here be projects...lots of them

in my mind, i defend all the craft supplies by the fact that sometime in may, i'll be unemployed. and in my mind, between now and then, i'll spit out piles and piles of adorable felted dolls, embroidered hand towels  and etsy banner sets (graphics) to keep us afloat until the wits program picks up in the 2013 new school year. yeah, in my mind, my crafting can keep up my financial end from may through october. i'm funny, right?? at least i have that!

lately, as i mentioned earlier, i started needle felting. it's a lot of fun and really portable. i've made some mini houses, a couple fairies, a faceless cat, and a geisha doll. i have a few boxes of roving felt to keep me through the long spring (it's texas, i can't claim an endless winter like i could in alaska).

i also taught myself (and am in the middle of TEACHING myself) really basic graphic design. i love blogs and i love redesigning blogs and i'll be hammed (yes, i said hammed and not the other word...i'm improving myself, people!) if i want to keep paying people $40 a pop to do something i sorta half like but will redo in a few months anyway. the blog headers aren't as easy, though i'm getting better (this very blog header above was my first one..not TOO bad, right?)

but what i am pretty decent at is combining digital scrapbooking kits (way cheaper than their tangible counterparts) and making etsy shop banner sets. now those are super fun and super fast. i'm not the high art type...i'm pretty  much the classic cutesy, kawaii girl any day of the week, so that's what i've been working in.

this week i'm working on a new etsy shop, darjeeling's designs and as i get better at and bored with banner sets, i'll start tinkering with blog design. someday. ha!

not that i didn't love the mugs. and not that it didn't keep us afloat a couple times this winter. it's just that, well, i have a goldfish brain and i need new stimulus or i'll go crazy and chuck the plastic castle out of my bowl. oh, and shipping charges for those mugs was ba-nay-nays.

i also have MILLIONS of threads of embroidery floss and yarn. someday i'll work on my sketches for embroidery. and someday i'll teach myself to knit, but i wouldn't hold my breath on that one. my kids are WAY too interested in knitting needles and i see the way kenna eyes her brother sometimes...i'd hate to arm the violence with my bamboo knitters.

hope the week is awesome where you are!

needle felting and my bloody fingers

let's just say it's one step below the required dexterity and timing that operating a hot glue gun requires. i'm terrible with glue guns. my husband hates it when i have one fired up when the kids are awake because i  have a talent for getting the glue strings and third degree burns everywhere. eveeeeeerywhere.

and a tool with six sharp, tiny needles that requires you to stab a ball of roving wool over and over and over again into oblivion? well, let's just say i feel for diabetics who have to poke their fingers multiple times a day. it hurts! (and i've managed to ruin some light-colored wool with blood spots. awesome, right?)

today i worked on a cat for a fairy house my mom is building for my grandmother. she said she needed a cat for nanny's fairy. i remember pop's cat bg passed away this year and i'm pretty sure, if i remember correctly, bg was white. so white it is. this is the second bg i had to make because of the afore-mentioned blood splatters. that poor prototype looks like it didn't quite make it across the road to the other side. but THIS bg is pretty darn cute, even if he doesn't have eyes. i can't quite do eyes yet. they're hard.

and beside bg, i made a fairy of sorts. i love purple. it hides blood reeeeally well.

And just for fun, here's a picture of what kenna did in the short two minutes i was shooting the photos. nilla wafers and corn chips and a floor. glorious!

Easy Valentine Project: Baby Food Jar Moss Terrarium

We needed a quick valentine for Boy Wonder's teachers. Normally, I'm not the best at remembering these after buying the obligatory box of boring, generic kid valentines and spending the morning filling them all out for the kid...but it just so happens that today I'm volunteering in the classroom. Yipes.

It helps that I live in the warm, humid wilds of Gulf Coast Texas. We spend lots of our winter days out at parks and since I started saving Roo's baby jars, I started collecting all the moss I can find in hopes of making a terrarium shop on Etsy. When I figure out how to SHIP them, well, then I'll be in business. But until then, I'll just be the weird moss chick who keeps tiny terrariums on her window sill.

