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Heart Bracelet

Since Valentine’s Day seems to be our next crafty holiday, I thought I’d share a photo of this heart bracelet I designed for the book Stash Happy Felt. (Shown here before I added the elastic strap). This was another project using the wonderful industrial wool felt from FilzFelt. For complete instructions and templates, you can check out the book, which has 30 quick and easy felt projects. In the book, there are two different templates — a larger size for adults and a smaller one for kids, as shown here.

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Valentine’s Round-Up

Here are a few Valentine’s card ideas from the past. My kids have ideas for this year, so hopefully I will get to share those with you soon. Meanwhile, we are collecting toilet paper tubes! My husband asked why they were all lined up in the kitchen and I said we were saving them for Valentines. His comment was “Of course. Nothing says ‘I love you’ like toilet paper tubes”. So true.

Tweet, Tweet printable valentines.

Cupid’s Arrow Pencils with printable from my post for Alpha Mom.

Crayon Hearts with printable card.

Several ideas for simple handmade valentines in a post for Alpha Mom.

Recycled card ideas.

Salt Dough Hearts.

 

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Holiday Cheer

I’ve got the tree up and just made a stocking for our new addition to the family. Yes, we have stockings for all of our pets, including the guinea pig. And after I hung it, I realized that our other stockings point to the right. Oh, well.

Here are the triangle templates that I created to make the stocking if you’d like to use them for a quilt block or other project. I love paper piecing for getting precision in smaller triangles like these. If you’re unfamiliar with the technique, you basically place the fabric behind your paper pattern and sew right through the paper. You can check out tutorials on YouTube, because it’s tricky to explain. Here are some other paper pieced blocks I made.

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Costumes

Chaos. Halloween always turns into chaos for us and trying to get a photo of the girls as trick-or-treaters are starting to arrive is sure to be a bust. My house is a wreck, but I managed to get both kids into DIY costumes yesterday. I have my priorities.

Here we have Mary and her little (completely uncooperative) lamb. I made a little lamb costume for the dog, but he hated it and just continued to jump and twist around trying to bite it off. The dress is Burda 9702 and the staff is a coat hanger wrapped in quilt batting and stuffed into a fabric tube.

And my older daughter was a gumball machine. We saw the idea over on Dollar Store Crafts and made our own version using two plastic bowls, pom-poms, an embroidery hoop stuffed and covered with fabric for the top and aquarium tubing in the skirt. Parenting tip: when you have to make air holes for your child, you probably haven’t picked the best costume! We only let her wear the top for 10 minutes at a time, and there is also a vent in the bottom part with mesh for breathing — I tried it on and it’s hot, but breathable. (Just so you know that I am not a completely terrible parent.) She won Funniest Costume at our school carnival and was a big hit last night trick-or-treating, never mind the fact that she could barely see anything after dark.

This is the same kid who went as Violet Beauregarde a couple of years ago. I begged her to be a headless Barbie this year, but she wasn’t interested. Maybe next year. You can read my post about costume lessons learned from a couple of years ago here. I am so ready to move on from Halloween. Onward to the next holiday!