Things I found on the internet this week that I thought were just swell!

I forgot to write my blog post again last night...  I'm not going to let myself off the hook though.  It is too easy to go from letting myself off the hook for one blog post to letting myself off the hook for quitting the blog.  I just need to get back into a writing schedule like I used to have.  So, today I'm going to highlight a few projects that I saw this week that I thought were great, and I want to share (and really want to try if I ever get the time). That's cool right?  Maybe you have seen these already but I know I would love it if one of my projects made it to like every single craft blog on the internet so...  Here we go!

Fabulous find 1: V and Co. Ruffled Heart Pillow

How cute is this pillow?  I want to make a ton of them to throw around my house.  Or maybe I should make one for my office chair.  I've had a Christmas tree pillow sitting on my chair for over a year now.  (It was pretty exciting when it was back in season, but sadly, now I'm feeling like a goober again for still having it out, especially since I put away the rest of my Christmas stuff...) I've been toying with the idea of making myself a set of seasonal pillows that I could stash somewhere near my desk, since I am eternally forgetting things I want to bring to/take home from work.  This pillow might be the jump-start I need.  Also, I wish I had pretty white furniture/white walls to take photos against.  I'm so jealous of good craft photographers!  Great job Vanessa!

Fabulous find #2: Craftify It Ric Rac Rosettes

What a great idea!  I kind of love the rosette trend going around right now, but am way to lazy to go to the effort to make them.  Too much prep involved.  But I already have ric-rac and I know I can roll things up!  I even have some beads already so I'm on my way to making an adorable necklace like the one featured on Craftify It.  So so cute!  I'm all for simple projects with fantastic results.  Thanks for the awesome tutorial Staci!

Fabulous find #3: Magnetic Bunting at Hickety Pickety Handmade

To me, this project is so so clever and so awesome!  I just love it! Along with rosettes, I'm also kind of crazy about the bunting trend in the crafting world.  I would love to dress my fridge up with this bunting (if my husband will let me, I already have about 8 billion magnets on there...)  I have some old promotional magnets that I've been saving for a project and I think this is going to be the one! So cute Chrissy!

Thanks all of you for the inspiration!  Where would I be without all the other crafters in the world to spark my creativity? 

*All images featured here are property of the respective blog owners. I only wish I could take photos this nice.

The best card I've ever made - the iPad card.

Do you ever make something, and you're so excited about it that you want to tell everyone you know about it?  That is how it was for me with this card.  Except I made it as a surprise for my husband so I couldn't put it up on the blog right away.  And then I got distracted.  And then it was like 6 months later, and I realized I never shared it.  Well today is the day!

Check out the coolest card in the entire world, made by yours truly:

 Ok, ok.  I know not everyone is a mac person.  And I know that there are people out there who think iPads are dumb.  Still, you have to admit this is a cool card! BTW - it is the size of an actual iPad - I know right?  Awesome!

  I made this for Stephen for our first anniversary back in July.  He is a huge apple fan, and was saving up for an iPad at the time, so I thought it was appropriate.  I on the other hand, don't care all that much about apple, so I had to secretly surf the apple website, looking at all the iPad pictures I could find, and looking up all the dimensions I could to get my card as realistic as possible.  Well, at least as realistic as and iPad made out of cardstock could get.  And then I would lock myself in my craft room, and tell Stephen "You can't come in - I'm working on your card!"  He probably thought I was nuts,  because I was in there a loooong time...  ANYWAYS - I'm super excited about how it turned out.

 I felt super clever writing out my message using app icons.  I had to browse the app store looking for icons with letters that fit my needs, but of course I had to adapt some of them (thank goodness for all the apps with big blank spaces to write on!)

I even tried to preserve the placement of the apps as they were on the apple website's iPad picture.  I had to move some of course.  My art skills aren't fantastic, but after hand drawing all these apps I'm pretty pleased with the results.  Also, I tried my best to replicate the stock photo that is the iPad's default background.

Angry birds anyone?

The heart above the email means you've got love letters waiting in your inbox!

For the date I put our anniversary...  Now I wish I had put Saturday since the wedding was on a Saturday, but that's not really a big deal.

And I had to go out and buy a new set of colored pencils so I'd have a white one to put the time/wi-fi/battery on the top.  Full battery and wi-fi signal!  I thought I had written the time of our wedding ceremony, but then I remembered it was at 2:30...  oops!

