What I've been up to

I know you've been wondering. First of all, the reason my LOST post was so late was because we're having trouble with our television. The problem is that it's on too much. So if we feel like going out and having fun, or staying in and having a backgammon tournament, we do that instead of turning on the TV. So we missed LOST on Tuesday and I didn't get to watch it until Wednesday.

I also would like to ask why all you people are reading my blog and not commenting? Throw a girl a bone now and then! As of right now, Michele wins my awesomest blog reader award because she comments! And congrats to her because she's about to have another baby! Here's hoping it's not on a Tuesday, Michele!

What I've been up to is this:

1) Making M's Easter dress.
Yeah, I know. I was cutting it down to the wire. What can I say? I like to live on the edge with my sewing.

Front view

Back view
For the record, this is my favorite fabric ever. I need to go buy more before they discontinue it. Also, my friend was over the other day and said, "How smart! You used a ribbon for a sash!" Yeah, that's called being lazy because I didn't want to make a sash, but thanks.


2) Making fun burp rags for my friend.

I love making burp rags. They're fast, easy, and they turn out beautiful. Why have your baby puke all over an ugly burp rag when you can have one of my beautiful ones! Oh, and they wash out.

My favorite is the one on the far left. I need to buy out that fabric, too. I like the colorful flowers in the center right, too.

3)Decorating our French doors with M

We don't have much room in this house. It's pretty crowded and we just repainted with the intention of putting the house on the market, so we can't hang anything on the walls (I just accidentally typed anythong. For the record we won't hang anythong on the wall either). So M and I decorate the French doors. Right now we're working on spring scenes. The photos are dark because my camera only uses the flash when it feels like it. Temperamental weirdo camera.


First of all, M is big on glitter. She loves the stuff. So we use it in just about every craft we do. The butterflies are fold and paint. Very simple. Cut a butterfly out of construction paper, let your child paint one half of the butterfly, then fold the wings over and smash them together. Pull them apart and they have the same pattern on both wings. M loved it because of the paint and the smashing. I loved it because it wasn't too messy and it wasn't frustrating for her, as a lot of crafts are at this stage. Oh, and the penguins were one of our winter crafts, but she won't let me take them down.

The other door is our "rainy" door. That may change as we get into the summer and the rain lets up some.

4) Enjoying the bea-u-ti-ful weather we've been having lately.

This winter has been rough. Usually I'm all about winter and big cozy sweaters, fires in the fireplace, and hot cocoa, but I can only push so many cars out of my ditch, who landed there because of the unrelenting snow, before winter starts to take a toll on me. It's been wonderful to see dogwoods blooming and feel the warm sunshine again.


5)Acheiving a milestone....and saying goodbye to babydom.

What do these flowers have to do with M growing up? Good question. Hubs bought M these daisies the other day because she loves flowers, she's insanley jealous when he buys me flowers, and because M is potty trained. That's right. I don't have a baby anymore. I have a big girl. It's bittersweet. I love that we're not going to have to shell out the big bucks for diapers anymore, but, seriously, I miss my little baby. I'm proud of my big girl, but I can't believe she's this grown up.


What have you been up to lately?

Crayon Tutuorial

I made my melty rainbow crayons yesterday. I've been trying to figure out how to make these for awhile. I toyed with a lot of things like microwaving and using a double boiler. This is the best outcome I've had with the least burns, because melted crayon BURNS. One thing I'm going to tell you before I start the tutorial is DON'T LEAVE THEM IN THE OVEN TOO LONG. You know what burnt crayons smell like? They smell like stank.

Anyway, we used to make these in elementary school when I was little. One of my teachers would keep broken crayons in a big tub in her room and a couple of times a year we got to help her make rainbow crayons. I decided to make some for M for Christmas, since she won't use broken crayons. It's really simple.

1. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees F.
2. Make sure there is no paper left on your crayon remnants.
3. Put a few crayon pieces in each cup of a mini muffin tin, or you can use silicone baking cups. I used both and took pictures because I love all of you that much.
4. Put your crayon muffins in the oven and bake for THREE MINUTES. If you check on them at three minutes and they are still solid, leave them in the oven and check them every minute. Remember what I said about the stank? This step is critical.
   
5. When they are melted remove them from the oven as carefully as possible. The more you move the pan, the more the colors will combine. You want that nice rainbow color, so try to keep the colors from mixing too much on removal.
   
