WhatTheCraft Handmade Giveaway – SmarmyClothes tees

This week’s WhatTheCraft Giveaway is sponsored by SmarmyClothes… Hey, that’s me!

The winner of this giveaway will receive:
your choice of one of my new line of SmarmyClothes tees

Valued at up to $30!

I won’t bore you with the usual giveaway interview, since you hear quite enough from me as it is. But I do want to tell you how effing excited I am about these shirts!

First- the skull and safety pins shirt is available in a ton of print options already – glitter, neon, glow in the dark, etc. And I want everyone to know that you can choose any print color/style that you want. If the option isn’t in my shop, just contact me and I will make it happen. Second, the shirt styles can be customized as well, so if you want a hoodie or a baby onesie or even a dress, your wish is my command!

The kawaii animal shirts are my favorite because 1. They’re FUZZY. And 2. The pig and the fox have TAILS IN THE BACK. It’s so cute, I might explode.

Alright, I’ll shut up now and tell you how to enter- but before I go, I also wanted to mention that I’m also having a birthday sale this weekend… all ready to ship tops, skirts, and dresses are 29% off at SmarmyClothes.com through Monday!

Giveaway Info:

SmarmyClothes  is giving away a t-shirt of your choice.

There are lots of ways to enter, so even us lazy folk have a chance at winning!

This contest will close on May 10th at 11:59 PM EST. I will randomly select one winner after the contest closes.

You MUST comment on this post with your entries as you complete them.

If you do not comment, I will have no way to count your entries.
You can post a separate comment for each entry or
put all of your entries into one comment.

If you have Liked/Followed/etc. WhatTheCraft in previous giveaways,
you can still use that as entry, just comment saying you have done so.

Ways to Enter

On Facebook:
Please include your Facebook name in your comment

• “LIKE” WhatTheCraft on Facebook
• “LIKE” SmarmyClothes on Facebook
• Post a Facebook status update with a link to this giveaway
• Post a Facebook update with a link to your favorite t-shirt design from SmarmyClothes

On Twitter:
Please include your Twitter name in your comment

• Follow WhatTheCraft on Twitter
• Follow SmarmyClothes on Twitter
• Retweet this tweet from your Twitter
• Tweet with a link to your favorite t-shirt design from SmarmyClothes
  

Other Ways:

• Follow SmarmyClothes on Tumblr – include your Tumblr username in your comment
  
• Blog about this giveaway and/or about SmarmyClothes - include a link to the post in your comment
• Subscribe to my YouTube channel – include your YouTube username in your comment

 

PLEASE make sure you include a valid email address on the comment form so I can get in touch with you if you win!

This giveaway will end at 11:59 PM EST on Thursday, May 10th, 2012.

What I’ve been working on…

Aside from the mountain of custom orders and Extreme Unicorns stuff (and I swear new video tutorials are imminent!)… I’ve added a bunch of new custom skirt designs to my shop (and two former dress designs that are now also available on a custom order basis)!

Peggy zip back pencil skirt, available in houndstooth, leopard, or any print of your choice!

Stormer zebra corset skirt

Read more

Gussy up a light switch cover

Do people still say “gussy up”?  Well, I do. So there.

This tutorial from gurl.com inspired me to tackle some of my boring old light switch covers.

Some of the light switch covers in this house were worse than boring.

Look at the funk!  Let’s get out the trusty old Contact paper!

The cool part about using Contact paper is that it peels off nice and clean. So if you’re a renter and can’t paint things or do any permanent decor changes, Contact paper is the answer! When I was in college, we couldn’t paint in our dorms. We had these ugly old particle board dressers and desks, and I just covered all the drawer faces with this checkerboard Contact paper.

It also means you can switch the pattern whenever you feel like it. 5 minutes and you’ve got a whole new light switch cover.

And one final bonus: it can be easily wiped clean (more so than fabric and paper anyway), so it’s a good choice for a kitchen or bathroom.

Tips for your Contact paper cover: trace your cover on the back of the paper and leave a 1/2″ edge for folding over the back of your switch plate.

Read more

Cut it out!

It’s not really Spring yet, but it’s Spring-ish here in Michigan, and I’ve got cabin fever. Cabin fever always makes me want to try something new, and somehow I stumbled upon the art of paper cutting, and I’m smitten. (Obsessed might be a better word.)

So obsessed was I that I hadn’t even done a single paper cut before I started making all these plans for a big, elaborate, layered paper cut. I had to put on the brakes. Surely it would be wise to try it out first to see if I like it? Yes, my rational self says. That would be wise.

There’s a buttload of inspiration out there, especially these by Helen Musselwhite:

I LOVE the diorama effect. Dioramas. are. so. cool. They’re always one of my favorite parts of natural history museums. I used to spend hours on dioramas for school. Plus, it’s fun to say. DIE OH RAMAAAAAA!!!!

In a cloche! AWESOME!

I really SQUEE’ed when I saw the owls because the design I’m planning is a mirror image like that. I initially started it a few months ago thinking it would be an embroidery project, but now I’m in the midst of paper cut fever, so paper beats thread in this battle!

