My first quilt

I have finally finished my first quilt project!



What did I learn? Lots of stuff. The main one being: Don't do a king sized quilt for your first project. Anyone with half a brain knows that right?

The reason I did a king sized quilt is because Adam needs a "summer" quilt. One that is thinner and doesn't make him sweat at night.

This quilt has pinwheel squares in the middle. This is one of the easiest if not the easiest squares to make. They aren't all perfect but I think it turned out better than I was expecting it to about 3/4 of the way through. I just got so tired of working on it!

I used old fashioned cotton batting in the middle. This is a little more expensive but I used a 40% off coupon at Hobby Lobby and it wasn't bad. It's thinner and breathes a little better I think.



Finished it off with some floral fabric on the back, tied it and there you have it! Quilt #1 is in the books.

A bib that covers all

So now that you have seen Lauren feeding herself and the mess that it makes, you can understand my need for a bigger bib than all of the store boughten ones that I have in her closet.

My mom always had a few bibs that were like this in her towel drawer and this shape seems to make the most sense to me.


She usually has food all over her chest, lap, shoulders and arms along with face and hands of course.

I took out some old scraps of fabric which work great for simple little projects like this. I used cotton. I usually have a burp rag and washcloth handy when feeding her anyway so I am not to worried about making the bibs with terrycloth because that would just add a lot unnecessary expense. Like I said, I'm just wanting to keep the food off her, not wipe her off.

First, I made a pattern out of some more scrap material and then sewed it quick to test and make sure everything would work as needed.

I did learn that I needed to cut my material a little more inside the circle for a seam allowance. If you don't do this then your neck hole will be extra large.

Then I cut out the main fabric to the size of a hand towel.


I stiched around it inside out, turned it out and top stitched around it again.


I also added some velcro to the back for a closure.

This bib has much more coverage than anything else we have in the house for $0.00.


I do think that it could be a little smaller for her right now but she will grow into it.

Wooden Name Letters

I finally got around to making Laurens name to put above her crib. These seem to be the cool thing to do for nurseries and they are super easy to make so I jumped on the bandwagon.



I bought these letters from Hobby Lobby for like 50 cents each.

I glued scrapbook paper to the letters and then roughly cut the paper away. I just used a thin layer of Mod Podge.


Then I took fine sandpaper and sanded the paper along the edges of the wooden letters. This "cut away" the paper to the exact letter shape.



Added some ribbon and you are done!

Christmas Cards

I made most of our Christmas cards this year. It's really not too hard if you have the tools - and I'm guessing if you are going to take on the task to make your own cards you have the tools.

I bought some premade cards at Hobby Lobby because I used my coupon and got them for 8 cents a card. They came in a package of 50. Much easier and cheaper than cutting them myself.

The trick to making your own cards is a system. Cut or make all your pieces or elements and then assemble your cards.

I did a lot of trial and error to figure out my design but in the end I decided that I liked the brown paper and wanted to keep the card simple to show off the paper (and save time.)

First thing I did was lay out all the cards and splatter them with white acrylic paint to create the look of snow.

I used my cricut and the Plantin Schoolbook cartridge to cut the tags. Then I stamped them with a Christmas tree stamp in black ink.


Then I stamped the insides of the cards with a message.


I used some ribbon that I had left over from our wedding for the bow and used this easy Cheater bow method to create the bows.

After that I folded them and signed them.

Then I used my Glue Runner to glue on the tags. Then I used a mini glue dot to attach the bow.

After that I added our pictures/birth announcement since I didn't feel like addressing and paying for postage for birth announcements 3 months ago :)


There you go - easy homemade Christmas cards!




P.S. If you read my blog and don't get one of these...it's because I wasn't thinking when I went to buy the cards and only got 50. Of course Adams family is huge so I ran out and don't really feel like lugging Lauren to Hobby Lobby again. Please forgive me :) You'll be getting my quickie postcard version of the pictures/birth announcement.

Baptism booties

This weekend was little miss Laurens baptism.



We borrowed the dress that Adams sister wore so I wanted something special that was just for Lauren. So I made her some little shoes :) I found a pattern on this great blog. Check it out. She also has lots of other cool stuff. I love the blogging community :) Here is my finished product. I'm not the neatest sewer around curves but they turned out alright.

Old English on my Cedar Chest

I have a cedar chest that was my grandma's. I took it to college with me so that combined with being moved so many times in the last 5 years, it's taken a beating. It's in the baby's room now and last week it occurred to me out of the blue to try Old English on it. I have no idea why I haven't thought of this before but it worked WONDERS. It's so fun to just see the scratches and dings disappear before your eyes. I also fixed a couple things inside that had come loose.

Here is the result


Some day I'll work on getting the paint off of it. The feet also need a little work. For now, I'm so happy the Old English made a world of difference.