I bought the carbon and the fish bowl gravel at Walmart for about $4 each. I did a shallow layer of gravel and topped it off with a tiny bit of carbon to cut down on the mold factor. Then I just sorta smooshed in the moss and dirt I'd collected, arranged a cute little twig or rock and voila...masterpiece.

Add a red bow, a Hershey's kiss, and one witty pun...and BAM POW BOOM...instant adorable valentine.

Hope your day comes up roses...assuming that's your thing. If not, here's wishing you chocolates, or jewelry, or...umm...moss terrariums!

....with love....

Crafty Tutorial: Button Art and Mod Podge Frame

I don't do a lot of tutorials. Mostly, it's because a lot of what I attempt gets flattened by the crafty fail whale, but it also happens that when things DO go right, I'm too distracted to stop and take pictures.

And what good is a tutorial with no photos?

No good, I tell you, no good at all.

Our house is very, very slowly adding life. We have a table. Chairs. Couch. Loveseat. Coffee table. Bed in our room (poor Boo still has an air mattress, but we're working on that!)

But the walls are bare. Part of me can't bring myself to riddle them with finishing nails to hang stuff like I seem to do in all of our rentals. (I'll be trying out those non-damaging wall-hanger-upper things in this place). And the other part of me, well, that's the girl that got rid of most of her stuff in Alaska, so there isn't much art for the kids' rooms. At all.

This is the part of the story that I found inspiration. It started with my girl, Vanessa, at Tried & True. I've raved about her before (not everyone gets to say they went to high school with a craft superstar!). I'll do it again. She has the best. tutorials.ever. She reviewed a new book in this post: "Mod Podge Rocks!"

Of couse I read it and was intrigued by the author, Amy Anderson, who runs a blog called...wait for it...Mod Podge Rocks!

My bottles of Mod Podge happened to make the trek down from Alaska and I was thrilled at the Serendipty of it all. Or maybe just the good luck. Whatever floats your boat, y'know?

Anyway, digging through Amy's site, I found a post called "Button Art on the Cheap" and really liked it. Reeeeeally liked it and thought I could spruce up a frame with some scrapbook paper and make something special for the girls' room.

Turns out, I could!

I hit the local Hobby Lobby (I have lived 8 long years without outdoor swimming pools or Hobby Lobbies...I'm not entirely sure how) and grabbed a frame and a couple sheets of pretty paper. I had the rest in my craft boxes. (Unpacked, still. Texas is too hot to bother with unpacking when you don't have shelves or bookcases to put anything on.)

Ready for the tutorial? Sweet!

Button Art and Mod Podge Frame

Materials:

Plain wooden frame (can be repurposed, but mine wasn't, so boo on me)



Pretty scrapbook paper, cut in all sorts of sizes

Craft paint in coordinating color

Mod Podge (I used the gloss formula)

Buttons


Hot glue gun


Any extras for your finished frame (I had a fabric butterfly from a flower arrangement that a good friend gave to me when we arrived in Texas. Isnt' she so sweet?)


Directions:

Assemble your materials. I pulled my frame apart and readied a paint brush and craft paint.

Paint the outside and inside edges of your frame. If you are deft of hand and don't mind making slivers of paper and mod podge to cover these parts of the raw frame, be my guest! But I'm lazy and didn't want to really bother with that part. So I painted them...messily, too. That's the great part about the next step...

Apply thick layers of Mod Podge and assemble your paper scraps all around the frame. Be neat. Be messy. Doesn't matter...it all works out nicely in the end!

I cut one of my papers to fit the frame backing and adhered it (yes, more Mod Podge!) to said backing to make the next step easier.

 

So while the frame was drying in all its decoupage and paper scrap glory, I got to glueing buttons on my paper and backing (it's so much easier to have the paper stuck to the frame back for stability).  I kept my buttons in pretty neat little rows, but you should experiment. Also, I thought one plain button was sort of boring, so Boo and I got to finding little, bitty "partner" buttons to glue on top of our bigger buttons for a little height and visual interest. 

