Welcome to this edition of Craftastic Cribs!  Today we are going to take a look at the room in which I create many of my crafts.  
Here we have a general overview of my craft room.  This room is actually intended to be a formal sitting room in my house, but who the heck uses a formal sitting room.  The bookshelves were purchased at the unfinished wood store and were painstakingly stained and varnished by me and my friend Erica.  The shelves are home to our books, my yarn stash, gem stones, papercrafting supplies, photo albums, and many other random items of crafty significance.  My craft table was found in the clearance room of Ethan Allen for $199.  It is very heavy duty and was in perfect condition.  I still can't believe what a deal that was!  The table is very messy because it seems to be the place in the house where we throw random stuff and I haven't gotten around to cleaning it up.  Anyway, who has a clean craft room?  Also, check out the wicked awesome hardwood floor that I installed all by myself.  
Here we have my jewelry corner.  Here is where I keep all of my beads, wires, and other findings.  I have found the tool boxes to be the best place to keep all my beads and I have even labeled some of the drawers!  The white bike basket was given to me by Patrick to go on the front of my Harley.  Unfortunately, we had to remove it to pass inspection so it now is employed as an earring holder.
The next stop is where I keep the majority of my completed jewelry.  Basically I took a piece of plywood, covered it with several layers of quilt batting and some canvas fabric from an old tablecloth and embellished with some ribbon and voila a jewelry-hanging thingy!  I use T-pins to hold the jewelry in place.  I am working on a larger solution now that my inventory is growing and hope to have it up soon.
Our last stop on this craftastic tour is my kick-ass rubber stamp shelf.  Patrick and I built this for all my rubber stamps.  I have all my jewelry hanging below it.  Once I move my jewelry, I will be building another shelf to house the stamps that do not yet have a home.  

I hope you enjoyed this tour of my craft room.  Now everyone get out so I can get back to work!

Copper Bowl--Complete!

Copper Bowl--Complete!
Originally uploaded by coveykeating

Just as I promised. The copper bowl in all its glory. Patrick cut the base in half for me. Thanks sweetie! I spent almost two hours shaping it and getting it ready to solder to the bowl. My instructor and I soldered the whole thing in one shot which was awesome. I cleaned it up and waxed it to protect the patina and it now lives on one of our shelves. Yay!

So I went to knitting on Tuesday and showed Beverly (the LYS owner) my sweater sans sleeves.  It is WAAAAAY too big for me.  There is at least 10 extra inches around.  I am going to have to sew up the sides, make the sleeve holes smaller and rewrite the pattern for the sleeves.  Oh well, what ya gonna do?

I finished my bowl on Thursday.  It looks awesome, but I have been too lazy to take pictures.  Patrick cut half of the base off so it looks much neater now.  It still took me two hours to make the base fit to the bottom of the bowl close enough to solder the two pieces together.

The weather here is starting to get a little more spring-like.  The snow is starting to melt.  I can't wait for the weather to get warmer so I can get my Harley out.  It will definitely help save money on gas to ride instead of drive.  This weekend we need to clean out the basement and garage as I don't want a repeat of the post flooding mess we had last year.  Luckily, most of the stuff that needs to be cleaned up is going straight to Goodwill as it is left over from our garage sale.  Fun!

They say that when March comes in like a lamb it goes out like a lion.  What happens when March comes in like raging, psycho, insane bull?  I was over the snow two storms ago and we probably have several more in our future.  Lucky lucky us!  Our plow guy is making a mint off us this year!

In other news, I am almost done with my sweater!  I hope to have it done by the end of the upcoming week.  Lucky for me, winter is showing no sign of going away, so I will have plenty of time to wear it.  My metalsmithing class is going well.  It can be frustrating at times when things don't come out like I want them to.  I made a beautiful bowl and am working on a base.  I will be doing major reconstruction on the base as it doesn't look like I want and the soldered seam keeps splitting.  I should be able to fix it on Monday during open studio.  The bowl was completely handshaped using hammers.  My arm was very tired after two and a half hours of straight hammering.  I did a lot of cleaning up of the bowl on Thursday between bouts of wanting to scream and throw the base out the window.  

You can see the size of the bowl and the base in relation to my laptop.  I'll repost photos of the redone bowl base.  

Last night I went to Friday Night Knitting Club at Ewe'll Love It in Nashua.  It was a good time.  Erica's birthday is today so I baked cupcakes in her honor.  My new friend Holly also came and it was really good to get to see her again.  Next month's knitting club is going to be a cookie bake off.  Make way for the champion ladies!!!