What I did on my snow day.

Before snow day. 

After snow day. 

My art studio is a long narrow room in the basement that was originally meant to be my ex-husbands 'Man Cave'. But recently all it's been is a storage room for art supplies. I decided I would be more inspired if the room were more.... inspiring. My manfriend was kind enough to buy a gallon of paint a few weeks ago and with nothing else to do today, we used it!

I was inspired by this Simply Color post on Design Sponge:

I think with a few more weeks of organizing, spray painting and decorating, I'll be crafting in a retro inspired art studio in no time! Of course, I will be sure to keep y'all up to date!

Animal Art!

I have a bi-polar kitty named Grace Kelly (because she is our little princess). While her random attacks and constant complaining about the unsatisfactory conditions are annoying as all get out, we love her very much. I’ve been thinking that I should create some pet art to honor our furry friend and went poking around for inspiration. Oh and inspiration I did find!!

Guinea Pig Pirate!

 Matreshkas by Irina Troitskaya

American Gothic by VL. Desgins

Needle Felted Fox by GERRY Poseable

Pug Bride and Groom

Final Turn by Ron Krajewski

Elephant and Antique Hot Air Balloons!

Golden by Rob Kelly

Pulp Fiction cast by The House of Mouse

What I’m Reading!

I’ve been an avid reader of Make  and Craft for some time now and have become huge fans of their founders – Mark and Carla Frauenfelder – through them. First of all, isn’t that the awesomest thing ever? Husband and Make, Wife and Craft? I love it! Second of all, I read on BoingBoing (another Mark project) that Mark had written a book. I put in a request at my local library and picked it up last week.

Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World is quickly becoming my manifesto. Not only does he touch on the history of a consuming society (it’s a new concept! People are naturally DIYers, but advertising has trained us that store bought and brand new is better.) but he also goes onto describe the parts of crafting I love – the pride, the learning process, the community, the therapy.

In reading this book, I have been inspired to do things I was too scared to do in the past (tear out my back yard and start a garden oasis) and things I never knew I wanted to do (keep chickens). This book is a perfect start to 2011 “Catch Up!” for me!

Interested? You should be! You can read some chapters for FREE here. 

My 15 Minutes of Internet Fame: My Psycho Themed Bathroom Reno!

Bathroom Before

Bathroom After

I moved into my fixer-upper in March of 2006 and after lots of sweat and tears, I finally finished the renovations on my guest bathroom in January of 2008 and posted it on Craftster. I was tickled pink when the response was so amazing there! I think I was even a featured project that month! Just over the moon proud of myself. 

But then, people started blogging about it! Every now and again I google Psycho Bathroom to see where it is. Obviously, over the course of three years the traffic has slowed down considerably, but it still pops up (especially around Halloween!)

This was my very first step into the interweb crafting community as well - This bathroom was my big start! I've been reading the comments on those blogs, and everyone seems pretty disappointed that I didn't make the signs or shower curtain. Who has two thumbs and doesn't care? This girl. 

See my bathroom blogged at:

Craft

Boing Boing

Crafting Kindness

I'm a member of a loose group of artists and creatives called DenverMind Media. We are trying to create socially conscience media and to make media available to small local business and non-profits. Over the past few months we have been building up to project with The Random Acts of Kindness Foundation. 

You can see yours truly near the end of the video holding a sign I crafted! You can also read all about the process here.

A Monthly Challenge? Count Me In!!

 Jemalia from JemJam challenged anyone who felt like joining in to make a bag a month from Amy Butler’s Stylin’ Stitches for the entire year. Since I am not one to let a challenge pass me by, I decided to not only join in, but become the world’s most amazing amateur bag maker ever! However, since I haven’t used my sewing machine basically ever, I will have an uphill battle at accomplishing that.

When I told manfriend about this, he took me by my hand and led me into our closet. Then he silently pointed to the shelves where I keep my purses. There are many and I love them all dearly. Then he asked very quietly if I had to because he was hoping to find room in the closet for a second pair of shoes. Since I love him so dearly, I decided to make the purses, but give them away to my friends.

January is the Cosmo Bag for my dear friend Mel. I tried to get her to shop for fabric with me, but our schedules just never matched up. So I forged ahead without her and bought it myself over the weekend!

My January Cosmo Bag Fabric Selects!

All of these pretties are from the Moda line. I can’t wait to see how this turns out!

New Years Resolutions Can Suck It

I hate New Years Resolutions. They seem like a silly way to set yourself up for failure. When next New Year’s comes rolling along you get to remember how excited you were a year ago to learn to knit or jog everyday and then realize you never did it. Then in order to prove that you’ve grown and changed, you do it again. It’s a vicious cycle. Just face it - some people will never jog. I prefer giving every year a theme. Some simple thought or phrase that I can put behind an entire year of actions.

