All posts by chasenfratz

Upcycling with scrap fabric, trim, buttons and beads

August 1, 2017Fabric and Fiber Arts, Upcycling#handmadewithjoann, customizing clothing, decorating accessories, decorating clothing, fabric pouch, fanny pack, hand sewing, Perennial, tank top, upcycled fabric, upcycled trim, upcycling clothing, upholstery fabricchasenfratz

Over the years I’ve collected a lot of recycled fabric, trim, beads and buttons. Some of it comes from thrift stores or places that specialize in teaching the reuse of materials. Two such places where you can score fabric and related items at a low price are Leftovers, Etc. and Perennial. I teach classes at Perennial so be sure to check my schedule to see what I’m doing there in the near future!

I also get scrap fabric and sewing items from people who know that I collect it. In addition I made a big score a few years ago when a local interior design studio allowed me to salvage some samples and scraps that were being discarded. I’ve thought of a lot of ways to use these pieces over the years. Pictured below is a fanny pack that I’ve been using for over 20 years. The zipper went out on it recently but the rest of it was still in good shape. I decided to purchase a replacement zipper from JoAnn Fabrics and crafts (where I also teach classes) and repair the bag while adding a pocket to the front made of upcycled upholstery fabric and trim. I added some snaps to keep the new front pocket closed and some buttons given to me by fellow teacher Kate. My old fanny pack is better than new now!

Fabric pouch refurbished by repairing the zipper and adding a front pocket made from salvaged materials.

I also recently took three plain solid color tank tops and made them more interesting by sewing strips of fabric and trim to the fronts. Much of the trim was salvaged and I also purchased a couple of new rolls from JoAnn. To the coral colored tank top I also added some buttons and beads.

Tank tops embellished with upcycled fabric, trim, beads and buttons.

My wardrobe is a little more colorful and interesting now thanks to my stash of upcycled materials!

Help – My Pond is Full of Algae!

July 30, 2017Conservation, Gardeningaerobic bacteria, algae, algae removal, algaecide, aquatic plants, beneficial bacteria, biological filtration, fountain, hair algae, keeping ponds clean, lava rock, pond, pond algae, pond maintenance, pond water filtration, pond water quality, Schnarr's Blog, Schnarr's Hardware, St. Louis Master Gardeners, water feature, water gardenchasenfratz

This is the time of year when small lakes, ponds and water gardens sometimes get green “pea soup” water or mats of algae floating on the surface. The limiting factors for algae growth are mainly food and sunlight. If you can reduce the amount of sunlight and nutrients getting into the water, you can reduce algae growth in your water feature.

Read more on the Schnarr’s blog! Help – My Pond is Full of Algae!

More Pop Art – Poop Emoji Patch and Pillow

June 21, 2017Fabric and Fiber Arts, Home Decor, Upcycling@JoAnn, #handmadewithjoann, applique, embroidery, emoji, emoticon, felt applique, felt patch, felt pillow, hand sewing, JoAnn Fabrics and Crafts, poop emoji, poop emoji patch, poop emoji pattern, poop emoji pillow, poop patch, poop pillow, pop art, pop culturechasenfratz

I started seeing poop emoji pillows for sale in mall kiosks last fall. Ever since then I’ve been tempted to buy one – why? They make me laugh, that’s why, and I like to laugh! But I have been too embarrassed to buy one. It’s kind of hard to justify at my age! At JoAnn Fabrics and Crafts, where I teach classes, they have started selling emoji merchandise. You can buy patches, pillows, pillow kits, suncatcher kits and more. The poop designs seem to sell out a lot faster than the other emojis, so I guess I don’t need to be embarrassed. Still, I feel better about making a poop patch and poop pillow rather than buying one. I can always justify it as sewing practice, right?

When I was in seventh grade, my Mom made a duffel bag for me out of an old pair of my jeans. I used to use it for Girl Scout camping trips. It’s a good size for transporting a sleeping bag, pillow, air mattress and sheets. When I was older, for nostalgia reasons I got it out again and I decided it would be a good place to display my growing collection of patches. Over the last several years I’ve been sewing on old patches and collecting new ones and adding them to the duffel bag. It’s a great conversation starter on trips and reminds me of fun times!

To make the poop patch, I downloaded a pattern and used Photoshop to size it for a patch. I printed out the design and traced it onto tracing paper. I made extra tracings to use for cutting and lining up.

To make a poop patch like mine, transfer a tracing of the outline of the poop, the white smile and the white part of the eyeballs onto scrap chipboard. Cut out the chipboard.

Place the poop outline chipboard template onto a piece of medium brown felt. Trace around the chipboard with a ball-point pen and cut out the brown poop piece. Trace around the smile and eyeball pieces on white felt and cut out.

