Playing Catch-up.... AGAIN :)

So it's been a while.  I think I go through seasons of liking to update my blog and not liking to.  I tend to post everything I make on facebook and forget to keep a better record of it here.  Anyway, here are some fairy shoes I made the past few months.

This one my daughter found while she was hunting for leprechaun treasure in the yard on Saint Patty's.  She figured finding one of their shoes as almost as good as their treasure. :)

I've been meaning to do something fun with this table for a while now.  For some reason I made it happen yesterday. hahahaha  I was walking past it in the morning and said to myself, "Ok.  Get out the paints and do it!"  So I did. :) 

I've been learning how to crochet from a cute lady at my church.  She has a goal to teach a bunch of us "youngsters" how to do it and then have us all make together 100 sets of these hats and booties to donate to the hospital across the street.  This was my first completed set.  I've made several more since, but then then started buying my own yarn and thinking it would be fun to alter the pattern a little to make a hat for Pip and her buddies. :)  Then I'll go back to making for the hospital again.

Kendyl loves to sit and make crochet chains, pull them all out and start over again.  She doesn't want to learn any other stitches yet.  hahaha  This is her sitting on the floor at church making her long snaky chains. :)

 Here's one of the hats I made for Pip.  Actually she is giving this one to her buddy.  She wants me to make her's with yarn that is more sparkly. hahaha  What a girly-girl.  LOVE IT! :)

Ok.  So there's more to update, but that's all I've got time for now.  Later!

Valentine Love Letters Decoration

The last week has been a lot of fun to find little love notes randomly throughout the day in our own envelope on this banner that I made. A few weeks ago I began sketching out this idea. Originally I was going to make it into an advent calendar, but my sister had a great idea to turn it into little pockets to keep love notes in. So I sketched it out and she did color tests and we decided on this! Man alive, I love that sister of mine and how fun it is to create stuff with her. Someday we'll live by each other again, but it's wonderful to be able to create together via the internet. :)

I have enough materials to custom make 3 more for anyone that would like to purchase it. I posted it on my etsy shop at: http://www.etsy.com/listing/91563034/owl-valentine-love-notes-banner

So here's the full view...

...and a close up on those two cute little love birds :)

This is the heart pocket that holds the papers to write on and the little red envelope holds our small pencils.

I LOVE the new embroidery machine I got for Christmas. It was really fun embroidering all our names and little designs on it and writing "Be Mine" with it. Those little Christmas tree advent calendars took about 3-4 hours just to embroider the numbers below the pockets. Now it's a cinch.

Another Needle Book (For My Little Sis)...

I decided to make another needle book especially for my sister. She loves owls and hedgehogs and the colors green, turqoise, browns, oranges, etc. I just sent it yesterday so she should be able to start using it in a few days. :)

More Needle Books and Another Advent Calendar

Okay so that was pretty fun making the little birdies hugging needle book and I decided I wanted to make a bunch more. I have no idea why I made so many. And I've sketched a few more ideas to make more. They are fun and fairly fast. It just feels good to finish something instead of it taking a month (or a few years... ahem... my cross-stitch). I really love working with felt. It's so fun and bright and easy. Anyway, here's a bunch more little needle books I made this last weekend.

And here's the side view. Look at all that fun color?!

Princess and the Pea Needle Book. I used some of my mom's old Victorian trim she gave me. :)

Closeup of the pea. :) So I may just keep this one and give the rest away. I have to keep this one because of a funny story between Seth and I. Here goes... a few years ago while living in LA Seth was teasing me about being such a princess about something. I decided to make a joke of it. Without him knowing just before bed I put a pea under our mattress on my side. When we got into bed I tossed and turned and pretended like I just couldn't get comfortable to the point of driving him crazy. Finally I stopped and said, "It feels like there's something jabbing into my back. I just can't fall asleep. Hold on... I'll check..." then I lifted up my mattress edge and pulled out the pea and said with relief, "OH! That's why! A princess can't sleep on a pea." He looked shocked and then laughed so hard at me. I felt very clever of course, well, because I was. :)

Cherry Blossoms Needle Book

Little Red Riding Hood Needle Book (This one is Seth's fav)

Froggy and Mushrooms Needle Book

Night Owl Needle Book

Leafy Branch Needle Book

... soooo which one is your favorite?

