Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Here's a really cool St. Patrick's Day project - I found the link on The Crafty Crow. I'll share my own finished photos of the project later on.

In the meantime, The Crafty Crow is also hosting a giveaway - you could win a doll kit from Pretty Ditty! The dolls are so cute. :)

Hop on over and check it all out!

A Recent Project

A friend of mine has a table and chairs that belonged to his parents when they were first married. The chairs may not have been recovered since then, and they needed some work. I helped pick out fabric and brought over the tools we needed to fix up the chairs, including my staple gun.

Mostly what needed fixing were the bottoms, because there wasn't any support there, and so the cushioning had been pushed out over time:

We took all the seats off the chairs and cut and sanded wood to the right size, then attached the wood to the frames of the seats to support the cushions.

Then we took the fabric we had picked out, and recovered all the chairs:

His idea was to do each one in the same fabric, but a different color. 

And it was so easy to do! You just cut the fabric to the right size, pull it taut over the cushion, and use the staple gun to secure it to the frame. The hardest part was definitely making the bases for the cushions. If you have a chair with enough support already, you can recover it in no time. Go try it!

And Another One

Oh, wow, I LOVE this dress. I must have it!! But I am still sharing the link with you, cause I'm nice like that. Also cause I have to. :)

Sunday Laundry Shirt Dress GIVEAWAY!!!!

Just a Quick One to Say...

...that Not Quite June Cleaver is having another giveaway!

And speaking of giveaways, my one-year blog-iversary came and went without me mentioning it! It was earlier this month, and in celebration I will come up with a giveaway and let you know what it is soon.

A little bubbly to celebrate.

Deliciousness

Hot chocolate with whipped cream and sprinkles. Yum.

[Still feels very much like winter here. More snow predicted for tomorrow.]

Valentine's Day...

...because it's better late than never, right?!

So I haven't shared a lot of personal information on here, but I have had some big changes I wanted to tell you about. This past summer, my husband and I got divorced. I don't need to go into details here, but suffice it to say that we are both better off this way, and I am much, much happier. It's sad when something like that happens and a chapter in your life is over, but at the same time it means a new chapter is starting. 

And so, on to the bulk of this post: for Valentine's Day I bought my boyfriend this tie on Etsy, from a super cool store called Sugar Lust. I love the idea of taking old ties and creating something new with them, and I thought that would be fun to try.

I got my chance sooner than I thought I would. Just after the sweet robot tie appeared in the mail (but before I had given it as a gift), my boyfriend picked up several ties at a thrift store, including this one:

It wasn't until he was showing them to me later that we discovered this on the inside:

Super-funny that he hadn't realized it was there, but that didn't mean he wanted to wear it. He threw it away, but later I thought to pull it out and repurpose it.

First, I dug through my fabric stash, and found just what I needed with some lovely things that I won in a giveaway that Amy had awhile back. I'm so sorry I didn't get a chance to put it on the blog before now, Amy! She sent me this sweet pack of fabric, among other things:

In addition to the fabric, Amy sent me some beautiful ribbons, buttons, paper cut-outs, and lace. I will have to get some pictures of it all when we start having some sunny days around here. :) I pulled this bird from Amy's goodies, and hand stitched it over the logo on the tie:

From the fabric, I chose a floral one and hand stitched it inside the tie, then I took off the label that was on the tie:

And added my own:

So that the whole thing looked like this:

Much better, don't you think?

I took the robot tie from Sugar Lust and the tie that I had fixed up, and wrapped each of them up in their own boxes. I wrapped the boxes in white paper, and then fashioned some pipe cleaner hearts as decorations:

Happy Groundhog Day!

Photo courtesy of National Geographic.

Share the Muffins!

Yummy - muffins, fresh from the oven. Big O looks like he's wondering if I'll share.

I know, it's bad, I let him on the counter. I let him on the table, too. But (despite the fact that it seems he wants a muffin) he doesn't actually like people food so that makes it ok, right?

Share the Love

Head on over to 'Not Quite June Cleaver' for a very generous Valentine's giveaway!

Craft Day Part One

Hello! Sorry for the long absence. I began teaching kindergarten at the end of August, and the job sort of took over my life. It's been incredibly fun, but also incredibly time consuming. I found that there were some things that I just didn't have time for anymore (such as blogging!). Now that I've been teaching for awhile, it's getting easier to do, and I'm finding I need to put less time into my prep and therefore I have a little more time for myself. I appreciate those of you who checked in with comments and emails during my absence. It was nice to know I was missed! I will have a lot of catching up to do with all of you, and that probably won't all happen this weekend, but I thought I'd take advantage of the Thanksgiving break to put another post out there. (And Happy Thanksgiving to those of you who celebrate it!).

This is very belated, but this summer just before I started my job I did a major craft day with a friend of mine. I finished a bunch of projects that I wanted to share with all of you. It was really fun and satisfying to work on things that I could finish in one go. I love knitting and scrapbooking, but they are not typically one-day projects. Here are some of the things that I did, with links to directions for the projects. I have even more projects that I completed that day, if you can believe it (I'm telling you, it was productive!). I will try to post those this weekend, but if not, then expect me back over winter break at the latest! :)

I love these paintings. I found the directions on Martha Stewart, and they were so much fun to do. She has two templates on her website (one being the bird above) but since I did this one I have just searched on google images for silhouettes, and found others that I could do. I am planning on making several similar paintings for Christmas gifts. Basically, you staple fabric to a canvas frame. Then you use Mod Podge to make it hard. Once that dries, you copy your template on the fabric with a fabric pencil. Then you can paint either inside or outside your template lines. Or you can choose to do both and have a set, as I did above. Check it out: Painted Fabric Silhouettes.

I also made wine glass charms. These were really fun to do, and I will definitely be making more of them. They don't take long, and would make great hostess gifts or something like that. I bought the beads, charms, and loops at Michael's. They can be found in the jewelry-making section. I looked at several websites for the ideas for this, but didn't really follow any one set of directions.

If you visit Not Martha, there are some ideas for wine charms, plus lots of links to other places.

I found directions for these 'crayon nibbles' on another blog, and thought they would be really fun to try. They are also very easy, and take no time at all. They would be cool gifts for kids. I think they would look great packaged up in clear cellophane bags with a cute ribbon, and would look good tied to a bigger package or present. Also a fun project to make with kids.

You can find directions at Crafty Daisies.

It feels really good to be back! I may spend some time this weekend catching up on some blog reading, because I have missed seeing what all of you are up to. And stay tuned for part 2 of my craft day!