Quilt Teaser

I am currently working on two quilts.

Both are currently incomplete.

Both are gifts. (one an extra special one... no I am not the 'Mom' represented below-- so don't take it there.)

So you see why I can't fully disclose the progress or results at this point. 

But I thought I would put up some prettiness for you to gaze upon in your anticipation. 

Tummy ache-- and totally worth it.

For several days now Z and I have been discussing and reminiscing about childhood snacks. I mentioned an Orange Julius and and he enthusiastically agreed... and neither of us has shaken the thought since then. Though we have had several arguments about how you make them. I remember a recipe that my mom used to make where you used an egg-- a whole egg-- shell and all-- just dropped into the blender, and how fascinated my sister and I were with that. Z claims they always made theirs with orange juice concentrate and yogurt. Yogurt? I don't know about that...
Last night after dinner we were lounging on the couch and Z said: Let's make Orange Julius!!!
And I was ever so happy to oblige my husband when he was that excited about food and when he used the phrase "let's make" implying that he would like to be a part of the making process. DONE.

ORANGE JULIUS
6 oz (half a can) of frozen orange juice concentrate
1 cup water
1 cup milk
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp vanilla
6-8 ice cubes
Put the first 5 ingredients in a blender and blend on high until it is well blended and frothy. While blender is running start adding ice cubes one at a time until you have reached desired consistency. Serve in a pretty glass with a bendy straw! :)


We each drank two glasses and got a massive tummy ache. But it was so yummy and so worth it. I imagine the Julius will be making repeat appearances in our evening routine. Yum.

Paper Crafter

My friend Erin is super crafty and really into scrapbooking and cardmaking and all those paper crafts that have terrified me for years. Paper crafting-- I don't know what it is about it, I am just not patient or skilled enough to complete a project. So I don't. Erin laughs at me each time I express my fear of paper crafting.

Reeeewind about a month to Christmas. Santa was extra nice to me. He put a Silhouette under my tree. Yay fun. I was expressing to my friends once again that I was not a paper crafter and Erin said-- well you've got a silhouette now, so you are about to be. 

And I have to be honest with you, while I was BEYOND tickled about my new crafty gadget... it sat untouched for about four weeks, because I was still pretty intimidated by it. And you know... there's that paper thing...

Anyway. I finally busted it out about a week or so ago, and OMG I will never go back. I have barely scratched the surface of what this thing can do, and I am so loving it. Yay.

The first thing I made was a Happy Birthday cupcake topper for my niece. Not really ambitious or exciting, but it turned out cute and I was happy. (didn't take a picture...)

Z was impressed and asked me if I would make him a bookmark. I was like yeah, sure... and put it at the end of my to do list. Then he asked about four more times that same day, so I relented, and designed him a bookmark. 

(I had to put the thing together with fabric glue because I had no regular glue... Not a paper crafter, remember???) He was very impressed. We went to the store to get appropriate glue. As I type this he is requesting 2 more bookmarks. Husbands are silly.

At the beginning of the year there was this little thing going around on facebook where people who responded to a status post would get a handmade gift in 2011... and I decided to play along. My gifts are done, and I was trying to decide how to wrap them and I thought of those little pillow box things... and wouldn't you know... My Silhouette can make one of those. Easy peasy. 

But it couldn't be easy peasy, could it? It needed to be pretty and personalized... and well...

It needed to have intricate paper flowers on it. 

I did have a lot of fun designing and putting these flowers together after my spiffy machine cut them all out. All these shapes are ones that come with the software already, so that's pretty awesome too!

And I figured out how to weld all my text together so I could easily personalize them without a million tiny pieces to glue down.

And they are just colorful and make me happy. Oh, and if you happen to be someone owed a gift, and you see your name on one of these boxes... well, your gift is ready! 

