Christmas Snapshots

Here are a few snaphots from our Christmas celebration this year.

Sophia feeling festive

Sophia giving Grammy & Grampy the gift she picked out for them.

The new Star Wars Pajama pants and Lego Shirt from Santa

Sophia & her daddy

The cousins with their new baby cousin(who wasn't in the mood for a group photo)

The Red Velvet cake we made to celebrate Jesus' Birthday. This is the cake that Steve grew up with and is the recipe that his mom made when he was little.

Coffee Please!

I embroidered this towel for a friend of mine who never seems to be seen without a 2 go cup in his hand.

I sort of traced a medium sized cup that I had on hand and then traced the bottom of a cup to make the circle in a size that seemed to work. I had to put the American Red Cross in the middle as a joke because it seems to be his lifeline! haha
He did get a kick out of it and said it now has many uses around the house which is good to hear.

Snowy Trees Towel

We had one side of our family's Christmas celebration yesterday and I wanted to give something to my grandma who just turned 86. She has been cleaning out some of the extra stuff around her house so I wanted to give her something she could actually use and that I made for her.

I came up with this winter tree scene from a vintage pattern I found online. I copied the trees that I liked and moved the deer up to run between them. It just felt cozy to me.
I think she liked it, she said she would put it on display anyway.

Waechtersbach Pattern

My crafty sister-in-law Alyson, has a mother who has commented varies times on my towels recently. I have the feeling that she really wants one, but doesn't know what to get.

I asked Alyson and she thought that a towel made with the tree from the Waechtersbach Dishes she has would look cool. So we found the dishes online, printed one out and then I pinned it to the back of the towel, held it up to a window and traced it. That made my pattern! Really you could do this with anything that you wanted to try to embroider.

The whole point of those dishes are a solid red background with a solid green tree and all of the bulbs, candles and stars are solid white, but this is how I could improvise on a white dish towel. I thought about doing the candles and stars in yellow, but just didn't think that would be true to the pattern.

I like how it turned out & hope it will be a great surprise for Mrs. Bev!

ps. if you know her, don't tell

Here it is up close.

Towels for Aunt Laura

My dad's Aunt Laura was in town this fall and requested that I embroider some towels for her daughters for Christmas. These are a few of them.

She gave me ideas for patterns and colors that would work in their kitchens.
I tried using different stitching techniques for different areas. Mostly I used the Back Stitch, but also tried the Chain Stitch and some Stem Stitching.

Hopefully she will be happy with how they turned out. I went to the post office today and the line was super long, so I tried the automated machine and then the parcel collector was full! I hope they make it there :)

Holiday Botique

These are some of the items I had at the Holiday Boutique I was in last weekend.

My version of Rodolph's Spare noses, I got this idea from Kerry over at Pete and Kerry She has so many great paper crafting ideas and she does a lot of craft sales too.
This year's version of Snowman Soup. I like these much better than last years that I made.
My husband really wanted to make those "Frustration Pencils!" Do you remember them as a kid? I had forgotten all about them until he told my daughter about them. We couldn't find the "fur" at any of our local stores, but when we were in Omaha for Thanksgiving we went to a smaller hobby type shop & bought some there.

This sweet girl around 8 years old(or so) bought most of them to give to her friends for Christmas. My husband was thrilled that he sold so many of them!

A few of the gift card holders that I made this year... More to come...

I have embroidered a bunch of towels for gifts and the holidays so as soon as I get some good photos of them I will get them posted.

Homemade Vanilla Experiment

I have found some recipes online to make your own Homemade Vanilla Extract and decided to try to make my own as holiday gifts.
You need Vodka and Vanilla Beans. I bought Vodka that wasn't too expensive in case it didn't work out! A friend recommended this Vodka and said it didn't leave that bad after taste. I bought a 2 pack of Vanilla Beans as Costco, it was 10 beans for $12 which I thought was a great deal.

You need to split them down the middle for the flavor to come out, but leave the top still attached.

Then I tossed them all in my jug of Vodka. Then I needed to leave them sit for 8-10 weeks and hope for the best.

Now that it has been a few weeks I have put them in individual bottles to "brew" better. I think I will need to add another bean to each bottle to really make it work. I read that you should have 3 beans per 1 cup of Vodka, but I may try it with 2 beans and see how it works. This is something that you should be able to just add more Vodka to your bean bottle when you are getting low and will last for a long time.

Holiday Candy Jars

These are some of the candy jars that I did for the craft sales that I am doing this fall.

I added the little Rhinestones this year & people seemed to like the extra bling!

Gift Tags

I recently participated in a local craft sale. These are the gift tags that I made & sold most of them. They were 12 tags for $3.

I used my scalloped square punch(I think it's the purple one by Marvy Uchida) to punch the Kraft paper and then cut out squares of designer paper and plain white to stamp To & From on.

Jenny Hart!

I got to meet her last week! Can you believe it? Jenny Hart from Sublime Stitching had a book signing at Crafty Planet to support her new book Embroidered Effects. I had to go, after all she is the reason I started embroidering and I LOVE her patterns. It was great, she took time to talk to all of us for a few minutes and sign her new book. I even showed her what my 6 year old daughter was working on. She seemed so genuine & sweet. I dig crafty women!

