new couch

I'm still moving stuff around and sorting it all out, but I am finally down to just one couch as the big old nubbly beige-tastic slip covered monster is gone! (I feel like I should be humming the ding-dong the witch is dead song from The Wizard of Oz) After two years of loathing a piece of furniture I am free. And thanks to my parents swooping in to Ikea and grabbing the last white slipcover the Emeryville location had in stock, I have a fresh new couch!. It's not my dream couch, but it's a much more appropriate size for the space and it's clean and it's up off the floor and I have actually been enjoying hanging out in this room so much more now. 

Somehow I came up with the idea to keep the footstool from the old couch and just remove the slipcover to use with the new couch. While the legs don't currently match it makes the left side of the couch into a nice cozy chaise when covered with a sheepskin. Also all of my more quirky pillows have a great background on the white couch. I will be replacing the legs with something less blocky as soon as possible and there's always the possibility of rearranging and shifting things around, but for now, I am monumentally happy with this change. The whole space is lighter and airier and so much more welcoming. And seeing as this is the first space I see when I come out of my room in the morning, and the first thing guests see as the enter the apartment, I consider that pretty important. 

(I don't know why but I loved this out of focus photo of the room and felt the need to include it.)

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beehive cake topper

Just wanted to pop in real quick to talk about making that cake topper for the tea party. This should wrap up the last of the July party posts so that I can move on to other thinks, like this months party!
The structure of the hive was pretty simple, I just folded and taped some construction paper into a roughly hive-like shape and then covered it in yellow crepe paper. But that didn't seem cute and bee-ish enough so of course I had to make some bees.

Since it seemed best for them to be vaguely in scale to the mini hive I pulled out these little yellow pom poms I've had stashed from some old project. I skewered each one on a straight pin, drew on some stripes and glued in some tiny paper wings and voila! It's a bumble bee!

You can see the scale represented pretty well her next to that big sharpie marker.

Since they were already on pins I was able to just stick them into the hive wherever I wanted and I also added a little buzzbuzzbuzz banner on a longer straight pin as well. Simple and cute.

Paper flowers

The paper flowers for last months part turned out to be very simple. I wanted something sturdy so I used construction paper. Then I started with a small middle 'flower' and kept cutting bigger and bigger ones until I thought it would be full enough. I rolled the tips or sides of the petals down so that they would be more curved, cut a small fringed yellow piece for the center and green paper leaves, and then stacked it all and glued it together.

When that seemed to work out, I used it as a template and cut out a bunch more so that they would be more or less uniform and assembled them all factory style.

It seems like this super simple technique would be easily modifiable to make different 'types' of flowers, change the shape of the petals, play around with the leaves and such, but overall it was was easy and satisfying. As you can see I made them about the size of a tea saucer but they could easily be made bigger and more layered, or very tiny as well.

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Bee piñata

The bumble bee was a big part of the decoration for July's party, and was relatively easy to construct.

I made a base out of crumpled up packing paper (I'd just gotten a box of shoes so that was convenient) and then wrapped it in strips of yellow tissue paper to form a base. Then I cut up a bunch of white, yellow and black fringe.

I started with a small circle of white fringe at the bottom, or butt of the bee, and worked in circles gluing on fringe as I went, switching to yellow after a few rows.

When the entire body was covered in fringe, I made legs and antenna out of black pipe cleaners, doubled up and twisted together. I tried to make little feet at the bottom of them but figured I could bend them into more leg like positions once the bee was all put together. I punched holes in the bee with an awl and threaded the legs in with a dab of hot clue so they would stick. Same for the antenna.

And then I cut some vaguely wing shaped pieces out of drafting tracing paper and and sewed the layers together, then glued them up under the stripe of black fringe. I tried out some kind of 'eyes' but thought they just looked too cartoon-esc so I scrapped that idea. I used a big upholstery needle to go through the body sideways with fishing line so that I could hang him from an angle. I did some fluffing of the fringe and straightening of the legs once it was on the wall, I think this took about two hours to construct. 

It is not a real pinata, in the sense that it isn't hollow and full of candy, but as a three dimensional decorative object I think it adds a nice oomf to the honeycomb wall. And now of course it's languishing on top of my bookshelf until I come up with another venue for it. 

July muni people