Tutorial Archives - Page 89 of 117 - Violet LeBeaux

Violet's Fun Storage Ideas- Dresser

by VioletLeBeaux | May 16, 2011 | About Me, Storage/Utility-Tutorials, Tutorial

Following on from my previous storage idea posts today we move on to my dresser! If you need to catch up you can find the first post on my wardrobe here and the updated wardrobe one here.

My dresser is really precious to me, my Mother bought it somewhere in Brisbane and when she moved to Japan I kept it, it’s moved through 5 houses so far and was the only piece of furniture that we bothered taking from Brisbane to Melbourne with us. It was almost left behind because of space constrictions but James’ parents were lovely enough to drive it down for us.

While it’s most likely not actually an antique I love the style and all of the detail in it, the seat has been reupholstered from the looks of it and is about due to be done again so that’s on my list of projects to do ^_^

I dont’ usually sit down and do things like hair or make up here but it makes a great storage space as well as looking very pretty.

Main points about it:

The stool leaves ample storage space underneath so I keep our fan there. There is also room for more storage on either side.
The drawer holds all the pretty things that are a bit useless but too pretty to throw away.
Lots of storage space for nail polishes and gloves underneath that!
Night time cream, perfumes and anything that feels nice and luxurious ends up on this table. It’s where I look and sit when I’m feeling a bit down because all the pretty things really cheer me up!
I keep things here that I need in a hurry when getting dressed like safety pins or small scissors to snip threads on a dress.
Once I get some better lighting I am planning to set this up as my new video area so I can film make up and hair tutorials much more easily 😀
I keep my gloves underneath the nail polish for easy access in winter.

So let’s look at stuff in a bit more detail! Firstly the nail polish.

For the longest time I couldn’t decide how I wanted to store my nail polishes. In our town house I didn’t have many so I kept them in a bag, then it became a big plastic box then there were so many that I lined my windows with them then there were too many for that too so I sucked it up and finally bought some little shelves. I loved these shelves because they are quite roomy so you can still see which polish is which as well as being adorable with the little heart cut outs along the side.

I divide the polishes up by colour so I can quickly find things I need for nail art. Most of my other nail art supplies are kept in a box with my crafting things but I keep basics that I use a lot like small brushes, nail treatments etc here for easy access.

I like to hang and decorate the mirror of this too, it’s the perfect place to put headphones, earmuffs and other things roughly that shape. Of course I made those bunny ear muffs like 6 years ago and still have not used them once so at this point I’d say they are definitely more decorative than functional XD I decorated the mirror with a pocket watch I bought in Japan and some A.P. charms.

Moving over to the middle…

I have a stack of night creams and things I’m working through for reviews or testing out so they all sit here. To be honest so far none of them have had noticeable results either good or bad so I haven’t bothered writing about them yet! They are all housed in the little wooden box I decorated ages ago.

Next to that there is an old Innocent World calendar that was given to me by a great friend many years ago and in front of that is my small collection of perfumes. I don’t generally wear much perfume but there are some I love (like MOR, The Body Shop’s Cherry Blossom, Epicly Epic’s Cake fragrance) so they keep here along with others that were either sent by PR agencies or happen to have pretty bottles that I’m trying to work out how to refill with something better without damaging XD

I also keep little random pretty things I’ve collected here like pretty combs/mirrors/dolls etc.

I like to keep similar items grouped together like all my perfumes in one place, all my hair things in one place etc because I’m so forgetful that if I don’t know where to look I will probably never use them >_<

In front of that…

Next we have a music box that was my grandmothers (I think) and it’s home to utility things like scissors and safety pins. It also holds things I’ve just taken off when I got home but not gotten around to putting away like the S.O.P.H.I.E bracelets. I keep my (no idea what this is actually called so I’m going to guess) make up hair pulling back headband thing here too so if I’m applying moisturisers etc I don’t have to go and try to find it in the bathroom XD

The right side:

This vase was another pretty find from the throw away pile in our building. Some people moved out and their entire house was furnished with this kind of thing and everything they couldn’t sell just got dumped in the hard rubbish downstairs, that was a great day!! I am allergic to flowers so inside lives my meerkat from the Melbourne Zoo, his name is ThunderKat and I think he should have that expression all the time XD

Again when you have limited space, it’s a good idea to fill every place you can with stuff. We don’t have a linen cupboard so underneath ThunderKat is used to store tea towels for the kitchen!