2010 was the “Wrap Shit Up!” year for me. I opened my eyes 1/1/10 and realized that I was more than a year divorced, but still dealing with his things and the devastation from the process. I was living in a construction zone of a ‘fixer upper’ and was desperate to walk into my bedroom and not find a hammer somewhere in the pile of shoes. As I continued to look around my life I saw dozens of unfinished projects and processing and needed to... you got it… “Wrap Shit Up!” (The exclamation is very important. Without it, how would I remember I was excited about it?)

I think I did okay. It’s not all wrapped up, but I made huge strides! I wrapped up almost all of the interior renovations, leaving just a few odds and ends like “Touch up paint” on the list. The divorce thing is taking some extra time due to a terrible and boring list of legal reasons I’m still dealing with, but I did finally hire a lawyer to finish it up for me! And best of all, the tools are now in a place in the basement just for tools!!

A few weeks ago I opened my eyes to 2011 and I took another look around my life. I felt really good about wrapping things up last year. I was proud of the changes I made instead of disappointed that I failed to meet a resolution. But I knew that I still needed something… 2011 is time for RockStarCrafter to “Catch Up!!” (TWO exclamations. Yes, that’s how excited I need to be about this year!)

“Catch Up!!” means a lot of things to me. I am trying to find the areas of my life where I was less than vigilant over the past few years and make up for lost time. For your reference, please find a sampling of those areas:

• ·      Personal Health and Fitness
• ·      Finance
• ·      Community Outreach
• ·      Social Activity
• ·      Creative Expression
• ·      Car Cleanliness
• ·      Lipstick 

Like I said, it's just a sampling.

So, in an attempt to work on the health and finance areas, I decided to start hauling my breakfast and lunch from home to my 9 – 5. At first I was pretty bummed about it. Last night’s leftovers and a romance novel during my lunch hour were far less appealing than cracking jokes over $5 milkshakes with the guys from the office. But I was excited about “Catch Up!” so I did it anyway.

Then, my dear friends, a miracle happened! No, you’re right. It was more like an awesome coincidence. I found Lunch It, Punch It – a website that offers an amazing revolution in the ‘bringing your lunch to work to save money’ syndrome:

A punch card!!

If you bring your lunch 10 work-days in a row, you get to treat yourself to an awesome lunch out. I thought this might work since I am the type who will continue to get bad coffee from that place around the corner just because I am three cups away from a free bad cup of coffee. So I printed up their punch cards and started punching!

Today, dear readers, was my first full punch card lunch and it was amazing! Because I hadn’t been spending all my pennies on not-so-great lunches everyday, I got to splurge on my favorite lunch from the local organic pizzeria, The Oven. It was magically delicious.

A salad, personal pizza of your choice and a beverage for just $11.95!! 

Another wonderful side effect is that I no longer dread packing my lunch every morning. I’ve been planning for it, both in time and food. And even better? I think I need to make my own reusable lunch bag! Anyone know of any patterns I can use?

2010: Handmade Christmas Gifts Part 1

Let’s all jump into my way-back machine to one month ago…… Wow! Doesn’t the past feel so backwards! I mean, seriously, look at the size of that cell phone! And my hair! HAHAHAHA!!

Not funny? Well I tried damnit….

So a month ago my manfriend and I were running around preparing for the holidays. I had saved my vacation days to spend the last 2 weeks of the year with our families back east. We were splitting the time between my family in Kentucky and his in Illinois.

He’s spent some serious time with my family, including two family summer vacations and a Christmas already. On the flip side, I have had really minimal contact with his family. Now his brother lives here in Denver and is actually moving into our spare room in the next few months, so I have had more than my fair share of contact with that particular relative. The only other relation I’ve met is his mother who has come to see her boys three times since I’ve been in the picture.

Now, I love Mama Manfriend. She’s a pretty laid back and a genuinely great lady – PLUS she totally raised my favorite person in the whole world. I’m a big fan of her! But… you know… I don’t really know her. So when it finally hit me that I was going to need a gift for her… I, um…. Panicked. That’s the word. Panicked.

I had this awesome plan for a really great and thoughtful and useful handmade gift, but then I got really sick the day before our flight. The day I was scheduled to do a significant amount of the work on this really great and thoughtful and useful handmade gift. So, no one got really great and thoughtful and useful handmade gifts. I woke up after a sleepless and miserable night and started packing.

I got to Kentucky with the following items:

3 individual shoes

1 pair of pants (the pair I was wearing on the plane)

1 sweater

7 bottles of perfume

5 pounds of fabric

1 portable hard drive

1 finished gift for my brother

1 wrapped gift for manfriend

It was embarrassing. And made leaving the house very difficult since my ankle high converse were no match for the snow and ice.

Luckily, it was just food poisoning and I was up and running in time to open my stocking. Unluckily, I still needed a gift for Mama Manfriend. So my mother and I whisked over to the local craft store, picked up a few items and checked my portable hard drive embroidery patterns.

