Handmade Parade: Spice Tray

For almost as long as I've known her, my close friend has spent the summer at her cabin in Northern Saskatchewan. Every spring, she packs up her car and makes the trip to her favourite place on earth, only to return six months later before winter sets in. This means a huge packing up of the car, twice a year, and major decisions about what items are essential enough to make the cut.

I had all this in mind, plus her passion for cooking, when I made her a spice carrier last year. This baby will travel with ease between homes, and never leave her stranded without the essential ground cumin!

I chose airtight glass jars and then built a wooden box that would fit them snugly, attaching drawer pulls as carry handles on either side. I hand-coloured a vintage illustration of a "cuts of meat" diagram (from a pretty creepy 1960s cookbook called The Complete Round-the-World Meat Cookbook) to decorate the bottom of the tray.

 

 

(Aside: Is it weird that I collected this gem of a book, featuring such recipes as "Tongue in Almond Sauce", even though I follow a vegan diet? No? Perfectly normal? I'm a hero? Okay, good.)

I also made an accompanying cookbook for my friend, with categories and splash-resistant pages, so that she could keep her recipes organized in one place, ready for easy transport. I filled it with a few of our shared favourite recipes, and left lots of room for her own cherished discoveries.

Check out the illustration on the "Desserts" cover page...

Stay tuned... Megan will be reporting on our completed 'Seating System' shortly!

Starting the Seating System

Thank you so much to everyone who voted on our last post. The results are in, and the Simple Seating System has reigned supreme!

Suck it, Team Wall Tidy! I'm joking of course, you Wall Tidies fought a good fight. We will have to put the Tidy back in the game the next time we let you decide our crafty fate...

Still, majority rules and so we've starting to work on our new version of the mid-70s Seating System -- which will really open up the lounging options at the Five Corners studio. We are modernizing and making the project more practical for our purposes... but you'll still recognize it!

To pay homage to the era of the inspiration craft, we've chosen a verrrry 70s rust colour for the fabric:

Can you dig it?

We're hard at work on our assignment now. We'll post again with pictures of some of the steps we took and, of course, the finished project!

 

You Decide: Craft from the Past

In our 'Craft from the Past' posts, we seek inspiration from our ever-growing studio book collection, and attempt to revamp vintage craft projects. 

At Five Corners, we're always on the lookout for weird (and cheap!) crafty books. We have amassed a huge stack of books -- but our very favourites are the funny and ridiculous publications from the seventies and eighties.

The hardest part can be just choosing from all the great, weird projects. So this time, we're letting you decide! Majority rules!


First up, a 'Wall Tidy'... of course. Circa 1982, this beauty stores your items. Tidily. On a wall.


And as the copy reads, it is "well received at any fund raising event". Huh?

 

Your second choice, also circa 1982, is an 'Embroidered Notebook Cover'. As you can see, it looks quite stunning beside your rotary phone. So there's that.

 

And your final choice -- a 'Simple Seating System'. As they always say, you're not fully grown up until you've sewn your own uncomfortable couch. (That's totally a saying, right?).

 

Okay, you have until Saturday night to vote... and then we'll get to the task of making a modern version of your assignment!

Which vintage craft project would you like us to tackle?

Random Men in Windows

In all the craziness and chaos of the Christmas season I neglected to take pictures of any of the presents I made. I was just thrilled to have even finished them in time! So, unlike Sarah, I don't have any fancy photos to show you (which clearly makes her the better blogger around these parts...) Instead I thought I would tell you a story.

Some of you may recall that our first ever blog post was about 'Art Basement Guy' - a random man who appeared in the window of our studio one day last summer. Well, apparently there is something about Five Corners and random men in windows because here is another story about just that.

One recent rare sunny day the two of us were in the courtyard with Sadie, Five Corners' resident mannequin, taking photos for our Etsy listings. This involves all sorts of manipulations of the mannequin; taking her arms off to photograph bracelets, wrapping scarves around her neck, moving her around the courtyard, posing her in various ways. We were working away, minding our own business, when we heard a hollow sort of banging sound. Bam, bam, bam, bam. Both of us looked around but didn't see anything so we just ignored it and went on with what we were doing. But then it happened again.

