Filed under: Clever Crafts by Chelsea

One day I will learn to sew. It’s on my list of things to do before I die, along with milking a cow and riding in a hot air balloon. In the meantime, however, I’ve learned a lot of handy tricks and devised some odd ways to avoid sewing machines, including (but not limited to) using the stapler in unconventional ways.

Here are the materials used for my staple throw pillows, along with one of the completed pillows. I did also use a needle and thread to finish one side on each of the pillows. You may recognize the fabric from my Hide Your Shelves post awhile back. Nate complained that the fabric was too “baroque” for a valance over a plain white drape - which launched an ongoing debate about whether or not he really knows what baroque means, but that’s another story.

I had an extra full-size pillow laying around, which I cut in half and stapled into two smaller pillows. I simply took the two open ends that were left after cutting the pillow in half, placed them into my stapler, and stapled just like I would with paper. I did this repeatedly along the edge until the whole thing was securely closed.

Then, I cut rectangular shapes into the size needed to cover the two pillows. I put the outside of the fabric pieces facing inward toward each other, stapled the two long sides shut and one of the shorter sides shut, and then flipped the thing right-side out so that it looked like a proper pillowcase. I inserted my pillow, folded the remaining edge inward, and sewed it shut with a hemstitch. While I really can’t sew anything extensive, learning to do a quick stitch here and there is a) totally necessary for a lot of craft projects and b) so easy a monkey could do it. Trust me, I HATE sewing machines and have an odd aversion to thimbles, but sewing this one little stitch by hand is totally doable. I just tie a knot at the end of the thread and weave it in and out of the fabric, then tie off the other end. Not perfect, but it’ll suffice for a throw pillow.

Please note, since this involves stapling in place of sewing, it will really only work for throw pillows. Please don’t do this with pillows you actually intend to use/sleep on, as I don’t want to be responsilbe for someone getting jabbed in the jaw with a rogue staple.

Filed under: Clever Crafts by Chelsea

I’ve been needing a bookmark for weeks now (my copy of The Memory Keeper’s daughter will never recover from all its folded corners), but I haven’t managed to get over to Hallmark to pick one up. I did, however, get to the mall and buy more new pairs of jeans than one person could wear in a lifetime (I’ve mentioned a slight obsession I have with shoes and accessories in a previous post and I may have a similar penchant for skinny jeans, as well). Anyway, while wearing said jeans and reading said book, I had a genius idea. Sale hangtags had been looped through the belt by pretty faux-suede ribbons. These ribbons happened to be the perfect size bookmark. Problem solved!

That got me thinking about what other inventive uses I could find for stuff that was laying around the house. Good Housekeeping recently featured a clever craft using a mint tin as a pen holder. Tin + scrap fabric + a magnet = crafty pen holder.

My office is getting prettier by the day! I didn’t actually have a spare magnet on hand, so I straightened a paper clip and looped it through the hinge where the lid had gone, then hung it over a board instead of sticking it on there magnetically. Paper clips have actually come in handy in a lot of crafts recently…and when I didn’t have ornament hangers this Christmas, I DID have paper clips – problem solved!

A lot of the most inventive crafts I’ve seen have featured everyday household items. You can hollow out an old hardcover book to store emergency cash (or pizza money, a top-secret stash of chocolate, credit cards you were supposed to cut up, etc). If you have leftover greeting cards from the holidays, try cutting them into gift tags or folding them into small boxes (see the method for that over at The Bearister Bookcase). What clever crafts have you done with household items recently?