Take a tracing on tracing paper of the whole poop design, with the brown lines and facial features indicated and pin it to the front of the brown felt piece. Use it as a guide for where to pin the white smile and eyeball pieces. Using white thread, sew around the edges of the white pieces to hold them in place.

Using dark brown embroidery thread, sew the brown diagonal lines using a running stitch. Don’t sew the outline yet – you’ll sew the outline when you sew your patch where it’s going to go. Carefully tear the paper away. A pair of tweezers is helpful for removing tiny bits of paper that might stick in small crevices.

Make a tracing on tracing paper of only the eyes, including the pupils and cut out, leaving some space around the eyes for pinning in place. Pin your tracing over the eyes so you can see exactly where to sew the pupils. With black embroidery thread, outline the pupils then fill them in solid with a satin stitch. Tear away the paper.

When you sew on your patch, use brown embroidery thread around the edge. You’re done!

Pictured above is the small pillow I made from the same pattern at a larger size. Because of the larger size I sewed on black felt ovals for the pupils instead of using stitching only to fill them in. I used two pieces of dark brown felt as the pillow body. Cut a little larger, they made a nice outline. I sewed the medium brown felt portion with all the details onto the front.

Heisenberg Pillow

June 16, 2017Fabric and Fiber Arts, Home Decor, Upcycling#handmadewithjoann, applique, Breaking Bad, embroidered pillow, embroidery, fan art, hand sewing, hand sewn pillow, Heisenberg, pop art, pop culture, sewing, sewing felt, talking pillow, Walter Whitechasenfratz

A therapist recently suggested the use of a talking globe for family discussions. This reminded me of the family intervention scene with the talking pillow in the TV show Breaking Bad. In my immediate family we are all fans of the show and I thought it would be funny to make a talking pillow and have a portrait of the main character Walter White aka Heisenberg on it. That should create a more convivial atmosphere for us. I feel a little silly making fan art at my age but if I call it Pop Art it’s more legit, right?

I traced a drawing of the character at the size I wanted onto translucent tracing paper. I decided to applique felt onto the dark hat and sunglasses areas so I used my tracing to make additional outlines for the hat and glasses on scrap paper. I pinned the scrap paper to the felt and cut the shapes out. Another method for transferring a shape design to felt is to make a chipboard template and trace around it with a ball point pen or graphite pencil for light colors or a light colored chalk pencil for dark felt colors.

Next I cut out two square pieces for the front and back of the pillow from scrap knit white fabric with a texture to it that was suggestive of cross stitch backing fabric. I ironed fusible webbing onto the backs of each piece because stretchy fabric like this knit is sometimes hard to keep square.

I pinned my tracing to the front of the pillow and fastened my felt pieces in place over the sunglasses and hat areas. I stitched the felt pieces around the edges with black embroidery thread to hold the applied pieces in place. I then stitched the rest of the design with two different weights of embroidery thread through the tracing paper. When I was finished stitching I carefully tore the tracing paper away. In places where the stitching was close together I used a pair of tweezers to tear out some small remaining tracing paper bits.

I pinned the pillow halves together with the good sides facing out since I was not planning to turn the pillow inside out. I stitched the halves together with more of the black embroidery thread leaving a gap at the bottom edge for stuffing. I stuffed he pillow with fiberfill then sewed the gap shut. The last step to finish the pillow was to trim the raw fabric edges with pinking shears.

Handmade greeting cards with geometric designs

June 9, 2017Paper Crafts, Rubber Stamping@JoAnn, @TimHoltz, #handmadewithjoann, congratulations rubber stamp, greeting card, handmade congratulations cards, handmade greeting cards, JoAnn Fabrics and Crafts, paper crafting, paper crafts, rubber stamp, rubber stamping, Schnarr's Hardware, Schnarr's Ladue, vellum paperchasenfratz

Handmade greeting cards made with hexagon paper punches

To design these handmade cards, first from assorted paper scraps I punched out a whole bunch of hexagons in two sizes. I used a lot of geometric patterns and for extra interest some vellum paper printed with black and gold designs. Then I cut out some 1″ wide strips of paper and stamped on the the word “congratulations” from a rubber stamp set made by Tim Holtz.

To the front of my cards, I added other paper accents then glued everything down with glue sticks. I’m pleased with how a touch of translucency here and there from the vellum paper helps add some depth and interest to the simple card designs.

The cards you see here are currently offered for sale in the shipping department at Schnarr’s Hardware in Ladue, MO.

