Jake and Tobi: Bored Crafty

As I've mentioned before, I've spent the last few years on a lot of important commitments that I made to others. Although I learned a lot, I had to sacrifice a lot of my own time and personal projects. I had almost zero down time, so there was no space for exploring some of the things I wanted to work on. This year, I'm really trying to let myself get back to my passions. Going from back to back meetings almost every day to winter break with a part time job is quite a transition. Mine went something like this:

-Forget I have nothing to do and continue to be anxious for a couple of days.

-Remember I have nothing to do and do what any kid would on break from school... watch A LOT of TV (We don't have cable so that would be Netflix and Hulu).

-Let the house get destroyed and not care for a couple of days.

-Miss my responsibilities... just a pinch.

-Watch more TV.

-Get bored.

-Get really bored.

-Hit the rock bottom of boredom.

-Get obsessed with cleaning the house.

-Get frustrated with cleaning the house.

-Get finished with cleaning the house.

-Finally go to the gym.

-Keep going to the gym.

-Discover hobbies you enjoy again...

And that about brings you up to speed. It required going to the depths of bored, but I've started to rediscover my hobbies. The first one to come back around has been crafting. Yesterday, I had gone to the gym, I was home from work, I had cleaned the house... and suddenly I just wanted to make something. So I did.

I've seen a million and one tutorials online lately about rosettes and pom poms. They're on necklaces and sweaters and just about everything else. I decided to give them a try. Here's how to make them if you have the urge to get crafty too.

1. Gather Your Supplies: I like this project because you probably won't have to buy anything. All you need is scissors, a glue gun, a fabric pencil (pen or regular pencil will work fine too), a scrap piece of felt and some scrap fabric.

Isn't this fabric pretty? I used it for another project and just love it. It might be hard to see, but it has silver all through it.

2. Cut Out a Felt Base: Cut a circle out of your felt. It can be any size you'd like. Your rosette will end up a little bigger than your base. You can trace around the bottom of something round, like a paint bottle or cup, or just free hand it.

3. Cut Out Your "Petals": Using your scrap fabric, cut out 12-20 (the bigger the base the more you need) circles the same size as your base. You can trace them and then cut, or just hold the fabrics together and cut around the felt like I did.

4. Get to Gluing: Using one circle at a time, put the flat end of your pencil in the center of the fabric and wrap the sides around. Apply some hot glue to the center of the fabric. Put your first circle in the center of the felt base and then build around the center until you get the thickness you want.

This is what they look like with one layer around the center.

This is what they look like with about two layers around the center... much fuller.

When you are done, this is what you will have left over.

After I had a whole family of rosettes, I didn't know what to do with them. I had just been playing around so I hadn't planned a necklace or sweater. Then, I got an idea. Magnets.

There are only two rules I know about magnets:

1. Don't swallow them.

2. The better they work, the more ugly they will probably be.

Everybody has ugly magnets and I had about as many as I had rosettes.