Short Hiatus - Vertigo

Dear Readers,

A few of you know this, but last week after writing the Sunset Springs Apartments post, I developed vertigo. As a result, I've been unable to stare at computer screens, TVs, mobile phone screens...etc...  for more than a few minutes without coming away more dizzy than before looking. I'll be taking a few weeks hiatus so that I can more fully recover and continue blogging. 

Thursday will continue to be Craftsday, except that I won't be updating the blog with pictures until I've made a full recovery from vertigo. This is actually great timing because I've wanted to work on a present for a dear friend of mine, as her birthday is coming up in a few weeks. This way I'll be able to keep it a secret. ;) Win-win! 

Thank you all for your patience and understanding. See you in a few weeks!

Sincerely,

Beth

Sunset Springs Apartments

I'm the webmistress of Sunset Springs Apartments and my Thursday activity this week has been to update the website. Yeah, I know.. not very crafty. But it takes skill to write code! I needed to get it done, so why not set aside time on a Thursday to do it? :)

I focused my work on two pages of the website: Surrounding Area of St. George and Tuacahn Furnished Apartments. The surrounding Area of St. George has some highlighted text that you can move your mouse over and see the specifically named "place of interest" of your choice.

For the Tuacahn Furnished Apartments page, I edited, resized, and uploaded the pictures for the gallery. Working on both of these pages may seem like simple tasks, but it took four, straight, devoted hours to finish just these 2 pages, both of which were mostly done to begin with.

Please let me know if the drop-down, mouse-hover works correctly for you on the Surrounding Area of St. George page. It doesn't work for mobile phones, though, since there is no cursor/mouse on a mobile device.

Level of difficulty: 1/5 for me, but if you have no coding experience, it might be a 4/5. It also helps to have a photo-editing program like Photoshop to make your pictures look pretty. Personally I just use Photoshop 7.0.

Mending Old Jeans - HowTo

Ever have that PERFECT pair of jeans that gets an embarasing rip in it? Or they have holes in them from regular use? Then you go to Walmart and buy those patches, but the jean pattern doesn't exactly match. Bummer! Well, I found a pretty good tutorial that'll fix -any- jean rip/hole, no matter the color of your jeans - using interfacing! Here's the tutorial that I used. I'll take you through the steps I used and some snags I ran into...

Following the directions in the Tutorial, I ironed on the interface on the inside of the jean. Then I turned it right-side out and started sewing back and forth, back and forth... over and over again. My first attempt's results were:

Looks like someone took a pen and scribbled on some paper, right? 

This is what it looks like on the outside of the pants:

With my first attempt, I tried my hardest to cover up as much white as possible. The picture shown above demonstrates the difference of pre-stitching vs. post-stitching. Hardly a difference. There's still a lot of white showing, even though I tried my hardest.

With the first attempt, I was trying to stitch with the grain of the pants. After it took forever-and-a-day to finish, I wanted to see what would happen if I did a more... sloppy stitch.

With this one (above), I didn't care about the grain and I stitched much fewer lines. I didn't take a picture of the finished product, but there wasn't much of a difference between my first attempt and my second attempt. They were both patched up and still had some faded white showing through the stitching. But all-in-all, they looked pretty good!

BE CAREFUL! You could end up sewing a few layers together. I was very careful while I was sewing, trying to keep it as flat as I could feel. Somehow there were still a few stitches that attached themselves to another layer of the pants. THIS CAN HAPPEN TO YOU!!!

Luckily I didn't sew too much into the fabric, and it's a really easy fix. You just snip the extra threads and re-do the area that was snipped. Easy peasy. 

The tutorial mentions that you can sew a border around the excess white interfacing to keep it from coming loose. I have NO idea how you'd be able to sew a 360 degrees on a pant-leg, though, without hand stitching it. I've seen other tutorials where they take pinking scissors and cut around the sewn part. I would personally just keep ironing it back down every time it comes up, or just trim it then iron it. I'm a low-maintenance kind-of-gal. 

Overall, the project was easy. Another 2/5. Might be 3/5 depending on your sewing skills (for my sister, this'd be a 3/5 project) but if you're used to handling a sewing machine, it's pretty easy. The thread I used was this, Dual Dity Plus Denim Thread. Great stuff.

Also I have to apologize; the reason it took a few days to create this post was because we had family over periodically throughout the weekend starting Friday, so I just wasn't able to update. Family first, ya know. :)