From above…

You can see that while there is a whole lot of stuff on the dresser it’s organised well enough that there is still space in the middle so it’s functional. All of the larger items are at the back so I can easily see everything at a glance.

Inside the drawer…

I lined the drawer with leopard print paper (tutorial coming soon) to make it a bit more me and like a crazy hidden oasis of bling inside a nice fancy old fashioned dresser. I suppose that’s maybe a metaphor for myself hahaha!

Inside it I keep all of my deco projects that I no longer use daily but can’t stand to throw away. Business cards, old phone cases, cameras, keep sakes, anything shiny and pretty that doesn’t have a home anywhere else. It’s so bright in here it’s like looking into the sun 😉

The only sensible thing here is the lint brush which is useful and I need in quick reach for when going out. Everything here is pretty haphazardly thrown in but I think that’s what I like about it 😀 You wouldn’t know it too look at but this little dresser holds so much stuff that it’s become a really valuable piece of storage in my room.

So that’s it about this one I think. Let me know if you have any questions and if this has been useful, next time I will show you my sets of shelves, then shoes, craft area and bathroom after that ^_^

How To Make A Woven Laptop or iPad Case

by VioletLeBeaux | May 13, 2011 | Craft, Other-Tutorials, Tutorial

I love working with pretty yarn and I love knitting and crochet but not everyone has those skills so I sometimes hesitate posting tutorials that need those skills here… but I still love working with yarn so I try to do other techniques that use it. Things like the heart and strawberry shaped pompoms, no knit yarn strawberries etc are really fun to do and don’t take much skill at all 😀

With that in mind today I’ll show you how I made a simple woven slip cover for my ipad. You could use this same technique for a laptop, phone or anything really!

What you need:

Yarn
Scissors
Whatever you’re making the case for, I’m using my iPad (yay for early birthday presents!)

I wanted to get this done quite quickly so I decided to use this really thick squishy yarn, it’s super soft and kind of looks like a big rainbow pipe cleaner. If you use thin yarn it will take longer to put it all together and weave tight enough to avoid holes. Whatever you use the technique is the same.

So grab one end of the yarn and tie it around the ipad/laptop. Knot it in place so it doesn’t move. Don’t do this too tightly because you want the gadget to be able to slide in and out of the case easily.

Next keep wrapping the yarn around in a big spiral so it forms several straight lines across the ipad. Tie the last loop to itself so the whole thing doesn’t come undone.

Now the case I made has a fancy end part which is woven in a different direction to the bottom, if you want to do that then you can cut the extra yarn off but if you want to have the whole thing woven in the same direction leave it attached. The reason for this is that when you weave it all together it will compact and it won’t be long enough to encase the whole ipad anymore so it’s easier to just work with it in two sections.

Next it’s time to measure out the cross pieces, if you’re doing the fancy end weaving you want them to be around 3-4 times as long as the gadget so there is lots of room for mistakes. If you just want it to do regular weaving then 3 times as long should be fine. Folded in half mine was this long:

Cut a *heap* of them. I needed about 3 times as many as shown here to do the whole case. In fact I used a whole ball of yarn for this project.

So let’s get to the actual weaving part. Take one of your lengths of yarn and start weaving it horizontally across under, over, under, over, under, over etc until you reach the other side.

Do the same with another piece but if you started by going under, this time start by going over. It should be the opposite to the pattern you did with the first yarn.

Close up you can see what I mean.

