Zipper Roses Again and a few Other Things

Hello Readers!

I've changed my nights and days around again so I'm now creating while most of you are sleeping.  Zippers are still on the radar with more ideas cropping up all the time! That's a good thing... because I still have a ton of zippers to do something with!

So, on with what I've been up to since I was here last. Yes, I know that was not too many days ago! But I keep busy almost everyday and progress is always being made on something!

This is a terrible picture but I think you can get the idea. I've added felt leaves to some of the zipper roses.

I put the veins on the leaves with Tulip Slick fabric paint. The leaves are hot glued to the back of the rose. This one has tiny glass balls glued over the hot glue that seeped through from the back. It looked awful...had to do something with it! Those tiny glass balls are a bit like glitter, just much heavier. They are glass after all.  If you'd like to check out what these glass balls are all about you can order your own here. Or just go see what I'm talking about. While you're at American Science and Surplus check out all the great buys on alternative art supplies they have to offer. I'll warn you though that you WILL spend hours there. First link takes you to the listing for the glass beads (though they are really tiny balls) and the other link will take you to what's new at AS&S. You can figure out how to navigate the site...nothing hard about it.

Not all of the zipper roses will have glass balls because not all of the roses have that ugly hot glue showing through. 

I put an origami butterfly on the surface of each rose. I think the butterflies will eventually get prettied up some. Probably with some dots of fingernail polish or something like that.

I made this junk magnet out of a couple of different zippers, some with the fabric edge left on, some without it. The eyes are rounds of fat yarn wound into a circle with metal disks (from magnetic clips that I tore up for the magnets) filled with copper colored glitter glue, a green tri-bead and a little black plastic holeless bead atop the green bead. His beak is a triangle cut from an aluminum can and his body is the lid off a bean can. The little silver rods on his wings came from the magnetic clips same as the metal disks used for his eyes. The reason I tear up these magnetic clips is because I have a great many of them. 

I will probably make more owl junk magnets using zippers. This one is about three inches across.

I finished the piece of chocolate cake. It looks a bit odd sitting on the shelf in the kitchen. It's truly amazing how real it appears!

I crocheted a sleeve for my water bottle.  I like a lid on my cup to keep cat tongues out of whatever I may have in my cup. I call it a water bottle but it seldom holds water; usually tea or lemonade. I have no clue why cats think they like lemonade when they never get passed that first tiny taste! I'd rather they just didn't have the opportunity for that first tiny taste!  You can see my stack of plastic lunch boxes to the right of the bottle in the picture. Pay no attention to the mess on the other side of the bottle. 

Day before yesterday was my neice's 16th birthday. Her mama asked me to make her a funky hat for the occasion. 

I believe I accomplished the funky part! Allison loves hats and the weirder the better for her! 

I wouldn't wear it but I think she will. She hasn't seen it yet even though it's already two days passed her birthday. I'll have to send it to her.

Here it is on my head. Goofy looking hat, if you ask me. But it isn't up to me to decide if it's goofy or not. It is only up to me to make it so it can be judged good or bad. 

I started out with a pattern for a slouchie beanie hat. That wasn't working out so well so I scrapped the first attempt, changed the yarn completely and made up my own hat as I went along. There is no pattern. I could't make another one just like it if I wanted to.  It took two tries to get that pompom right! Wasted a bunch of that blue yarn....I threw that yarn in my trash can by the painting table but I might still drag it out of there and use it on my next fish picture. Fish pictures take lots of little things...those 2 inch snips of blue yarn would make great seaweeds.

I have been thinking about this basket for days! Trying to figure out how I could pull off a basket with nothing but zippers as the material. Turns out, that can't be done by me.

It all starts off with just an idea, an experiment, if you will. I started off using only the short nylon zippers.

But once the sides starting getting taller, I started using the longer nylon zippers too. They are hot glued together. The zipper teeth are on the inside in this picture.

But I turned it inside out so the zipper teeth are on the outside of the basket and the glued edges are on the inside.

It wasn't the sturdiest of baskets with just zippers as its material.

I slept on it. 

Trying to figure out how the heck I could make it into a tote bag instead of a basket by putting handles on it and a clasp of some sort.

Everything I tried didn't make sense to me so I gave up and decided I'd just make a lined basket and call it good!

I knew it was going to need to be stiffened up somehow. That was pretty easy to figure out actually. I smeared a thin layer of caulking all over the inside of the basket and then clipped it to the sides of the empty dog bone box so it would dry in the right position. Drying of that caulking took two weeks when I used it on the fake cake. It took about an hour with this basket.

While the caulking was drying, I sewed the liner by hand. No pattern. I wing all sewing projects and always sew them by hand! 

Once the caulking was dry enough and I was figuring out how to fit the lining correctly, I noticed that the basket still wasn't stiff enough to stand up straight. I had some thin fiberglass rods that I thought would do the trick. I cut them to length, bent them in the right places and then hot glued them to the sides and bottom of the basket. I picked those long fiberglass rods in the dumpster at the electrical supply place in town. They're just thin, 6 foot lengths of white fiberglass. The basket might be a bit sturdier if I'd added a couple more rods. It's too late now though.

Then I fit the liner in, pinned it in place and 

whipped stitched the gray cashmere to the top of the basket.

The liner is ONLY attached at the top edge of the basket. I think I probably should have tried to tack it down at the bottom but I am not a seamstress and that was above my skills.

The basket is about 10 inches tall. 10 inches across at the top and roughly six inches across the bottom. I've torn up over 150 zippers since starting this zipper endeavor. There are approximately 90 zippers of varying lengths in this basket, all of them nylon zippers. I am saving the metal zippers for flowers and other projects.

This is what it looks like upside down. I'm quite pleased with it. Adding the fiberglass rods, which are flexible, helped greatly with it standing up without slouching. 

I still have a few nylon zippers but not enough to make another basket this size. Nylon zippers are pretty easy to come by though so who knows, maybe there will be another basket on this order made sometime in the future. 

The beans just keep getting browner and browner! The first bean picture was taken on the 28th and the other on the 29th.

For those who missed my answer to the question posed in the comments;

Miss Iowa wanted to know what my fascination with the soybean field was all about. She lives in Iowa where soybeans are quite plentiful. Soybeans are quite plentiful in Kansas as well! I'm not really fascinated with the soybean field, it's just there, right outside the front door and I see it every single day! I've lived here for almost 15 years and this is the first year that there have been soybeans planted in that field. We usually get milo or wheat, and then cows in the early winter depending on whether wheat or milo was planted.  Milo produces cows for Fred to play with for a few weeks after harvest. They don't put cows on the harvested wheat. So that's what's going on with the pictures of soybeans. I figured I'd keep track of the progress if for no one but myself. I didn't have regular readers when I started keeping track of the soybeans. I'm just following through till the field is harvested.

Well, that's it for me today.  

Thanks for hanging in there to the end!

Remember....

Be good to one another!

It matters!

Peace

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