Weekly Ideas Post

[seryn]

It looks like everyone is in the same boat I am, where nothing I do feels creative. Even the food I have made this week has been the same kinds of dishes I always make. Seriously, the sum of my creativity for the week was adding a rubber stamp to a thank you card.

With that in mind, I think we should all challenge ourselves to come up with a creative project. What would you like to make or build? What questions do you have? Are there design issues you would like to address through discussion or do you tend to "wing it"? Feel free to make a whole post or to comment here (which I plan to do).

And thank you to all the new members for subscribing, the poster and commenters for participating, and the lurkers for lurking.

Comments

[seryn]

I should do more "yogurt art" like the icon. ;-)

My next big project feels more like a chore because I have no idea what I am doing. I have a rocking chair. Its legs were glued in originally but at some point someone added nails. I took the nails out when they were splitting the wood spindles and the seat. (One was at a bad enough angle to be causing the seat surface finish to bubble.) But now it is structurally iffy.

I actually own wood glue, but do not have any giant clamps like that Yankee Workshop guy has. Are there caveats I have not considered?

I would consider refinishing the chair entirely but the slight bubble on the seat is easily covered with the chair pad and the rest of the finish is better than I am likely to do, especially in the winter.

Every time I look at the chair I hear Bob The Builder saying, "Okay Team, Can we fix it? Yes. We. Can." So I need to work on it just so the voices in my head can mature a bit.

[reishka]

Since you don't have clamps, is there any way you can use cord/rope to tightly secure the legs against the seat as it's drying? As long as the legs fit into the joint tightly, I don't think you should have too much of a problem using cord. It's not THE best solution, but it's good for a quick DIY fix. If the finish bubble doesn't bother you when it's covered, I'd say don't worry about it and pretend it's not there. On the other hand, if you want to have a go at refinishing, there's no real reason NOT to.

[seryn]

If I refinish it, I think I should do so while it is disassembled. It would just be a lot easier to get an even color on the leg spindles if I could work from all sides. But it's been weather-ing a lot here and that means I'd have to work inside. I've been putting off working on this for almost a year, so I should probably not throw roadblocks and caltrops in my own path.

I'd been hoping that gravity (turning the chair upside down) after pounding things in with a padded rubber mallet would be sufficient in lieu of clamps. It can hardly get worse than it is now because sitting in the chair makes scary noises. ....

[reishka]

I think I'm the opposite -- I have so many projects waiting in the wings I don't even know where to begin! I have a winter quilt cut. It needs to be pieced, stuffed, and stitched. I have the plannings for next year's Christmas Quilt beginning to form. I also have some really nice asian-themed fabric that I want to incorporate into a quilt, but I haven't really started thinking about that one yet. I've started a katamari damacy-themed breadcover -- and I'm kind of winging that one as I go along, making it up without any real pattern. And I've been working on learning how to meake fabric flower hairpieces and learning how to whittle so I can make some wooden hairsticks.

The flowers have been stupidly tough -- I've found some pretty amazing tutorials, but my flowers keep coming out looking lopsided, or frumpy, or they don't hold together at all. I've decided that I need to go out and grab a glue gun, even though I was trying to avoid it.

My problem is lack of space and lack of time. School starts in a week, and I live in a ridiculously small apartment with my hubby. It pretty much leaves only the living room table available for working on projects... but our living room table is also the dinner table, the homework table, the laptop table, etc. I can't just leave a project as-is if I've started working on it and then go do something else. I have to clean it all up, put it away, and then drag it all out the next time I want to work on it. It's not a problem for the smaller things (such as the cross-stitching), but for working on quilts or even the fabric hairpieces it can be a PITA to drag everything out and then put it all away again.

[seryn]

I have the same table problems (though I do have a separate desk and no official homework). I keep small projects in dishpans so I can swap between them and errant items are easy to toss back in. But the biggest improvement was realizing we'd much rather eat in front of the TV with our feet on the coffee table. Heh. Totally not a viable solution for most people.

You know that you might find people who have done those flowers if you posted about them. Especially if you could show a picture of the common failure types. It seems like the kind of thing that would be helped distributed experience--- people providing pointers. I was kind of surprised that one could possibly make fabric flowers without a glue gun, so I'm clearly not the right person!

Good luck with the quilting.

I had to look up bread cover and Katamari Damacy. But that would be awesomely cool if it turned out!

[reishka]

I'll get around to posting about the flowers eventually... Probably the next time I get around to attempting them. The last time I tried I just tossed them all because they ended up unsalvageable!

I'm pretty adept at making the flowers themselvs without any sort of glue, but they're fussy. The new method I've been trying is supposedly easier, but so far I've had no luck. :)

I did head out to Target and got a cute little tower-storage-cubby-thing to hold some of my crafts-in-progress instead of having them strewn about the living room or taking them back and forth... we'll see how it goes.

[seryn]

Just recently I've personally experienced how "easier" needed to have a caveat about people being different. I found the "easier" method to be frustrating and impossible.

I had purchased my dishpans so I could wash skeins of newly spun yarn without cleaning my kitchen sink. But they work really well for holding whole projects. I have a closed bin for projects that have gone into a longer idle phase. I'm supposed to be limiting my projects to the number of dishpans. Ha. Instead I go in a completely different direction. "If I can't start spinning a new yarn, I'll take the chair apart instead!"

[undyedyarnpire]

I had so many problems with the "easier" method of warping my rigid heddle loom that I re-invented the old method.

You have my sympathy on your flowers.

[thistleingrey]

Good question. I have a needlepoint project lurking amidst my desultory knitting. Haven't done needlepoint since childhood, but I think I can handle it.... That's as close as I get to this post's topic, at the moment.

[seryn]

Sounds like fun. I saw the pictures of the big thing you made for your mother, so it seems like you'd enjoy needlepoint too.

My knitting is desultory too. I'm in the bland section of a toe-up sock... the kind of thing that makes a solid-color latch hook rug kit seem entertaining.