Nostalgia!

One of the reasons I started this blog was to keep track of my own projects and to archive the vintage linens in the family collection. My mom has been cleaning out her house and has given me piles of lovely sentimental things and I am hopelessly behind on photographing them.

Among the things she has found in the corners of my childhood home are some art projects I did in school. Here is a very surprised looking portrait of someone:



I made this in 1976 when I was in Mrs. Mustoe's 4th grade class.



In fact, here is a picture of that very class. I'm the girl in the middle row on the far right below the teacher. On facebook, someone tagged the little girl with the glasses in the front row as Liz Phair whose indie rocker career has cooled a bit in the last decade, and the boy below me in the front row is a successful producer of short lived guilty pleasure prime time soap operas.


At any rate, don't think I was particularly talented with clay, but here is a wall hanging we appliqued in art class:



I love that blue burlap. I suppose someone still sells soft burlap like that, but I don't see it at my fabric stores..

Mom also found some very beautiful crocheted things. These were not made by anyone in my family, but they are still lovely.





My grandma gave these thread crochet aprons to my mom because Mom used to hold a little vintage style tea party for a small but lucky group of little students of hers. The tea party was a fundraiser offering at her elementary school. I think I was already away at college when the tea parties occurred.



If I had a vintage style waistline, I would totally wear these.

Felt Pinwheels

I saw this adorable pinwheel brooch project by Betz White last month in several crafty places on the internet. If you browse crafty blogland, I imagine you saw it too. I had to make them especially since I have that cherry fabric in my collection.

This is the one that my daughter made:

She's a bit crafted out since she got a nice variety of craft kits for her birthday recently, so I let her be the designer and I would simply be the craftsman for the rest of our lot.

This one is my favorite. I love that dotted fabric:

They all have safety pin backs. We each wore one to our holiday picnic, but the rest we attached to little sticks and stuck them in the flower pots as decorations.

We had a relaxing 4th of July holiday! Hope you are enjoying the season!

Girl Scouts Craft

I'm having fun being a Girl Scout Co-leader, although the badge requirements are getting more and more complicated. Fortunately, our girls like getting crafty. We meet in the school gym, so baking and cooking are tricky.

I brought supplies to a recent meeting to make felt flowers:







Unfortunately, I get kind of busy running the activity and I always forget to photograph the finished projects. I used the Klutz/Chicken Socks book Paper Flowers for the templates, although I had to make our own from tagboard. My daughter had fun with this book over the Christmas Holidays.

Happy Thanksgiving!

It's getting close to mealtime around here! We are just waiting for the rest of the family to arrive.



I resurrect my Grandma Nelson's favorite Bob White dishes for this special holiday. For years and years this was the holiday we spent in Iowa visiting our lovely relatives. Actually, for a long time as a child I thought only old people lived in Iowa and the kids I saw were just visiting like me.



Roasting the turkey in a bag is a great method as is having one of those thermometers you can read from the countertop. Our turkey is now resting peacefully in the kitchen awaiting the carving and gravy prep.



Enjoy this wonderful holiday!

Sharpie Tie-Dye

You have to do this project. I saw this on Happy Things. She saw it on Steve Spangler Science.



You draw on fabric with Sharpies (I suppose you can also use other types of permanent markers. I happen to have a lot of Sharpies.) Draw a design that is at least an inch in diameter. More ink bleeds more. Drip rubbing alcohol into the center of the design and watch the ink bleed out to beautiful effect. More highly concentrated alcohol works better. Look for 70% or more concentrate at the drug store. This is probably what you already have in the cabinet.



I probably have a medicine dropper somewhere, but we just used a straw as a dropper for the rubbing alcohol. Let them dry completely. After a few minutes, we laid ours out on an old towel to dry. To set the color, they must be heat set, but be careful with the iron or the clothes dryer because alcohol is extremely flammable.



We were totally mesmerized by the process and could not stop. I had some white muslin that I cut up to use, but we used that up quick, so I also cut up an old sheet.



