How to make a Fitted T-Shirt

So my boyfriend had bought me a sewing machine as a birthday gift last September. It took me until May to work up the courage to learn how to use it. Now I have a little bit of anxiousness / nervousness whenever I try a new thing. He knew the basics of it, and while I have made one outfit while I was in Girl Scouts when I was younger it was with much supervision (thank you Fairy Godmother). So he taught me the basics of the sewing machine along with the help of me watching the tutorial video it actually came with I started to learn the simple thing of threading the machine (bobbin thread especially when it messed up). I have to say that I have googled videos and they have been helpful.

So enough about that. First project I did was simply hem the kitchen window curtain so that it was not puddling on the counter. It was nerve wrecking... I had the machine flying faster then I could control it and was trying to pull and push the fabric too much. Then I settled down. Took my time. Got a good rythm going and just breathed. Let the machine's feed dogs ( I just looked that up to see what to call those !) feed it and just move it with it. I know I know I am boring you to tears. But I have to say this was a very eye opening for me. It was emotional and at times frustrating. And I havent even tried to use it much!

All this nonsense brings me to my proudest moment today.

I love boys t-shirts because they are longer then the girls. I often shop in the boys (not mens!) section for t-shirts and in goodwill I found a shirt I loved. I never wore it though because it was just too baggy in the waist and too tight in the neck. By the way. I am terrible at posting before photos so this will have to do. I took this photo after I marked and sewed it but before I cut it.

Front view inside out you can see the spots I sewed, using my favorite t-shirt as the model I marked this one in pencil. Followed that line and voila.

 This next one is to show everyone that though it was a little boys shirt there was much fabric that I needed to trim off. Notice that I took the armpits in but still made it go to the original hem for the red parts cause I didnt feel like learning how to mess with that.

 And then I trimmed off all that fabric (I asked permission to use the kitchen scissors in the cutting block because apparently I only own children scissors. BF had no problem with that seeing as how we do not use them for food anyhow)

Voila! SUPER CUTE FITTED TEE !!! The arms kind of flare because of how I did it but that doesn't bother me. I like a little more room in the sleeves. The neck of the t-shirt used to choke me but now that the shirt is fitted and I took in the arm-pits the neck doesn't choke me at all.

P.S. I almost always look a bit between a smile and confusion when I take a photo of myself in the mirror.

 Using this as inspiration.

Andrea inspired me

Raised garden beds

So we bought our house April 29th 2011. I feel like we are still moving in and making it our home. Last year we focused mostly on the living room and kitchen seeing as how that is where we spend most of our time. This year we are focusing on the back yard. We had talked all year about building raised garden beds for the back. We are really into growing our own food and I think it makes cooking more fun.

How to build a raised Garden Bed

http://karewares.blogspot.com/2012/04/raised-garden-bed-tutorial.html

Karen has an awesome tutorial on this for those of you that do not have a boyfriend that "already knows everything" lol. He was like "I can do that no problem". And sure enough he used exactly this method without ever even reading the blog. I read it before hand so that I could give him informed tips had he needed it.

First what we did was put down the weed barrier along the whole back of our yard. We covered it with mulch and used a black edging between the grass and mulch.

As you may be able to see here the only thing a little different then the tutorial is since we made long skinny beds the middle of the bed is reinforced on the inside with a 2x4 to keep the wood from bowing.

Lots of basil for homemade pesto ! 

In the pots I decided to put in plants that are invasive so that they have their own places to spread out with out taking over my whole garden. Strawberries are in the middle, catnip is on the left blue pot and mint is in the right. These three plants are known to take over so having them contained by themselves really is key.

This first year was a little bit expensive for our garden because we did not have our composter going quite yet so we just bought all new dank ass soil and starts for our garden. I had seeds but kept forgetting to start them. By the time our raised beds were built we still had the seeds in a packets. Maybe next year I'll get on that.