6. Set the pan down and leave the room until the crayons cool. Resist the urge to stir the crayons, or poke them with your finger, or jiggle the pan. I can't make them without touching them when they're still hot, so I always leave the house for awhile so I'll leave them alone. I know, it's sad.
7. After about an hour the crayons should be cooled and hardened again. Pop them out of the pan or silicone cups and color away!
   

Have fun with your crayon making!

Christmas Projects

So I did some major crafting (I just typed "mammory" instead of major. Freudian slip much?) this week. So much that I might be able to add some stuff to my "to make" list for Christmas. See, we're going on vacation in a month and that makes me nervous that I'll lose my momentum. We're also getting ready to put our house on the market and I'm thinking a move is really going to make me lose my momentum. So I dug in and really worked on projects this past week and now I'm bored because I don't have anything left to right now. Here are a couple of the projects I worked on. Both are for M and I love them a lot.

The first is a crocheted purse that turns into a baby cradle (cute, right?!). I got the pattern here:

http://www.geocities.com/crotiques/origcradle.htm

Then I changed it up because she doesn't have a doll the size of an ant. So I made it a little bigger and a little uglier, but I still like it so shut it.



With the baby I got for $1 at Wal-Mart. It fits perfectly! SCORE!



If you're a beginning crocheter, don't be intimidated by this pattern. It is actually very easy. It is mostly single and double crochet rounds and I was able to finish it really quickly. I made it from yarn scraps that I had so total cost =$1 for the doll.

My second craft was a little more complex, but again, don't be intimidated by it because it is easy to do, just time consuming. M has this problem with her crayons. She hates for them to be in a box. When we color we have to take 20 minutes to lay them all out side by side on the table so she can see them all and none of them are touching (thanks, Hubs, for passing your anal retentive tendencies on). So I thought she might like something that keeps her crayons in that layout all the time. A long time ago I made a needle roll for my crochet hooks. It's just a flat piece of fabric with pockets sewn in to hold your needles. So I thought, "Why not do that with crayons?" The result was this:




The crayons roll up into a neat little bundle that fits in her craft drawer. They're always organized, always laying side by side, and never touching. She will be in heaven. You can use actual fabric to make your crayon roll like I did, or you can use felt. Here is a link to a tutorial that gives you the basic instructions to making a crayon roll. The roll I made holds 96 crayons, but you can make it hold as many as you please. Once you get the hang of it, this craft is really simple. If you can sew a semi-straight line, you can make a crayon roll. :)

http://www.skiptomylou.org/2008/08/06/felt-crayon-roll/

Remember those cheap boxes of crayons I bought? I used half of them to fill her crayon roll. I used discount fabric to make the roll, and ribbon I already had on hand. Project cost = $3.25.

The first of these posts are going to center around actual gifts, as it's a little too early to start on my decorations (I like to use real greenery), but I'll soon get into things that look more Christmas-y. Today and tomorrow I'll be working on a gift for the grandparents and the elusive melty crayons that Kelly asked about. ;) I'll post as soon as I'm done with them.

Oh, and I set up a gmail account if anyone has any questions about the things I'm making. It's allkindsofcreative AT gmail.com. Feel free to e-mail me with any questions and I'll do my darndest to answer them. Happy crafting!

Craft stuff

So I made a new purse for a friend. She asked me to make it for her daughter and she picked out the fabric. I wasn't really crazy about the prints she picked out, but it ended up looking cute! In case you can't tell from the pictures, the brown print has green in it. That's why she picked the green trim.





I also altered the pattern again and opted for a fold over clasp instead of putting the clasp inside the purse. Mainly because of the awesome blingy button I found that matched the fabric. I had to add it to the purse somehow!

And a craft fail this week. :-(

I periodically use plaster of paris to make a cast of M's handprint. I've been doing it every few months since she was born. She hates holding her hand in the plaster for so long. I found this kit at Hobby Lobby that said it was quick dry so I bought it. It turned out that the "clay" was some unknown substance with the consistency of a marshmallow and it wouldn't hold shape at all. When I would try to push her hand into it, it would crack and crumble. So this is what I ended up with:



Meh. I think I'll just buy a real kit and redo it.

I made a purse today!

