It’s a case for my snips, needle minder, and spare needles! I can even swap the needle minder onto the front while I’m working if I want to, since he’s attached to a hidden metal disc glued inside the case lining. When the case is closed, though, he sticks to the blades on the snips and helps make sure they won’t slide out. The fastener is also magnetic, assembled using a couple of small magnets I stripped out of the fancy packaging my USB power bank came in (who puts magnetic closures in a disposable cardboard box, seriously?)
And it even fits in my travel sewing tin with just room for a box of pins and a couple of reels of thread. Perfect!
[Design, including needlepoint pattern, all mine, for the record.]
I’m reblogging this post a month down the line to report that I do not know how I ever managed without this little contraption. It does everything I made it for perfectly and I’ve finally stopped misplacing my freaking needles.
Well, I mostly used the pattern? I found the bobbles were not lining up with where they should have been with the previous rows so I just moved them until they did match up
I’ve been redyeing my old leather jackets! Left and right, before and after:
Top four pics are of my original and oldest leather jacket from my teens, secondhand when I got it and probably around thirty years old; bottom four are of one I got new around 2010, but the leather on that one was softer to start with so the damage had accumulated faster. All done with a leather restoration kit I got from Furniture Clinic UK (link in post source, so Tumblr won’t hide this post in tags for, uh, having a link in it).
This was overall easier than I expected and also gave me my first ever chance to use an airbrush, which was neat because I love it when I get an excuse to learn a new technique. Still need to clean up the metalwork and apply a final dose of leather conditioner, but I’m so happy to see my faithful old friends looking so shiny again!
For @shinyhide who asked in the notes (thank you for your interest!) this was all done with a leather colourant kit from a UK company called Furniture Clinic, followed up with a couple of rounds of their leather protection cream. Depending on the type of leather and how bad the colour loss is, you might also get away with just using their leather recolouring balm though I haven’t tried that so can’t vouch for it myself.
They ship internationally, if anyone wants to give their products a try, but a word of caution: I found there was no need to use any kind of abrasive on this type of relatively soft garment leather either when I was prepping it at the start of the process or during the colouring stages, despite the advice in the instructions. So yeah, be gentle!
my friend made a game about learning pixel art that will go into early access this August! I want to check it out on stream! let’s play, chill and chat 🐸
I have no idea who or what this is but they fell off the end of my pen and I kind of love them.
Fordite, also known as Detroit agate or Motor City agate, is a lapidarist term for polished pieces of finely-layered paint masses from automobile factories. The masses consist of automotive paint which has hardened sufficiently to be cut and polished. It was formed from the buildup of layers of enamel paint slag on tracks and skids on which cars were painted with acrylic lacquer, which have been baked numerous times. In recent timethe material has been upcycled into jewelry. Wikipedia