We didn't fill the beds all the way with soil because we wanted them to have a little bit of room to grow with out the harsh winds blowing them over. It is also going to be good because next year we expect to put our starts in there. Cover the top with some old windows and make our own greenhouse outside for the starts !

Inspiration came from http://simplycountrylife.blogspot.com/2012/02/greenhouse-just-in-time-for-spring.html for the windows later on !

Mason Jar Soap Dispenser

The Inspiration Jo-anna inpsired me

Pinterest has inspired me to create more than any other site. One of the things I needed was a new soap dispenser for the master bathroom.  My taste and my boyfriend’s taste is a little eclectic with a touch of re-purposing things. Ever since I had met him he had always used an old salsa jar to hold his toothbrushes. I kind of liked that about him. It was cute and a little bit “country.” I’m not talking country like western, I’m talking he lived in the country and didn't really have much need to buy fancy things. I loved this. He loves glass jars and thinks that “they are too nice to throw out.” Now that we have a stock pile of old jars that we used and reused a bunch of times I have been able to keep our jar collection down. But I still have a sweet spot for mason jars.

I saw on pinterest a cool easy project that turned an old jar into a soap dispenser. The only step really was to get the metal lid, drill a hole big enough to get the soap dispenser pump to fit. I just used the pump from the soft-soap container that we currently were using, cut it a little bit shorter and insert it into the hole I drilled. I hot-glued around the bottom of the lid around the pump to ensure a good seal. Put a cute piece of scrapbook paper around the lid and glued that on top. 

What pinterest DIDN'T say is that glass on top of a ceramic sink made it slide too much. 

Tip: Hot glue the bottom of the jar to make a bit of a buffer. I just did circles, let it harden and then it has stabilized the jar from sliding. I love hot glue.

I also had an old coil pot I had made in like 4th grade that I have been using for my makeup stuff and q-tips since I can remember. It was no use trying to "match" it up with a tooth brush holder and soap dispenser ( I had tried ). So I really like our mismatched things that really speak volumes about us. When the Roberto's salsa jar get yucky I just toss it in the dishwasher So simple. So us.

UPDATE:: Scrapbook paper "obviously" didnt last long with out a protective layer on it. I took it off and went with the jar top plain. If you want to Protect the paper look Here for what I did to fix that situation!

3 Steps on How to Pin old photos you saved from the Internet before Pinterest

Today I am devoting it to getting to those projects that I never seemed to finish. One of them is to go through my computer photos. Before Pinterest I used to just save favorite things to my computer. While they are nice in my photo gallery I like the idea of putting everything I have up on Pinterest and giving them credit and a link.

  I don’t ever look at my photo gallery and we need to keep things going on Pinterest. A lot of people just simply re-pin the things their friends do. There is a whole world out there waiting to be found and pinned.

 If you want to put up images that you have saved a long time ago but don’t remember where you got them from there is a somewhat easy way to find an original source (might not be the same one but close to).

1.) So the first step is making sure you have installed the "Pin It" button on your bookmarks bar.

   If you don't know how, you can find the info on your Pinterest page in the about section.

2.)  Ok next you open up Google (only works in Google chrome or Firefox 3.0 or higher) and from the home page click search images.

 I usually have my Google page and my photos file open side by side at this point.

3.) Now all you have to do is drag your photo onto search images. I choose this cute rocking chair I found online a while back. It will find it automatically on the web. Pick the link you want to give it credit to.

Open up the page and click on your "Pin It" button on your bookmarks bar that you installed first.

Once you click Pin It you will see a list of all the photos on that part of the site. Click the one you want to pin. Now you also have all the tools to truly create unique boards.

 There you go! Instead of files on your computer hard drive that separate and organize your photos you can have different boards on Pinterest to organize and share it!

 Remember that this is a public group so make sure you don’t post things that are so personal that you don’t want them shared with everyone on the internet. Please check pinterest etiquette in your Terms and Services section on your Pinterest page to see the suggestions to help keep the community positive and to ensure that every pin is useful to other people.

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My own backdrop

I made this using a backdrop and a quote I liked to get me through my work days.