This one's better than the other one I made. I wasn't very happy with the way the other one turned out, so I tweaked the pattern a little bit. This one is much more acceptable.






And my Japanese Lillies are blooming! They make me so happy!



^That is enough to make me happy in spite of the fact that our air conditioner broke down this weekend in the middle of this awful heat! Yikes! Did I mention that our heater broke in the dead of winter this year? Yeah, we're being plagued. It's all good.

Nonsense post

I have been making amigurumi lately. Here are all of the ones I've made. The big penguin looks mad, but he has a really bad attitude. We've been working on that lately.



Hubs is gonna be soooooo mad when he finds out I accidentally spray-painted the lawn again. So I made him this to soften him up a little bit. It's his favorite Death by Chocolate Ganache cake. I can't even be in the same room with it without getting fat. Adult Onset Diabetes? Check.



And check out this massive bruise on my leg! I wish I could say that I got it from doing something awesome like cage fighting or falling down the stairs on my unicycle, but unfortunately I got it from being the normal spazz that I am and stumbling into a doorjamb.




Okay, nonsense aside. I am really sad that LOST is gone until next year. BOO! Anyway, I've decided that I'm going to *try* to do a character analysis every week or so. I may miss some weeks because we are taking some awesome vacations this summer and fall (can you say Disney World? Jealous?). Anyway, I'll try to do it weekly or at least biweekly. This week's won't be up until late tonight or tomorrow, though. I will take suggestions for characters if you want to leave them in the comments. I'm going to start with Shannon.

Amigurumi

So this is my first attempt at amigurumi. Don't be hatin on him because for one I didn't use a pattern, I just made the fool up. And second, M happens to think he's the bomb and she's already named him "Hooey."



For those of you (Hubs) who can't tell (Hubs), it's an owl. (Duh, Hubs).

Making stuff

I made M another outfit last night. It is awesome squared. In case you can't tell, the top is white eyelet lace. The pants are supposed to be capris but since she's so short, they're decidedly pants.



I love the shirt and I'm thinking I need to make a gigantic one for me:



Check out this cute bag! It's the perfect size for a quick run to the store:



I made it all by myself during M's nap today. I was super jazzed because I found this ribbon on CLEARANCE. It is beautiful. I have it in blue, too:



This is the most awesome Easter toy ever invented. You wind it up and it bounces around like a superball. Hubs and I call it the seizure rabbit. Too bad M's scared of it:



For those of you who know, M is finally getting over her bout with RSV. Luckily, we didn't have any trips to the ER. We didn't even have to use a nebulizer. She is mostly back to her happy self, except for the occasional sniffle. She still feels under the weather some. I am completely wiped out. It has been a rough week for both of us, but hopefully we can put this all behind us now.

Aaaannnnnddd in keeping with my promise from my Lost post, I have signed up for some Bollywood dance classes. I'm so going to rock the house with my mad dance skillz. Wait and see.

Sewing Sewing Sewing

I made M some new clothes. A couple of sundresses and a pair of capris and a matching top.








Sorry there aren't more funnies today. It was a rough morning. Anyway, I'll try to be more cheerful next time I post. And I just watched Twilight again and 1) Why did they change Biology teacher to Mr. Molina? 2) and Edward's stink face is hilarious. 3) I didn't catch the S Meyer cameo until the second viewing.

Oh, and this is for Michele, because she asked me to.



That is all.

Crafty Goodness

I made some more junk!

First, Hairbows and clips for M.

Purple flower:



Purple butterfly:



Other random bows:





And I made some cloth and felt food for the daughter of some friends of mine:



My favorites are the doughnuts:



And the pizza:



Although the apple slices and strawberries are pretty fabulous. :)

Crafty goodness!

I finished a couple of my projects today! First, a quilt for M's first birthday. I embroidered the blocks and tried to pick things she likes: Butterflies, music, sunny days, etc. Here are some pictures of it and my favorite blocks. It's not done yet. I still have to quilt it, but I've been working on it forever. I'm just glad I'm almost done!

My favorite blocks:







Here is a a supersoft blanket I crocheted for her, too. In case you can't tell from what I called it before, it's supersoft.

And last, the tiara I made for her yesterday. OKAY OKAY, I KNOW IT SUCKS. Don't be a hateful skeev. It is my first try, so maybe my next one won't be so awful.