Crossroads Ring - Sterling Silver

I've spent the weekend working on a 'Crossroads' ring - this one is extra special as it's a sterling silver version for a lovely young lady on her 21st birthday. I hope she likes it!

V For Victory

I've just started out on a month long workshop, learning how to re-create vintage hairstyles! Woot!
Anyone who knows me knows I have a soft spot for victory rolls, and this week was learning all about just that!
So here's my first crack ... yeah yeah it's messy, but for an hours worth of teaching, I think it's a pretty good first attempt. Believe it or not, these were achieved only after setting my whole head in hot rollers and going through nearly an entire can of hairspray. They stood the real test though - I managed to make it the whole way home on a typical windy Wellington night and still have the 'do' more or less intact!

Next week we're learning how to create a Betty Grable inspired style, so I'll show you the results if I can get a worthy shot!

And this is what I'm hoping to get it looking like after a lot of practice!

Boots For Walkin'

I have new boots, and I think I'm in love. They're comfy, deliciously soft leather, so they smell wonderful every time I wear them... and I wear them a lot... I also has me some mad re-growth, jeeps! And a borrowed 'standing on a chair' pose from dee*construction.

Arrowhead Necklace

I've been working on some more of my arrowhead necklaces, just waiting on my chain to arrive and I should have some ready to sell really soon... watch this space!

View Over the Fence

My weekend looked like this, what did yours look like?

Talk of Chalkboards

Last week I had an itch to make a chalkboard speech bubble - one of those things that's great in theory, but I'm not entirely sure how usable it will be!

Still, I armed myself with some 6mm MDF, a jigsaw, some old white paint test pots (for undercoat), some chalkboard paint and wollah! See that classy chick modelling with her new prop at work? That be me!

Kia ora!

Excitement in the Pipelines

There are some good things in the pipelines... watch this space!

Friday Night: Moustache Ring

On Friday nights my little sister comes round and we have 'Girls' Night' in front of the telly. Last night we decided to be productive while waiting for Graham Norton to start, and we made her a sterling silver moustache ring. Cute huh!?

DIY Singer Sewing Table

A few years ago the 'in laws' gave me an old industrial Singer sewing table that promptly went into our storage unit while we traveled overseas. On returning, I dug it out in the hopes that I could get it restored to a  point that it could be used for upholstery again... but unfortunately it was a bit beyond repair. The mechanism had rusted so badly that the costs to have it repaired were a little ridiculous. I couldn't bare to part with the table altogether, so the cogs got turning, and with a bit of sweet talking to the boy, we set about turning it into an awesome table for our entryway.

As we pulled the sewing machine apart, I selvedged all the nick-nacks that I found in the table drawer; thimbles, needles and spools of old thread.

 

The sewing machine itself went to the scrap metal recycler's, and we set about finding some timber to make a new table top from.

Corey managed to grab a van load of Rimu joists that were being ripped out of an old building he was working on (and about to be thrown out!). We laminated them together, and gradually planed the new top down to a nice smooth surface, then sealed it with clear polyurethane.

The table base, though not the most intricate Singer base that I've seen, was really cool none-the-less, but was in need of a really good wire brush and powder-coating. The cost to powder-coat was a little insane, so we grabbed a few cans of black gloss spray paint and applied coat after coat to the steel base until it looked just like new.

I'd love to say that we managed this little DIY over this Easter weekend, but in all honestly we've been chipping away at it for over 12 months! But this weekend I finally got it installed in our entryway. Success!

A Weekend Of...

A weekend of soup making, of sauce making, of reading, of movie watching, of clothes washing, of caterpillar battle losing, of spinach growing, of afternoon creating.

A Tool Snapshot