The Library Baby Shower

Once upon a time. That's the start of an awesome book, right? Well, it's also the start to an awesome baby shower! 

I have some friends that I have known since we were 8 years old. In 5th grade, I went to a different school, yet somehow, we managed to stay friends all through Jr. High, High School, and into college. Now we are married and having babies!

I jumped the gun (I guess), so Talina is the first of my friends from way-back-when to have a baby, and it's a girl! I co-hosted with our good friend Lena and we decided on a library themed baby shower. The goal of this shower is to give the mom-to-be a good start to her children's library! 

It was a lot of fun to make the invites. I staged the picture, then edited the words right on top using picnik.com. Do you see Hero's addition? He's really into Pokemon right now.

Lena was in charge of location (it being at her house) and the food. Which left the fun decorating to me! (Thanks, Lena, for letting me have free reign on this.) We are not the game-playing type of shower-throwing people, so I put a bit more effort into the decorations to really make it special.

I searched for "book shower" on the internet, and discovered that Martha Stewart had this great book garland idea for a "Once upon a baby shower"! Wow. I'm cool like Martha Stewart, having a book shower... We decided to make it a bit more colorful, rather than the all pink that the original suggested. Lena and I spent a night ripping apart an old book and making these little ones.

I'll post more about the making this later.

I made a few more items, too. It turns out that ripping up books is very satisfying. So I made a wreath, a tray, and a canvas art piece.

I spent an good amount of time hunched over my glue gun (about 4 hours) making this book wreath, using this tutorial. I made a few changes to it, and will post more about that later.

The tray and the art were made with an old book, Mod-Podge and a little black paint. I also made more of my baby food jar party favors, this time adding the round magnets that hold so much better.

I'll show you exactly how I did these two items in later posts as well.

Here is Talina with all her new books! She got so many great books, as well as the usual and useful baby clothes, blankets and burp cloths.

It's amazing to me that we all met 18 years ago, and now we are here. Congratulations, Talina! I can't wait to met your sweet little girl!

Summer! And now on Twitter!

Hey everyone. I'm slowly trying to work my way back into a more regular crafting schedule. This summer has been awesome with swimming lessons where the biggest goal was learning to back float.

Watch the video and tell me, would you believe the first lesson he refused to get in the water?

We've been hiking, and eating watermelon.

Doesn't she make this look so good?!

And later today, we will be taking the kids on their first sleep-in-a-tent camping trip. I'm excited to start doing these type things with my family! 

But I have a few crafty things coming up. I'm joint hosting a baby shower next week, so I'll get to show off a few things from that. Plus, I'm still trying to sell my sock creations in my shop, Lively Designs. 

And here's something new! I've just joined Twitter. I'm a bit slow when it comes to the social sites. I finally joined MySpace when all of my friends had switched to FB. But now, you can follow me on FB (here), add pictures of things you've made from my tutorials on Flickr (here, I would LOVE to see it!), and on Twitter @CraftwConfdence. (Before you ask, yes. There are letters missing. I just couldn't fit it all in!). Whew! I did it. I'm finally "in" and "cool". Maybe not. Who knows.

Have an awesome weekend! And let's pray that sleeping on the ground in a tent with two kids and a snoring husband for two nights doesn't result in a sad murder/murder/murder/suicide.

Later.

Bright Robots for a Baby

A good friend of mine just had her 3rd baby, a sweet little boy. I wanted to make her something useful, but cute. Because this is baby #3 and boy #2, I knew it didn't have to be super baby-ish. I went to the store and when I found these robots, I had to get them! 

I used the yard of flannel to make one Straight-Jacket Swaddler, and three burp cloths. It would have been two, but I found some orange flannel floating around in my stash!

The swaddler sews up so fast, it really is an easy gift to make.

And it's so useful. My friend's husband loves it, and without knowing I called this already, dubbed it the straight jacket! Great minds think alike, right?!

