Geometry and Teeth!

Today I have two small projects that I pinned to my "to make when you have time" pinterest board a while back and finally got around to trying.  The first is this completely un-zippable tetrahedral coin purse.  You can see in the unzipped photo below it's basically just a ribbon sewn to a zipper, but when you zip it up it makes a cute tetrahedron.  I made up this one with some fun dragonfly ribbon I've had forever and sent it off to my sister (an ex-math teacher) to cheer her up the other day.  It's not hard to make at all, I used the tutorial found here.  The instructions were accurate and easy to follow and the whole thing came out just how I thought it would.  In the tutorial she uses the ribbon on the outside and fabric on the inside, but I just used ribbon on both sides.  Also, I machine sewed the whole thing rather than hand sewing.  That worked just fine (with a zipper foot) except around the edges where I did it by hand.  All together I thought it was a pretty cute and clever idea.  It didn't go together quite as quickly as I thought it would, but it still probably only took about 2 hours, so you could easily make one in an evening.

The second quick project is a custom dry erase board.  I'd been seeing them all over the internet but this one using fabric really caught my eye.  I picked up a gross old picture frame from the thrift store and painted it silver with some spray paint left over from another project I can't even remember.  I just covered the back insert in fabric, added some light blue trim and voila! custom dry erase board.  The frame is about 18 x 21 so not huge but big enough to be useful.  I hung it up in my cubby at work to keep track of all I have going on.  I had the fabric and trim on hand, and chose the fabric because I thought the lines were nice for something that was likely going to be used to make lists.  In addition, I wanted light colors (so I could see what I was writing).  Anyone who's ever seen my stash would know how hard it is to find a piece of fabric with light colors, so I was glad to un-bury this.

So, do any of you guys pinterest?  Have you made anything you've pinned there? That site is at once the most fabulous and worst thing ever!  There are so many inspiring things I want to try and having them all there staring at me is very distracting.