Sponsored post: My DIY glittery eco-friendly tank top tote

Tulip asked me to try two new products, Fashion Glitter Shimmer Transfer Sheets and Fabric Paint.

So far I've only gotten to try the paint, and it rocks. After painting three items with multiple coats I found two bits of glitter on my cheek and one on my husband's. (What can I say? We're close.)

No mess. Easy to use. I tried it on t-shirt fabric, satin and patent leather, and it adhered to all three.

I'll show you one project now and another in a few hours.

My first project was inspired by this Ann Taylor Loft foil tote below.

I didn't want to buy a new tote to paint. (If I'm going to do that, I might as well have bought the Ann Taylor one.) And I couldn't find the right kind in my favorite thrifting spots.

So instead I made a variation of the traditional tote bag from a t-shirt.

Here is all the good stuff Tulip sent me.

I picked out the gold shimmer paint and used an extra large men's tank top I picked up at a thrift store.

I used masking tape to tape off the stripes. (Elizabeth at My Growing Home did a similar project with a shirt. I got the tape tips from her.)

Tape the back side as well and make sure the tape meets up evenly. Put some cardboard inside the shirt to keep paint from leaking through and paint both sides of the shirt. (Allow about a half hour for the first side to dry.)

Pull off the tape and you'll have nice stripes.

Turn the shirt inside out and sew up the bottom. I sewed high enough to hide the tank top logo.

Also, I sewed opposite the normal tank top seams. To do this, line up the two side seams across from each other and then pin along the bottom of the shirt. This seems counter intuitive but the bag lays better on your sholder when sewn this way.

You can be done right now if you want. Or for extra credit, you can flatten off the corners to give it a bit of a flat bag bottom shape.

Pros: The paint is way way easier to use than sprinkling loose glitter or mixing it with Mod Podge. Be aware that the glitter is in a clear medium, so your fabric color will show through, especially with only one coat of paint.

Cons: The paint is $6 a pot, and I had only enough paint for one coat on my tote. Two coats would have looked better but I would never invest $12 in a t-shirt tote. I would reserve this product for high impact glitter accessories like small purses and shoes.

As far as the tote goes, I like that it's light weight and can be folded up inside a purse and brought out only when needed. (And in a pinch it can double as a scarf.)

On the other hand, it ended up being HUGE. I can't imagine what I'd fill it with other than pumpkins.

Seriously thinking about turning it into a scarf.

Tulip provided me the paints and compensated me for trying the products. All opinions are my own.

Glitter

I used to think glitter was the must useless invention next to rayon. In addition to its ability to render something otherwise practical into something hardly ever worn, it gets everywhere. (You will not catch this girl throwing a fistful of glitter in the air without a Hoover nearby.)

Tomorrow I will be reviewing a product that could revolutionize the DIY glitter industry.

In the meantime, here's some DIY inspiration.

Images: Ari Skyes; Mackie Baby; Unknown; My Cutiest; Love Maegan; Burberry via Cup of Te; Blink Pink; Made by Girl; Pair and a Spare.

Modernizing the rag rug

Make it square, not round. Make it bright. bold and linear.

Braided rug by Christina Ruhaak.

Rope necklace winners

Sorry I sort of forgot about this. But our rope necklace giveaway winners are MaviDeniz and Christina at Full House. Since Christina specified the smaller necklace, she gets it.

Please contact me at bromeliadliving at gmail dot com and I'll get these mailed off to you.

We'll have another giveaway this week - something J.Crew-ish.

Sponsored post: My DIY Pendleton-inspired pillow

Plaid asked a number of DIY bloggers to try out their new home screenprinting kit. Plaid provided the kit and compensated me for reviewing the product. All opinions and mistakes are my own.

The short of it is this product made a complete fool of me. I feel like one of those chefs on Chopped who planned on croquette of pomme frites remoulade and ended up with a cold baked potato.

