It was SEW Easy

There's always an excuse for why you haven't blogged much lately. So since you've heard 'em all, I won't bore you with it. Insert un-original blogging excuse here.

Instead, let me show you my project I just finished. Promise you won't laugh when you get to the end of the story. Actually, I'd appreciate it if you didn't laugh at the beginning, either!!

So I had some old sewing notions that were my mom's, and I thought it would be fun to gather them together into a shadow box of vintage supplies -- to hang in the new craft room. One of those theme-related decor items. I had thought to wait before showing it to you, but I'm sure a little sneak peek wouldn't hurt.

There are two kinds of hand needles, some old Singer machine needles, metal snaps, pins, wooden spools of thread, and my mom's old tape measure:

So on a recent trip to Michaels, I found a little 8x10 shadow box -- which I used at 25% off coupon on, thank you! And then last Sunday, during our church's General Conference broadcast, I sat and arranged it all. I didn't want to damage any of the items by using glue or the included Velcro attachments, so I decided to sew each item down the the back board.

So when you see a few strands of black thread here and there, that's why. I'm thinking I don't entirely like the thread showing, but I couldn't figure out a better way to do it, with the arrangement I chose.

I know it looks like the tape measure is upside down at first, but if you look more closely, you can see the brown base with the words, "How Will I Measure Man?". That's an interesting question to ponder one of these days.

The project didn't take long to do, and it's ready to hang in the new craft room........ except for one tiny little detail.

When I was diligently sewing along to mount these treasures, I neglected to notice that the back of the the board has pre-mounted hangers. In my own defense, the hangers were taped over with foam, so they didn't exactly show up. And, you guessed it, I mounted all my sewing notions UPSIDE DOWN.

The positive spin on this, is that (as Todd logically pointed out) my shadow box is not really evenly weighted. So, even if I HAD mounted it right-side-up, I would still have probably needed to add a sawtooth hanger to compensate for the off-balance box, so it would still hang straight. And all's well that ends well.

Watch for this shadow box to show up on a wall in the new craft room -- in some future post when I get it finished enough to show off. In the mean time, I'm off to the fabric store to get some fabric for curtains, desk front and wall decor!