Friday Arts & Crafts Day Update: April 1, 2022
Skipped doing one of these last week because, well, I didn’t have much done last week for crafts and I had no time to blog anyway due to getting this week’s huge “Meet Nick White” video.
But for next week’s video? Well, we need a peek inside the Whites’ boudoir, and that required some crafting.
First up, a recent Amazon box served as the bed itself. I think by dimensions it would be sorta a queen size but a bit longer. Not huge but hey, it’s not like Nick stumbles home to share it with Mrs. White all that often… just often enough to annoy her.
I then went into my quilting cotton stash for material to make the bedding.
I decided it would be fun to make it so that Nick has insisted on a nautical color scheme, so I found this Riley Blake fabric for the fitted sheet.
I didn’t bother sewing it, just taped it on like it was wrapping paper in case I want to change it later or reuse the fabric in some other way… quilting cotton ain’t cheap, and while I haven’t been inside a quilt shop since before the Great Karening of 2020 when they all went full maskhole lunacy (not that it made much difference, I have more fabric than I’ll ever get around to sewing anyway), I would assume that fabric has been insanely inflated in price like everything else.
Then I set about making a quilt from a ship fabric.
Kinda was mad at myself that I made it more like a comforter and less like an actual pieced quilt… I mean, I’ve won blue ribbons for my quilts in the local fair before, so this felt rather lazy, but… time was a factor and also accuracy: how the Hell would Nick acquire an actual quilt? He sure doesn’t sew, and his wife Joanne’s unrepentant lack of domesticity is one of her defining traits, so she wouldn’t have made it. He has no sisters, doesn’t get along with his sisters-in-law, his mom is long since dead and also wasn’t the domestic type… he has been a rock star for 40+ years so certain of his fans would now be at the age where they’d take up quilting and possibly seek to give him one, but do you think Joanne’s gonna tolerate sleeping under a quilt some other bitch gave her husband? Even if the other bitch is 20 years older than Joanne and absolutely not one Nick would ever be interested in fucking? Nope!
So… it seemed that doing it lazy and making it look like a commercially bought comforter was the right choice. I also washed it to make it look ever-so-slightly worn-in (I used cotton batting, which tends to get wrinkly and puckered once washed for that authentic old-quilt look.)
I might at some point make them a proper quilt, if only to appease my ego, lol… and to practise mini-piecing. (Former co-leader of a local-ish chapter of the Modern Quilt Guild here.)
I’ll probably have to make it a joke that either a rival made it for Nick and Joanne is enraged or maybe Joanne has an aunt who quilts and was making one for each family member, dunno.
Anyway, next were the pillows. For now they each only have one, but I may make some shams later.
I made the actual pillows from white scraps and stuffed them with a fibre-fill, then sewed the stuffing end shut:
I’d actually made the pillowcases first:
I reinforced the corners as you can see above, because anything worth doing is worth overdoing.
Then I made a top sheet from a fat quarter of water-print quilting cotton, doing a double-fold hem all around and making it wider at the top. You can also sorta see the finished pillows behind Nick here:
I kinda debated stopping there, but had a sense that I ought to also make them a padded/tufted headboard.
So, I grabbed a scrap piece of foamcore leftover from making the SSL (which I still haven’t finished yet).
I marked a grid for where each of the “buttons” would go and used my Xacto to slice a little + in each of them.
Next, it was time to pad it. I used 2 layers of cotton batting, but probably I should have used double that for a more lush look. Oh well, live and learn.
I just hot-glued the batting around the edges, and then hot-glued the bottom untufted edge of the turquoise fabric and pinned it to the other 3 sides in preparation to sew on the gold glass beads that would serve as the “buttons.”
Here’s the back of it. I put some hot glue over the stitching to secure it just to be sure.
One issue I ran into was that the thread was slicing into the foamcore and slicing through. I mean, without using wood or plastic as a base, that was kinda a given. Maybe if I’d done what I originally planned and had small cheap buttons on the back to give some support and block some of that strain on the foamcore, dunno.
For now, it’s fine, and it looks good from the front.
So, kinda busy on the crafting front this week.
FYI: Between the show schedule and the upcoming gardening season and trying to keep things alive (other than the weeds, which must all die), I doubt I’ll have much crafting time that isn’t tied to building props for a while, so these updates will be more on an as-needed basis just like this month where I skipped last week due to having nothing done for it.