At the end, take the two pieces of yarn and wrap them over the end of the gadget.

… and continue the weaving pattern over the back. if you ended on an “over” on the front then make sure to start on an “under” on the back to keep the pattern going. Also make sure the loose ends on the yarn are roughly the same length so we can use them later.

Now go crazy with the weaving! I did about half of them on one side working form the middle to the edge then flipped it and continued them on the back.

At around this point its a good idea to add a couple of cross yarn lengths to the bottom so it strengthens it a bit more.

All I did was cut 2 more lengths of yarn and just weave them into the bottom from left to right.

I knotted them and left the ends loose so I could knot them with the yarn on the sides to form more sturdy corners.

The sides need to have a nice tight weave to protect the ipad/laptop/whatever from damage so when you get to that point make sure the yarn is very close together.

In the photo below you can still see gaps so it’s best to add another strand or two just to be on the safe side!

Repeat the process until the whole thing is covered nice and tightly. You can see that by pushing the strands together tightly to form the fabric the whole thing has shrunk leaving around 1/3rd of the ipad exposed. At this point if you want to keep the straight weave all you need to do is move the case a little further down the gadget so you have room to wrap around another lot of vertical strings to weave the ends in to. Keep going in this way until it’s as long as you want 😀

I decided I wanted something a little more decorative at the ends so what I did was tie each pair of end strings into a knot. Then from each pair I pointed one diagonally right and one diagonally left. Having them all pointed at an angle like than made it very easy to weave them together. Same concept as before: over/under/over/under etc but on an angle.

I kept doing it around the edge, slowly getting them all into place. Once it was long enough I broke them into pairs again and double knotted all of the ends together to prevent it from just coming undone.

At that point it looked like this…

I trimmed all the ends down so they were even but I left them around 5cm long to make a kind of frill at the end. Lastly I just pushed the couple of loose ends from the bottom corners in.

All finished!

And that it, the techniques can seem a bit complicated at first but once you get the basic idea down you can make pretty much anything. The fact that you’re actually weaving onto your ipad/laptop/whatever means you know it’s going to be a perfect fit every time. Easy! ^_^

Violet's Storage Ideas – Wardrobe Reorganised

by VioletLeBeaux | May 12, 2011 | About Me, Storage/Utility-Tutorials, Tutorial

So a while ago I made a post about my wardrobe and some storage ideas for people living in small apartments with lots of stuff. I said if enough people were interested I would make it into a series of posts and go through room by room showing what I’d done with my space. Well I finally cleaned up enough to take some photos hahaha! As I mentioned in the last post I’m not completely comfortable having my whole house on display so I have blacked out some parts and there won’t be whole room shots, just smaller areas where you can actually see the storage and ideas I’ve used.

This is what the wardrobe looked liked last time…

And after I’ve done a re-organize and tidy up, this is what it looks like now…

Other than the general moving/tidying/reorganising of things the biggest difference is that I’ve got a little pink set of shelves at the bottom left now to make things tidier. You probably can’t even tell but I’ve removed around half of the clothes that were hanging up as well and put them on some other shelves I bought. I’ll go over all of the shelves in much more detail in the next post and today I’ll focus on the wardrobe part and why I’ve made the changes.The one thing to point out on the clothes side of the wardrobe is that it originally only had the higher of the two rails, I added in the second one because the first is so high that I have trouble reaching it easily… also I horde clothes like crazy and needed more room XD

The above shelves are generally the same as last time but there are some important differences. Here’s a quick run down of what’s in each:

Top Shelf- Bags I use regularly, travel things (like passport holder and travel make up brushes etc), books I’ve recently read which need to be put away, other things waiting to be put away or things waiting to be used.
Middle Shelf- Magazines, toys, favorite jewellery, storage.
Bottom Shelf- Jewellery and lots of it.