In just a few short hours with a needle in my hand, I whipped up this little fellow courtesy of the Forrest Friends patterns from Sublime Stitching.

This was really only my third or fourth finished embroidery piece and I think it’s adorable!!

Mama Manfriend was appreciative and I got bonus points for making it and wrapping it with a super cute bow, but I have a little paranoid fear that she’s just going to hand it off to one the grandkids. Whatever, right? I survived the visit, the gift disaster, and food poisoning. I’m going to count it as a win!

I Freaking Heart Cake!

So when bragging to my mother that I had written my very first blog yesterday, she had a follow up question, “What will you write about tomorrow?” The answer sprung from my brain before I could think about it! “Cake molds.” I said it like it was the only obvious choice in the whole second post conundrum and that my mother, the woman who knows me best in all the world, should be ashamed that she didn’t know that already.

Yes, dear non-existent readers, I am one of the faceless masses of hipster wannabes who loves cupcakes. But unlike too many of the rest of the masses, I have the thighs to prove it. Not only that, but I really just love cake, the cup sized versions are only better due to the ability to eat without utensils.

Proof that I really like cake.

So I have gathered a handful of products from my very most favorite companies around on the web. Fred&Friends! I know for a fact that I am not the only web geek out there telling the world how amusing these are, so I would be surprised if these were all new to you. But, it is quite possible that I might be the one to tell you they all come from one company! AHA!! Victory is mine in that I am geeky enough to know the name brand of all the things that amuse me!!

The Cakewhich!

Seriously, who would not love this cakewhich for their birthday? PB&J is quiet possibly my favorite emergency meal of all time; sometimes it’s my dessert, I like this sandwich so much.  Now it’s a full-on cake as well? Splendid! Clever! Genius even!! I now need to add “Meet the Man Who Invented the Cakewhich” to my life long goals.

The Peace of Cake!

If you ask my boyfriend, he would tell you I am a hippy. But that’s okay with him since he thinks hippys are cheap. That should have been his biggest clue, right there. I have extraordinarily expensive taste. I would get this cake mold to convince him that I am a hippy, however. It would have nothing at all to do with how delicious this cake looks with all those lovely berries. Really, buying this mold and making the cake might be the thing that takes my relationship to the next level:

“He proposed because he realized she’s cheap… How? Oh, the peace sign cake she made for their anniversary, obviously.”

The cupcakes are by far the best! I naturally shy away from non-disposable cupcake wrappers, because peeling that thin paper off of my treat makes me feel like I am working for it. But how can these get any more awesome?

Tea Cupakes!

I would buy these for a baby shower. Can you imagine me and all my foul-mouthed friends sitting around with our pinkies up like that? No, you’re right. I don’t have many friends. Okay, so it would just be me, surrounded by baby items and tea cupcakes? That still sounds like a good time to me…

Yumbots!

And for the geekier side of me, the Yumbots! These I could bring into work  and share with my mostly male geek friends in the office. There is nothing, and I mean nothing, better than a room full of computer geeks with a sugar rush and little toys that looks like robots. The possibility for hilarity is endless!!

Picking a Day and Rocking It!

So I’ve been talking about blogging for my whole life. Yes, I came home from the hospital in my mothers’ arms and asked her immediately if they had the interwebs yet because I needed to blog. Literally, that’s what happened.

So after that first stab at blogging 28 years ago, I let it lie until the time was right. The problem was that the time was never right. I was in school, working, being a housewife, getting divorced, buying a car or obsessed with nature walks. Those excuses were eating up all my blogging time! So I quit all of them. Really, that’s literally what happened.

After those distractions were out of my life, it was just me and my computer screen. Turns out, we’re best friends. I spend lots of time hanging out with her. We laugh and cry together, learn new and interesting things and find ways to prove my boyfriend wrong all the livelong day. But I still wasn’t blogging.

So I realized, after taking several online classes on building blogs, reading blogs about blogging and researching blogs through thoughtfully written and educational blogging blogs, that I should just start!

Honestly now, this is what is literally happening right now! How exciting!

Allow myself to introduce… myself.

I am RockStarCrafter. I am a twenty something red head living in Denver, Colorado with my super adorable boyfriend and my bi-polar kitty. I like to craft and make. I like to read and take pictures. I like to decorate and build. I like to travel and design.  I like movies and music and food and life. But then again, who doesn’t?

This is my blog. She’s brand new and very shy. But I’m sure that give her some time and she’ll turn out to be a lot of fun.  I’m planning on giving my blog all the things I make from crafting to building furniture. I want to give her my favorite books and movies. I am hoping to give her inspiration from my friends and favorite people!

She’s a little plain, but I’m still new to this. My plans are to make this blog awesome as I go. Waiting until I designed the world’s best banner or had two dozen thoughtfully composed posts already written was obviously just not working out for me. So I picked a day and I am rocking it!

Ready, Set… Here we go!