Upcycled Tool Belt

June 8, 2017Fabric and Fiber Arts, Upcyclingcanvas tool belt, embroidery, fabric scraps, hand sewing, recycling, upcycling, upholstery fabricchasenfratz

A friend of mine gave me two unused canvas tool belts that advertise a hardware store that I don’t work for. I decided to cover up the advertisement and create a more robust belt loop by sewing on some recycled upholstery material. I used recycled trim, a recycled belt and some thread to make something that turned out really comfortable to wear. I’ll test the functionality today when I wear it to hold my hand tools while I work on the garden at a client’s house. Going to work is a lot more fun when you can express your personality with your tools!

Aquatic Macro Invertebrates at Litzinger Road Ecology Center

June 3, 2017Conservation, Gardening, Outdoor Funaquatic insects, aquatic invertebrates, backyard wildlife, crawdads, crawfish, crayfish, Deer Creek, Litzinger Road Ecology Center, LREC, Master Gardener Program, Missouri Department of Conservation, Missouri Stream Team, Schnarr's Blog, Schnarr's Hardware, St. Louis Master Gardenerschasenfratz

Mother crawdad with babies — I used my childhood crawdad catching skills to hand-catch the most “Macro” invertebrate of the day – a large mother crawdad with tiny babies clinging to the underside of her tail. We released all the animals back into the water after we had a look at them.

Aquatic Macro Invertebrates are animals without a backbone that live in water and can be seen with the naked eye. I’ve had an interest in these creatures ever since I can remember. When I was young I caught a variety of water invertebrates such as water beetles, clams, crawdads and snails and attempted to maintain them in my aquariums. I was thrilled when my brother’s aquarium started to grow hydra even though they predate on tiny fish, because I’d read about them but never thought I’d see any. I currently have small colonies of freshwater shrimp in three of my aquariums. Many aquatic invertebrates are insects that live part of their life cycles in water but have an adult flying stage.

When the Litzinger Road Ecology Center offered a training workshop for volunteers on how Aquatic Macro Invertebrates are used to monitor water quality, of course I had to attend. Master Naturalist and Stream Team member Cliff Parmer taught us some Aquatic Entomology facts then we went outside to Deer Creek to learn how to take a scientific sample of water invertebrates.

Read more on the Schnarr’s Blog: Aquatic Macro Invertebrates at Litzinger Road Ecology Center

Bringing color into a shady spot

June 3, 2017Gardeningannuals for shade, colorful shade plants, foliage plants for shade, gardening in shade, perennials for shade, Schnarr's Blog, Schnarr's Hardware, shade garden design, shade gardening, spring ephemeralschasenfratz

Columbines with Liriope and “Gold” Creeping Jenny groundcover.

I recently had a client ask me how to get more color into his shady yard. If you have a lot of shade in your garden and want a lot of color, that’s a challenge. Most flowering shade plants don’t bloom as heavily as plants for sun. Here are some ideas to help you get some color even with this limitation.

Read more on the Schnarr’s blog: Bringing color into a shady spot

MSD’s Project Clear and Our Local Water Issues

May 19, 2017Conservationdownspout, flood damage, flood prevention, gray water, green infrastructure, greenscaping, lowering sewer bills, managing runoff, Metropolitan Sewer District, MSD, Project Clear, rain garden, rainscaping, Schnarr's Blog, Schnarr's Hardware, sewage, sewers, St. Louis, St. Louis County, St. Louis Missouri, wastewater management, water damage, water qualitychasenfratz

The Metropolitan Sewer District has been working hard on outreach to inform the public about Project Clear. In their own words, Project Clear is the “planning, design and construction of MSD’s initiative to improve water quality and alleviate many wastewater concerns in the St. Louis region.” MSD operates in both St. Louis City and County.

What are some examples of wastewater concerns in our region? Flooding, erosion, water pollution and sewer backups are some issues that affect many of our neighbors if not ourselves. MSD deals with both stormwater, which is intended to discharge directly into the natural environment, and wastewater, which needs to be treated at a wastewater treatment plant before release. MSD is undertaking large scale projects right now that are estimated to take 23 years to complete.

Read more on the Schnarr’s blog: schnarrsblog.com

Do you have discarded woody plant material? Try making a Bonsai!

May 19, 2017Gardening, Upcyclingbonsai trees, container plants, growing bonsai, Japanese gardening styles, Schnarr's Blog, Schnarr's Hardwarechasenfratz

This sad-looking bush would a make a nice bonsai!

Sometimes plants that don’t look right for their intended purpose can be suitable for Bonsai. For example, this Privet bush (Ligustrum vulgare ‘Cheyenne’) was removed and replaced because it didn’t look right in the hedge where it had been growing.