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A bracelet worthy of a beautiful fall day
It’s been a lovely Thanksgiving Day here, and to celebrate, here’s a little tribute to a beautiful bracelet design by Shanna Steele of Auntie’s Beads in Southlake. It uses Czech pressed-glass beads...
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Mahogany gameboard is a winner
As I’m wrapping up my Christmas shopping for this year, I wanted to share a photo of a gift I made last year: an Othello game board for my Dad. Isn’t this a pretty piece of African mahogany? (It cost...
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Squee! Sold my first pair of earrings!
I’ve been making earrings as a hobby for about a year now, and this week I built an online store using eCrater and also put one pair of earrings up for auction on eBay — the red roses at left,...
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Slice through plastic packaging with tin snips
This was my pre-Christmas tip on Twitter: Tin snips, which will only run you about $14, are the answer you have been searching for to annoying plastic packaging. They cut through that stuff the way...
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Magical thinking: Hallway becomes library
Hallway at former Sparks home on West Avenue in Austin. Photo by Trey Hunter If I ever get to design a house for myself, or just remodel a hallway, I’m totally doing this: Brilliant use of space in...
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For the discriminating egg painter
When I was a kid, we had plastic items called Decoreggers that held an Easter egg securely while you painted or drew on it. Last year, my family went on a major hunt for Decoreggers and couldn’t find...
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Sewing in a straight line from 43,000 BC to the iPad
Sewing is, by some estimates, 45,000 years old. Sewing is older than cloth, but not as old as clothes: First we wrapped ourselves in hides, then we tied the hides around ourselves with cords or sinews,...
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Extra ‘hands’ to help you install chair rail
When I went loopy and redid our two front rooms, I foolishly did all the chair rail part by myself. The real problem was trying to miter the joints with a cheap plastic miter box and a hand saw — I...
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A quick New Year’s how-to: Convert pierced earrings to clip
Ladies like me who don’t have pierced ears but occasionally like to wear big sparkly earrings, I am about to share something I wish I’d known 20 years ago. Look at the earrings you’re thinking of...
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How to wrap canvas neatly over a frame? Don’t use a frame
This method/kit just struck me as a really genius way to make a difficult task very easy. Three difficult tasks, in fact, because — Stretching canvas evenly is hard — it puckers — Wrapping canvas...
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