Hi there!

I’m ready to write a new post for the blog, oh yeah! Exactly a week after my last post. If you’ve been wondering what was taking me so long, flu has. It sort of melted my brain into a mix of… stuffy, disgusting bits.

Anyway, here I am again, and I have a post for all of you. I’ve been working on this one for a while, if not on the text, at least on the images. They were all taken with my phone (S4) and then perfected (ha!) in Photoshop, mainly because I tend to get creative at night, so the lighting in all my quick phone pictures is usually bad. That’s how I seem to roll…

This is something I saw on Pinterest. I think the first time I saw stuff like this was probably on one of the million photos and posts about doing things with Mason jars.

For some reason, it seems I never pinned any of those, but pinned this one instead, which let’s be honest, it’s much prettier than what I’ve ended up doing! Unfortunately, the original link seems to be broken…

I don’t have any Mason jars, even though I keep thinking about buying a bunch. I know, they look awesome, but I can’t really go spending money around on something like that, so instead, I decided to use what I have. Enter Bonne Maman!

Obviously, it’s better to do this project after you’ve finished eating the contents of the jar, but that isn’t much of a problem around here!

First of all, I set my working space, which was no other than my coffee table, while I was watching TV.

I wasn’t drinking beer, I just like to have big glasses of water and save myself trips to the kitchen!

Now, I must admit that the whole sewing kit you’re going to see here started really as a test, as a I’m bored, let’s see what happens… sort of project, so I didn’t have any plan at all when I started.

I cut a circle out of the cardboard, to give the cushioned top a circular shape, and made a hole in the middle to insert the stuffing (I finally found a use for all those broken socks, yay me!)

I then cut a bigger circle in my fabric, chosen at random from fabric my aunt gave me a few months ago. I threaded it along the outer area (if that makes any sense) very loosely, so I could then pull the thread tight around the cardboard.

Does that make more sense? As you can see, I filled the thing with my shredded sock(s), which gave it a pretty nice consistency.

After that, I gave the lid a coat of gesso, which to be honest, didn’t work as I thought. The idea was to make the lid a bit rougher so that I could paint it properly, but I didn’t expect the surface to end up that rough. I used some sanding paper to try to smooth it a bit once it had dried, which didn’t work completely either. It’s fine, as I was just sort of testing stuff. I decided to go ahead and just paint it in this pretty blue, and then added some white dots.

Once that was dry, I glued the cushion to the lid. Then, it was just a matter of getting creative and add decorations to the cushion. I made a pretty rose with some random fabric I found, I did a crochet flower, and added some pretty pins and a handmade button…

Finally, I added the finishing touches: a metallic tag that shows it was made with love along with a card tag that I stamped myself.

For the contents, I just raided my sewing box and filled the jar with a couple of threads, small scissors, a tape measure, and a thimble! The usual.

I think it ended up looking great, despite it being done with no plan and on a trial and error basis.

I definitely enjoy doing this kind of thing, and I’ve been looking for new projects for the past couple of months.

For now, my next project is probably going to be a tie. I just finished watching The Great British Sewing Bee on TV and on their last episode, the sewers had to make a tie from scratch as their first challenge. Not only it look difficult enough, but the finished items looked absolutely beautiful. Unfortunately, I don’t know that many guys who wear ties, so I guess they’ll be just personal projects once again. I’ll let you know how it goes!