DIY Rain Drop Mobile

Admittedly, this project was made about six months ago - one of those "I have been meaning to do this for years and even bought all the supplies for it months ago. Better just get 'er done."

It was inspired by a combination of the paper mobiles I made for Kiddo's first birthday, plus a Pinterest find. I chose to run with the colors, clouds, and rain drops because they fit with Kiddo's room "theme" (a very loose sort of theme, if you can even call it that).

I feel like I'm a broken record saying this, but again, sewing with paper is really stupid easy. The most time consuming part was cutting out I-don't-even-know how many rain drops and clouds by hand.

DIY Rain Drop Mobile

You will need:

• paper (duh)
• scissors (also duh)
• pencil and eraser
• sewing machine and thread
• yard stick ruler - I found one for $2 (I think?) in the paint section of our local home improvement store.
• sanding paper/block (optional)

How you make it:

1. (This step is optional.) Sand your yard stick down to make it look more worn down-slash-get rid of the bright blue printed numbers across it. If you're feeling really crazy, you could probably also stain it a bit to make it look vintage.

2. If you have a small child, find them some sort of entertainment. If they're asleep, find yourself some sort of entertainment. A movie is a great option.

3. Either find or make a template of a cloud and a rain drop. I made one size rain drop, and two sizes of clouds.

4. Chop, chop. Trace and cut your rain drops and clouds to your heart's content. I think I cut 22 or 23 of each color rain drop, 12 large clouds, and 20 small clouds.

Note: I wanted to give the clouds more of a 3D effect, so I made double the number I wanted, sewed two paper pieces together, and slightly folded the front one to get that effect.

5. Lay out your pieces to (1) decide just how you want it to look, and (2) to keep things in order when you sew. I went through various iterations of color schemes, but decided to run with the one below.

6. Sewing time! Carefully pile the first column (top to bottom) to keep the order you want. For example, mine went cloud-two pink-cloud-three yellow-etc. Before starting to sew, give yourself about 9-12 inches of thread, which you will eventually use to tie to the yard stick.

7. Starting with the top one (cloud), sew straight from top to bottom on each piece of paper. Give about a half an inch between each piece.

Note: here are some pictures showing what I mean about the 3D clouds. I put two cloud pieces on top of each other and sewed them together. After I was done, I folded the top cloud on each side of the seam to have it pop out for effect.

sew...

fold...

cloud!

Another note: if you run out of thread in the middle of one of your mobiles, don't fret.  All you need to do is get more thread in your machine, and then start sewing again on the paper over the last couple of stitches.  After you've finished, you can go back and cut off the excess thread.

8. Once all your columns are sewn together, tie them to the yard stick as evenly as you'd like. I wrapped around twice and tied super-de-duper tight, knowing it would be placed above my child's bed and would likely get some abuse from playing and tugging on it.

9. Hang it up and admire your handiwork! I simply used two nails on each end of the yard stick to set it on.  Feel free to do what you need.

Total cost: $2 (or whatever) for the yard stick. Extra cost would come if you didn't have any of the other above supplies.

Happy crafting!

Christmas Decorating: Year Two

I can't believe we decorated for Christmas the weekend after Thanksgiving.  It was far too early to decorate for this family, but we did! And I'm sure you've been waiting all year for the reveal of this year's Christmas tree.

[Background on the tree - we decided to start a tradition of creating a Christmas tree every year.  For the full details, head over to last year's decorating post.]

This year's tree was inspired by... my child.  I thought it would be really fun to have a tree she could play with, as a way to start being involved in the Christmas season.

cost: $20

supplies: felt, embroidery floss, buttons, velcro

inspiration: here and here

So this one was definitely more expensive than last year's practically-free-tree.  This is largely due to my jumping in maybe a little too far to this project. *Wink*  Originally the plan was to just stick a 2D felt tree to the wall with ornament shaped felt pieces for her to mess with to her heart's content, but then I saw THIS.

And I had to make one myself.

Three weeks later, it's done.  And it's almost everything I dreamed it would be.

It's cute. 

Kiddo loves playing with it.

Unfortunately, so does the cat.

