I can’t possibly only work on one thing at a time. No way, no how. That makes too much sense. Then I might actually *finish* something in a timely manner. Can’t have that!
For my birthday/mother’s day I got a new sewing machine. My old one still mostly works and would probably work just fine if I took it for a tune up. It is, however, older than I am. After some research and checking of the budget and saving up, I got the Brother SE400 sewing & embroidery machine. I LOVE IT!
I can only make embroidery things that are 4″ square (or smaller), but that’s more than big enough for right now. I’ve mostly deduced how to make my own patterns and I’ve had varied success with them thus far. I’ve also broken two needles embroidering and one while sewing.
I’ve been working on quilting, some other random presents, and completely failing at making myself a new wallet. I haven’t actually *finished* any sewing projects yet. Yet!
One of the projects I actually got done this weekend (mostly), is the organizational drawers for all of my polyhedral dice. I did some research and settled on Beyond The Page MDF Tower Storage With Drawers by Kaisercraft. I should have done more research.
It’s the dark brown six-drawer tower. Not only is the entire thing unassembled (which I expected for the price I paid), but the drawers are a hard cardboard and it is *impossible* to assemble them without glue & tape. There were *no* assembly instructions with it or on their website. I finally had to resort to watching a youtube video (which I hate doing, rawr) to figure out how to assemble the damn things.
So I painted the ‘wood’ frame with some acrylic paint, glued it together, lined the cardboard drawers with some pretty scrapbook paper and modge podge, and glued the damn things together. They *BARELY* fit in the holes, and that’s without putting paper on the outside of the drawer. Crap! I resorted to just putting paper over the front and down the sides about a third of the way. It’s a bit of work to get the things open and closed.
It was a lot more work than I thought. The drawers couldn’t be those neat ones that fold in on themselves and hold everything together, no no. I had to buy and break out the awesome glue in the metalish tube that if you leave the cap off, will leak EVERYWHERE!
The labels on the front were made with photoshop and one of the many fonts I have (I’m not a font geek .. I swear) and printed out on normal printer paper. I was going to use my cool sticker maker to attach them, but then I realized that I used all of my sticker stuff to make Beer Brand Beer Labels for Bar Flies, so I had to resort to modge podge again.
The three-drawer tower was found in the clearance bin at Michael’s. I decided to leave it plain, aside from the labels, because I was being lazy. The little black box is our ‘gaming room fund’ for the purchase of snacks/dinner for the group. I think it has $8 right now! It was purchased many moons ago at one of those craft-type stores and painted flat black with no adornments.
I’m not 100% happy with how my dice organizational thingies came out, but I’m 100% fed up with them, so I’m calling them done. (Pretty sure the 6-drawer tower sat on the floor in the gaming room for about a month and a half before I finally finished it).
I also finished the GM screen for one of our roleplaying games, Legend of the Five Rings. The GM bribed me with an extra XP point. The backside has info for the GM to help make the games go more smoothly. The front is two pictures from the card game/wiki page, the map of the world of Rokugan, and then the logo for the game, my approximation at “Echoes of Rokugan” in Kanji and Hiragana (it’s close, but not exact), and the clan logos for the five player character clans.
Yeah, I had too much fun making it.
Last weekend, after helping with the set build on season two of Bar Flies, I threw together some generic Beer labels for them to wrap around root beer bottles as they don’t want *ANY* brand names in their shots. Everyone was pretty pleased with how they turned out.
If you haven’t watched season one of Bar Flies yet, OH MY GOD GO WATCH IT BECAUSE SEASON TWO IS GOING TO BE AMAZING! (and they’re not paying me to say that. They still owe me cookies for helping out)
If I keep working on the projects, eventually I’ll get things done. Eventually. Hopefully.
My cats keep wanting to ‘help’ and by help, I mean they keep laying all over all of my things!
The Ivory Tower of Doom 