Homemade Christmas Gifts

This year I had hoped to make some gifts at home in order to save money and expend a little creative energy. The point was not to go out and buy a ton of supplies, but rather to use up things I already have. My goal was to create gifts without buying lots of extra stuff. If I can get my act together these are the projects I would like to complete:

1) Doll T-shirt kit. I already bought fabric paint and some embellishments at Michaels on black friday, and am working on making little American girl sized T-shirts for Trouwbottom's daughter to decorate. All you need for the T-shirts is one or two old T-shirts and some velcro. We'll see how it turns out!

2) Husband quilt. This idea was born out of a bag of my husband's old clothes that I couldn't put in the clothes closet (what our church calls the room full of free clothes) because of small rips, stains, etc. Some of the clothes I had really liked and I hated to trash them, but I also knew that keeping them around indefinitely was totally crazy. And so the Husband Quilt was born! I bought an inexpensive twin sheet at Walmart for the backing, picked up some crib-sized batting at Michaels on black friday, and whipped up a lap quilt top out of 5 old shirts. Now all I have left to do is quilt it, and sew up the binding.

3) In the same vein, I would love to sew up some little stuffed animals out of the fabric I have lying around for my cousin's kids. I already have the stuffing, and plenty of embroidery floss and buttons for faces, and a ton of fabric scraps that would be perfect.

4) I also want to finish a pair of these little cross-stitch ornaments I've been working on FOREVER. They aren't really that creative (cross-stitch never is), but I would be making them out of supplies I already have, so I guess they count too. I'm hoping to get them finished before the 26th, so I can give them to my aunt and uncle who I'm visiting that day.

Hopefully I'll be posting pics of these completed projects soon! (fingers crossed)

Halloween

Greg wanted us to be Mario and Princess Peach for Halloween this year. I made Henry a star costume to match.

An Enchanted Evening

Greg got a saucy boardgame that we played last night. It was a lot more funny than saucy, but at least we were hanging out together and having a good time. We drank some sparkling grape juice and laughed all night. Now all I have to do is figure out where to hide it in case someone comes over for a game night...

I also finished the Valentine's we started for the deans at our law school. They'll either get a kick out of them or think we're crazy. We are crazy, so I don't have a problem with that.

Craft Projects make me Happy!

Things are looking much better around here. I'm really trying to focus on the enjoyable parts of my life and not get too bogged down with worrying about the stressful details. Now when I come home from work, instead of frantically trying to clean my apartment, I just do something fun and relaxing for a little while. Lately I've been working on some fun sewing projects, possibly baby gifts. I have always liked to sew but never really did anything that required a lot of skill or experience. This means I'm sort of nervous to invest in nice materials because I don't want to waste them. I have some vintage chenille bedspread fabric that I've been collecting to use in baby quilts, and lately I've been drooling over some of the designer fabrics I've seen online, especially Moda fabric. While I'd love to stock up on some of this stuff, my budget does not have a lot of room for unnecessary hobby supplies, so I was torn. Luckily I found a really cool site, called fatquarterquilters.com, that sells these sets of small squares of a whole collection of designer fabric. I got several for around 5 dollars a set. I'll try and figure out how to post photos of my quilt tops soon. I'm pretty nervous also about quilting with my machine. I have a pretty nice Kenmore model sewing machine that came with a free quilting foot, but I've never actually used it to quilt.

Since I'm just starting to look online for quilting ideas and advice, I don't know that much about it, but from what I understand, you can buy fabric for quilting in fat quarters, which is a quarter of a yard, but cut more rectangular-ly instead of as a strip. You can also buy layer-cakes, which is around 30 10" squares, usually one of each fabric from a collection. I've seen these from anywhere around 10- 30 dollars, depending on the quality of the fabric. Jelly-rolls are strips of fabric, I think around 2-2 1/2 inches by one yard, all rolled up into a cylinder. I think there are usually around 30 different fabrics in this, sometimes more. These are usually around 25-30 dollars. Finally there are charm packs, which is what I bought. They are 5" or 4" squares, one of each fabric in the collection, and usually this means that there are around 30-50 squares in one pack. I used one pack of 36 to assemble a small baby quilt, but I threw in 6 more squares of chenille to give it a little texture, but the quilt top is still a bit small and I'll probably either try and get another pack or just use more than one border fabric. All in all, if you want to quilt using designer fabrics, these seem pretty good if you don't have a lot of spare cash and you don't want lots of extra fabric going to waste.

In a related craft note. I went to a charity bazaar this weekend and picked up two antique chairs that I want to refinish. The chairs have wood frames and the backs have a little rose carved on them. The seats are very worn fabric. I'm planning on taking off the seats, painting the frames a cottage white, perhaps highlighting the roses with a little pink or silver paint, and then covering the seats with some of my vintage chenille and re-attaching them. I'll try and post pictures of this project too.