This is my favorite part of the card.  The button is an actual button!  White embroidery thread looped through it to make the little square.  Sometimes I'm so clever I just can't believe myself!

Inside was a little apple logo...

Sorry guys, this message is private!

...which was actually a little pocket which I stuffed with CASH! (To go towards the purchase of a real iPad)

Real money was included at the time of presentation.

And on the back of the card, I used a silver sharpie to draw the apple logo and a sweet sentiment. Awww!

I put a lot of work into this iPad.  It took a lot of cutting and gluing (there are so many layers of cardstock going on - it is very hard to cut out clouds!) Now that Stephen has a real iPad, I can barely tell the difference...

The real one is on the right.  You're welcome ;)

My Crafty Christmas

I'm back!  My bloggy friend Jamie reminded me that it's been a month since I've last posted.  Oops!  Not really what I intended to happen, but you know how things kind of get away from you... Good thing I have people keeping up with me, or you'd all still be left without my wonderful internet presence ;)

I thought a good way to get back into the swing of blogging would be to let you in on what I've been up to in my time off.  It seems like things have been going non-stop since Thanksgiving.  We hosted this year's Thanksgiving dinner at our house this year, and it went off well, but as soon as it was over Christmas kind of took over and then before I knew it, Christmas was over, and then it was time for New Years, when we had our friends over for a couple of days. And then we had Stephen's birthday this weekend.  Whew!  Lots of activity - it was all a blast though.

Don't worry - I did manage to get some crafting done during my busy time!  Here's a quick rundown of what I did.

First of all, I promised my mother-in-law I'd take a picture of our Christmas tree for her so here it is (Sorry for the delay Suanne!)  I made sure to take the picture before I shipped off all the gifts.  It was pretty bare under there for most of the time we had the tree up.

And here are a few close ups of my handmade ornaments in action:

For my gift wrapping, I made a big roll of hand stamped kraft paper.  It came out so cute!  I love it!  I also used a bunch of hand made gift bows on my packages.  I think I'll post a tutorial for the bows one of these days.  They are pretty simple and cute! Here's a close up of the paper and bows:

Just curious, but did anyone else fall in love with this sweater wrapping paper in the dollar bins at Michael's as much as I did?

Oh my goodness!  It's so cute!  I had to keep myself from buying like 50 rolls of it.  I also decided to put yarn bows on all of my presents I was shipping this year, that way it wouldn't make a difference if my bows got squashed in the mail.  Great idea right?  Oh, and I don't think I took any photos of the gift tags, but they are all handmade too, you can see them a little in my present shots.

Here is my stack of gifts at it's most impressive looking point.  Beautiful!! Well, at least I think so.  Maybe next year I'll just wrap up a bunch of dummy boxes to put under my tree so I can look at a cheery pile of presents for more than a few hours.

Next, here are the Christmas cards I made for my co-workers this year.  It is important to me to give handmade Christmas cards, but my list is just too long.  So for the past couple years I've made up just enough for work people, and everyone else gets the pretty photo cards.  Here's this year's card:

A cute little forest of trees!  Here is a closer shot:

I sewed fabric scraps onto card stock using my sewing machine, then stitched around the edge and then sewed a few button ornaments on each one before sticking the card stock on to a blank card.  Then I put a hand stamped message on the inside:

Ahh!!  I'm totally in love with how they came out!  Sooooo cute!  (Sew cute?)

And, since I never posted it, here's the 2009 model:

Kinda the same idea but with a hand carved tree stamp instead (all the ornaments were mini hand-carved stamps too!)

Let's see... What next.  How about the crafty gifts I made.  I'll start with the nesting doll pillows I made for my mom and my sisters.  We've kind of got a running nesting doll gift thing going in our family, so it seemed appropriate.  I made these from a pattern I made up all by myself.  Go me!  I've still got a couple more to make, but I just couldn't get them done in time for Christmas.  Here are the ones I did get done.

Cute right?  Then this set of note cards went to my aunt.  These were kind of fun to make because it isn't 4 individual stamps, it is one stamp inked with 4 different colors.  That was kind of tricky!

My sisters-in-law each got one of these cute boxes:

Which held cute earrings!  I'm learning how to make jewelry now - Yay!

And my nephew got a stuffed "One Yard Wonders" dinosaur.