Top shelf-

Previously the top shelf was all about bags which at the time seemed smart because I could display all of the pretty ones I never used. Problem with that was I had no where to dump stuff when there was no time to get out a chair to put it away properly. So it all ended up on the floor which resulted in a lot of mess and more than one foot injury from stepping on something pointy!

I realised the I never use any of my handbags other than maybe 2 of them so rather than wasting the space I took a photo of them all and bundled them all up in a space bag. That way if I really need one I can check the photo, see what matches my outfit then get it down. I’m far too lazy to change bags often so this works well for me 😀

Now I have an area that I can stick books/recently used bags/stuff waiting to be crafted into something else/random junk that I don’t have time to put away in until I have time to deal with it properly. I think having a dumping space like this is important for someone messy like me so the rest of the room doesn’t get too overrun XD

Middle shelf-

The things here are pretty much the same as before, lots of magazines, necklace display, toys etc. The biggest difference is that I found a little plastic container to to contain my toys in a display. Before, whenever I wanted to get a magazine I had to carefully reach through so as not to disturb them but now there’s no problem and I also don’t have a fear of losing any of the little tiny pieces. I know you can buy little display cases like this specifically for toys but I didn’t want to spend any money so I used the container that a free hand towel from my favorite bubble tea place came in XD Perfect size and shape!

Bottom Shelf-

This is where the biggest changes have happened. Previously I kept socks, gloves, scarves and a lot of other stuff on this shelf and it worked really well. Now I have other areas for those things so I don’t need to have everything squished in as hard.

So what I did was remove all of the socks etc at the back and move the necklace displays over there so I can see at a glance what they hold. The back ones are propped up on a couple of books so they sit higher and are able to be seen. In front I have a decorative alarm clock James bought for photo shoots and the silver tray. On top of the tray there is a silver basket type of thing that we found in the throw away pile of our apartment building which I covered with a scarf and filled up with bracelets and random pieces of jewellery. It looks pretty cluttered and messy in the photo but I think that’s just the angle, it’s actually just above waist height in real life so when you look down it’s easy to get a quick view of all the pieces and pick out one.

So there you have it! Those are the changes I’ve made so far in my wardrobe area, the next installment of this series will be my dressing table. There are LOTS of sparkly pretty things there to look forward to and my nail polish collection as well ^_^

How to Repair an Elastic Skirt Waist

by VioletLeBeaux | May 11, 2011 | Clothing-Tutorials, Tutorial

Continuing on the idea of remaking and reworking old clothes into better versions of themselves today I’m posting a quick easy fix I did for a skirt given to me by Celeste. It was super cute and had nothing wrong with it other than the fact the elastic was crunched up and a bit past it’s used by date.

Quick fix: replace the elastic.

What you need:

The skirt in question
Flat, thick elastic, same size as is in the skirt already so it fits in the channel
Scissors
Needle and thread

In most elastic waisted skirts the top is a band which encases the elastic and allows the fabric to bunch up when the elastic is not stretched. In that section there is generally a vertical size seam which will allow easy access to the elastic once you snip the stitches. Locate it and using a very small pair of scissors carefully cut the stitches making sure not to cut or damage the fabric around it.Through the hole you should be able to pull out the elastic. See how it’s all twisted and crinkly?

Cut the loop of elastic so you have two ends hanging out of the hole. Take your new piece of elastic and roughly stitch it to one of the ends of the old elastic. You could also use a safety pin to pin them together if you have one handy.

Now carefully pull the old end of elastic (the one that’s NOT attached to the new elastic) out of hole in the skirt. What should happen is that as you pull, it will drag the other end of the elastic through and around the casing and it will bring the new elastic through with it. You might need to be fairly delicate pulling it so you don’t damage the hole in the fabric and it doesn’t catch on the inside.

Keep feeding it through and pulling until the good elastic is all the way through. Then detach the good from the bad and sew the two ends of the good together. Make sure they are the correct way around so the whole waist band is flat, you don’t want to have a twisted waist and have to redo it :S Once you’ve stitched them together, push the whole thing back into the skirt band and flatten it out, you should be able to do this by holding the waist from the inside with your thumbs and gently stretching it out so the fabric settles around it.