What I'd hoped to make for you tonight was a trendy tribal-Navajo-Pendleton inspired clutch or other object. The lumply little mess above is what I scraped together in the final seconds with a sprig of parsley on top. This is mostly my fault.

You can download my stencil at examiner.com. (FYI, there's also a template there for regular stenciling, which doesn't require a screen print kit.)

The screen printing kit comes like this. The packaging becomes your lightbox, which is pretty brilliant.

Inside is a light, tray, sponge, brush and a bit of paint.

You can create a design on your computer or with a black marker. You make your stencil using a light-sensitive sheet. The black parts of your design wash off in water after exposure, leaving a very fine screen that allows paint to go through. This means no cutting out a stencil, which is huge if your design is curvy or complicated or you have bad knife skills. (That would be me.)

My test screen came out sharp in some areas but the emulsion did not come off in others. Some other bloggers had suggested increasing the exposure time. Big mistake.

After an hour of scrubbing on my stencil, the emulsion still did not come off some areas. At this point, if I had paid for the product, I would have stenciled a rude note to Plaid. I went to bed.

The next night, I tried again using refill sheets provided and the recommended exposure of 25 minutes and ended up with a nice sharp stencil.

My plan was to take this thrift store purse, paint it white and then stencil a design on top. This was before I understood that stenciling and screenprinting are not the same thing.

The idea was to knock off this Carlos Falchi snakeskin clutch that appeared in InStyle magazine (and exists nowhere else it seems).

I taped down my stencil and squeegeed on my paint. By the time I got all the colors on I wanted, my first color had dried on the screen.

And I learned you can't screen print onto a non-porous surface.

I spent the next 20 minutes scrubbing dried paint off my screen and went to bed.

The next night, I tried again with a thrift-store linen shirt. I was about out of blue paint, so I had to settle for red.

(Note that my screen printing is done on the kitchen floor because I live in a tiny apartment.)

I got it in my head to use masking tape to create some additional stripes.

Mistake number 3 (or is it 4 now?) was trying to do a multi-color stencil for my very first project. The stencil had to be lifted immediately so the paint wouldn't dry to it, and color had to be allowed to dry on the fabric before the next color could be laid down. This took all night.

Which is why the masking tape stripes were painted by me the next morning before work and in dress clothes.

Mistake 7. Don't use linen. It's light and wrinkly and won't let go of masking tape, and your paint will blob.

Mistake 8, 9, 10. Don't be in a hurry. I blobbed paint everywhere.

In the interests of full disclosure, my pillow is tiny. (I ran out of time to repeat the pattern to make a normal sized one. See mistake #3.)

The screenprinting kit is $40 and is available only at Hobby Lobby. Refill packs of the light-sensitive screens are $20.

That means if I had paid for the products, this pillow would cost more than $70 to make. More than a real Pendleton pillow. (Still less than a Falchi clutch.)

On the other hand, Hobby Lobby does the 40% off coupon thing pretty often, so you could get by for less.

So, given infinite time and space, a steady hand, a reason to repeat your stencil over and over, and other things I did not have, this is a cost-effective DIY product with infinite possibilities.

Other bloggers did some really cool things. I'm too pooped to link up. Maybe next week. In the meantime, The Silly Pearl has most of them.

DIY striped skirts and curtains

Lots of stripey ideas today. Make a no-sew striped skirt out of a shirt with Sarah at Welcome to the Good Life.

Make a stretch knit skirt with one seam using an existing skirt as a template with Suburbs Mama.

Make DIY horizontal striped curtains with muslin and spray paint with The Crafty CPA.

Anthro knocked off

The design scouts at Anthropologie have been snooping around my blog again, evidenced by the Decorated Bib Necklace, an obvious riff on my faux crochet necklace of Fall 2010.

I went looking for the thing, hoping to update it with some cording and beads only to discover it was apparently the victim of a recent craftwa. Which is a lesson in why you should never declare war on your mess since it could one day become a $600 accessory.

Speaking of which . . . mom, don't throw out any glasses.