A Creative Distraction to Spice It Up!

My craft room was boring.  Actually, it is half craft room, half single bedroom.  The bed and it's bedclothes have a very southwestern feel to them.  The room is split down the middle with two different styles, crafty cottage and southwestern. But to make it worse, the craft side had very little color or style to it. I have white walls and white storage.  Since we live in a rental, painting the walls was out of the question.  There were some areas where color was added in a picture and vase of faux flowers but not much.  I felt disappointed and uninspired whenever I went in there.  As you know, I have been working on reorganizing my life but, because of my disappointment,  I got distracted by some actual crafts/decor that I wanted to do.  Thankfully, I was able to pretty much keep their creation to the use of items that I already owned and, as a result, I didn't have to go buy extra materials which would only add to my list of reorganization needs. 

The first project I undertook was to add color were I could.  I saw this post on Pinterest (http://recentlytheblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/bookcase-project.html) about using colored foam core or paint to give the back of a book case some pop.  However, the embellishment center I wanted to decorate was very shallow; the foam core would not work.  And I wanted to be able to change the color anytime I wanted to, so paint was out as well.  I settled on using my paper stash.  I could also have used fabric over cardboard but felt that the paper would be the easiest to work with. 

Originally, I had wanted to use a patterned paper in some spaces to provide more visual stimulation but I did not have any large enough to fit the spaces so I stuck with a solid paper.  Naturally, I chose purple and simply measured, cut, and placed the paper against the back.  When the paper was properly cut at size or an imperceptible amount larger, it would push into the space and hold itself there.  When I cut it just an 1/8 too small I had to use some photo mounting squares on the back.  Since the caddy is painted with a glossy, smooth white paint, the squares stick but can be pulled off easily without damaging the paint.  I really like how it turned out.  I love how it adds color to an area that other wise was fading into the wall.


The other craft that I chose to complete was more out of necessity.  In our home, there are very few clocks. We have our phones, an alarm clock in the bedroom, and a time display on our cable router. That is it.  And I will often will get distracted by my crafting and lose track of time.  So I decided that I needed a clock in my craft room that I could glance at regularly to keep track of time.  I had gone to Bed, Bath, and Beyond, Walmart, Target, etc but could not find anything that I liked; well, liked enough to pay the $20+ they wanted for them.  Luckily for me, I saw a post on Pinterest from Monkey Do ( http://imagingermonkey.blogspot.com/2012/02/paper-piecing.html ) that was a clock pattern the  blogger had found in the magazine Fat Quarterly - what could be more perfect for a craft room!
I altered the pattern a little to suit my fabrics and sewing desires.  The pattern says to use cardboard for the backing to attach the clock windings, but when I did this I was concerned that it was not stable enough and I didn't like how non-quilty it looked.  So I added some batting and two layers of foam core.  This meant that I could sandwich the edges of the quilted piece between them and didn't have to tape or glue it to anything should I want to switch out the design or fabrics sometime.  It also made the piece more stable.  It did force the clock windings to stick out from the back farther.  This did not bother me at all and made hanging it even easier. 

The fabric I used is left over from the first quilt I made and it suited my craft room colors perfectly.  I wanted black hands but I couldn't see them on the dark purple and the shape of the hands in black didn't match with the feel of the clock.  So I stayed with the silver hands.  They are a little difficult to see if the sun is unusually bright but thankfully, with the set up of our home, it rarely is that bright in my craft room.

I also stole the crosses we had throughout the house and put them up in the room.  While it didn't make a huge difference, it added some color and a little bit more of my style.  I certainly feel more inspired to craft in there now!