As an amateur seamstress, I always find myself with extra swatches of fabric that I have no use for – most of the times because they are too small or oddly shaped. I recently used some extra fabric from IKEA to create a wall piece for above my sewing area. The IKEA fabrics are great for futon covers, pillows, curtains, or even fun tote bags. You can check out all of their fabrics here. The only bummer about buying the fabric is finding someone in their giant maze of a store to cut it for you. But, it’s worth the wait!

To make this wall piece, I first removed the canvas from an old painting stretcher. I then wrapped the fabric around the stretcher and stapled the fabric down to the back of the stretcher bars. Use a staple gun and ask a friend to help hold the stretcher steady. You want to make sure that the fabric is stretched really tightly. You can also just buy a pre-made stretcher without canvas, like this one here. And voila, just hang as you would normally hang a painting. For the wall piece above, I also added an additional piece of fabric. I cut one of the flowers out of the IKEA fabric and simply pinned it onto the piece with fancy straight pins.

With smaller pieces of fabric, you can use small stretchers or line a shadowbox like in the image below. I used two different fabric types in 9″ x 12″ shadow boxes that I painted lime green. A.C. Moore carries inexpensive unfinished shadow boxes that you can paint or stain yourself.  Use a staple gun to affix the fabric inside the boxes. I loosely attached the fabric inside the boxes, to create a sense of depth inside the boxes.

The new site for Sunset Entertainment Group is functioning entirely through WordPress and it was an exciting process. For any web-tech geeks out there, you might appreciate the implementation of the Jquery UI accordion component on the clients and sunset artists pages. The accordion slider not only organizes the large amount of information in a really nice, condensed way, it also adds some extra movement and interest on the page.

Mad Men is back with season 4. The man-friend and I have been crazy fans since Season 1. I was so excited to see this premiere knowing it would start sometime in 1964. The younger characters are getting more mod with every minute that goes by, and it’s so exciting. In the season premiere, I spotted a poster for Helvetica in the general work area of the new Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce office. See it there in the right hand corner? Try not to be distracted by the fact that Peggy is wearing a straight skirt and is drinking a cocktail.

The font showed up later in the scandalously modern Jantzen swimsuit ad. In short, loving Mad Men season 4!