The burp cloths are simple, I copied my sister who made me 20, (yes 20!), when I had Pretty. Just cut the rectangles 20 in x 8 in, sew right sides together, flip, and top stitch around the outside. She also sews a line down the center, going the short way, so the fabric doesn't shift with washes.

 I love how bright it all is!! Who says baby things need to be muted or pastel?

Congrats, Heather, on your adorable baby!!

Happy Birthday, Hero!

My sweet little boy is 4 years old. His birthday was at the beginning of the month, and we celebrated for about a week with all the different parties. I didn't go all out for his because I went as a leader to my church's girls camp that same week and was gone for his actual birthday. But we did have cake:

And I made cupcakes. Hero wanted the strawberry mix, but I didn't want the cake to be pink, so I added most of my liquid red food dye and it turned out an awesome red. Add some sprinkles, and we were set.

And he got his first 2-wheeler bike.

I made this bicycle bucket following the tutorial at Noodlehead.

I made a few minor changes, mainly because I made it at midnight the night before he got it and I didn't have some of the supplies. First, I made my own double sided fusible stiff interfacing using stiff sewable interfacing and Heat 'n' Bond. Second, I applied snaps for the closure instead of Velcro. Both changes worked great.

I can't believe he's 4 already! I am a lucky Momma.

Oh My!

I was linked to on Babble!

It was a good 2 weeks ago, and I had no idea. I guess I should be paying more attention... Yay!

Birthday Card Quilt

Wow, it's been a good while since I posted anything. I have excuses, but the most relevant one is that I'm busy enjoying the summer with my kids. But I did want to post about this project.

At the beginning of the month I mentioned that I was machine quilting my first quilt. Well, it was this big "Birthday Card Quilt" for my mom. 

As you can see, my mom just turned 50. Our family always has a pot luck breakfast to celebrate the 4th of July. This year, we turned it into a surprise birthday party for Mom! 

Everyone ate, played and of course, signed the quilt.

It was my mom who taught me how to sew and to piece quilt. I knew she would appreciate the work it took to make. It was a fun project for me because I was able to take ideas from blogs I love and sketch out a one-of-a-kind blanket just for Mom.

Don't you love the crazy scribbles of sketching? Ignore the math...

After I figured out just how I wanted to do it, I made the back first. I kind of based it off of this beautiful quilt over at Noodlehead. (I actually took a lot of advice from this post by Anna, about her quilt.)

And the front was based off of this adorable baby quilt by V and Co.

I used picnik.com to print out the letters. There were large enough, and enough of them, that I needed two pages. The first one, I printed normal and had to trace on the back of them to get the backwards on my Heat 'n' Bond. But then I remembered that picnik has a feature where you can reverse the images. So I did that for the second page. It just makes it less likely to mess up if they are already backward for you.

Anyway, I traced the letters backward on the Heat 'n' Bond, then ironed them onto the wrong side of my fabric.

 Then I cut them out, peeled the back, pinned and then ironed them into place.

Because Heat 'n' Bond will eventually dissolve, I stitched the letters down with the blanket stitch function on my machine.

I used the sandwich tutorial from Oh Fransson! to make this:

So many safety pins! I used regular safety pins, instead of "quilting pins".

I then used this tutorial for straight-line machine quilting. I used masking tape, and spaced them 2 inches apart, because it was easy with my 2-inch-wide ruler.

I sewed along the edge like I was told...

When it came to the words, I taped right across them, and then just back stitched at the beginning and end, just skipping over them.

For the binding I used this tutorial by Crazy Mom Quilts. The tutorial was easy to follow, and I chose to hand quilt it for a nice clean look.

Happy Birthday, Mom. I love you!

Quilt Anxiety

I've got the front and back pieced together.

I've made my quilt sandwich (using this awesome tutorial that I was directed to by Noodlehead).

And now it's just sitting there. Waiting.

I'm nervous about this first machine quilting experience. It's a smaller quilt, and I'm doing a simple straight line design. I eventually want to do free motion quilting, but I need to work up to it.

Deep breath and GO! Wish me luck!!