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!

Yo-Yo hair bows

I'm a bad blogger. I did not get my blog writing done this weekend, so today I'm putting up a short and sweet little post about some cute yo-yo hair bows I made back in July.  These are totally easy and quick to put together.  All you need is a little bit of fabric, a few buttons and some sort of hair clip.  My clips came from Jo-Ann Fabrics in the jewelry and beading section, I think I got a little baggie of 25 clips or so.  Oh and you'll also need some thread, and the knowledge of how to make a yo-yo. (Trust me - you CAN do this.  Also, I rarely turn under the edge of my yo-yo's since I usually cover the center with a button.  It's not that pretty, but it works!

I made this first one to wear in my hair on the 4th of July this year.  I know, I can't believe I wore this in my hair all day.  I still think it's cute though.  Anyways, it's two yo-yo's stacked on top of each other, and two stacked buttons on top of that.  I think I sewed them all together in one fell swoop.  Then I sewed it to the hair clip.

 I made these two to match the sweet little dresses I made a while back.  Totally cute, and much more age appropriate than my patriotic clip was, since they were going to little girls...  I actually think I hot glued the yo-yo's to the hair clip on the one on the right.  The one on the left is made exactly the same way as the patriotic one.

So there you have it.  A quick and easy way to make hair accessories to match any outfit, so long as you can find the right color fabric and buttons that is.  See you later this week when hopefully I'll have dedicated some more time to writing!  Peace!

It IS easy being green: Cloth Napkins

A few months ago I decided Stephen and I would start using cloth napkins.  Did I decide this because I wanted an excuse to buy a bunch of cute fat quarter packs, or because I wanted to cut down on our waste paper?  Does it really matter?  I made us a big pile of napkins so we didn't have to worry about washing them every day.  They are each about 16"x16" and made from one fat quarter each. 

First I made this cute set of flowered napkins.  They are sewn around the edges with a simple straight stitch.

I decided to buy this set of fabric since I wanted a few that were a little less girly for Stephen's benefit.  Most of them are still pretty girly though...

A fun added touch for these is the decorative stitching I used!  Neato!

Then I made these two double layered napkins.  I love these ones the most.  So cute!

I had this remnant of blue fabric with polka dot circles from Hobby Lobby, so I made a pair of napkins with it.  They are also double layered, and used some semi-solid-colored pieces for the back.

I keep all our napkins in this cute basket.  I found it at Ikea - it is the PERFECT size!

I don't know if your Michael's had these in their clearance bin, but my Michael's had a ton of cute more "traditional" printed fat quarters on sale for $.79 each.  Nice!  I bought a bunch of my favorites and made a set for my friends when they were having a house warming party. I did a cute scalloped stitch on the edges of these. 

And then I undid them from their neat stack pictured above and turned them into this awesome gift bow instead!  I LOVE how these napkins turned out.

In fact, I loved them so much that I went back to Michael's and bought a whole bunch more fat quarters for myself.

Maybe when I finally get around to "napkinizing" these, I'll whip up a little tutorial to show you how I made them.  Sound fun? What do you think?

Wordless Wednesday: The best gift bow ever edition

Blast from the past: Sewing projects from my youth

Oops!  I took the day off from work yesterday and completely forgot I hadn't scheduled something to post!  So here's Friday's post, a day late. Since we have Monday off too, maybe I'll go ahead and schedule that one now... Enjoy!!

 I've been crafty for a long long time.  I can't remember when I first learned to sew, but I was pretty young.  I started out making doll clothes for my baby doll.  In my head I did most of it myself, and all my mom did was help me interpret the patterns, but I'm sure she did a lot of the work too, since now I don't really enjoy sewing itty bitty little things, but maybe I did really do most of it.  After all, my hands were smaller then.  Anyways,  a while back I wandered around my mom's house taking pictures of things I made.  One pattern that got tons of use at our house was Simplicty 7367.  I was a little shocked at how simple it was for me to find this pattern online - and then I was shocked again to see that it was from 1967!  My mom had this pattern for almost 20 years before I was even born - wowwie!

The most used view from this pattern at our house was the frog.  I think we had about 5 of these around the house in various colors, but always in corduroy.  My brother had Mr. Frog, Mrs. Frog and Grandpa frog (he was always a very creative namer).  I decided I wanted to make some frogs for myself, so my mom helped me make these 2.

We always made them as bean bags instead of pillows.  These frogs were super popular in our house!  Grandpa frog sprung several leaks in his lifetime, but he always got "surgery" instead of being thrown in the trash.  Now my frogs live on top of the DVD shelf with Grandpa frog.

The other view that I made was the pig.

Piggy has seen better days...  He's got some pretty nasty orange spots that I have no idea where they came from, and his curly tail has seen better days.  And he's always been really flat...  Cute, but not nearly as cute as the one on the pattern envelope... Oh well!