Drapey Cardigan

I've been meaning to post this for a while... oops.
A few months ago I made myself this sweater. My mom thought it was adorable and asked me to make her one as well. I debated... do I want matching sweaters with my mom? Well, her requests were persistant and Christmas was approaching so I bought some soft fuzzy knit material in a pretty green color...
I have seen these draped cardigans lots of places... and figured... um, I can so do that. I looked for a pattern or tutorial online... but all I could find was this which was actually helpful, but i wanted sleeves. Soooo... here is my tutorial for a draped cardigan. It's really pretty darn simple and requires minimal sewing skills. Yay.
Here we go.

You are going to need:
Approx a yard of knit fabric
A sweater that fits you well for a pattern
Measuring tape
Pins
Coordinating thread
And... a sewing machine

 Start by measuring the sweater that fits you... Measure your sweater between the arms, across  the back. Also measure the sleeve from the shoulder to the arm pit.

 My fabric was 60 inches wide. I folded the width in half (the upper edge in the picture is a fold) and then cut the length at 30 inches. My arm to arm measurement was 14 inches, so I measure 7 inches from the fold (center) of the fabric and cut a slit through both layers that was 8 inches long (which was the measurement of shoulder to pit on my other sweater) This slit is about 4 inches from the top (right edge in picture) of the garment.

 Next I used my other sweater as a pattern to cut our the sleeve shape. (the sleeve on this sweater has a bell sleeve... but my cardigan will not.) I did cut my sleeves to be 3/4 length, because I like that cut on me, measure your arm if you need to, and make sure to leave a seam allowance when you cut out your sleeve piece. (again in this picture the top edge of the fabric is a fold--don't cut that!) (please also note... you will need to cut two sleeves, and make sure they are opposite/mirrors of each other)

 You don't have to if you are working with a knit... but i decided to put a hem on the sleeves. I turned up an inch on the bottom of my sleeve, and... finally busted out the sewing machine and sewed a straight seam across the bottom to create that hem.

 Once the sleeve was hemmed I folded it in half (right sides together) and sew along the side seam. (see the diagonal part along the right side of the pic? Don't sew that yet... okay?)

 Nooooooww... take the top corner of the sleeve (the longest point on that diagonal) and pin that to the top of the slit you made in the other piece of the fabric. Pin all around the sleeve, pinning right sides together all the way around...

 Then sew all the way around the top of the sleeve to attach it to the garment.

 Repeat for the other sleeve... and you are done!
I really like this sweater because you can wear it in different ways... just as a hanging drapey cardigan.

Or pin it across as a wrap sweater.

 Or... my favorite-- pinned up on one shoulder... so chic. :)

So there you go-- super easy, right? My mom was pretty excited about hers. But I don't have any pictures of her modeling it. It really looks much nicer on a person rather than a dress form... but you get the idea. Cozy, comfy, warm, wrapable, drapey cardigan... go make one!

FELT FOOD

I shared in THIS POST that I was trying my hand at some felt food creations. My friend's son received a play kitchen for Christmas, and I just had to be a part of the fun. I actually should have taken a picture of all the food iI gave him... don't know why that didn't occur to me before I did, but whatever. It was a cute, fun gift, and I used mostly scraps to create it, so it was cheap and stash-busting as well. Yay.
I made for him two cookies, an egg, a stack of pancakes, two strips of bacon, a carrot, broccoli, an orange two strawberries, and... an apple.

I'll show you how i did it-- but I must admit my first attempt or two turned out rather lumpy fruit. They got prettier, though.

To make round fruit you start with 5 football shaped sections. my sections were about 6 inches long and 2.5 inches across at the widest point.

Start by pinning edges together (right sides together) and sew along one side.

with wrong sides still together pin another football to the un-sewn side of the first pieces you sewed together. (make sense?) Continue adding sections untill you have attached all five pieces, you will want to leave the the last section open about half way

because now you are going to turn it right side out. And stuff it.

And sew that thing up!

When you get to the end, insert your needle straight into the end and pull it all the way through and out the opposite end. I pulled it a little extra tight so the ends pucker in a little. The fold th leaf piece in half and attach it along with a scrap of brown to create a stem... and...

There you have it! Not real hard, but super cute.
Shoot. Now I want to make more. :)
Let me know if you try it... or if you have made any felt food? I just love the stuff... too cute.

