soap is an environmentally friendly one, you get extra brownie points. This mix should make a kind of... goo? If you don't have sand, you can just add bicarb until you like the consistency, and play with that, but I don't think you can really call it kinetic sand without the sand!

Note: I have all my measurements in tablespoons because I only made a small batch- about a handful. Feel free to use a cup or larger measure instead! Just stick to the same ratio.

Step 3: Add a tablespoon or so of sand, and mix it through as well as possible. This might make a quite dry mix, so knead it a little and test the consistency. Mine was still very sticky, and crumbly.

Step 4: If yours is still as sticky and crumbly as mine, add a sprinkle more bicarb soda, and knead it through. Mine now feels pretty good! If yours isn't quite right, add a little bit more bicarb, or maybe some extra detergent - adjust the ingredients as you like to suit your idea of what kinetic sand should feel like.


Step 5: Play with it!! Knead it, mould it, cut it, stick it back together again, pretend it's a stress ball... My favourite thing to do with mine was to make a little loaf of bread, and slice it up with a butter knife. Cutting through that sandy texture just feels so cool!

Step 6: When you and kids finish playing with it, make sure to wash your hands thoroughly, and put some moisturiser on-- remember, there's a lot of detergent in there, so it dries your skin out a bit.

Optional Final Step: If your kinetic sand doesn't
turn out great, or you get bored of it... You know how the main ingredient is bicarb soda? You know what bicarb soda reacts with? Yep, that's what I'm suggesting: Add some vinegar and turn it into a volcano/ science experiment!! As long as your batch is small, it's quite safe, it just froths a lot, so do it outside or over a sink.
When the reaction is done and your kids (or you) are satisfied that the whole kinetic sand attempt was good fun, (even if it ended with a volcano instead of kinetic sand,) just chuck out the remaining frothy concoction. It's not the easiest thing to dispose of since its kind runny, but I just put mine in a takeaway container. Otherwise, you can add a heap more sand so it's less runny before chucking it. Please don't chuck it back into the beach or into your garden! There's a lot of detergent and bicarb in there, and I don't think plants or fishies like that stuff.  And I like plants and fishies, so I like to be nice to them.

Anyway, I hope you had plenty of fun! Whether or not it's a perfect replica of store-bought kinetic sand, making your own is a fun activity, perfect for a rainy day.

~Motivational~

Yo! So this is just a brief post, for any Kikki k fans out there... a daily goals chart!

I saw a lil' set of 'daily goals' sticky notes on one of my many visits to the store, (I justify shopping trips by telling myself I won't buy anything, I'll just look for craft ideas), and decided to make my own. The idea is to write down small goals that you want to achieve daily, or maybe every second day, and reward yourself if you do them.

It's a very simple project, but you can jazz it up as much as you like.

Materials:
Ruler
Sharp pencil
Felt tip pen (for nice neat writing!)
Filing cards or similar small pieces of card
Decorating materials of your choice (eg. coloured paper, glitter, washi tape, coloured pens, stickers)

Method:

1. If your card isn't already lined, use the ruler to measure out where to draw lines, which can be as closely spaced as 6mm. Mark 6mm intervals along each side of the card, and join them up, in pencil. Similarly, draw vertical lines every 6mm starting at the right edge of the paper, and making either 7 or 14 columns, depending on the size of your card, and leaving enough space on the left to write down your goals.
If you like, you can draw one extra column, probably on the right, for 'rewards' - maybe if you exercise every day for a week, you want to reward yourself with a chocolate bar, or diy face mask? (The latter will be explained in a post soon!)

2. Now bring forth your felt tip pen, and title your columns-- I put a big "goals" title on the left, in fancy writing, and very minimal day of the week titles for the small columns, with just the first letter of each day. Yes, Saturday and Sunday start with the same letter, but you know which one comes first, so it doesn't cause confusion! Note: you can make it even cuter by using coloured pens for this step. I wish I'd thought of that earlier.

3. Decoration time!! I left mine very plain, but that doesn't mean you have to! If you don't have enough goals to fill the page, add a few cute or encouraging stickers or doodles at the bottom. You could leave an extra margin along the left, and put a stripe of brightly patterned washi tape, or a line of glue to sprinkle glitter on. for a really pro look, cut a piece of coloured card about 1cm bigger than your main card, and glue it on the back to make a neat border. For mine, I just wrote a few words along the top to remind me of the quote: "How we spend our days is, after all, how we spend our lives." It adds that extra touch of inspiration to get me fulfilling those goals!

