Detailed Experience
Crafting Expertise
Cyndee is an expert in many crafting categories. She designs and writes tutorials for Fave Crafts, All Free Christmas Crafts, and her website, Restyled Junk, where she implements many of her crafting skills to create beautiful treasures using so-called junk.
Passion for Upcycling
Cyndee believes in the "8-Rs":
- Restyling
- Recycling
- Re-purposing
- Reclaiming
- Re-imagining
- Reusing
- Reinventing
- Rebuilding
Finding an inexpensive way to create something beautiful is an eco-friendly way of preventing trash and castoffs from overflowing in our landfills. Furniture and vintage textiles are her favorite craft mediums.
Junking Enthusiast
Cyndee's fondest memories are of junking adventures as a child with her dad. Weekends were spent at estate auctions and yard sales. They never walked away without finding a gem among the junk. Her dad's gift was finding things that could be used as-is or required small fixes, but as Cyndee got older, making do with scarred and battered furnishings lost its appeal.
A Talent for Re-Purposing
Money was scarce, so re-purposing and re-imagining became a new adventure. Cyndee found she had a knack for making old, tattered things appear new again.
Cyndee didn't stop at just facelifts. She also discovered that vintage linens and old clothes were the perfect substitute for store-bought fabric. Digging through boxes of textiles at tag sales became a passion, but she never had tunnel vision. There were just too many possibilities at every tag sale, curb and (gasp) dumpster to limit creativity.
Craft Vendor Experience
Since she could never make one of anything, Cyndee decided to try her hand at craft sales a few years before her first child was born. She was hooked and has been a vendor at shows for almost 30 years.
Cyndee opened a shop on Etsy and a Facebook page, branded with her website's name, and has been enjoying the interaction with virtual friends from all over the world.
Arts and Crafts for Kids
When her children were young, Cyndee went to work as a teacher's aide and substitute teacher. In the midst of all that fun Cyndee became a jack-of-all-trades as she taught many children the joy of arts and crafts as a VBS craft coordinator, after-school program craft coordinator and a prop and costume designer for local theater productions.
Sewing Experience
From an early age Cyndee's grandmother, mother and numerous aunts had a hand in her sewing education. Nine-patch pillows and Barbie clothes were her first projects.
Over the years she expanded her sewing capabilities and projects with quilts, home accents, holiday decorations and clothes for herself, friends and family members. The county fair, 4-H and craft shows were her introduction into publicly displaying her skills. Since then, thousands of her articles have been published online and in print, many of those including sewing tips, techniques and tutorials.
More About Cyndee Kromminga
If you'd like to learn more about Cyndee's craft projects and perhaps try some of them yourself, check out her projects here at LoveToKnow or visit her at Restyled Junk. You can also find her on LinkedIn and follow her on Twitter.
