After a manic match of mayhem on the roller derby track, it's nice to come home to some awesome pain and stress relief. As a gift, I made these therapeutic rice bags for my boyfriend's sister, Mistress Miter Saw, a sassy and spunky member of the Fox Cityz Foxz and reigning British World Champion of Pillow Fights. When she's not kicking butt, she's kicking back and using these punkified rice bags to relax those derby-inspired aches and pains away.

Using the same modified pattern I borrowed from Sew, Mama, Sew for the October 2nd, 2009 post Crafting for a Cause: Cool Rice Therapy Bags, I opted rocker chic fabric for this rocker chick and incorporated punk princess pink accents. (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Alert: Notice the scraps from the quilt I made last summer!) I also made a matching soothing eye mask using a soft pink fleece liner whip-stitched with pink embroidery floss. You can find a template pattern for such an eye mask here.

Whether you're recovering from a day of body slams and elbow jabs on the fierce derby track, or you're just struggling with the everyday aches and pains of a life on the go, these therapeutic rice bags offer soothing comfort and make a great gift for the roller derby princess in your life!

Check out the Women's Flat Track Derby Association on how you can locate, join, or support a local derby in your area!

Crafting for a Cause: Cool Rice Therapy Bags

Back in May, I formed a unique collaboration with Heartland Hospice Care. I'm now a volunteer with their organization who gets to spend all of her volunteer time sewing and crafting! What great luck for a craft-a-holic! It's a wonderful way for me to focus my creative energies and as a bonus, patients and volunteers of Heartland Hospice Care benefit from my creativity.

My goal as a "crafter with a cause" is to work with the volunteer coordinator to discover the needs of the hospice patients and volunteers and design a craft project to both fulfill those needs and quench my creative thirst. Thanks to Sew, Mama, Sew, I was able to create these amazing Cool Rice Therapy Bags. I altered the size of the pattern provided by Sew, Mama, Sew and used a medley of fabric scraps and remnants. I tried to achieve a balance of both masculine and feminine color and pattern schemes.

Each Cool Rice Therapy Bag includes a decorative sleeve, a muslin rice-filled pouch, and a tag of directions. The muslin-filled rice pouch contains approximately 1 cup of rice and is to be stored in the freezer. When you're in need of some cool, soothing relief, just slip over the decorative sleeve and rest the therapy bag on your forehead, neck, over your eyes, etc. The flexible rice bag conforms to the shape of your body, providing targeted relief.

For the patients of Heartland Hospice Care I made 10 Cool Rice Therapy Bags, 2 each of 5 designs. Now I can't wait to try my hand at other shapes, sizes, and fabric choices for some Cool Rice Therapy Bags of my very own!

Funky Fabric Project Portfolio & Blog Journal

(Click on Photo to Enlarge Image)

Dissatisfied with some of the craft and office supplies available on the market, I seized the opportunity to design my very own, functional Project Portfolio & Blog Journal. I needed an organized space to store ideas, jot down brainstorms, and keep my blog running on schedule (or try to at least). And ever the design diva, this scheme needed to be a stylish one as well!

Here's a short summary of how the "Funky Fabric Project Portfolio & Blog Journal" was created. Check out the corresponding photos too!

1. 1" x 12" strips of coordinating fabrics are sewn together in a random, alternating pattern to fit the length of the anticipated binder.
2. Cut thick corrugated cardboard or corrugated plastic as firm center for the binder. Using a bright hued duct tape, adhere two 8 1/2" x 11" corrugated sheets with a 1" x 11" corrugated strip running down the center.
3. Sew two 6 1/2" x 11" solid colored panels to the ends of the sewn strips. Add velcro closures if desired.
4. Add coordinating pockets in contrasting fabrics to the left side panel.
5. Pound two grommets near the top of the binder. Lace with ribbon or embroidery floss and secure a small calender or "To Do List".
6. Finish off by adding a composition notebook and commence with project planning and blog scheduling!
   

Crafty Quick Fix: Fabric Storage

Anyone who claims the title of "craft-a-holic", finds themselves casually scouring the remnant bins and clearance racks of craft stores, looking for amazing deals and items to inspire future projects. While its lucky to save money and always be looking ahead to your next project, you still have to find room to store all of those fabric remnants and leftovers from past projects. Storage is a difficult premise for any craft-a-holic, but especially so for an apartment-dwelling one! (For a real challenge, try it in a single bedroom apartment with a roommate and a cat like I do!)

Solution: Purchase a shoe organizer to hang in a closet. Inexpensive yet sturdy, this organizer cost less than $10 and really serves it purpose well. I utilize the bottom boot-size cubby spaces as a colorized miscellaneous fabric catch-all. The upper portion, with shoe-size cubby holes, is the perfect spot to store specific materials for specific projects, like dyes to make custom curtains or fabric & supplies to make plastic bag organizers for a non-profit group.

Free Recipe Cards!

This recent cooking frenzy got me in the mood to finally try to organize some of the amazing recipes I've come across over the years. I also have the challenge of incorporating two recipe collections into one, my boyfriend's and my own. This is an especially daunting task, considering how very different his palette and penchant for food is from mine. We've been able to muddle through so far, but we came across the problem of storing our recipes in a useful yet pleasing manner. I needed something simple and clean yet striking and adaptable in a small, sometimes very messy kitchen. I'm also pretty particular when it comes to the design aesthetic pretty much everything in our apartment - form and function rule this roost.

Solution: Design my own Recipe Cards and Recipe Book!

Using a 4x6 photo album, I've embellished and crafted my way to a chic yet convenient way to display and store all of our favorite recipes. The album itself used vintage travel labels and vintage postcards as decoration for the cover and blank pages. Keeping true to this vintage feel, I used distressed cardboard as the foundation for my bohemian inspired recipe cards you see picture above. Mixed media was scanned and photoshopped on the computer to give these cards a collage-like look that is most apparent in printed versions of the cards. Fabric, Scrabble tiles, metallic brads, and ribbon create this eclectic effect and are enhanced by layering and detailing done on the computer.

If you simply adore these cards like I do, you can download a pdf file of them for you to use in your fabulous kitchen at home. Look for more recipe card designs in the future!

Download Recipe Card Template Here!