I'm Back!

So I have taken a vacation from blogging for a couple of weeks, and I took a vacation from everything this week. And... now that i am feeling a little less stressed and a little bit more comfortable with my ever changing (hopefully for the better?) life... I'm back! With some things I've made... some new skills I'm learning... some fun new adventures I'm trying... and some teasers about what I'm doing for the next couple months. Hopefully I'll be back in the game and blogging more frequently over the next couple months. :) I'm looking forward to sharing with you.

The Wedding of my Dreams

7.5 months after the big day I have my first wedding day nightmare.
I didn't have any wedding nightmares when I was planning the wedding-- I was surprisingly chill. But last night I had a dream in which I was a bridezilla of unimaginable proportions. And nothing was right. NOTHING.

It was snowing. I had selected a lovely spring day to get married and in came a raging storm like none other. With mud and slush and cold and the whole church was a soggy mess from it.

My carefully altered gown was too big and hung unattractively off my shoulders... I was trying to get ready and my mom was trying to put safety pins in my shoulders to hold my dress on.

The bridesmaids revolted, and instead of the lovely, simple, flattering black dresses I had selected for them to wear-- with the handmade veils and headpieces I created-- they wanted to wear blue. But not all the girls could get a blue dress in their size, so one just showed up in her sweats, shrugging, saying it was the only blue thing she owned, and it's not a big deal, because all I really wanted was her presence anyway... right?
Well, yes, of course. But...

We were on our way to the church... and I couldn't find my bouquet. I knew it had been delivered, and I was so excited to see the yummy rich roses and gold accents I had carefully selected... but I couldn't find it anywhere, I walked out onto my parent's back deck and I found a gorgeous $200 bridal bouquet in pieces... most of the pieces hanging out of the mouth of my parent's dog.
My mom took a brown silk flower out of an arrangement on the wall of her house and told me I should just use that. I was crying from disappointment, and wanting to kill the dog, and everyone was telling me I was being ridiculous, and the wedding was not that important anyhow, and why was I so upset?

We arrived at the church to meet the photographer and my groom... only to discover that neither had showed up. Apparently the groom had decided he didn't love me and he didn't want to get married that day.

His best friend had gone to talk some sense into him... but sense we were on a time crunch, and he hadn't yet changed his mind, they were going to have his brother (who was one of the groomsman) stand in as the groom for pictures... And one of the groomsmen's wife stand in as the extra groomsman. They got her a tuxedo t-shirt so she wouldn't stand out.

 Our photographer still had not arrived, but everyone was reprimanding me for my hysteria because I was going to look horrible in my pictures-- and this isn't the way I wanted to remember my day. And they were right! This was all wrong! I didn't want to remember my wedding day like this... I wanted everything to be right. I didn't want to be a bridezilla--

But as my dad was walking me down the aisle to be married I was crying because even though every other detail was wrong about the day... I would have gone through with it. But I was not looking at the man that I loved. He was not there, and I knew I shouldn't be either.

So there were no vows said that day.

There was no first kiss,

And no first dance.

And no happily ever after.

Everyone kept calling me bridezilla and scolding me for getting caught up on 'details' that don't matter. And I didn't understand why NO ONE thought NOT having a groom there was was anything more than an unimportant 'detail'. I was screaming at the top of my lungs at my bridesmaids, at my mom, at the whole church, at the dog that ate my flowers-- GROOMS ARE NOT DETAILS!!!! And everyone looked at me like I had completely lost my mind.

I woke up suddenly and miserably with my adrenaline pumping and a throat sore from screaming.

When I became conscious that I was actually in bed I was happy to discover that it was January. And snowing outside. My husband was asleep breathing softly in bed next to me. We were in fact married last May. It was a beautiful, perfect day. Every detail was in place. My groom was the most handsome charming man alive. And he loved me very much that day.

And... for all our hardship over the past few months I know-- I KNOW-- he loves me even more today. So after the worst wedding nightmare ever (7+ months after the fact), I am happy to report I did not have the wedding--or the groom--of my dreams.

Sigh of relief.