Cathe Holden’s Inspired Barn | Creative Lifestyle

Easy Drapery Ring Lifesavers

Thursday, March 3, 2011 by Cathe Holden

I just returned from a wonderful weekend at the beach with some other bloggers-turned-dear-friends, where we shared a gorgeous beach house along the Marin County coast. So…I have beachy things on the brain!I’ve been hanging onto some vintage wooden drapery rings (aka: curtain rings) and thought of a cute and easy project to share. Vintage wooden drapery rings are easy to find on Etsy, eBay, antique shops and thrift stores. The chunkier the better. New rings will work fine as well, however they tend to be a big skinnier. Mine were already painted, but if you find some that are darker, just give them a good coat of white or off-white spray paint.
Supplies include rings, antique alphabet rubber stamps, stamp pad and Sharpie markers (or paint.)
I removed the eye-screws and made marks at each quarter of the rings as guides and then colored in sections, narrow at the ring center growing wider towards the outer edge and continuing to the other side.
I marked each with S.S. HOLDEN and my kids’ names on blue and red banded rings. After drying, it’s a good idea to coat them with satin finish acrylic spray.
The red banded lifesavers will hang outside for beach towels.
The blue banded ones will hang in the kids’ bathroom for bath towels.
Drapery ring lifesavers would also be cute as ornaments, gift embellishments, picture frame embellishments, beach house key rings and more!

59 Comments | Posted in Decorating, general craft, repurposing |

Cigar Box Doll Bed and Postage Stamp Quilt

Thursday, February 24, 2011 by Cathe Holden

The other day as I sat there looking at my stash of vintage cigar boxes, and my other stash of vintage postage stamps* I couldn’t help but think how they would work so nice together. Eventually, with my old box, stamps, printable cotton fabric sheets, and some digitally scanned images, I created my own fun piece of folk art– a charming little doll bed.

I began with the box, trimming away the lid. Digging into my box of vintage game pieces, I found the perfect bed legs and attached them to the bottom of the box. I trimmed off a bit of the box lid and attached the large section to one end of the box as a headboard. I used E6000 adhesive for both the headboard and legs.I gathered a load of colorful stamps, laid them out in a grid and scanned them. Here are the digital images made from the stamps, feel free to use them for your projects (just please don’t sell the images- they’re supposed to be free.) Click on each to snag their slightly larger images.I printed the red stamps and the multi-colored stamps to printable cotton sheets. I sewed the two pieces fronts facing in, leaving an unsewn section open to turn the piece right-side out. Once turned, I pressed the piece at the seams, stitched closed the hole, then stitched between each row of stamps vertically and horizontally.

Here is my tiny two-sided postage stamp doll quilt.

I created a pillow from a vintage envelope image I shared HERE and addressed to Little Miss Dolly. I printed the front and back envelope images to fabric and stitched them together complete with flap and stuffed with fill.I printed a handwritten letter image that I shared HERE to the dimensions of my cigar box and used it as the top of a little mattress sewn and stuffed with fiber fill.I tucked the mattress into the cigar box and made up the bed with the quilt and pillow.If you create a similar project, you may need to do a bit of sizing of your images in Photoshop, Photoshop Elements or other image editing software to get them to the dimensions needed to fit your own cigar box or for other projects. Be sure to let me know if you make something with the stamps, I’d love to see it.*A very special thank you to JSIM reader, Tracey Ireland, that sent me all the beautiful stamps used in this project (and also in THIS fun project a while back!)

155 Comments | Posted in cigar boxes, Free digital collage sheets, Free digital downloads, Free Jpgs, free vintage art, general craft, Uncategorized, Vintage Ephemera | Tagged Cigar Box, postage stamp quilt

Flea Market Style Magazine

Wednesday, February 23, 2011 by Cathe Holden

It’s out. It’s delicious. It was worth the wait! The latest issue of Flea Market Style finally hit the shelves here in little ol’ Petaluma and I scooped it right up. It’s absolute candy to a flea market nut like me, (semi-sweet chocolate to be exact, my fav.) They even did a big feature on my favorite flea market in Alameda.

Here’s a few teaser crops of inspiration from this issue:Oh…did I mention that Just Something I Made is featured as one of the best flea market-style blogs to follow?

A HUGE Thank you to Flea Market Style magazine editors and publishers! I’m walking on air. What a pleasure to be a part of such a beautiful piece of work. And, as a graphic designer, I give big kudos to the publication designers/art director(s) as well for an amazing layout and for every scrumptious detail throughout this issue.