We realized that it was someone knocking on a window. We peered at the windows facing the courtyard but didn't see anything. We heard it again so we looked up and realized that across the alley is an office building and anyone on the upper floors would be able to see us mucking around down there. We still didn't see anyone in any of the windows. What we did see was a big whiteboard propped up, facing outwards. On it, someone had written in big block letters "Leave the dummy alone!"

"Uh... is that for us, do you think?" I asked, confused.

"It must be. What the heck?" Came Sarah's reply.

Just then someone inside the office picked up the board and waggled it back and forth. Then a man's face appeared next to it - he grinned down at us, waving and pointing to the message on the board.

We both burst out laughing and returned his greeting. A moment later he took down the board and with one final wave at us went back to whatever work he was presumably supposed to be doing. We went back to our photo session, but laughed about it all day. I wonder what he thought we were doing? I wish we had had a whiteboard of our own to write back to him. Alas, we all just went on with our regularly scheduled day, but brightened by the momentary interruption and the odd connection with yet another random man in a random window.

Handmade Parade: T-Shirt Quilt

I've written about the highs and lows of my collecting instinct before (recap: high - when I finally get to use the glass jars I've kept since I was a teenager and they are perfect for my current project; low - the feeling that it's just a slippery slippery slope to having a space so full o' weird stuff you can't bathe and you're suddenly being featured on "Hoarders: Buried Alive").

Still, I love t-shirts. I always have and always will. I'd assembled quite a collection  -- including some rad tees from fun gigs in my twenties, a couple of very special teeny shirts from when I was a child, a few delightfully embarrasing ones (NKOTB concert tee November 1990 - what up?), and a lot of memories.

So many of my t-shirts reminded me of the people in my life - a David Letterman tee from a family trip to New York, a shirt screenprinted for me by a wonderful ex-boyfriend, one from a friend's newly formed record company, a shirt from an art show that represents another friend's graphic design, and a concert tee from the first show I ever went to with a friend and without my parents (Jesus Jones, hilariously, in 1991), to name but a few. Looking at them all at once, it became apparent that much of my life was mapped in this pile of shirts.

I asked a few close friends and family to contribute to my collection. I wanted the shirt that they no longer wore, but that held some meaning and memories for them. I put them all together in a giant two-sided quilt that I completed in the summer of 2008.

It's amazingly warm and weirdly stretchy -- and I just love it!

Tip time! It was a pain in the butt to sew since both sides were stretchy - If I've inspired you to give it a go, I'd recommend doing it single sided with a cotton or quilting fabric backing.

Anyway, my good friend Jeff made me promise that he could have my quilt when I die (creepy, dude!), so this summer I decided to make one for him as a Christmas gift (admittedly partially so he wouldn't kill me off). I enlisted my husband to donate some of his own well-loved (read: worn out) t-shirts. This version was all band/concert shirts and all are meaningful to the three of us - artists my husband and Jeff bonded over when they first became friends and shows we've seen together over the years.

See? Now I'm so glad I kept all those shirts...

Handmade Parade: Personalized Birdhouse

As Megan mentioned, we've spent the last month crafting up a storm in preparation for the holidays. Well, the steamy hot chocolate has been savoured, the carols have been sung, the vegan Nanaimo bars are long gone, and the gifts have been opened.

Now it's a brand new year. It's time to organize our closets, do a sit-up (yep, only one -- I'm being realistic), and blog it up!


Here's a gift that my husband and I made for my birding father-in-law this Christmas. A birdhouse that looks like his house.

With a secret surprise if you look in the front door... there's a family picture on the wall!

Stay tuned to see more of our handmade gifts!

Busiest Bloggers Ever!

Hi Folks,

We want to apologize for leaving you all Crafty Chronicles-less over the last six weeks! Both of us found ourselves in unexpected situations that kept us mostly out of the studio and out of cyberspace, but we're back and we promise to have a real update soon. We have some fun stories, some great pictures and will soon have lots of new projects to show all of you. Thanks for hanging in there with us!!

Five Corners