Dresser

Adam's newest woodworking project is a dresser. If you remember the nightstands that he made for our room, he made a dresser to match. We needed a dresser for the baby's room so this was as good of an opportunity than any!



As with the nightstands he inlayed some walnut on the top.


This holds our stuff a lot better than our old one. Probably because it's custom made for our needs huh? :)

When he put the knobs on, the standard screws were too long for how thick the drawer faces were.


So last night he went through and replaced all of those. It's now officially finished!

Burp Rags and Minky Blankets

I got a bunch of old gerber cloth diapers from my sister that she had used as burp rags. They are a little stained which is fine; they still work. BUT, I thought it would be fun to give them a little decoration.

Here is some of what I did:










I also make a blanket and a tag blanket with some minky fabric.
The minky is harder to work with than I would have thought. It is stretchy so you have to use lots of pins and it sheds.
I sewed these inside out first and then flipped them and went over them again on the outside.
Here is the blanket:


Tag blanket:

Glider

I am borrowing my sisters glider for the nursery but it was very sun bleached. She gave me the go ahead to recover it so of course that is exactly what I did. I forgot to take before pics but I laid the old covers over the chair to give you an idea.

Before:


After:


I still have a little work to do to the back cushion but it's almost ready!

Newest Creation

Adam's newest creation is a nightstand. Our room in this house is much smaller than the one in our last house so the nightstands we used before do not fit. New project for Adam!

Tada!


It's oak with inlays of walnut on the top.

Pretty fancy!

Wall Vinyl

My cricut cuts vinyl which means that I can make just about anything that Uppercase Living could make as long as I have the cartridge that has the images. I ordered the vinyl a while ago and my sister in law did some cute sports wall images for her sons room but I finally decided it was time for me to make one for my house.



I don't totally love it, but I don't dislike it either.

When cutting vinyl with the cricut I used 5 Pressure, 6 blade depth, 4 speed, a new blade and a new mat. Everything worked perfectly!

Antenna

Adam's latest project has been one that is more fun for him than stuff that needs to be done. He decided that since people are going to be having tvs with antenna's on them more he wanted to make one that was nicer aesthetically. He did some research online and came up with a plan. This is what he made.



We'll get it hung up on the wall soon to make it look more like a piece of art and it will look better than rabbit ears!

Anyone still out there? :)

The only thing creative I've done lately is thank you cards.
Here's some pictures:









This past weekend was a fun weekend filled with a basketball game, a testicle festival and the Super Bowl. What a crazy Super Bowl too huh? I think that my favorite commercials were the Mr. Potato head one the "Coke heist.

Potato Head Ad

Coke Heist Ad

Here's a link to all of them in case you missed any!
All Ads

Happy hump day!

Jackpot!

My co-worker was wandering around Walmart last night and came upon Cricut cartridges in the clearance isle for.........$20! I got 3! $60! Which may seem like a lot of money but at regular price these three items I would have been $239.97!!!!

For those of you that know what I'm talking about:
I got the basketball solutions cart. (reg. $49.99), the Doodletype cart. (reg. $89.99) and the Disney Dreams come true cart (Reg. $99.99)

I promise, I'm going to be better at posting from now on :)

Name Signs

What do you get someone who has enough money to get what they want when they want it, are a bachelor and just bought a house a year ago?

Well, I came up with the bright idea of a last name sign made out of wood.

This is how Adam and I work: I come up with an idea, he thinks, taps his finger to his lips, does some math and measurements, edits, then I edit and so on and so forth until we come up with something we like - whether he creates the end product or I do, this is how we work.

My initial idea was for him to sort of cut out some letters. He then wanted to router some out of a piece of wood. Which didn't really work so he wanted a template to use the router around. I had some craft letters in my craft room that I told him to try which worked pretty well. Once those letters were in the picture we then decided - well, why don't we just use boughten wood letters?

Here's the final results which turned out very nice and were very easy.


Slab of walnut, boughten letters, glue and danish oil.


Ta Da!

Successful Christmas presents #2.

Train Table

One of the Christmas presents Adam made this year is a train table for our nephew. It's just the perfect height for 2 year olds to play with stuff on it and it fits this perfectly on the top.


The white stuff you see on it is just dust from sanding the poly so disregard that.

We were at Adam's sisters house this weekend and Trey just loved playing on the table. Anything that was on the table, he played with it. If you knelt by the table, he'd look at you and then kneel too because he thought that was what you are supposed to do.

The table is 48" x 32" and about 14" high. He made the base out of walnut and the top is birch plywood stained and finished with poly so all the little spills I'm sure are going to happen don't hurt the table.

Homemade present #1 a success!

P.S. If you want one Adam can make you one :)

Table Feet

What do you do when you have brand new hardwood floors and a coffee table with hard plastic feet?

Make a template.


Cut out felt.


Glue felt to the feet.


Discard old towel scrap that is now covered in cat hair.


Worry no more.