Black Tie Tee

I needed to do a t-shirt makeover.  There are so many good ones out there but I really wanted something classy that I could dress up a bit.  I saw a great You Tube video by Stitchless TV on how to do a bustle on the back of a t-shirt and I knew I had to try it.  I had a black Old Navy t-shirt and a ton of old black and white clothes that I could repurpose along with some cool black trim.  The first thing I did was add the pieces for the bustle to the back of the tee.  I didn't actually cut the t-shirt as it says to do in the video.  I just added the bustle on top of the shirt.  When I was done and tried it on it still looked like an Old Navy t-shirt to me.  Something else needed to be done...  So I cut the neckline into a v-neck and added a couple of scrap pieces from another shirt (part of which I used for the bustle) to make a collar.  That was it!  The final touch was adding the black trim to the v-neck and the top of the bustle using fabric glue.  I don't think it looks like an Old Navy t-shirt anymore.  What do you think?

Mosaic

I picked up a couple of packs of mosaic tile stickers from Michaels the other day because they were on clearance and because I always thought they were kind of cool.  I just wasn't sure what I wanted to do with them.  I wanted to try something different then adhering them to a photo frame and I'm not really into scrapbooking (at the moment).  What to do...what to do...

I just bought a spool of wonderful gray ribbon to use on my jewelry organizer / cutlery tray and I thought the color of it went really well with some of the tiles.  So, I put the stickers on the ribbon in a checkerboard pattern and added a black flower pin to it and voila! My checkerboard mosaic choker.

Move over flatware!

This is another idea I've seen on Pinterest a bunch of times.  I really wanted to try it since I have an overabundance of necklaces and not too many places to put them.  The idea is to turn a cutlery tray into a jewelry organizer.  I got my tray at Ikea so it was pretty cheap.  The paint I used was Martha Stewart Multi-Surface Metallic Craft Paint in Brushed Pewter.  The knobs I got were from Target and I picked up a little round mirror from the dollar store.  It was actually a pretty easy craft to accomplish.  Carefully drilling holes for the knobs was probably the worst of it.  Here is the result:

Chalk it up

I've seen this so many times on Pinterest that I had to try it for myself to see if chalkboard paint is really as easy as they say.  I bought a couple of the little tin serving trays from the dollar store, a bottle of Martha Stewart multi-surface chalkboard paint and some chalk (a little hard to find in February...FYI).  The instructions and pins said to apply at least two coats of the paint.  I applied three, waiting a day between each coat.  Then you are supposed to condition the paint by rubbing the flat side of the chalk over the entire surface.  Well, this actually scratched up the whole surface of my paint so that the tin on the bottom of the tray showed through again.  I ended up applying two more coats of paint for a total of five coats.  This time I was super careful when rubbing the chalk across the surface and it didn't scratch.  Yay!  One small caveat, Martha Stewart Black Chalkboard paint is very black not the traditional chalkboard grey.  But the nice thing is these trays are obviously metal so I added a couple of cute paper flower magnets that I made and Voila...

Onsie Twosie

My baby girl turned one year old recently and she's got a ton of "onsies" that don't fit any more.  Luckily, she's pretty slim so it's just the length that doesn't fit.  Some of them are way too cute to get rid of so I've decided to make them into shirts instead.  Being the non-seamstress that I am I have to make my sewing projects as quick and easy as possible.  I love that onsies are made out of basic t-shirt material and when you cut them you don't have to seam the edges because they won't fray.  So I basically cut off the bottom of the onsie and added a trim.  Notice the cute little pink pleated trim that I didn't have to pleat myself...LOVE!  Anyway, I know the shirt won't fit her too long but at least I'll get a couple more months out of it.  Easy Breezy...five minutes tops!