I love all the photos in this thread!  Especially the animal ones b/c I'm a sucker for animals .  I'm not a photographer at all, in my opinion.  I mostly take pictures of my cat but I do try to make them interesting.  I'll show my most recent ones from this week.  Sorry they're so small though .





I might come back and post some more later if no one minds the exact same subject, lol.

It's nothing new or original but I'm so happy I finally finished this.  It took me over a year to finish.  Basically I ran out of thread and I constantly kept forgetting to buy some more.  Once I got the thread I finished it in 30 minutes.  I am going to iron it, frame it, and give it to my mother.

It's been a pain in my side because it was my first "back-to-cross-stitch-after-giving-it-up-when-I-was-a-little-kid" project and I made a lot of mistakes.  Plus I found out metallic thread is so annoying and I left out a whole part because I needed to get some more metallic thread.  It would've taken me another year just to complete it .

I've got more cross-stitch projects that I'm working on so keep an eye out for more posts from me... in the distant future !

Sorry to disrupt the awesome tattoo pictures but I was hoping there was someone from around Dallas, TX who knows a good tattoo shop?  I'm in Plano.
I also finally took a picture of the drawing that I'm going to have tattooed... someday .  The one thing that I've not decided on is the placement.  I want to show it off but yet I want to make sure it can be covered for special occasions.  The drawing needs more work because I left out some major details.  Missy had a black patch on her right eye, a black tail, and a huge black spot on her back.  Anyhoo, here it is:

I want the tattoo artist to come up with a way of making all of the unfinished lines spell out Missy and include the date of her passing on it.  I'm not good at intricate things like that.
And one last thing!  Leeann, I love your tattoos but I was wondering why you put bright neon spots in all of them?  I like the spots but just wondered at the recurring theme.

Alright, I seem to think of weird things to make but here goes: I want to make belts.  There's a specific one I have in mind right now but I also just want to know how to make belts in general.  I know about ribbon belts and all that but how do you make, uhm, real belts that are big and sturdy like leather belts are?  I don't want to use leather though (I love animals ). 

The belt I want to make -^.  I like almost everything about it except for the initials. So I guess the belt is made out of elastic because there's no way to make adjustments to the size.  I could use webbing but I'd have to attach three colors together and that would probably be too thick for a belt loop.  How would I put color on the elastic, dye or paint?  I want to make sure the colors won't run if I get wet (it's been raining a lot here in Texas).  I need suggestions for what to replace the CD with?  Maybe I could just use red, green, and yellow fabric in the yellow loops and make it a tie belt.  That sounds cool... hmm.  Anyhoo, offer any tips you might have for this belt or just belt-making in general.

(I hope this is in the right spot, I figured belts are accessories for clothing so... heh? Move it if it shouldn't be here.)

Hi, this is my first post on craftster.

This is the first purse I have ever made:


I only sewed on the really easy parts... which weren't that easy because of the vinyl.  My mom, the experienced sewer, sewed the majority of the purse.  It was incredibly difficult even for her.

The fur fabric came from an old purse I had.  It was a huge bulky messenger purse that went to my knees and made me get too hot in the summer (Texas heat... eww).  I hadn't used it in months so I decided to re-use the fabric because my sister gave me the purse for Christmas.  I bought the vinyl from Jo-Anns Fabric.  We just made up a pattern of our own based on my drawing and went from there.

It's not absolutely perfect though, there's a ton of itty bitty mistakes that a normal person probably wouldn't notice at first.  I'm just one of those extremely nit-picky persons so I notice mistakes too easily and stress out way too much over them as well.

Anyway, I'm thrilled with the purse.  My mom said I have to use it for the rest of my life after all the stress we had to go through to make it, heh.