Here is my very first paper cut (unless you count snowflakes and paper doll chains I made as a kid):
Free squirrel Valentine template from Little Acorn.

I love the way you can bend the little branches and bits to make them stand away from the background more.

I used a piece of regular old printer paper as my test, as I didn’t really have anything better at the time. (Though I’m now armed with 200 pieces of pretty colored paper from the craft store, mwahaha.) I used a standard Xacto knife with a #2 blade.

I chose the squirrel design as my test because it’s symmetrical and cute.  Since the design is symmetrical, you can fold it in half and cut through two layers at once. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that with my design, thus the test. I actually wound up cutting the whole thing out flat. I tried doing it the folded way, but I couldn’t tell when I was cutting through both layers of paper, and I gave up. That’s okay, I like doing things the long, hard way (that’s what she said!).

The verdict is: paper cutting RULES! It’s the perfect thing to do in front of the TV, which is what I’m always looking for, since sewing in front of the TV doesn’t work so well. I love my Boob Tube, but I get antsy sometimes just sitting there like a po-tah-to. Now I shall be a knife wielding potato.

Smarmy Frocks

We’ve been watching Project Runway Australia, and they refer to pretty much everything as a “frock”, so I couldn’t resist. Frocks frocks frocks. Frockity frock.
This zombie brains dress will make a killer Halloween costume!

This is my Dark Alice dress in the fabric I have as a replacement for the original. It’s a super awesome stretch satin.

A slightly less “dark” Alice dress in black and white damask knit.

Hogwarts dress with lace and black and grey details.

I took a vintage slip and made it a little more retro with some topstitching, lace, bows, and garter clips.

I Sharpied my Sewing Machine!

I’ve always wanted to paint my Singer 301, because it’s beige and beige is… well, beige. So when Sharpie asked me to be part of the Sharpie Takeover, and I started thinking, “What will I Sharpie?” the first thing that popped into my head was: SEWING MACHINE.

I chose my other Singer to Sharpie, because it’s white and would show color better. The beige will have to stay beige until another day.

Here it is.

Boring. White. Plastic.

 

And here’s the “new” version. Way cooler.

 

Hardcore Nightmare Before Christmas fans will probably recognize that I used Sally’s dress as the inspiration for my pattern. What better pattern for a sewing machine than one inspired by a rag doll who sews herself up when her arm gets ripped off?

I used regular Sharpie permanent markers. Depending on what you draw on, you might want to seal your artwork, or it might eventually start to rub off with a lot of use. Also, if you make a mistake, rubbing alcohol will take off MOST of the ink.

Now before you start running around trying to amass all of your Sharpies (I swear they grow feet, like scissors. I know I have 20 Sharpie in the house but I can never find them when I need them!) so you can doodle on your appliances, don’t forget to submit your Sharpie creation to the Sharpie gallery at Sharpie.com, so you can get featured in the Sharpie Takeover Youtube video!

Plus, I have 2 fantastic words for you, my friends. SHARPIE GIVEAWAY. Sharpie has generously offered to provide one lucky WhatTheCraft reader with a Sharpie grab bag! You get a set of Sharpie minis, fabric brush markers, Fine Point pens, highlighters, and Liquid Graphite pencils (these are mind bogglingly awesome).

 

The giveaway starts on Monday, so don’t forget to head back here! In the meantime, check out our current giveaway with Briar Muse!

Fairytale Embroidery

This was my first big embroidery project. It’s from a few years ago, but I just realized I’d never shared it here.

Before this I embellished some pockets on a few pairs of jeans and I made a pouch for my brother that I embroidered last year, but this is the most elaborate project I’ve done.

Whenever I wanted to use something other than a straight stitch or satin stitch, I had to get out this 1970′s embroidery guide that was my mom’s and stare at the thing for 30 minutes before I figured out what the stupid drawings meant.

I intentionally didn’t keep track of my hours, because I didn’t want to know. But let’s just say I went through a whole season of Gilmore Girls DVDs (maybe a season and a half) while working on it, plus many, many hours on top of that. I started in November and finished in (eep!) July.

I probably started in September or October, intending it as a Xmas gift for my mom, but after 7 straight hours of embroidering on Xmas Eve, and many hours of work still needing to be done, I realized that wasn’t going to happen. There wasn’t much embroidery from January through the middle of July, but I busted my butt in the end because I wanted to finish it for my mom’s b-day, which is at the end of July.

This is what I used as my (quite literal) inspiration:

It’s from The Golden Book of Fairy Tales, a book my mom had when she was a kid and passed down to me.  She says she likes this particular illustration the most (though all of them in the book are really amazing.  I’d frame them all.) because the girl looks like me (it doesn’t).  For a while, she even had a crappy scanned and printed copy on the wall, which is what gave me the idea to do this in the first place.  The artist’s name is Adrienne Segur and the illustration goes with the store “The Seven Crow Princes”.

 

 

I did it on muslin… if I did it over again, I’d use something sturdier like canvas. Muslin would have been okay if it wasn’t quite so heavily stitched.
It’s about 11″ X 17″, which is pretty close to the illustration in the book.
Once the embroidery was done, I used colored pencils to paint/color the blank spots that were too big to fill in with stitches. Read more