Sewing Project: Pretty business card case

 Thanks to the lovely Pamela over at Dayton Time, I was suddenly in possession of 500 wonderful business cards. It makes it so much easier to share my fancy new google voice phone number and my work e-mail when its all on a handy dandy little card!  One teensy weensy little problem. For those of you who have been following the game here, my name is set to change in t-minus 205 days, so I had to get those babies out the door! My solution, make the cutest ever business card holder so I can convince people to take my card. So far, its gone something like this...

Me: Oh! Let me show you my latest sewing project that I completed in all the time that I have free.

Unsuspecting parent/teacher/specialist:Wow! That's super cute! But what could be inside? I must know!

Me: Why, I'm glad you asked. I have right here some handy dandy business cards so you have no excuse not to call me back my information easily accessible.

Unsuspecting parent/teacher/specialist: Oh! Wonderful! I'll take 5!

Or something along those lines....

Anyway, I found a great pattern which, as with the best projects, took about 30 minutes, including the time I spent rummaging though my crazy stash of random fabrics and clothes that will someday be awesome projects. The finial product was a combination of pretty print fabric left over from my days of making sorority shirts, some terry cloth remnants from baby bibs I made this past spring, a ribbon that was decoration on the package of some gift given to me, and a metal spare button that came with a piece of clothing I'm pretty sure I no longer own.  After gathering those things up, and a few cuts, pins and stitches, I ended up with this!

Even better, when I showed it to my cousin, she requested one for a Christmas gift. Wonderful! I love an excuse to make things for people, but its tough sometimes to know how they'll react to a homemade gift.

Oh so pretty!

Remember that post about anthropologie being a store I drool over, but can't really afford? Well... I found this great lady who can MAKE anthropology-like pretty things and, even better, recycles other clothes to make them!



Just look at this great shirt here! Even better, she's GIVING IT AWAY!

Oh, fingers crossed!

At last, an update! Holiday Craftiness!

I have totally been slacking on my posting, but I have a good excuse. After Mike and I returned from Utah, I started my first student teaching placement of my master's program at a great school for the Deaf. Hopefully, I'll get to posting about that later. For now, here are the as promised details of my holiday craftiness.

The first was a Secret Hollow Book that I made for Michael. I got the directions from the How to do Stuff blog and it was a pretty easy, though somewhat time consuming project.

I took a trip to the local used book store to pick out the book. I had a little trouble at first, because I wanted to get a book that was hard cover and large enough to hold something. It also had to be a book that would be expected to be in Mike's collection, but not one that he would be upset about not being able to actually read. I settled on a wine encyclopedia that was updated for 1980.


Without its dust cover on it was a simple white book with just a little bit of texture. I thought it would look nice on a shelf in the office. Then it was time to break out the decoupage and paint brushes which i had from a chair project I never finished several years previously...


After it was all glued together, I had the arduous process of cutting out the middle. This took several hours and made a lot of mess. But the finished project was worth it!



I filled it with several little gifts and wrapped it up. Mike seemed pretty happy about the finished project and hopefully will be used in our house for quite some time.

The next gift was another idea that I stumbled upon though some blogs I read. This one was from With this Ring, one of the many wedding inspiration blogs that I read. It was a really cute and really simple apron made from a tea towel. I decided this would be cute for Jenny as well as a good hostess gift for Cassandra who was going to be taking care of us while we were in Utah.

This is the one I made for Jenny, I bought some cute matching towels from Bed, Bath and Beyond so I could add a pocket to the original design and give her another towel to have that matched.

Here's the basic design.


The only sewing in the basic design was attaching the buttons. The ribbon is actually just tied around the buttons.

Here's the finished product with pockets. They were pretty simple to put on, but I think they add a lot to the design. I also gave Jen a bag of Wegman's loose leaf tea. Last year I gave her a reusable tea basket (which you use in place of tea bags). I like to try encourage good eco-friendly habits in my friends when I can- plus its handy and the tea tastes bettter!


I also decided to make Mike an apron. I didn't have a whole lot of time when I came up with this idea and I thought he'd like a full one, so I went with embelshing a pre-made one instead of making my own or another tea towel one.

I picked one up at my favorite store, Wegamans. I decided to embroider it, even though I've never done that in my life. My strategy was to print out a letter from Microsoft Word, copy it on to tissue paper. Then I pined it to the apron and use an embrodery needle I got with a set and some thread that I had leftover from my friendship bracelet days.

I think the finished product again came out really nicely!



I did a few other crafty things, but I think this is plenty of showing off for one day. :)
I'll try to be back soon with a little bit about our Utah trip and goings on in my life right now. Take care everyone!

Responsible

Lately I've been trying to be a responsible consumer, or at least thinking about what a responsible consumer is. I've been trying thinking about who I buy from, what materials the product is made from and if I should buy things at all. I'm trying.
One way of being a responsible consumer is really thinking about the personal worth of what you're buying. There's this book I've heard of and would like to read about someone who went a little more to the extreme than I think I ever could. Its called "Not buying it: My year without shopping." by: Judith Levine. I doubt I'll ever be brave enough to try an experiment like that, but there are plenty of ways
I've also been looking for companies/products that are socially/environmentally beneficial... or at least better for the environment than their alternatives. I really like the Bert's Bees products, for example. Besides just being nice products, they are not tested on animals, use recycled/recyclable packaging and part of the proceeds goes towards buying land for conservation. I've also started using Preserve razors lately too. I've read about them in the past and finally found them at Wegman's so I decided to give them a try. These are razors that the handle is made from recycled plastic (something like 60% comes from Stony Field Farm yogurt containers). On top of that, once you use them (they're disposable) you can get free packaging to send the handles back to Preserve where they make them into plastic lumber that picnic tables are made of! I don't know where these picnic tables go or are sold. Maybe I'd be helping them make double profits by giving them their materials back, but I guess thats okay because its keeping them out of the landfills.
Speaking of giving back materials, there are some neat recycling things I have found out about lately too. There are these paper recycling dumpsters at several locations around town, usually schools and churches. Depending on how much paper that place collects, the recycling company donates money to them! What a neat fund raiser :) I've found that I go through a lot of paper and typically take a paper bag over twice a month. Another great recycling thing I've found lately is a website called Book Mooch. Basically its a trading site for people to get rid of books they're finished with and "mooch" books that they want to read from other people... free! The more books that are shared, the less that are printed... which is bad for publishers, but good for the environment. And for my wallet... which most eco-friendly/organic things are not....
Maybe I'm just jumping on the environmentalism bandwagon that is so popular now. But is that really a bad thing?