You never know- it may just end up in the mail on it's way to your house. :)

Now onto the not-so-quick project. I still can't figure out why I could make that other little advent calendar for the missionaries in our branch on a lazy Saturday and this calendar for Seth's sister and her family took me all month. It was slow and go for some reason. I think I must have put a lot more time and thought into each little pocket. I made it go to 31 instead of 25 because they have a daughter who's bday is on the 31st.

Close up of the top half.

Close up of the bottom half. It was fun to invent so many more little pockets since it went all the way to 31. I also decided not to make some of the pockets I had made for the missionaries.

This was the little bear on a stick that goes from pocket to pocket as the month wears on. I made a bear because I'm cheesy and their last name is Bair. Get it? I know, I'm a nerd. :)

The very good news is that my hubby bought me an embroidery machine for Christmas so I don't have to spend 4-6 hours hand embroidering all those numbers if I ever want to make another again! Now I could even start making my Halloween calendars again and selling them. At least that's the plan. Yipee!

A Few New Things (plus an update on an old thing)

I'm always losing my needles as I work on my different little projects and my family is always finding them in not very fun ways, so I made this little book out of felt to hold them for me. :) I liked the book so much I've decided to make another one and send this one on to a friend for Christmas.

I went to a little craft day with some friends and made these two framed pictures. Everyone else made calendars, but I decided to turn mine into a weekly menu (which is now hanging in my kitchen) and a conducting help for Young Women's on Sundays. You put the permanent information under the glass and write on top of it with dry erase markers. Super cute and easy. It's always fun to mess around with pretty papers and actually finish something in less than 20 minutes.

I have a niece staying with me while her momma is sick and she wanted me to take pictures of the fun snow flakes we made and put it on my blog here. I learned how to make them a few years ago and every year have made a few more and laminated them to keep well and add to the collection. We have about 40 of them now. Someday I'd love to have a couple hundred, but that's a lot of laminating and I can't get myself to use more than 10 sheets on snowflakes every year. :) They are really fun to make and super addicting. We have enough of a collection to hang from our family room ceiling. :) For instructions on how you can look back at my blog where I wrote about it here.

And last of all: My yearly update on my cross stitch. :) Remember this sucker? This is such a monster. I wrote about it here. It may not look like a lot of progress, but when you have to make 625 per inch and the entire project is 18" by 22" it's takes a long time to make a noticeable difference. I'm still working on it in the evenings for an hour or two every night while catching up on shows with Seth or him reading to me. I'm guessing it will be done by next Christmas. I'm itching to start a new cross stitch pattern. I'm getting pretty sick of oranges, browns, yellows, and reds. I have 8 more Scott Gustafson patterns waiting for me to make. I'll probably go blind before I finish them all when they take me 3 years each. I know, I'm crazy. It gives me something to do. I just don't like sitting still. It feels unproductive. Probably I have adhd or something. haha

Here is what it looks like now:

Here is what it looked like last Jan:

(seeing them side by side

helps to see progress)

Here's a close up.

And here is an even more close up. :) My cell phone camera doesn't take the best pictures, but you get the idea of how tiny the little stitches are.

Matter Unorganized :)

Our whole family likes to be artsy-fartsy and a lot of the time we spend together is artsy type stuff.:) My husband is much more professionally artsy-fartsy than I am, but I still find much joy in it even if I'm not a professional artist. :) I just put some of his "lunch bag" art work up on our family blog here. Anyway, few things give me greater pleasure than to create something out of a mess. :) I really relate to the words of this talk by Pres. Uchtdorf: "Happiness, Your Heritage". I love to look at an empty canvas or a pile of fabric and wonder what life is inside of it and will emerge as I play with it. I have bags of felt scraps and on Saturday I threw them all over my table and stared at them wondering what they would turn into and at the end of the day I had this...