And my mother in law got a cute flower pillow (I love this pillow so much!  I have one of my own on my guest room bed! I've actually got the photos to post a walk through for this one - hopefully I'll get it up soon.)

Then, my niece turned 3 last week so I made her this cute card:

To accompany her new handmade fishing toy!

This was really fun to make!  This project was inspired by From An Igloo.  What a great idea right?  It's little stuffed fishies (I just sketched out a simple fish pattern).  Each fishy has a washer attached to it's nose, and there is a magnet inside the felt worm.  I kind of wanted to keep it to play with on my own.  Stephen demonstrated the proper fishing technique for me.

I also stitched up a quick drawstring bag for her fishies to live in.  I found the perfect fish fabric at Hobby Lobby too!

That's about all I've got!  And that's only the stuff I remembered to take pictures of! I'm exhausted just thinking about it... :)  And just for fun, and because Stephen took these photos, and I forgot about them, and I don't usually post photos like this here, here are a few pictures of me hard at work.

This is me making cards at my crafting table crafting table - it is usually about this jam packed full of stuff.

And here I am sewing buttons at the sewing table.  Wine is always a good accompaniment for crafting!  And this is my standard crafting attire.  Gotta love the pj pants!

Here's to a new year of blogging!  Hope it's a good one!

Ornament Month! Flower pot bells

My last ornaments for the month are these cute little flower pot bells!  My mom loves bells so we always have bells on our tree.  When I saw these little flower pots at Michael's, I immediately thought of bells!

They were pretty easy to put together, but I admit I had to think a little bit about how to rig up the clapper for the inside.  I started off by painting the flower puts in cute bright colors, just because that's what paint I had on hand.  These guys aren't going to end up matching anything I have on my tree...

 After that I had to figure out how to make the clapper for the inside.  I wanted it to tied together with the hanger, but the hole in the bottom (well now the top...) of the flower pot was too big to just tie a knot on either side of the hole.  Instead, I put a button on either side of the hole and strung my cording through that.  I used a 2-hole button on the top, but a 4 hole on the bottom.

 Let's see if I can say this clearly... I tied a knot on top of my outside button strung the cord through the 2 holes of the top button, and then I strung them through two opposite holes in the inside button.  I another piece of cord through the other two holes of the inner button, and attached a bead and then tied a knot under the bead.  THEN I tied the two ends of the hanger cord into a knot, and trimmed all the edges.  You can kinda see what I'm talking about in this photo.  Maybe...

So, that brings us to the end of ornament month!  I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.  I still have a few more ornaments that I haven't posted about yet, so I might be putting some of those up in December.  Or I could just save them for next year :)

Ornament Month! Button Wreath

 Today's ornament turns this:

 And this:

 Into this!

 When I started this ornament I wasn't sure it was going to work out, so I didn't take many "in process" photos, but I'll try to describe how I put it together as best I can.  I started out by "sewing" together a bunch of large green buttons in a circular shape using dark green wire.  I didn't really have a method for this, just up through one hole in the button, down in the opposite button, and then up through one hole of the next button and down through the opposite and on and on and on.  I twisted on more wire whenever I needed it, and twisted together the two wire ends to connect the circle ends.  My circle was pretty flimsy at this point.

Then I added a layer of smaller buttons on top of that, sewing them on to the previous layer using the holes in the bigger buttons.  The more buttons I added the more solid my shape became. I kept adding buttons where they were needed to fill out my wreath and where I needed to add stability, always twisting together my wire ends when I got to them  I kept going until I had a pretty stable wreath.  Here's a photo of the finished wreath before I added my red "berries" on.  You can also see the circle guide I drew for myself before I started.

 After I got all my greens "sewn" together I cut off all the excess wire sticking out - there was a LOT - this thing was a mess...  To help you picture this, here is how scraggly it looked after I attached the five red holly berry buttons.

 And here's a close up of some of my twisted wire,  maybe this will give you an idea of how I put this together.

 Then I attached a red ribbon onto my wreath for a hanger.

 I made sure to hide it under the buttons on the front, like so:

 Then, although it was pretty stable at this point, I figured it could still get bent up pretty easily when it was packed up for the year, so I hot glued a felt ring on the back of the wreath.

 Now all that was left was to glue my ribbon bow on the front.  It was a lot of work, but I'm so so happy with how this turned out - it is pretty much exactly how I pictured it.  It's my favorite ornament creation so far.  Is it dorky to say that I'm really proud of myself?