Stitch back up the hole with the needle and thread.

Done! Now it’s as good as new and has a nice flat (and much more flattering) waist 😀

So this took about 15 minutes to do and saved a perfectly cute skirt ^_^

Sailor Style Super Cute T-Shirt Surgery

by VioletLeBeaux | May 6, 2011 | Clothing-Tutorials, Craft, Tutorial

As sad as it is and no matter how much I wish otherwise, sometimes favorite pieces of clothing are un-savable. My Metamorphose sailor cutsew is one of them. It met with an unfortunate accident with a delightful 9 year old’s icecream cone and hasn’t been the same since. I’ve been carting it around for 3 years now thinking maybe I could fix it or meet a magical dry cleaner but in the last wardrobe clean out I decided to bite the bullet and give up. To be honest it never really looked great on me to begin with because it had wide shoulders and no shape in the waist but it’s hard to shake brand love as an ex-Lolita XD While I no longer wear the fashion, some pieces just have too much memory in them to give up.

So I salvaged the parts I liked (the sailor collar and sleeves) and spliced it with another nautical shirt which Is started customising many years ago (added the bottom frill and made it tighter) in my “to do with at some point” pile ^_^

The offending icecream stain 🙁I cut the sleeves, collar and ribbons off leaving as much fabric to use as a seam as possible. This is roughly the layout I decided on…

Collar was nice and easy, just overlock the raw edge…

Pin it along the inside of the current collar…

and stitch it in place.

Bam! New collar ^_^

Now the sleeves!

I cut off the cuff of the sleeves on the anchor shirt and overlocked the seams together. Insanely simple.

And that was it. Nothing earth shattering and I haven’t decided if I completely like the end result yet but at least now my poor Meta shirt didn’t die in vain XD

The back:

And co-ordinated…

Ugh I need to remember to take outfit photos before I go out so my clothes aren’t always so crinkly looking XD Normally I’m in a rush to leave and by the time I get home I’m all disheveled and I just want to get it all off and sit down haha!

So that’s it, two unwearable shirts into one that I actually like ^_^

Easy Leopard Print Nailart Photo Tutorial

by VioletLeBeaux | May 3, 2011 | Beauty, Nail-Art-Tutorials, Nails, Tutorial

So remember that leopard print nail art I was talking about when I reviewed Molten Metalics from Face of Australia? I actually got around to doing it! No, it’s not particularly original and I’ve done the same pattern a bajillion times but it’s still hard to not look at in the sunlight!
I’ve previously done a video tutorial on leopard print but some people have trouble following videos so here’s a nice easy quick photo tutorial of the steps.

What you need:

3 colours of polish
Thin brush
Clear topcoat

I’m using false nails, these were the only ones I had left in my stash and they weren’t quite the correct size or the shape I prefer unfortunately. Kind of makes me want to grow out my natural nails again or get awesome glitter acrylics but I just don’t have time or patience for it at the moment >_<Start with clean, filed nails.

Apply 2 coats of base coat and wait until completely dry. The base colour I used was White Gold.

The next colour I’m using is Gold. This is where the tiny paint brush comes in handy!

Paint little splotches all over the nails randomly.

They don’t need to be even or the same size, you can make them as big or small as you like.

Last colour I’m using is Bronze.

Use the tiny paint brush to edge the spotches. Don’t worry about being neat about it and don’t go around the edge in a complete circle, you want it to be broken up into 2-3 parts with gaps between them.

Let it dry, apply a clear top coat for extra shine and you’re done!

You could reverse the colours to put a light leopard print on a dark background for a really pretty effect too.

This is a really good pattern to break your teeth on if you’ve never tried nail art before because it doesn’t matter if you make mistakes 😀

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