Mortem's Tricks or Treats: A Practice in Productivity.

This weekend I decided to make some time for my own projects, as I have been very busy catching up on projects for others.
Remember those gaming cushions I made? Well I finally got around to making the larger cushions to go with.

I had to order the Star Trek cotton on Etsy because the shop where I work at doesn't carry it... and I have a hunch the owner wouldn't order it; she's a Star Wars nut, and her and my husband like to gang up on me with that, heh.

She, of course, carried varieties of Star Wars cottons I have never seen in all my searches through fabric stores.

It glows in the dark

I admit, I am probably beaten on the cool factor this time on my pillow, simply because his glows in the dark and mine does not... so in order to draw some attention to mine, I appliqued a command logo onto mine... I think my mini pillow wins between those, though... bah!

Overall the cushions were a fairly quick afternoon project-- the thing that took the most time was making the bias tape, and then making it into piping to sew in. I made them into envelope covers so it would be easy to wash them.. I wish I would've done that with the mini ones.

Afterwards I sunk the rest of my afternoon into Guild Wars 2; I decided to get back to it after hearing of all the updates that have been made. I am not pleased about the whole dyes not dropping anymore, and still not please about the lack of a trinity system... but the other changes were enough to rekindle my interest in playing.
The problem with playing an MMO is that you never realize it's late until it's really late... but you're not tired and you still have so much energy leftover!

I decided to tinker around with a bin of 20 year old legos my husband brought in from the garage. Leftover pieces of his childhood years.
So what would a grown woman do with legos?

That's right. Sit down and make an extravagant mess on the ground. It was all inspired by something I saw on pinterest, and oh so worth the cleanup:

Ta-da!

You might notice I also had to put a mascot on my mini lego sewing machine... that is a must. No sewing machine I've ever owned big or small goes without one. Unless of course it's an antique... that's a mascot on its own! It wasn't all that easy creating this from a bin of random parts... I was half expecting to get nowhere in this endeavor. There were remnants of ships, star crafts, and houses... pirates and dragons and ronins...
but like any quest, I persevered, in a manner of speaking. I did try starting off with black, but failed.

You might also be wondering where I got a small wooden spool of thread. It was luck, pure and simple.
Several years back I bought a vintage travel sewing kit with most of its tools still intact. It's rough around the edges but something that I've always had on my to-do list to restore and just never got around to even planning how I'm going to do that.

Anyway, it came with mini wooden spools-- a big reason why I got it in the first place. The rod detaches so you can keep refilling the spools with thread to use. Quite handy, and awesome not to mention cute as hell.

It was the perfect final touch along with a tiny scrap of fabric to go onto the "machine".

All in all, a very productive day I would say! 

How does a productive day look like in your life?

Mortem's Tricks or Treats: Leveling Up Home

So, one of the problems I discussed with my husband is that, although we are obviously together, the house doesn't quite reflect that...

I mean that it's entirely decorated with his possessions and the only place which is solely decorated with my things is my craft room.
It seems like such an insignificant thing to be unhappy about, but you'd be surprised how much one could take it for granted. A house needs to feel like home, afterall.
It took me so long to finally pinpoint it, largely because my husband and I share many decorative tastes in common, but the difference between the two was just enough that it started wearing away at something in me.
Constantly looking at things I couldn't even tell someone where it was purchased...

It's an easy enough fix, but it would cost a lot of money overall. So we're taking little bites here and there in the way of projects-- work our way to the big stuff.

The first step was getting rid of, or masking some of the hand me downs that are perpetuating the horrid beige and brown in our home.

The couch and its cushions.

This is actually a panorama of the room after some huge reorganizing we did last week. It was a ton of work, and it doesn't quite show, but the point of it was to make room for some of my paintings and posters awaiting postage down.

There isn't much we can do about the recliner couch that is wildly uncomfortable to horizontally lay on (it was given to us), so I just put a spider web lace tablecloth on it and it doesn't seem to shift much even when the recliner is set out.

I already knew I wanted to get rid of the cushions, but because they were yet another hand me down... we put off replacing them because we couldn't justify to ourselves that money should be spent on replacing them.

Then, I went to my husband a couple weeks ago with the strong intent to burn the savagely rough cushions, and we compromised by gutting them and making new comfortable cushions out of the entrails.

And so, that is when I, Madame Mortem with husband on board, justified buying fabric for new cushions.
I further enticed him by promising they'll actually reflect our gaming and movie/show tastes.
So we get not two, but 4 new cushions in total.

I came up with 2 large, and 2 medium: the large will be featuring Star Trek fabric for me, and Star Wars for him-- he's actually a Tolkienite, but we have so much LOTR weaponry, shields and maps about it, that I figured it would be nice to integrate our (by ours I mean mine) immense love of sci-fi in the mix, too (more compromise! Otherwise it would've just been something with Ray Bradbury, Issac Asimov or Douglas Adams to accompany Mr. Roddenberry's universe). The medium ones will feature the emblem of his favorite game the Witcher, and mine would be the Legend of Zelda.

Silver for him, gold for her... should've been the other way round, but gamers choice, right.

I started with the smaller ones, and chose to use batik quarters.
I printed vectors of the two and began the tedious task of tracing them onto freezer paper, cutting it out very carefully with an exacto knife, and arranging the pieces neatly onto the fabric for pressing and painting...

Definitely not for those with little patience and an unsteady hand...

My eyes ached so much after this; it didn't help I was already pretty tired.
Painting proceeded as carefully because the freezer paper kept threatening to come up with this particular design. At least my Hylian crest was easy as pie...

I was actually debating making the dark Link Hylian crest; silver, because I think it's awesome and I'm not really a gold person. But I must stay true... so.

Last minute, I decided I better use the premade piping I had stashed for so long, but little did I regard that it would not be enough for the two cushions, so I had to make the tough decision of completing just one.
And it ended up being the one I worked hardest on... the Witcher.

I scoured the house for twine big enough to match this one, but alas there wasn't any to be found... and so, until I either buy more premade pipping or buy matching twine to make my own, my cushion will go unfinished...

Sad face!

I couldn't find the right Star Trek and Star Wars fabric at Joann's so I ordered it online... I'm still awaiting their arrival to begin the gutting of the old large cushions.

Edit to add:

I finished my version of our cushions!

Stay tuned, creepy crafters!