Speaking of visual interest, that's the fabric butterfly that was stuck to a dowel and inserted into a beautiful flower arrangement.

You can see the final product in the next photo...

 

A close up. I love the stacked buttons. Heck, I love the whole darn thing and now Boo is asking for a boy version (with dinosaurs and race cars, no less) for his room. We'll see what we can come up with...

Happy crafting!

Project! Spring Thaw and Easy Bird Feeder Craft

Little by little the snow is getting smaller and smaller outside. Now the banks may only come up to our knee caps instead of our thighs, but that's still something, right?

Outside our tiny back deck we have a group of birds that we've named "Bob, Larry, Bojangles, and Sue." Two were Veggie Tales inspired, and two were country music inspired. Go figure.

It's been a few months since we last saw them all, but we got to know them pretty well over the summer. This morning Boo saw one of them and just about lost his adorable mind in all of his excitement. He then informed me that they were incredibly hungry and we needed to feed them. Our last attempt to feed them ended up with a cheap yard sale dish falling off our balcony into the snow below, so we needed another option.

Yes, we had peanut butter, but we lacked pinecones. What do crafty moms do when there are no pinecones on hand? Well, they grab toilet paper rolls, it seems. No lie, there were about fifty different tutorials all singing the praises of feeding your wild birds with the likes of a Charmin roll. Guess what? In a house of five, we have PLENTY of those!

The craft couldn't get more simple and the photos show that even I could do it and snap photos at the same time. I even get the honor of introducing you to Bojangles in that last shot. He's my favorite, but that could be the Jerry Jeff Walker fan in me. It's true.

Ingredients and supplies? Too simple.

an empty roll or two from a toilet paper roll or a paper towel roll snipped in half

ribbon or string or purple yarn (like I had on hand)

peanut butter and some sort of spreading mechanism (butter knife? cake spatula?)

bird seed (had it!)

Tie a pretty bow through your roll. Spread on the peanut butter and apply seeds. Then get outside and feed your hungry birds!!

1. Our man Boo and our supplies.

2. I tied the string first and it seemed much easier that way!

3. The odd-smelling combination of peanut butter bird seed! It sticks to fingers, so be ready with the wipes.

4. Impatiently waiting for our lunch guests.

5. Mr. Bojangles! You're here! We've missed you!

Happy Spring to you, wherever you are!

At last! Lulu is here...

Well, and by "Lulu" I mean that legless doll part conglomoration I was calling "Maisie" last weekend. (See here.) The pattern came from a book by the very talented Hilary Lang of Wee Wonderfuls fame and I. Love. Her. Stuff. It's true.

The pattern was relatively easy, even for a noob sewer like me, although I have to admit that while I spent the last few steps attaching the various body parts by hand, I was thinking to myself "self, there's got to be an easier way." And I think there might be. So for future creations, I might work on tweaking that bit because let's face it, folks, I am not the neatest of hand stitchers. I suck at it, actually.

But the directions were pretty straight forward and now I look at fat quarters in a whole new doll house fashion/coordination light. It's tons of fun. The finished product was supposed to have a pony tail sewn in there, but in all my excitement, I totally forgot to attach it. And then when it came time, I was so sick of poking myself and making my thumb bleed, I decided against hand sewing one on. I left her with a cute "pixie" haircut...sorta like my girl 'Kenna has herself. To compensate for the lack of flowing locks, I dug out an applique strawberry I had in the sewing box from a year or so back when I swore I was going to knit the world's cutest baby blanket (which currently sits in my basket as the world's cutest oblong washcloth. Whatever.)

The strawberry did it's part and I think Lulu is divine. The name, by the way, is courtesy of big brother Andrew. He simply said "she should be Lulu" and she was. Amazing powers, that boy has. He then stated that he wanted one too, and when I pressed and asked him if he really wanted a girl "dolly," (I was more than willing to make him one), he paused and changed his order.