As a whole, I am really pleased with how this year's tree turned out.  While it did take three times as long to make as I had planned, the end result was something that was worth the pain both figuratively and literally.  The buttons have turned out to be a little advanced for Kiddo's fine motor skills, but I'm going to assume that won't be the case next year. This tree is definitely something that will be coming out each Christmas until it gets destroyed - hopefully by small children loving it to death and not by the cat jumping out from under it to scare the dogs.  

Busy Bags

Have you heard of busy bags?

Essentially, a busy bag is an activity for a young child to do, where all the supplies for said activity fits inside a bag or container.  There are variations all over the map, but the point is that the supplies are containable and travel easily for use on road trips, flights, church events, so on and so forth.  Busy bags are usually handmade and geared towards children between 2 and 5 years old [you know, the busy ones].

This weekend, my friends came up with the idea to do a busy bag exchange party.  We all picked a busy bag activity, got enough supplies to make enough of our activity for each mom, and then had a get together and made them.

The verdict from this mom is a thumbs up.  While Kiddo is not quite ready for most of the activities that were made, I was a huge fan of spending time socializing and making stuff with friends, sharing a variety of bag ideas that I probably wouldn't have chosen on my own, and coming home with a bunch of loot.  I felt like a kid at Halloween or a birthday party.

While there was an upfront cost of supplies [such as $12 worth of Crystal Light containers], reality is I probably spent less than I would have getting all the supplies to make each individual bag idea myself.  And for a lot of my friends, they had most of the supplies on hand, so the cost was virtually nothing.

Okay, on to the interesting part!  We didn't come up with these ideas ourselves, so below the pictures are links to where the ideas originated.

Cupcake Busy Bag

Um , can you say adorable?  I think I will be playing with these felt cupcakes long before my child ever gets the chance.

Foam Shape Patterns

An activity for the "older" crowd that can start to understand patterns, shapes, and matching them. Making this project is undeniably one of the easiest.  All you need are construction paper and foam stickers. Stick half the pattern down, and leave the other half of the pattern free for you child to match up themselves.

Pipe Cleaner Color Sort

This activity was my choice - I think what drew me to it was that it was the only one I could find that adapts to a child's developmental levels, starting at one years old.   The idea is that your child can start out just putting pipe cleaners in the container, then start working on fine motor skills and thread the pipe cleaners through random holes, and eventually graduate into color matching. Not going to lie, though, getting holes punched through the container lids was a royal pain.  If you're planning on using Crystal Light containers [like I did], don't try to use a hole punch.  Just go for broke and get an awl.

Number Wheel

Another good matching game for older kids who are starting to understand numbers and counting.  I think I've got a couple years to practice my counting skills before I have to hand it over to Kiddo.

Jan Brett Animal Matching Game

Please tell me you remember reading Jan Brett as a child.  The side stories through her illustrations is nothing short of brilliant.  This activity is making a matching game using the animal characters from her books.  At this point, Kiddo will probably just being using them in the near future as flash cards to work on her animal sounds and [maybe] names.

ABC Match

I couldn't find a link to this specific activity, but I think you will get the idea quickly with the picture.  The name of the game is to the match upper and lower case letters.  To make, you simply write the upper and lower case on each side of a card [cool shaped ones are obviously better] then cut the card in half.  Easy peasy.

Counting Activities

Sorry, no link again, but I'm pretty sure this one was actually self-inspired.  Essentially, half of the bag is full of different items in groups of six that can be counted.  The other half has 3-piece puzzles with the numbers [1, 2, 3] written on the backs to match up.

Fun, no?

Mother's Day Crafties

Happy Mother's Day [in advance] to all the mom readers out there!  I hope you are getting something delicious, special, or comfy this Sunday. Josh asked me a couple days ago what I wanted; truth is, I have no clue.  Maybe to sleep in. Or a day where calories literally didn't count.

These gifts were actually a specific request from the grandmothers last Father's Day.  For that holiday I decorated dishes with handprints smooshed all over by a 5 month old.  Wouldn't recommend it, but our dads loved it anyway.  This year's Mom's Day make was a similar idea, but instead I smooshed 15 month old footprints on tea towels.  My best guess is our moms are going to love it too.

I learned a lot from this craft!  One, our child really is a neat freak.  Painting the bottoms of her feet was not fun at all for her.  Neither was being asked to walk in a particular direction.  However, with proper motivation [aka sugary snacks] we all survived with a couple of cute and totally homemade gifts. Second, I learned that fabric paint works especially well on fabric you don't want to get painted.  So do this project naked.

