Happy V Day!

In accordance with my recent crafty streak, the boys and I have been busy this week. We needed to make Valentines for both the boys (Owen to take to school and Riley to take to playgroup). Oh, and you don't have to tell me, I know I'm an amazing photographer! Right???

We made butterflies for Riley to take. I thought these were so cute and I tried and tried to convince Owen to make these for his friends, but he refused. He wanted to make something with lollipops in it. Plus Riley's playgroup is all kids age 2 and under and I figured the babies wouldn't really have any use for candy. But bubbles...everyone loves bubbles, right? Even babies. So we used these little tubes of bubbles for the body. Both boys helped color them and then Owen glued the little hearts on for decorations. I did have to sign Riley's name though. He's not quite ready for that yet!


And Owen made mice and put chocolate lollipops (because that's all I could find since I was rushing to get out of the store before Riley fell asleep...I didn't make it, but anyway...) in them. The lollipops don't actually serve a purpose of any kind. There was another mouse he could have made where the stick of the pop was the tail, but he liked these better, so we did these. Owen colored the nose, glued on the eyes, put the pipe cleaners on, and inserted the lollipops. I punched the holes and put the to and from on the back. My favorite is the one in the top left with the wonky eyes. I wish I could have kept that one for myself. Then when I picked Owen up from school, I saw that some of the kids had given little bags of goodies and I kind of felt bad that we'd just given these silly mice with a single candy on each one. Then I realized that if I only let Owen have one candy after lunch and one after dinner, it's still going to take him over a week to eat all the candy (unless I eat half of it first!), so then I didn't feel so bad about only putting one piece of candy on his. I think next year I'll push him to do something without candy at all...like butterflies made out of bubbles!


I love the cheap little t-shirts they have at Target to celebrate each holiday. I have one for Halloween and one for Christmas, but I haven't been able to make the trip to town to get one for Valentines, so I made my own. :-P I just bought a pale pink shirt and stamped pink hearts on it. It turned out alright and of course it actually looks better when it's on me.

My favorite project though was aprons for the boys. As I mentioned in my last post, I've been wanting to make aprons for them and finally decided to do it for V day. After going back to get the right kind of bias tape (double fold, not single), I finally finished them up. I think they turned out really well. The dish towels came in a 2 pack and only one of them was "pretty" so while I was stamping my t-shirt, I got Owen to help me stamp the dish towel. He had no idea what it was for, but I think he enjoyed doing it. The interesting thing is that I used the same paint on the apron and my shirt, but the color looks totally different on the 2 different colors.

So that's my week in review! I had one more project I wanted to get finished, but I just haven't had the time. Tomorrow night is my scrapbooking night though and I have a couple of things in mind to finish up then, so hopefully I'll have more to post this weekend!

I'm not as craft-savvy as I thought.

My mom is a crafty woman. She had a ceramics studio (if you can call it that) in our basement when I was growing up and she'd teach classes and such down there. It's one of those things I didn't think too much about since it had always been that way. It was fun to go down and help her pour the molds and scrape off the little creases (I'm sure there's "right" word for that, but I don't know what it is). And of course I painted my fair share (and then some) of knick-knacks. Later she got out of the ceramics business and started doing folk art. My friends and I always painted little ornaments for Christmas every year and thought it was lots of fun.

She also taught me how to sew. My husband and even his sister make me feel like a sewing goddess when I actually find the time to complete a sewing project. My mother-in-law is an excellent seamstress (my first sewing machine was one of her hand-me-downs), but I guess her kids never really paid much attention to what she was doing.

I actually put all the craftyness I have on the back burner for many years. I don't know if I thought it was uncool. I think it was just more of lack of desire and "better" things to do with my time. But since having kids I've started getting back into it and these past few months I've gotten "the fever."

There's a tutorial for making aprons out of dish towels. I love it. It's right up my alley because most of the measuring and hemming are done. I've been wanting to make these ever since I saw the tute, but it's hard to find boyish dish towels. Then today I saw Valentine dish towels and bought some to make aprons. After getting all the boys to bed, I had about an hour to work on these and didn't get very far before realizing I had bought single fold bias tape at the store instead of double fold. What's the difference? Does it matter? Turns out it does matter and I could make the single fold into double fold without too much trouble (at least I think I can), but then it will be too narrow for the ties. So I guess I have to wait until tomorrow to return the single fold and get the double fold and then hopefully tomorrow night I will get it finished...hopefully.

I ran across this blog...

Whenever I have a little extra time, but I don't really feel up to actually DOING anything, I sit and kill some brain cells on the computer. If I'm not chatting with my wise mommy friends, then I'm often playing games. But when I'm not doing that, I'm blog hopping. I pick a blog I like and then I go through their lists of blogs to see if any catch my eye. When I see one I like, I add it to my list of blogs. But today I found a blog that I've been spending a lot of time looking through. She does a lot of cute things and they're things that I think, "I could probably do that." She seems to be like me and doesn't want to make something totally from scratch, but will use store-bought (or thrift-store-bought) items and fix them up to make something new.

One thing she did was to take your average solid colored tee shirt and used a bleach pen to make a design on it. Very cute outcome!

Or for her son, she took tee shirt with an emblem on it that she didn't like and embroidered some cute fabric over it.

And these cute magnets. I've tried to do these before with Owen's face on them to give to his grandparents, but the glass acts as a magnifying glass and made him look a little strange. I like her idea of using old books and even catalogs. I especially like the Richard Scarry ones. Brings back childhood memories. Although I think I would have trouble cutting up a Richard Scarry book. Maybe I can find one in REALLY bad shape so that I won't mind so much.

And how adorable are these shirts? I'm not sure Eric would consider them manly enough for his boys to wear though...I guess there's just one way to find out.

And these aprons.

And this mobile is such a cute little decorating idea. It looks like it would be easy, but I would have to put it REALLY high to keep it from being demolished. ;-D

And last, but not least, I'm going to HAVE to give this freezer paper stenciling a try. She says it's easy. I hope she's right.

Bon Mardi Gras

It snuck up on me. I had no idea Mardi Gras was coming up until one of Eric's friends called him from New Orleans to see if we wanted a King Cake. What? It's this week? No!

So we told him to get us one and FedEx brought it today. God bless FedEx. We came back from eating lunch with Eric to find it on the front stoop. Yeah!

I also made a run to the store this morning so we could have Jambalaya. That gives all the ingredients for a great Mardi Gras...except a parade...and moonpies...and beads. I guess I would say that's the draw back to where we live. No celebration of Mardi Gras. Or none that we've found. Maybe in a couple of years we can take the boys to Mobile for a few parades. The Mobile parades tend to be more family friendly than the New Orleans ones. And Mobile is closer. But until then, we'll just stick to our little family mini-celebration.