DIY: hand warmers

Hey! So this is possibly the most lame DIY ever, but. I'm sick, I get bored and I start making things and taking pictures. Thats just how I roll.

I love arm warmers, leg warmers-pretty much anything that will keep me warm. Why not just like mittens or socks, you ask? I dunno. It started out as a childhood dislike of socks and went on from there somehow.

I wanted these from Free People but they're too expensive. So I made some instead.

DIY Go Time!!

1.Purchase some gloves! I found these at H&M for under $10. The Free People ones I like are $40, I think? So....yay I saved moneys!!

2. Figure out the length of them that you want. Do you want your hand warmers to just show the very tips of your fingers? Or do you want to lop off the fingers in their entirety like the pair from Free People? A good thing to think about also is, what kind of fabric are these gloves made of? If they are knit gloves, is the weave tight or loose? If its loose, it might become unravelled. In that case, don't cut the fingers too much, you may need to fold down the edges inside each finger and use fabric glue to make each finger have a hem. So no worries!

I wanted a length that was something in between...

3. You maybe don't want to wear the gloves as you are cutting the fingers off so...yeah.

It is a good idea to keep putting the glove on to make sure you don't just cut indiscriminately-if you just chop at it, when you put the glove on it might look odd, or be too short!

Since the fingers are different heights when you hold your hand up, you see that you may want the lengths of the fingers of your gloves to be different for each finger. Why cut off most of the pinky when I don't really use the pinky when I'm outside? It made more sense to me to not cut so much for that. But the thumb and the index finger I use to pull stuff out of my pocket and whatnot, so i chopped those glove fingas off like whoa.

4. When you're done with the first glove move on to the second one. This is the hardest part: making sure the other glove is identical. Unless you want to rock the asymmetrical look. I bet you could do it!

.....right, second glove! You can measure it this way. Snip, snip.

I could not for the life of me figure out how to take a picture of my own two hands except by making this weird hand warmer crab creature. I feel like when I am sick my brain doesn't work as well.

So, what to do with the chopped up bits from the glove??

Why, put on a puppet show, of course!!

Ta-daaaaaaaaaa!

Whirligig Mobile

I've been meaning to put this up since the post about terrariums!

I should update about mine-I upgraded it and its doing super well!

Anyway. It was my bestie Patricia who got me into mobiles. She has this amazing mobile above her dinner table that is dozens and dozens of origami fish. She gave one to us, made up of three cranes circling underneath a circular peacock feather. Peacock feathers are her thing.

My thing is kinda maple seeds. I love the little seeds that helicopter down gracefully!

I found this kind of resin that you can use to preserve the maple seeds and created my own mobile. I used bamboo for the frame and I used fishing line instead of thread or string because I wanted them to twirl as if they were falling from a tree.

I hung it up in our bedroom, right next her crane mobile!

This is what they look like when you're lying down on the bed and looking up.

Its such a tough object to photograph because the seeds are thin and always spiraling around.

I actually added more to this since I took photos-I preserved many seeds to make earrings and a necklace. Thats the original reason for preserving them-I never would've dreamed about making a mobile with them!

I've been toying with the idea of making an autumn leaf mobile but the thing about resin is that its toxic and not the easiest material to work with. You're not supposed to touch it, even...and that totally happened.