Footprint Tea Towels

You will need:

• tea towels  
• fabric paint, your choice of colors
• fabric paint pen [if you want to write sentiments on them]
• masking tape
• paper plates 
• paint brushes
• lots and lots of wipes
• a child
• a friend and her children, because the more the messier!

How it works:

1. Wash your towels and iron them well.  The washing is to get them, well, clean.  The ironing is to get rid of crinkles that would otherwise mess with the foot-painting.

2. When you're ready to begin, tape your towels down to the floor so they won't shift during the painting process.  Again, this gets messy, so do it in a place where you're comfortable with the amount of cleanup you will eventually be doing.

3. Strip your children, and yourself, of any clothing you would like to keep nice.

4. Paint the bottoms of their feet, then let them walk around on the towels. We had to repaint our kids' feet a good 3 times for each color.

5.When you like what you see, clean yourself and your child off thoroughly [I resorted to the bath tub method] and let your towels dry.

*At this point, follow the manufacturer directions for how to make sure the fabric paint sets.  The stuff I used, for example, recommends steam-ironing 1/2 inch over the fabric once the paint is dry.*

6. Add some sentiments or write the year if you want to.  I wrote a couple of appropriate verses about feet and grandparents on the towels I made.

My friend and fellow risk-taker had her children do handprints for a couple of the towels she made.  It was a nice combination for feet and hands to send to her mom and mom-in-law.

All in all, I had a lot of fun with this project [and I think my friend did too!].  Easy enough to make with a one year old, easy to wrap up and mail, and a little more personal than another bouquet of flowers.

What's the best gift you've ever gotten for Mother's Day?

Refashioning a Too-Flowy Top

With the changing of the weather from hot to hotter out here, I've been feeling the need to find clothes that are more appropriate for sweating in.  I'm not talking workout clothes, I'm talking tank tops.  [Yes, it is already hot enough for bare shoulders down here.]

Last week I took a trip to the local thrift shop, and found myself a couple of cute tops.  One thing I love about thrift shopping is that there's more freedom to refashion clothing you find there.  Something about buying it secondhand and for less than $5 just makes it easier to look at a shirt and go, "with a little this and a little that, this shirt will be exactly what I've been searching for!"

This tank was one of those situations.  There's a lot of love about this top [the fit, the colors, the braided straps] except the way the fabric flows right to my mom hips and makes them look even wider.  I wanted to keep the flowy look around the stomach, for both coverage and breathability. The original plan was to just shorten the length so that the top didn't end right at my widest point, but then I realized that this shirt had even more potential as a maternity top someday.

With some inspiration from the shirt off my back [literally], I realized what would make this top just what I wanted it to be.  It needed an elastic waistband.

The good news is, adding an elastic waistband is super easy.  And actually, there is no bad news.

So, here's the how-to:

You will need

• A shirt you like
• Polyester Elastic in the width you'd prefer [I used 1/2 inch]
• Sewing supplies - a machine, thread, scissors, etc.

You will do

[1] Measure out your elastic using your own body.  Wrap the elastic around where the bottom of the shirt hits [in most cases, this will be around your hips], then tighten it up a bit so that the elastic is stretched some, but still comfortable.  You should still be able to breathe.

[2] Cut off the excess elastic.  This is the diameter of your elastic.

[3] Now, cut your elastic diameter exactly in half.

[4] Sew the ends of your elastic halves on the inside of the shirt, at the hem, next to the side seams of your shirt. You want there to be about 1/8 inch of fabric that is below where your elastic ends - this is going to be your seam allowance when you encase the elastic. [That whole part might be confusing. Sorry. Hopefully this picture helps.]   Note: Your elastic will be shorter than the width of your shirt, but that is okay.

[5] Fold the hem of the shirt over, so that the elastic is encased inside.

[6] Sew a new hem around your shirt, making sure not to sew into the elastic.  I periodically pulled on the elastic a little bit to make sure it still slid around inside and wasn't sewn into.

Now try it on!

Happy Refashioning!

Happy Easter!

Happy April Fools and Day after Easter!  I really hope you had a good holiday weekend.

We celebrated with some familial bonding over eggs on Friday evening with the fun addition of  the hubby's brother, and a date night run for super delish milkshakes from here afterwards.

would you believe things got messy?

red, blue, red, blue.

red-ish, blue-ish, purple, purple.

