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!

One Yard Wonders: Wine-Lovers' Special

Just a quick note for all of you who follow me through Google Reader - I slipped up and published at least one post too early last night - clicked publish instead of schedule to publish... oops!  Even though I deleted the post it's still showing up in my reader, so if it doesn't make sense where it is, just stay tuned.  It will be published in it's correct place soon enough!  Now on with today's scheduled post...

I love wine!  If I had to choose my favorite drink (of the adult variety) it would be red wine!  Pretty much any kind of red wine, unless it is a super nasty one of course.  Or sweet.  I don't like my alcohol sweet thank you very much.  Unless it is a fruity island drink...

Ok - back on track!  I love wine, especially drinking wine with my friends, so when my BFF graduated last may I knew I wanted to give her a bottle of wine.  As a bonus, Stephen is my designated wine picker, so he would get to have a hand in the gift too!  Being the crafty crafter that I am, I decided to cute the gift up a little bit with my One Yard Wonders book, and make the wine bag and coasters in the Wine-Lovers' Special.

My apologies, but  I didn't take any "in process" pictures of this one.  However, you can trust me when I say this is super easy!  The wine bag takes like 5 minutes - at first I thought the ribbon tie was just a lazy excuse to not have a drawstring, but in the end, I think it looks much nicer to have the ribbon tied around the top in place of a scrunched up drawstring neck.

The coasters were a breeze too!  Personally, I think the coasters are a little doofy - I've never needed a coaster for my wine before, much less one that slides over the bottom of the glass.  But I figure they were fun and easy to make, and they could be used for regular drinks too - I made mine a little bigger than the book said to, since I have some really BIG wine glasses, and I made a set of six, so I would NOT be able to get 2 bag/coaster sets out of my one yard of fabric.  I zipped through the coasters assembly line style, and ended up finishing the whole thing in a couple of hours, I probably would have finished faster if I hadn't been watching TV intermittently.  I think the set turned out great!  Don't you Tommy?

One Yard Wonders: Folklore Bag

I mentioned a few posts back that I used one of my junk store fabrics to make a craft that I didn't get any pictures of.  Oops!  Well lucky you!  I made the folklore bag from One Yard Wonders for my mom for her birthday, and got my her to send me a few pictures of it!

I think it turned out super cute! It didn't come off without a hitch though. Like you may be doing right now, I googled the One Yard Wonders Folklore Bag to see if anyone else had documented their experiences with it, and like many other people have said, the top band did not fit quite right with the bottom of the bag.  I don't remember exactly how off it was, but I think the band may have been as much as an inch too long.  I'm pretty sure this wasn't just cutting error, I was pretty careful with it.  I worked around it though by putting a few little tucks in the top band near the side seams, and it turned out ok.

All in all, I enjoyed this project because it gave me some experience working with a smaller bag on my sewing machine - I had to do some tricky maneuvering to get all the top stitching sewn.  Plus I learned how to put in a magnetic snap (it was super easy, and I love it when I get to use a hammer in my crafting - maybe I should become a carpenter!)  So all you One Yard Wonderers, get out there and make your Folklore Bags, because they really are very cute! Just don't get too frustrated if your top band doesn't fit right - it happens to the best of us!

One-Yard Wonders: Not Ugly Car Trash Bag

I completed another One-Yard Wonders project!  Hooray!

I planned on making this one a loooooong time ago.  I had a trash bag in my car for almost as long as I had my car, but since we usually travel in Stephen's car, I'd just been stuffing all the straw wrappers and receipts in the little pocket in his car door.  I'm pretty sure that this was very annoying for Stephen, even though he didn't say much about it.  So when I saw the car trash bag pattern in the OYW book, I had an idea.
"Stephen," I said, "I will make myself a pretty car trash bag from this book, and then you can have my old ugly but very functional black one."
"That sounds absolutely wonderful!" said Stephen.
So we went to Joann and I bought some super cute fabric and the buckle for the strap, came home, cut out the pattern pieces and proceeded to do nothing with them for a month or so.  There really is no good excuse for me not putting the thing together faster because the pattern couldn't be easier!  It took me like 20 minutes (tops) to sew it together, and that's mostly just because I'm slow at ironing.  I'm not going to go into the process since it's laid out in the book, but here are a few photos!

All my pieces cut out and ready to go.  This was my first time using a buckle like this - EXCITING!

Ironing the straps.  I used to never iron stuff as I sewed, because I hate it.  Strangely enough, when I started ironing my finished projects started looking nicer.  Weird right?

Action shot!  Sewing on the not-actually-cut-on-the-bias bias tape.

And adding the straps...

Tada!  Done! Super easy.

Wouldn't you know it after I made it, it took me another couple of weeks to actually put it in my car, then maybe another week or so before I hung it on the seat.  I guess this project was just destined to be slow...

I'm not sure why it is so wrinkled. I think maybe it got stuffed down the side of the couch.

Before I put the trash bag in the car, it occurred to me that this might be a great, and potentially very fashionable, personal trash storage system.

I think I may be on to something! Don't you?

One Yard Wonders: Tack Board

Oh dear!  It's been over a month since I last posted.  Bad blogger!  BAD!
In my defense, I've been busy.  Well not really.  But Stephen has, and he had to use the computer for schoolwork and I felt bad taking it away from him for blogging purposes, soooooo here we are, a month later!  I haven't stopped making stuff though (although that has slowed down a little bit too).  To make up for it, here's a cute Josie picture:

"Hello?  Hello??!!  The reception on this thing is terrible!"

Now, let's get to it shall we?

For Christmas my sister gave me the most awesome of books!  One Yard Wonders is full of projects that use one yard of fabric or less.  It's got lots of fun looking patterns, and I have this idea that one day I will make everything in this book.  My stick-to-it-ness isn't quite what it used to be, though, so we'll see how many I actually end up doing.  


The first project in the book is a fabric covered bulletin board.  It was simple and really straightforward so I jumped right on it!  I got my yard of fabric, a piece of corkboard, and a cool weathered-looking frame to glue it into.  Enjoy these pictures of my making process and brief descriptions, as I'm not sure reading a story of me going through the project will be very interesting...  It's one of those fun to do, not fun to talk about kind of things.

Here's my cork board - it was longer but I chopped it off to fit in the frame.

I stapled the fabric to the corkboard.  An office type stapler works for this project, but if you have a "heavier dutier" one, I would recommend using it.

Voila!  My board pre-framing.

Tada! It's done!  This is actually before I glued it in, but I didn't take any after pictures, and it looks the same as this now, except with a few dried glue globs on the frame.

I tried to use hot glue to glue this in, but I was way too slow with it and the darn glue hardened up before I could get the board into the frame.  So I tried good old Tacky Glue instead.  Is there anything Tacky Glue isn't good for? Yes of course, but it's pretty good for most craft projects.  Anyways, the  Tacky Glue worked like a charm, but...

As Josie would say "Pfffftttttt! Sorry Mom"

Oops!  I glued my project to the carpet.  In the end, I got a really cute and beautiful bulletin board.  We did learn a lesson here today though.  If your project is so big that you have to work on it on the living room carpet, for the love, spread some newspaper under your workspace.