We had to quit when the alcohol smell got to us. My daughter already cut up some of our creations to make a card for her teacher. I think we might put some beads onto some of these and stitch them into pretty ornaments. We haven't decided. They would look great in a quilt too!



** Edit: How fun! I was contacted today by Sharpie and Steve Spangler about this project!

Gift Mascots

It was my birthday over the weekend. My daughter found a project in my felt mascot books and made this for me:

Cute! I love her running stitch in a contrasting thread! I'm wearing it on my jacket for fall. My mascot books are all in Japanese, but we aren't intimidated!

A few weeks ago I helped her make this elephant as a gift for a little sister of her close friend:

The little girl reports that she sleeps with her little blue elephant every night.

Here is the creator with her creation:

My husband and son got me some Gingher embroidery scissors and water soluble transfer pens. Husband has learned to go into JoAnns and just ask the ladies for help. He says he is totally unable to navigate the fabric, which I completely understand.

Gingher scissors are expensive, but they do seem like they are touched by a heavenly enchantment to cut fabric beautifully. I also have a nice spring green LeCrueset enamel stock pot! Yay for soup and stew!

Green Fundraiser Quilt

This is the second of the two quilts I made for a school fundraiser. My participation in this project was assembling them into blankets. I wish I knew what products they used to color the blocks.

This one is themed "Make the world Shine... Like a Star!" But I messed up and stitched the blocks backwards so it says "Like a Star! ... Make the World Shine". I have since fixed this mistake.

Red Fundraiser Quilt

Someone at my daughter's elementary school organized a quilt making project. The children in the 3rd and 4th grades (I think) each colored a fabric square according to a theme determined in each classroom. They solicited fabric and batting donations from parents and they sent out a note for sewing volunteers. My participation in this endeavor was the sew-it-into-a-quilt part.

Here is the first of the two quilts I assembled:

This one is themed "The Hands of Friendship". It measures about 55x42 or a lap quilt size.

It turned out cute! I decided against a complicated setting because I didn't want to distract from the children's darling work. Well.. that and I wanted to keep it simple for my own reasons. I get bogged down with design decisions and I didn't give myself enough time with these to do any bogging down..

I think what happens is that all the classroom quilts will be bid on in a silent auction at our annual Family Dance on Saturday. They'd been doing teacher themed gift baskets and decided on this project to change it up a little. I hope this project generates a lot of money!

Bibs

I'm one day late with my school fundraiser quilts, but thankfully, the deadline was flexible.. I'm doing the bindings today and turning them in this afternoon.

Meanwhile, I still haven't quite sent my last baby package. We got a message that sweet baby is already 4 months old and there were gorgeous pictures attached. As I recall, we started introducing solid foods around 4 months (or was it 6?). I decided to try my hand at bib making to add to the package:

These are infant sized bibs from a pattern I found on the internet, but I forgot to bookmark it for you. They went together pretty easily. I used two layers of flannel on the back. I am also happy that I went ahead and ordered a big supply of size 16 snaps on the internet so I no longer feel that they are too precious to use up.

Today is feeling a little bit more like spring around here! Time to get out the springy decorations.

Hello Kitty Sewing Machine

I did a review of the Hello Kitty Sewing Machine for Craft Critique. This was a long- planned gift for my daughter who turned 8 this summer. She loves it and has made several little beginning projects. Check out my review HERE.

Election Countdown

My daughter made some posters for us to use to cheer our candidates in last night's final debates.

McCain's poster says: "Don't go with something that everybody else wants. Be a MAVERICK!"


The McCain campaign might not like the implication that they are coming from behind, but they'd surely love the youthful look of the candidate here.


Obama's poster says: "Shade your change with Obama. Change"

Here Obama brings a sunny optimism implied by the rainbows.

My husband wants me to blog about taxes and earmarking, but he can get his own blog. This is as political as I plan to get.

When can we vote already? I am totally ready!

