I rather like it plain, but I'm tempted to add some embroidery, or maybe Gocco or stamps like Scrapabee's awesome stuff (warning: her site has music on autoplay).

Sketchy instructions: you need a 9 inch zipper, 10x12 inch rectangles of the lining and outer fabrics, and 13 inches of binding.

1. Stack your materials like this: lining right side up, zipper right side up with the tape edge along the 10 inch side of the lining fabric, outer fabric right side down and with the 10 inch edge aligned with the others.

2. Use a zipper foot and stitch pretty close to the zipper (takes a little feeling around since the zipper is inside.)

3. Fold back the fabrics to expose the zipper. Iron flat.

4. Topstitch along the zipper.

5. Trim the other 10 inch sides to be even if needed.

6. Fold everything around to make the same zipper sandwich on the other 10 inch sides like you did for step 1. Sew like step 2.

7. Now when you go to fold back the fabric and expose the zipper again, you'll end up with a tube. To topstitch, you have to upzip the whole length, and scrunch to get the very end where you can't unzip any more. It works, I swear.

8. Zip it up and iron flat, making sure the zipper is centered. Trim the ends straight, and so you only have about half an inch of zipper tape at each end.

9. Fold binding around the corner and over the raw edges. Sew on with a zigzag stitch, folding the end around the other corner. Repeat for the other side.

Hmm, this is hard to explain without pictures. Well, good luck if you try my instructions.

My sister found me the super cool fabric. This barely made a dent in it.

These required some trickery to make. I had to tape together a jig of wood discs to hold the center one still and to put everything at the same height so the spiro would spin properly.

First up, spirograph on shrink plastic. I tried this first on some smooth shrinky stuff that I already had, but it smeared too much. This type has one side textured so that it doesn't smear.

Necklaces. One has a little hole punched in it, and the other I cut a bigger hole from the center for stringing.

Pushpins ala the famous Wee Wonderfuls tutorial. I found some little short "sequin" pins made for applique that are just perfect pushpin-length. (btw, I wasn't going to include these in the proposal since it's not my idea, but they clearly had to be made once I saw the necklaces.)

I made these curtains for our kitchen, to block out the new crazy neighbors. They're a splurge fabric from Superbuzzy, and I used every last centimeter, including the selvedges. I'm pleasantly surprised at how nice they look and how easy they were.

Bezel cups. The first one was colored with a bit of fluorescein, a dye that glows under blue light. I haven't had a chance to test it yet.

Weird little mold that was originally filled with Hello Kitty stickers. Blythe-scale lime jello.

Another little guy and some tiny erasers I've had since I was a kid.

Center of my paint palette filled with buttons! Not sure what to do with it.

Most of these follow the template of 1 find some sort of ring 2 tape the back of the ring 3 fill with colored resin. I've now tried lab paper tape and packing tape, and I didn't like either; they leave too much sticky residue on the resin. Also, some of them leaked. More experiments needed. Most of these are probably destined to be necklaces.

hose clamps

Washers. The cork one is my favorite.

rubber band. I'm going to play around with this idea more, I think.

I am upset to move away from my craft night buddies, though. I made resin jewelry as goodbye presents for everybody.

All scientists love graph paper. In fact, over dinner at the last craft night, we had an entire conversation comparing brands of engineer pads and lamenting the discontinuation of our favorite brand of rectangle-gridded paper (immortalized in resin on the bottom left). Very sad. The nonscientists in the bunch thought we were crazy. :P These were molded in a paint palette and then I dremel-drilled a hole in each one and added a jump ring to make necklaces. The ones with numbers are funny because some of them turned translucent in the resin so the numbers from the back show through and make little weird looking patterns (top row middle, for example).

These are more 96-well plate molded plugs. Amy had some great deep-well plates that I used for the larger ones. Tinted with pastels and also dremelled for necklaces. They look really cute on.

One of the plugs sanded down and glued into a bezel cup, then to a ring blank.

Other lab-related ones I didn't give away:

Molded with part of the lid of a 96-well plate. You can even seen the little numbers embossed on the lids. I had a few other experiments with the lid, but they failed spectacularly. I like the effect enough that I'll probably try it again, though. Looks like a lego, but it a little curved because of how I had it squished into the little mold.

Molded inside lab tubing. I am really eager to see how these look as bracelets and necklaces.

Glued to ring blanks

1 layer clear, 1 layer yellow pastel, dremel drilled (I need to practice, obviously) with 4x fishing line

screw eye plus contact case molded and pastel colored

1. The font for the header is Ahnberg. I made the header and graph paper background myself.

2. I made a nifty iPhone icon for craftlog using the directions here and a free graphic from 123cursors (thanks, Google image search!) Obviously, it's a little pair of scissors to match my favicon. I will be shocked if anyone else in the world has craftlog bookmarked on their iPhone, but it at least makes me happy. :)

3. Also added a few new things to my bloglines (including one devoted entirely to googly eyes).

4. My artists and shops page had a giant update, since I don't think I've even looked at it for over a year. If you haven't checked there in a while, I started a list of shops that I've bought from. Also, lots of new links for things like resin jewelry.

5. Finally, I don't think I ever pointed out that I use a Creative Commons license for this whole site. That means that you are all welcome to take and repost my photos, replicate my projects, remix my ideas, whatever you want as long as you give attribution (a link is fine) and it's noncommercial.

Next on the list is updating my craft library.