goodbye travel chess in a drawstring bag

the boyfriend is off to africa for 3 months to get rabies and dysentery and aids and save the world. naturally i took this as an opportunity to make him a travel chess set. everyone ought to have a travel chess set....which i only realised when i offered to lend him mine for his trip (what if i wanted to travel in the next 3 months? i know i've not played chess for at least half a year but that doesn't mean that i won't soon!) anyways, here it is:

i'm rather proud of my idea for the board - i drew a chess board on a hanky, then made it into a drawstring bag so it can hold the pieces : )

here it is not being a bag. i made the pieces by sawing a cricket wicket into thin wooden disks, sanding them down and painting them. i figured that this was the lightest, most space-saving way of having a chess set. don't judge me too harshly on the drawings on the pieces - i forgot to take a picture of the finished product which has been all touched up to look neat(er).

dress 5 of 7: constallation dress

now i'm not sure if this is finished yet, it's had a couple of reincarnations already - most of which were too fussy, too look-at-this-i've-put-a-constallation-on-a-dress. all sequins and glitter. so i took out the stars, and was left with this gathering of runic amoeba which i rather like...though i get the feeling i'm going to have to explain what it is quite a lot:

so yes, i dyed one of the £1.99 H&M dresses deep blue, replaced the belt with a silver ribbon, and embroidered the southern hemisphere of the night sky across the front and right side. it's almost fancy now : )

it maybe could do with a circle around it - but that might make it look even more like the contents of a petri dish! so i think i'm just going to leave it as is.

you have no idea how many episodes of various shows i managed to get through while doing this embroideries.

space invaders t-shirt dress

for a while now i've been wanting my dad to send me some of his old, extra large nerd t-shirts so i can make cool dresses out of them...but he's either not gotten around to it or he doesn't want to part with them : (

no matter though! as primark sell them for £3. so i made this:

i had planned to make one of those skimpy halter neck ones that you can make out of large men's tops pretty easily, but then i remembered that i had a cut-up black t-shirt from a previous project (i needed black fabric to make the black bit of the beak on a bjork swan dress). so i simply cut the main body of the large t-shirt into a trapezium that was smaller at the top (generic skirt shape), sewed up the sides, and sewed the whole thing to the bottom of the black top.

it took like 20 minutes max, and looks great on : ) very happy making! now if only i could persuade dad to send me some tops, i wouldn't have to dress shop for a while..... 

crochet flower necklace

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i'm really quite pleased with this little piece - i simply scoured the net for free crochet patterns of flowers, picked some that i liked and made them using embroidery thread and 2mm hook. then it was just a case of sewing them together at the back and attaching them to a miss matching chain that i found (literally 'found'; i found it broken up on the pavement a while back, it was all in bits that were spread out over a good few hundred meters like bread crumbs, i half expected there to be something at the end of the trail).

when i get a chance i'll make some earrings to go with it.



treasure-junk

i was given a present yesterday, my kind of present; a bag full of stuff! there was bits of old toys, old coins, a harmonica, what looks like a collection of tiny screw drivers, bits of fabric and all sorts. while thinking about all the things i could make with this pile of goodies i got the jewellery wire out and made some fun earrings:

i've only made 6 so far - there's lego fire, some sort of lego gun thing, a lego flag with a dragon on it which i covered in plastic (to protect it from rain), a sixpence, a green game piece and a very small toy car.

 ooooooooooo there's so much other stuff i could make from the stuff!!!  

homemade drinks cabinet : )

i have far too many little projects planned for the summer, one of which is to get very good at making cocktails. of course, if one is going to have a multitude of booze in the house one really ought to have a drinks cabinet...i'm not sure if i was going for the 80's art deco revival look or something a little more reminiscent of an early star wars piece? there wasn't a plan, it sort of just happened:

it took a couple of lazy days and lots of cardboard to make - yes, it's made from cardboard. i must say i'm quite pleased about the unnecessary door (the big hole in the middle of it makes opening and closing the thing a bit redundant). i cut a couple of corners on the construction side of things - instead of paper mache i used masking tape to tidy the cardboard edges, and it could really do with another coat of paint, but i'm hoping that any onlookers will be too merry to notice these things : )

the three holes are whisky bottle tubes, the rest i pilfered from the recycling. one last thing to add it going to be the lining at the bottom of the draw; i'm going to glue the foil wrappers from chocolate coins to it, it's not in keeping with the theme but i think it'll look cool.

a very british picnic

as it's the jubilee today, and most of my friends aren't too fussed about/really don't like the monarchy, i thought i'd have a non-royal-related picnic. i did some research and found that the 5th of june is also the anniversary of the first hot air balloon flight (when i say 'i did some research' i mean i googled it and read the first hit, this is probably incorrect information). so to commemorate we had cucumber sernies, sat about in the university botanical gardens, and tried to make mini hot air balloons. we failed. also it was cold and rained a bit, but it was all good fun. here are some of the attempts:

so what did we learn? most plastic and card is flammable, as are crisp packets. birthday candles burn down faster than they heat the air in a 'balloon'. also, that we're not scientists, and we know very little about physics.



arg! i've run out of wrapping paper!

i had 30 minutes before one of my favourite people on the planet was due to come over....she's headed to america for 3 months....i hadn't got around to wrapping her going away survival pack....so what did i do? i made a purple draw-string bag with green ribbon to put the pressies in : )

inside it there was a copy of the great gatsby, a copy of alice in wonderland (last time she went i gave her english classics, thought i'd go american this time), a whisky miniature for trading purposes as americans love scotch, my old mini radio with some cute cupcake headphones (she's a baker in the making), actual chocolate as you don't get that in america and a cartoon doodle of the two of us in a frame.

....sometimes i go a little over the top with gifts....