My Crafty Daughter

This was my 8-year old daughter's "secret project". She was inspired by the stack of synthetic felt I gave her to use in any project she chooses. This is impressive to me because she used her sewing machine all by herself without any supervision. I think she did a good job top stitching those pieces onto her pumpkin. She told me she even ripped out a seam with the seam ripper and didn't tear anything.


Last week daughter made a brass shrine of her tooth to impress the tooth fairy. She has been trying to extract more $$ from the tooth fairy with little success.



I saved this poster she made this summer. It says, "Craft is Cool, Oh Yeah". I wanted to make it in felt and embroidery, but haven't gotten to it yet.

My son sums up our family interests in a paper he did the first week of school, "On Sundays during the fall, me and my dad watch football. My sister and mom are really crafty. I'm not crafty." I wish my son didn't feel that creating things like this is a girl thing, but he just takes after his dad and appreciates this as a hobby, but is interested in other things. Son makes charming drawings of people with giant arms and hands and is interested in filming videos.

Back to sewing!

My daughter and I made this receiving blanket for our friends' new baby. She picked out coordinating flannel and quilter's cotton. I trimmed them up into matching squares and rounded up the ends. We stitched on a packaged double fold binding and voila! Easy blanket!



I really need a new cover for that ironing board.... She used her new Hello Kitty Sewing Machine. It works great! It's really lightweight and easy to use. I prefer my high end Husqvarna Viking, but this would be a great machine for anyone to have to bring to classes and such.

Daughter is still distracted when sewing and doesn't seem to notice that I'm guiding the fabric most of the time. We also made Hanna Montana/High School Musical matching pillows for her and her friend. I normally refuse to buy things with licensed characters on them (Hello Kitty and other Japanese Cute are notable exceptions), but she was so excited, I gave in. I'm doing all the careful cutting and pinning for her so she doesn't get too frustrated. I find that sewing is easy once you get everything cut correctly. I want so much for her to enjoy sewing like I do.


In case my son feels left out of the blog, here he is at the Alluvial Fan at the RMNP. This is a spot where you can see the extensive damage done when a dam with faulty caulking burst in 1982 and flooded the valley below including Estes Park, CO. He thought this was the coolest feature we observed all week. As a teenager, I hiked all the way to the top where the lake is above the tree line. Son things this cool waterfall is way better than some boring lake anyway. It so happens that we have a connection to that awful flood. Our relative was a prominent citizen in Loveland, Colorado and was the president of the Water Board when the flood occurred. My dad says he always felt it was some sort of sabotage, but he felt terrible about what happened until the end of his life..

Getting Cozy

Summer tick-tick-ticks away! I'm trying to beef up my reading this summer and I finished all of the Chronicles of Narnia. That's 7 books so far! I know they were written for children, so this isn't much of an accomplishment. They were delightful and even better than I remembered as a kid. I don't know what I'll read next, but I was about halfway through Middlesex before I misplaced it.

I did a belated birthday project this morning for my niece:


This is a water bottle cozy from a pattern in Mr. Funky's Super Crochet Wonderful. I made a different one last spring for my daughter. She loves it and it was a big hit at school. The pattern says to use Sugar and Cream cotton and that's what I used for the other version. This one is Red Heart Acrylic and I think it''ll be more stain resistant and durable than the cotton one.
The back closes with buttons:


Next week is my daughter's 8th birthday and I am really excited about her gift. I'm probably more excited than she'll be about it. She is getting the Hello Kitty Sewing Machine. She's done a little bit of sewing on my machine, but this one is supposed to be a good one for beginners, and well.. it's Hello Kitty! I got her a bunch of nice notions and a good pair of Fiskars scissors. I forgot to bring my coupons to JoAnns so I paid too much for her stuff, but I think learners should have good tools to start with. I have idyllic dreams of us sitting at the table sewing projects together. This will probably not actually happen, but not for lack of supplies! She wants a craft themed birthday party which I have not even begun to plan.