On Saturday we got our baby fix in when we went to visit some friends and their brand new baby boy! I made him a couple of customized onesies - the left one was an embroidery design from my sewing machine, and the right one was a floppy tie onesie pattern I followed from over at See Kate Sew.

lamest easter dress picture in blogging history.

On Sunday kiddo got to participate in her first egg hunt [one-year olds are terrible, however super cute, during these things], and later in the evening discovered sand for the second time in her life. She was slightly less appalled that I dumped in the middle of a sandbox.

And then today - oh today! - so background, I have finally started getting back into running again since last summer, and it has been.so.wonderful. UNTIL TODAY.

You guys, I got attacked by a couple of dogs on my run today.  How scary is that?  Thankfully neither myself or Davi got hurt, but I am shaken.  My running ecstasy I've been in for the last week is gone.  Husband is now required to follow me whenever I step foot outside of this house to exercise for the next month. Maybe two.

Sigh.  Life can never be perfect, can it?

She Crafts Again!

National Guard weekends are fast becoming my crafting weekends.  It's the only time when I don't have a million things I should be doing [like being a responsible adult] but I'm not allowed to do fun things with my husband [because he is gone].  Last weekend was a special doozie, because his duty weekend started two days early. On top of that, he was shipped off to the middle of nowhere, meaning I didn't get the pleasure getting my feet warmed at night. *whining over*

In the name of trying to stay positive here, I did get a couple of long awaited projects finally finished.

And I "painted."  I say that in quotes because the only brush I used was a foam brush [which doesn't really count, I don't think], and the rest was drawn or stippled.  I've been cringing internally since we moved because our bedroom is. so. boring.  I know, I know, no one ever actually peeks in there, but I wanted it to look a little less like a bachelor's pad. But I'm not much of an actual artist, so painting anything truly amazing was out of the question.

I finally found inspiration when I ran across this pin, originating from Two Girls Being Crafty:

I had a few bottles of acrylic paint left over from *ahem* junior high, a paint pen, foam brush, and a gift card to the local craft shop. And that's how the adventure began.

I started off with the intention of trying to make my copy as close to the original as I could.  I did a lot of mix-experimenting with my paint and wound up with this color for the background:

When I finished painting half the canvas, I realized I didn't want any more brown in my life [being in the desert and all], so I changed things up a bit, and went instead with a grey that matched our comforter pretty closely. [I'm already starting to sound like an artist!]

Word from the wise: if you ever do something like this, mix up a ton of your background color.  You'll go through it faster than you think, and trying to replicate colors is a pain.

Once the background paint dried, the next step was to replicate the branches using a paint pen.  If you're pretty good at drawing by hand, but can't paint a straight line to save your life [like yours truly], then use a paint pen.

Looking simultaneously at the original painting and pictures of trees really helps with this process.  Realism, people, is what I was going for.

For the dots, I went cheap.  Honestly, I didn't want to go back out to buy circular foam brushes. So I scoured the house for anything that would make a dot the sizes I was looking for.  I came up with these:

the other end of the foam brush, a travel-size bottle of baby lotion, and a cigar tin.  [I ended up only using the foam brush and the baby lotion for my dots.]

After randomly placing dots in the colors I wanted [red, orange, pink, yellow, and white], I ended up with this:

While it wasn't bad, and it was decently close to the original, I felt like something was missing.  I sent a picture to the hubby, and his response was, "it doesn't go anywhere."

What?

"I mean it doesn't take your eye anywhere.  I learned in my design class that a good picture will direct your eye somewhere. You should put birds or the moon in the space in the middle."

Well, I didn't want to put the moon or anything in that space, but I did see what he was saying. There just wasn't much to look at.  So, I moped about my failed painting [like a good artist] until I ran across this pillow:

That was what I wanted above my bed. [On a side note, this pillow is from Target, and if I had the finances, I would get it.]

 So I went back at it with the butt end of the foam brush.  I worked to make the branches into trees, and using the inspiration from the pillow, I aimed for a semi-abstract cherry blossom tree look.

While I don't know if I can say that my eye goes anywhere with this rendition, it at least looks more like something.

And our bedroom makes me smile a little each time I walk in now.