4. Use it! Tick off the items you do each day, and keep track of your progress. Maybe you aim to exercise every day, and practice an instrument twice a week? If you achieve your aim, reward yoself!

Sequin Top: Part 1

Hi again!

Today's projects is a fancy/fun/fabulous top.

I'm going to a music festival in a few weeks, which led to me looking at heaps of festival fashion, and wondering what on earth I'll wear.  Of course, I could have gone through my cupboard, but being me, I went through my bag of fabric instead... and found this:

An old dance costume. Not exactly music-festival worthy, as it is. But, spoiler alert: it becomes this!!

Very cute. Much more festival-y than its previous incarnation as a strange sparkly sack. So, 'how to?', you ask?


Materials:
scissors,
chalk,
pins,
needle and white/blue/grey thread,
and sparkly fabric!
(you can just as easily start with a sheet of fabric as with an old costume, in which case you probably want a piece about 50cm x 2m, in order to have plenty of length to tie at the back. This might involve sewing two pieces together, but avoid having a seam at the front- if you sew the two into a wide tube, so the height of the cylinder is 50cm and the circumference 2m, then you'll be working with the kind of sack I have here :))



And, the steps:

1. Put on the dress or hold the fabric up to neck, and mark a line with the chalk at the height you want the neckline, and another where you'd like it to end at the bottom. Always leave a little more fabric than you think you want- you can always cut it off later to get a more cropped style! Make one last mark a bit below the armpit.



2. Snip snip! cut a nice straight line across at the neck height, and another at the waist height. The sequins on my fabric are in rows, so I can just follow one row right across for an easy straight line. At the back, you aren't going to want it at waist height, so you use the armpit-height marking to cut across the back half of the tube. It should look something like this...

neckline....................................armpit height back line.......................................tube!

Mine has those diagonally cut corners already, thanks to me starting with a dress, but they aren't necessary yet.

3. Snip again! This time, right down the middle of the back, so instead of a tube you have some kinda 2m-long strip of fabric that you can tie around yourself. Fashion.


4. Seriously though: fashion! Try it on! With a little imagination, it's starting to look like a top!


5. Get your chalk out again- now is the time to decide how wide you want the top edge to be- mark it out, leaving a row of sequins extra on either side, and draw a on the line you'd like between this high neck, and the armpit. Then lay it out, neaten up that line, and snip snip! In order to get it symmetrical, just cut one side first, fold it in half, and trace that line onto the other side.

It's hard to see, but I've made to marks for the width of the neck.                  Then there's the snipping.                                 

 

 6. And try it on again! A bit repetitive, I know: draw, cut, try it on, repeat, repeat. But it's worth it. See what you think of your neckline. For a very neat edge, you can now fold over a slim hem, both across the top and down these angled sections. You can vary the width of the hem in order to get your ideal neckline- that difficult balance between aesthetic and hiding your bra. Pin the hem while you have it on, so you can see how it will look. To make this step easier, I used a ribbon scrap as a temporary halter neck, simply by safety-pinning it on.

My neckline test, with bonus halter neck.                                     Pinning and sewing the hem to my liking!

7. Sew your hem! you only need to sew the top edge of the top, from armpit to armpit, because the rest will be tied in a loose knot at the back, and you wont notice a tiny bit of fraying. This kind of fabric seems to barely fray anyway! Since its a short distance, and a tricky fabric, I just sewed it by hand, with long lazy stitches.

8. The halter neck..... coming in part 2! Because first, I need to go out and buy some silver ribbon. I didn't plan that far ahead. But it's looking good so far!

Green Juice!! Wonder Juice!!

I recently got a new blender, and have become addicted to making juices! Somehow, I just cant put the effort in to eat an apple a day, but if I chop 'em and blitz 'em in the blender, it makes such a delicious glassful that I want to drink it all day every day... And I love using the blender, because you know the ENTIRE fruit goes into your glass- you don't lose all the delicious pulp like you do in a juicer. Of course, you gotta be considerate of your blender and limit yourself to quite soft ingredients -- if you want something as hard as a carrot you might need to grate it first.

Anyway, the recipe!

Ingredients:

The ingredients...

a banana
a kiwifruit
half a lemon
a lil lump of ginger
a sprig of mint
a few spinach leaves
water
soda water
(makes two small but intense glasses of juice)


Look at all those delicious ingredients! Are you getting keen to mix them all together and taste the goodness? I'm already impatient to make another one. This is my new fave recipe, but its honestly just a handful of random fruit and veg I found in my kitchen; fret not if you dont have all the ingredients, and feel free to add whatever else you think of. I think it'd be hard to make it taste bad if you tried.