Luckily the book signing was early enough that I could still make it to Twilight at 9pm and then New Moon at midnight. What a fun night :)

Birthday Gift Card Holder

My husband's sister turned 40 this week. They live out of state so we sent her a gift card to buy herself a nice dinner. I saw this gift card holder on a blog and thought it would be fun to make.
You can find the one I saw and the video tutorial by Dawn over at Dawns Stamping Thougthts. The cupcake stamp was one that we bought in the $ section at Michael's. I colored it in with my Prisma Colored Pencils and added glitter Stickles on the swirly parts for some sparkle. I added the big Rhinestone as the cherry on top!

It opens into a flap card so I stamped the message into the middle section. The gift card is supposed to go in the slot/hole on the bottom flap. I didn't have the same punch that they used in the video, so I just tried to use my small square punch instead. As you can see it didn't really go far enough up from the bottom to slide the gift card in, plus I taped it too close to the edge to slide the card in. So instead I used double stick tape and just centered it over the hole(hopefully she will never know- until she removes the gift card I guess).

The top kind of tucks behind the stamped image & holds it together when you close it all up.I really like this sentiment and it can apply to so many things, but works great for a birthday. I thought it was something different and turned out pretty cute! Who doesn't love to get a gift card in the mail no matter how it arrives?

Star Wars Birthday

This is the awesome cake that my friend Danielle made for Sophia's 6th birthday party. It's the coolest X-Wing Fighter cake ever! Can you see R2-D2 hiding in there?

Halloween Week

It was a really busy week last week doing all of the fun Fall/Halloween things that we could :)
On Wednesday I volunteered in class to help carve pumpkins, this is our table & how it turned out (One of these children got bored with cleaning out the pumpkin & when I turned around had stuck two of those big red pencils up their nose-but not the one holding the pencil...).

On Monday the class walked to the local Fire Station and learned about fire safety and got to check out the big fire truck.

The last 3 or 4 years we have driven over to my cousin's house and went Trick-R-Treating with their kids. They live in a big neighborhood with lots of houses, lots of kids and lots of candy.

Halloween Craft Project

This is the craft project that we made at the Kindergarten Halloween party. I only had approximately 8-10 minutes per group of 4-6 kids. I wasn't sure the skill level of the kids for making crafts & was advised to keep it super easy.


I remembered that someone gave me a cute little pumpkin like this a few years ago. So I made up a couple of projects and had my daughter try them all out to see which one would be the best project to do in class. This one was definitely the winner!

We used 5(seven might have worked better) Orange Slice candies, stood them on end in a circle on a piece of plastic wrap. Then pulled all four corners to the center and twisted them together, trying to keep it centered. We took a piece of floral tape and twisted it around for the stem. We had gold Pipe Cleaners on hand so I used those and cut them in half. Each child could then twist the Pipe Cleaner on the stem however they wanted too to look a vine. And if we remembered we trimmed off the extra plastic wrap on the top.

Voila, Candy Pumpkin

Kindergarten Halloween Party

I volunteered at my daughter's Halloween Party on the 3oth(I did the craft Project, which I will post). She was Darth Vader of course and all of the other girls were in a sparkly dress of some sort. Which is fine with me and all of the boys who came up to her and thought she was so cool! Here she is with Obi-Wan and Luke at the party.

Bird in Tree Towel

So my friend Matt Doubek is this awesome artist that I knew from high school. I recently got back in touch with him & his lovely wife, when Shawnna was in town this summer. I talked to her about Matt's awesome paintings & I decided to use one as an embroidery pattern.
I actually took things that stood out to me in 2 different paintings and combined them. I found out that some things are easier to transfer to thread than others.

I used 2 different colored threads on the outer orange part of the tree to match the shading idea in the painting and also in the brown threads for the trunk.

I just LOVE these trees, I think these would look great embroidered on a long skinny piece of fabric, framed and hung up on my wall.

They actually took a really long time to embroider because they are open tree trunks and not just one skinny line as I typically do.

This is the painting where I got the Birdie from, I just love that little spinner hat.

This is the print that I got the trees from. I thought about doing the umbrella, but the dingle balls just said "French Knots" to me & mine never turn out too well, so I decided against it and added the sweet bird instead.

I sent this one to him because I just enjoy having different patterns and ideas to try to embroider and hoped he could enjoy my interpretation of it.

You can find Matthew's work

Charming Wall

Matt's myspace

joyengine

Fall Towel

I thought it was about time to take down the 4th of July towel I had hanging on the stove and switch to a fall one. I did a search for fall clip art online and found a pattern that I liked. I then enlarged it on the copier to the size I wanted and traced it onto my towel.

I ended up filling in the moon because I thought it would look really cool, like it was "glowing". I debated filling in the Bat and the leaves but decided I like it the way it is.

This is my first real try at filling in a space, I know there are other stitches that you can use, so I may try those down the line. I decided to add the stars for added effect.

Sketch Challenge

I had some time to work on a card the other day & I finally finished it. It is based off of a sketch by Jen over at iheart2stamp. She does awesome stuff and has new layouts all of the time. I think this one was from July.
The cardstock is some brown stuff from Archiver's, the cream is slightly textured cardstock I had in my stash, the blue was a scrap, the ribbon is velvet from a swap I did. The funky blue & green paper is by We R Memory Keepers. The coffee stamp is by Heart Art Studios, Inc. and the "Seriously" stamp is by BC Dzyns.

Because I seriously need coffee!

Here is the sketch that I went off of. It is a pretty literal version of it, but I was just happy to find time to make a card again.