My sister and I made these huge calendars a few years ago to give as Christmas presents to family and I realized I had enough stuff to make a small one. It's about a 1/3 of the size. I looked at the one that I made a few years ago for reference, but decided to make a bunch of new pockets. It was so fun to see all my scraps before me and start cutting and gluing and creating each individual pocket.

This particular calendar I made for the missionaries serving in our area. My husband is always making fun of me for wanting to be such a mom to them. I know they are adults, but they are still 19-21 year old boys, who are away from family, learning about themselves and the world, and trying to share what they love most with others- the message of Christ. So maybe I'm a dork, but I made this for them. I put little slips of paper in each pocket with assignments for them to do each day (i.e. make the ugliest Christmas ornament they can out of paper, read a certain section in the scriptures, write letters to their family, do something secret and nice for their companion, call us on Penelope's birthday and sing "Happy Birthday", drink hot cocoa, build a snowman -on P. day of course :), etc.) A lot of families have these types of traditions in this season. I just thought that this time of year could be a hard time to be away from family. I wanted to help them stay focused on their work, but know that they are loved as well.

If you look closely you can see that I made two penguins (like the other calendars), but they have name badges- just like the missionaries. haha

The 13th has an angel on it because that's Pip's birthday. We actually had the elders over for Thanksgiving dinner and we had a surprise from one of the elders. He had been in contact with the other elder's family secretly and they had sent a letter from them for us to read aloud at the table. The letter was in a card that had three beautiful little angels on the front of it with each angel representing one of our girls and they were named. The mom had written "your angels"- so that's why I put an angel pocket for Pip's bday. :) The parents thanked us for reaching out to their son and his companion and told us it gave them comfort to know they would be eating a good meal even though they weren't together. Then the mom quoted lines that her son had written about our family in her letter. He had described each one of us individually and why he loves us. I bawled, of course. :) Between that, having Seth's sister and her family over, and our buddies the Falconbridges visiting us for Thanksgiving it was one of the most special Thanksgivings that I can remember.

Instead of Santa on the 25th like my other calendars I put the baby Jesus (and Santa on the 24th) :). I didn't have my sister's embroidery machine so I hand stitched all the numbers. I added extra touches too like the blanket stitch around the tree, trunk, and star. This little calendar turned out so sweet and was so fun to make. I've been scared to made another one for a while because I got really burnt out that year I made Christmas calendars and all those Halloween calendars and sold them. It is much more fun to make them as gifts. :) It makes me much more happy than making a few extra bucks.

Just for fun here's a picture I took on Thanksgiving of the two elders. We are thankful for their service and sacrifice. For those of you who may read this and not know- when a someone chooses to go on a mission they don't get paid for it. In fact, they pay for the cost of the mission themselves. They put a few years of college (and dating- haha) on hold to go out and serve. How could you not love someone willing to do that? :) Whatever all our differences and beliefs are it is a respectable thing to see anyone follow their heart and convictions like that.

I hope you have a very Merry Christmas and do things that bring you joy and remind you of why this time of year is so special and fills your heart. :) Merry Christmas!

Halloween Sewing...

Here's this year's costumes. :)

I love that Penelope is the pretty little princess between two scary big sisters. Her pose cracks me up. Her costume was the most time consuming this year. Kendyl wanted to be a scary ghost. It had to be "real looking"- so I made layers and layers of sheer fabric and finished all the edges to with a lettuce edge so it would ripple.

Makenzie wanted to be a dead fairy. I just used a fairy dress of mine and altered it a bit. It was actually very easy and fast- about 5 minutes at a machine. We put a battery pack of led lights in her hair do, add wings, dead looking makeup, typical Makenzie attitude and wah lah - we had ourselves a dead fairy.

Wish I could claim I sewed this. Truth is... last year while I was planning out an Edward Scissorhands costume and looking up prices for material, buckles, etc. online I came across this costume. It was 50% off because it was during December I'm guessing. So here it is, a costume that looks just like the movie and for about $80 cheaper than all the supplies would have been to buy it before sewing it. :)

I did help with the make up though. :) Oh my Seth Scissorhands. He makes Halloween... be Halloween.