Here's a funny story about this piggy.  One week in Junior girl scouts, we had to make stuffed animals or some sort of toy and bring them to the meeting - I don't remember why, but that's not the important part.  I made the piggy for my project.  I was sure everyone would be really impressed with my pig, but then I got there and one of the other girls had made the EXACT same thing! Same pattern, same pig. Ok - the fabrics were different, but what are the odds right?  I guess her mom held on to all her old patterns too!  We were both kind of blown away.  I still am actually.  What a bizarre coincidence!

Anyways, I'm sure this pattern will be in my life forever!  I'm surprised Josie doesn't have a beanbag froggy of her own yet!

Josie's Bunnies: Purl Bee Bunny Finger Puppets

Do you ever have those projects where you start off really excited about them, get to work on it, and then it fizzles out after a while?  Man it happens to me all the time!  This is one of those projects.  First of all how could you not get excited about this tutorial?  I found it over at the purl bee (which if you haven't checked it out, you should.  It's such a fantastic blog!)

 

I started on these with the intention of them being an Easter gift for my niece Josie.  That didn't exactly pan out, so I thought I would just send them as a surprise Josie present in my sister's birthday present box in May.  If you recall, I think I mentioned in an earlier post that this didn't exactly pan out either.  They did eventually get to Josie sometime in July and I hear they are a big hit!

I know I can't do any better than the tutorial over at the purl bee, so I'm just going to direct you there. As for my blog, please just enjoy the pretty pictures :)

 I just noticed this!  The tutorial took their bunny photos on a green back drop, and 

I took mine on my ugly old green chairs - great minds think alike!

I did make some minor changes from the tutorial.  I didn't use the recommended spring felt bundle, which I'm sure is just amazing!  I have limited selection here, so I just went for run of the mill Hobby Lobby felt squares.  I went ahead and picked up all the neon colors.

Also instead of stitching them with white thread, I used colored embroidery thread to match the felt.  I was pretty impressed at how closely I got them to match.  Go me!  I sort of followed the order the tutorial told me to sew them in. I don't actually remember now, but I know I didn't do it exactly the same.  I'd say, just do what works for you! Oh and instead of sewing the tail on, I just hot glued it.  I was just sick of embroidery thread by then!

Anxiously awaiting their tails

Anyways,  I hope you enjoyed my bunnies!  I did have a great time making them once I set my mind to it.  And I think they are just about the most adorable things ever!  Don't you?

 Off to Josie's house we go!

My Sweet Little Dresses!

Back in May I entered a giveaway on The Long Thread (fun blog - check it out!), and I WON!  Lucky me!  I won a sweet little dress from leila and ben!  I'm finally ready to post about it since I FINALLY got it sent out to my niece.  Isn't it adorable?

Along with that, I got the sewing pattern for the dress so I could make an endless supply of my own!  I happen to know an adorable pair of sisters who I decided needed some matching sweet little dresses!  We were going to visit them a few months ago, and since the pattern is pretty basic and simple, and I already had the fabric I wanted to use on hand, I decided I could whip them both up the night before we left. Big Sister's dress was a breeze!

I got through it in a snap, no problem!  Also, I found a new useful tool in my box of grandma presents - my new "hem measurer"

I have no idea what this thing is actually called, or how you're actually supposed to use it, but I'm pretty sure it is for hems.  I used it for ironing under my raw edges like so:

Fold it up to the tab, iron it down - simple as that

All you real seamstresses are probably shaking your heads and unfollowing my blog right now.  Sorry guys!  I don't claim to have any actual training in this!

Also, I got to use some of my Grandma elastic on this one - I was shocked to find that it was in perfect stretchy condition!

Anyways, let's move on to Little Sister's dress.  I call it a disaster, only because it was late and I was crunched for time, in the light of day it probably wouldn't have upset me so much.  For clarification,  this disaster arose only by my own error - don't go blaming leila and ben, because their pattern is great!  This is just a "Jenny screwed something up" story.  

I had gotten through a significant amount of the sewing on Little Sister's dress and was trimming the seams as called for in the pattern and then, as I snipped the underarm corner, I cut through the seam.  I sat there for a good 5 minutes staring at it in disbelief.  Then I said a few bad words. Then I cried a few angry tears. Then I tried to fix it.  It got worse and worse the more I tried to fix it.  Then I looked at the other sleeve and saw that the seams were not lined up - AT ALL.  Ummm... how did that happen? The whole thing was totally jacked up. I said a few more bad words, and tried to fix it again, which didn't work, again.  I ended up throwing the whole thing in the trash. Poor Stephen didn't really know what to do that evening, because I was in such a bad mood.  Anyways, the next day only Big Sister got a dress the next day.

About a week later I finally got over my distress over the Little Sister dress, ripped out the jacked up sleeves, cut out new ones, and reattached them.  Came out super cute!! Then it hung on my closet door for about a month. But now it's all packed up and ready to send!  Something to look forward to Little Sister! (Of course, given my record of getting packages to the post office in a timely fashion, I might just hand deliver it next time we visit...)

Note how my one and only zinnia bloom is color coordinated - woohoo!

So, the moral of this story is, this is a great pattern, and I'm 100% sure anyone could do it.  But don't be a doofus like me - pay attention to what you're doing. (and thanks to leila and ben, and the long thread!)