Pinterest Challenge: Winter Edition

Every season the lovely Katie Bower from BowerPower hosts a challenge to actually MAKE something you've pinned on Pinterest.  What a genius of an idea...to actually stop pinning, get off the computer, and get to work.  Sherry over at YoungHouseLove is in on the whole shebang, and I've really been wanting to be one of the cool kids and join the challenge, but up until now it has snuck up on me and I haven't had enough time to a. complete the project, or b. take pictures and blog about it.  Well not anymore my friends!  You can count me in with the cool crowd today, because here is my first official Pinterest Challenge project:

Give Peas a Chance Dishtowel

A pea towel!  Not really.  It's really a dish towel, but pea towel sounds like tea towel, and that makes me smile.  It's is originally from Anthropologie, but no longer available, and since the pretty things at Anthropologie also cost a pretty penny, I decided to make my own version.  This whole project cost me around $6.00, and the dish towels online at Anthropologie range from $16-$24, so I'd say I did okay.

First, I took some plain, off-white, bottom weight fabric I had lying around, and ran it through the laundry to get any shrinking out of the way before I started sewing.  Then I ironed and ironed and ironed, and, much to my dismay, still didn't completely get the wrinkles out.  I laid my fabric flat on the floor and laid another dish towel over it so I could easily cut the right size, and so I could ensure my cutting was going to be an even rectangle, and not a wonky parallelogram.  As you can see, my fabric was a little short if you take a seam allowance into account, but I decided it wasn't too much to worry about...my new dish towel would only end up being about a half an inch smaller all around.

After my cutting, I ironed and ironed and ironed again.  Those who like sewing had better like ironing, because it seems like every time I sew anything, it's 90% ironing and 10% sewing.  Either way, I folded down a 1/4 inch seam allowance and ironed all the way around, and then repeated this process again so I had a nice, clean edge, and so my fabric wouldn't fray.  After all the ironing was done I just ran a straight stitch around the edge, but you can picture what the finished project looked like.  I think it's worth mentioning here, that my ruler that gets used at LEAST once a week, is the same ruler that I received in the 5th grade for reaching a certain point level in Math SuperStars.  And it still has my name flanked by bright red stars, baby.  Cool points for this girl!  :)

So many crafty bloggers out there who are FAR craftier than I am have used Martha Stewart's new line of multi-surface paints and raved about them.  I bought the chalkboard paint for a project and ended up returning it because it was so terrible, but because I can't hold up to peer pressure, I decided to give them a second chance (and because Martha was the only one who had the exact perfect shade of green).  The color is called Green Olive, and can be used on glass, fabric, wood, plastic, and pretty much anything else you can put paint on.

I had originally planned on just using my finger and doing fingerprint circles, but I found this round sponge brush in my craft box underneath my ruler, so I decided to try it out.

I think part of what makes this towel so cute is it's imperfectness, so I didn't try hard to make perfectly round circles, or to evenly space everything.  I just dipped and pressed, and went with the flow.

At first I was a little concerned that the paint bubbled when I lifted the brush, but the bubbles cleared up in drying, and everything turned out A-Okay.  

I let everything dry for about 7 hours just to be sure I wouldn't mess anything up, and then I took a black Sharpie paint marker and drew circles and dots on all of my "peas" as in the original towel.

I needed to somehow write "Give peas a chance" on the bottom of my towel, and I just couldn't seem to get my handwriting neat enough to put in permanent marker, so I googled some fonts and ended up with one called "Pea Amy G" (hilarious, right?) from here.  The easier way to do this would have been to print out my saying and then trace, but I wanted to get practice writing it before I used my permanent marker on the towel, so I traced from the computer onto a piece of paper, and then went over it again with a dark marker.

You can see one of my feeble attempts at trying to free-hand copy a font at the bottom of the page.  It's not pretty.

I traced my tracing onto the towel with pencil to make sure I had the proper spacing and to double-check that it was centered and straight, and then traced again with the permanent paint pen.

The Sharpie paint pen was actually really easy to write with, but I have to complain and say it wasn't really paint-like.  It was basically like writing with a Sharpie marker, but it didn't bleed as much on the fabric.  It still smelled and wrote exactly like a Sharpie marker, and the handwriting did bleed a little bit, but not much; Just enough to make me want to try a different type of paint pen the next time I do a project like this.

I LOVE the finished project!  I think it came out super-cute, and it adds a little whimsy to my otherwise bland kitchen.  This project was start to finish in one afternoon if you take out the time for the paint to dry, which is awesome for people like me who always start new projects because I get impatient with other projects that take so long.

So now, I can officially say, Winter Pinterest Challenge: COMPLETE!

:) LoL