Blitzed! Super thick.

After adding soda

So, put all those fruit and veg in your blender! I break up the banana a little, peel and chop into big chunks the kiwi and lemon, cut up that ginger nice and fine, and tear the mint and spinach a bit as I put it in. Then add less than half a cup of water, just enough to make it blend easily, and blitz it in a few short bursts until the consistency is pretty smooth.

At this stage you'll have a very thick mixture, possibly closer to puree than juice, so that's where to soda water comes in. Of course, you could just thin it with normal water, but I personally love that extra fizz. Add around a cup of soda water, or however much brings it to the thickness you like, and serve!

Ta-da!

 

Too small? Too cute!

Hello, and welcome to my craft blog!! I hope I inspire y'all to make use of rainy days, lazy days, and snippets of spare time to get crafty and creative. :))

I recently cleaned out my cupboard, and found a heap of clothes that are too small, too big, or have some annoying detail... But I still love them, and am unwilling to give them to charity, so they go into a pile I call sewing projects. Two large bags full of sewing projects. Oh dear.

So I decided to get started on a cute old dress, which has grown too short for me (Or was it me who grew too tall? Nah, I blame the dress.) I hit up the fabric store and bought some ribbons, coming up with a plan...

Too small?                                                                                      Too cute!!  

PLAN: add sections of ribbon to the shoulders, to lengthen the shoulder straps and thus the overall length of the dress, and make it even cuter! And the sub-plan (Is that a word? Can I make that a word?): replace the ribbon in the lace-up section at the back, so all the ribbons match and it looks like it was made to be like this.

The Grand Plan                                                     Ribbon Strips                                      Tools (also nail polish!)                   

MATERIALS:
- about 60-80cm of wide ribbon for each shoulder, cut in half. That is, a total of 4 sections of wide ribbon, each 30-40cm long. More if you want to tie bows! I bought 160cm. Try to get a ribbon which is the same width as your shoulder straps!
- For the lace up back, the existing ribbon was 110cm, so I bought 110cm of new ribbon, nice and thin but the same colour and material as the wide ribbon. Depending on your dress, you may instead want to use this as a belt.
- A quick unpick to make you unpicking much easier
- Fabric scissors
- Pins
- Clear nail polish to seal the edges of your ribbon
- Thread in a colour to match your dress
- A sewing machine, or a ton of patience (if you're gonna do it by hand)

STEPS!!

1. Unpick those seams! Pull at the seam until the stitches are visible, and carefully hook your unpick tool under a stitch to cut it. Be careful not to cut threads from the fabric itself. Continue all along each seam.

Unpicking the seams

2. Fold over one end of one strip of ribbon, so you have about 1cm doubled over. Slide into (or behind, if easier) the raw edge of your shoulder seam, and pin in place so there the whole 1cm doubled section is hidden. You want to make sure that the shoulder seam itself is also hemmed- this means folding the end over, or if it's a kind of tube of fabric like mine, inside itself for 1cm.

Attaching the ribbons

Yay! One down, three to go...

3. Sew a straight line across your seam, about half a centimetre from the edge. This should go through two layers of ribbon, plus the dress fabric itself. Be sure to seal each end of the line by sewing back and forth, or securely tieing the ends of the thread. This step usually involves me struggling with the tension of my temperamental sewing machine, and getting very angry at it. I hope you've been blessed with a kinder sewing machine than mine... But it was worth it!



4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 for each half of each shoulder, until you have a strip of ribbon attached to each end. Step 4 requires patience and sometimes tears of frustration, but remember, the dress will be worth it. And the sense of achievement that you will eventually feel will make all the pain (and pin stab wounds, and bruises from an angry sewing machine) worthwhile.

Threading the ribbon into the lace-up back

5. If your dress, like mine, has a lace up back, replace the old ribbon with your new, matching one, and tie it in a cute bow. Yay for an easy step!! Or if your dress has a waistband/belt, perhaps you use a matching ribbon to replace that one instead.

Cute v-shapes, sealed!

6. Cut those nasty, fraying ribbon ends into cute v-shapes, and paint with a dash of clear nail polish to seal them. Just lightly dab nail polish along the very edge of the ribbon, and it will help to stop them fraying.




7. Put your dress on, tie your shoulders to the right length, and your choice of knots or bows, and ta-da!! Enjoy your cute-ass dress which has been given a new lease of life!

Wahoooo!!! You're done! Cute dress complete!

This was overall a very fun project and I am super happy with the product- I will be wearing the next time I go out! I hope you guys can use this to help with your own projects :)