"I want a monkey."

And there it is.

Add to that the "dragon blanket" Boy Wonder ordered, and there go any plans I might have for the next few weeks. My chldren have spoken, folks. I am but their humble, sewing, bloody-thumbed servant. I included a recent "smile" face photo of Kenna just for kicks. And to show you just how much that girl's got me wrapped around her baby fingers. Who wouldn't sew for her?

Have a great weekend!

Humble Fabric Beginnings...

I'm calling her Maisie. And even though I forgot to sew in her pig tails before sewing the body together, I still think she's on her way to perfect. Call me biased. All that's left now is the hand sewing steps and I had my fill of tangled thread yesterday...the finishing touches will wait til a little later this week.

But I was excited. And I wanted to share.

Happy Monday!

Me and My Sewing Machine

A long time ago, before Boo was born (you know, my three year old?), I taught myself to sew. Well, technically, the Singer DVD included with my machine and my most awesomest of awesome husbands who took Home Ec in middle school taught me to sew.

It wasn't fancy by any means. A rag quilt here, a burp cloth there. When Boo was born I was a wise little blackbird and refocused on my writing. (I'm sure the student loans as a reminder did nothing to urge me on to use the craft I was paying so dearly for...)

It's been a good two years since I dusted off my simplest of simple sewing machines, but last weekend I did. I hauled out my old fabric stash, I organized the old projects that I'd left in stick pin limbo.

Oh, sure, I forgot how to thread the needle and I boned it on the bobbin once or twice, but eventually, I was able to sew a very simple fleece blanket for the Boo. (See the picture? He loves "beep beeps" of any flavor, so the fact that these are farm machines and he's never seen a farm means nothing to him. I am a rockstar!)And thanks to one of the cutest books I've come across in a long, long time, I began to sew again.

It was a bumpy re-start, but it happened. From there, I was inspired to try a real project, and thanks to Kasja Wikman's book "Scandinavian Stitches" (a random buy from Amazon.com, thankee verra much!), I was hooked. Again.

I made two teensy projects, which, in hindsight could have worked against me. See, I'm not the greatest at small turns and tight corners...I'm more of an "open road" sort of sewer (read it: long, long stretches of flannel material all pinned out before me. I love blankets!)

The first project I attempted was the Spring Bird. In the fabric stash I'd found, there lived some vintage pillow cases my mama had sent me. One of them I actually recogniz

ed as my old pillow case from when I was in middle school. A few snips and stitches and one button eye later, and I had an adorable, Scandinavian spring bird for the mantle. (I've mentioned my family's heritage is very, very Norwegian before, haven't I? I'm sure I have...once or fourteen times.)

Wikman's approach at quilts and stitched art is whimsical and a ton of fun...just up my alley. I

have a few more projects dog-eared in the book that I'm planning, including some appliqued quilts and a few more pillowcase birds. All of these are building blocks on my way to my ultimate destination...a rag doll for Miss Makenna.

I dream in rag doll color combinations. I live for the day that I don't sew out of bounds around a

gently-curved head or get my embroidery thread knotted into an oblivion when I'm trying to stitch an eyebrow. Someday soon...

In the meantime, here's a picture of me and my Boo. I'm wearing yellow and I'm

smiling. It's about as close to Springtime in Anchorage as we'll get this month.

And Boo? Well, he's smiling because he's been in big-boy undies all week. My man....

Happy Spring melting to all you luckier folks!

Mid-week Links!: Tutorial Envy

I have a list of sewing/knitting/nesting awesomeness that only seems to grow...never shrinks.

That said...here, lemme add to the list.

This week's tutorials that have me drooling and eyeballing my sad little sewing machine:

1. Upcycled Bath Mat at Mamacraft

2. Scalloped Edge Baby Blanket at Zaaberry

3. Fat Quarter Napkins at All Things Shea

4. Mini Bookshelf Quilt at Don't Call Me Betsy

5. Patchwork Coasters (Ideal for the new mug rug craze, perhaps?) at Craft Snob