Beginner Gardener!

I'm just a beginner vegetable gardener! However, it's that time of year! Yay! Oh gosh, it's so much fun to have a food garden. Going out each day and finding new flowers blossoming to signify the coming of fruit or vegetables. The flowers are always such a fun sign and you can watch them as they transform into budding food. And all knowing you did it all yourself! So rewarding!
I prepare a spreadsheet of all the vegetables that I am going to plant and and the planting instructions and facts so that all the information is right there together when I begin my planting. It's no fun trying to read each packet whilst doing it, but it's also very nice having this sheet for later on when you are wondering when to thin the seedlings, or when to transplant your vegetables, etc. Then I made some labels for mine because I was experimenting with different brands of seeds to see which would do well or better and therefore these labels help me to keep an eye on which was which. A simple garden label works well too. These homemade ones are laminated with my fancy little laminator but they didn't quite keep all moisture out so I reccommend maybe making sure you cut farther away if you decide to do this method, or just going with traditional plant labeling.

~ Seeds, seeds let's plant our seeds! ~ Every year I buy some fun kids plants so my children can plant their own seeds and watch their own little garden grow. I also have my son go out and water his own bucket(s) each day. We have a lot of fun! Lots more gardening to come!!

A really good website that's fun to use is bhg.com. They have a program on their site that allows you to plan your garden and you can actually draw it out and stuff. They also have premade garden plans that are really great too!

5 minute pillow covers!

Here's the little tutorial I promised back in 2002. Just kidding, it wasn't that long ago, but it may as well be. I always go to the store during my selected holiday and choose 6, 7 or 8 coordinating fabrics. I think that's over kill but it happens to be hard to choose because I love all the fabrics and I have lots of pillows so I like to cover them all. So I only buy a 1/2 yard of each fabric that I like and really, you could get away with a couple inches less depending on your pillow size. Prewashing is always a good idea!

I take my half a yard and lay it out vertically in front of me RIGHT side facing up, then I fold the closest side in about half way and then fold an inch or so over as shown above. Keep in mind this is the WRONG side showing now.

Then bring the other side in halfway to match your first side and again fold a one or two inch fold over and make sure it overlaps the other one as shown above. It may take a trial and error to get them even to where your pocket will be in the middle of the pillow rather than 3/4 of the way up or something.


Here's another picture. It's hard to tell because I'm using fabrics that don't necessarily have a right or wrong side.

Then I just make sure my pillow is about the right size of the pillow and pin it to where it will need to be all the way along the edge. I've actually made so many of these I stopped pinning them. You may feel it's unneccesary as well but it's always good to pin what you are sewing to keep it together and avoid sewing it wrong.

Then one stitch down each side does the trick.

Other side...

Then turn them right side out, press if needed (I never have to because my pillow pulls it to an unwrinkled state). Then slip your pillows into the covers and you have a awesome season friendly display of pillows on your couches. So much fun!! And if your house is like mine, your regular season pillows totally clash when it's a holiday. So this makes it so much more flow-ish.

Here's my other three. Lucky number 7 is how many pillows I usually do.

Another pic! Enjoy! I hope someone makes some of these and sends me some pics. These were my fall pillows (Nov) by the way. I'm aware that it's almost Easter but I am trying to catch up on blogging at the moment after a crazy 6 months!

Halloween fun!

Ok for sure you should ignore the scratches in my table, it's definitely something I need to work on redo-ing one of these days but it's a big project so it will probably have to wait until we buy a house and then I'll care! That and my coffee table. Kids sure know how to ding up wood furniture! I made this table runner for Halloween because I couldn't find one to buy that I really liked. My husband actually suggested this and so I got right on it. Anytime he suggests I do something, that gives me the free will to spend the necessary time and small amounts of money to complete these projects - all with his support and sometimes even his assistance. I love him!

One thing you hopefully will notice is I'm a frugal hobbyist. I like to make things using stuff I find around my house or recycling things (in a non whimsical (or ghetto) way). I will hopefully be able to show you that in the upcoming posts.

This probably took a total of 45 minutes to make! Easy peezy!

I thought it would be fun to have some Halloween pillows. Mostly because once I got all my halloween decorations up, I was really annoyed with the color of my pillows for my normal decor so I thought I'd just make some pillow covers for them. So I made these three pillow covers. They each called for a 1/2 yard of fabric (depending on your current pillows). All I had to do was one stitch down each side and that's it. They took 5 minutes to make each. For real! And you don't have to be a seamstress either. And you will feel super awesome that you accomplished it! I also got this fabric 50% off!

My husband loved them and told me he wanted me to make more! He's so funny! So I did 4 more. I think 7 halloween pillows on our couch was definitely overkill but hey isn't that what halloween's all about anyhow. I have zero regrets because I love them!

I just took up close pics so you could see the different patterns in the fabrics. I used all coordinating fabrics that had glitter in them. There were so many other cute halloween fabrics that I wanted but I had to stick with the ones that all were in the same design line.

Candy!

The one on the left here is probably my favorite. And in case you didn't notice, they match my table runner as well!

The orange one here is also in the running for my favorite one! Probably takes 2nd best!

I'm just starting to make the pillows for my harvest/thanksgiving decorations and while I do that, I'll take better pics to show how I made these pillows so easily and then perhaps you could make some too! Christmas pillows anyone??

If you do try any of my ideas (not that making a pillow is really MY idea, but you know what I mean...), I would love love to see your results!! So please share!

Homemade Popsicle Birthday!

I was very disappointed at the party for this one main reason... I'd spent all this time on this montrosity of a birthday sign and the weather was way too windy for me to be able to hang it. So I sulked the whole time on the playground. Not really but it was tempting so instead I had to hang this in the most random part of my house where it would actually fit in order to take this picture. I had visions of it hanging from the pavillion we had rented for the party but anywho, this will do!

Close up!

I also made him this high chair sign that was going to hang from his high chair where he ate his cake! This one wasn't as great at being able to tell what it said! But it is what it is!

So there you have it. I'm turning the big Happy Birthday sign into a scrapbook for the little guy of either his party, or maybe his first year of life. Haven't decided yet...but it's all ready to go now... just add pics!

This is one of 4 popsicle shirts I made for this 1 year old party. I made one for Dad, one for me (Mom), 1 for brother and 1 for the birthday boy! I will upload those pics as soon as I can get a hold of them. They are currently in another state... but not that great to see anyhow.

First I got plain white T shirts from Walmart or somewhere and then died them the colors I wanted using fabric dye. I wasn't able to find T shirts in my kids sizes at the craft stores especially not in the colors I wanted to represent different popsicle colors so this was my only option. Cheap and do able! I cut out popsicles out of patterned fabric, and ironed them on the shirts. Then we used fabric paint to trace around each popsicle!

These were the popsicle invitations I sent out. I neglected to take a picture of the inside but that's beside the point anyhow. These were so much fun to make and create. I based them off of something I had seen online but of course did them my own way with my own "flavor"!
You can see all the different styles there was. I actually received the majority of these back in the mail because I didn't have the correct amount of postage on them. Some went, some didn't. Go figure. I guess some popsicle sticks weigh more than others. Lame! =) So this pic is for those of you friends and family who never received invitations. Now you know that I actually made them and this is what they looked like. That's all for now. I'll add those other pics eventually and I have TONZ more projects to post about so I'm going to try and be better at doing that. It's just I'm so busy doing projects I haven't taken the time to do one of my favorite hobbies - blogging!
Til next time...

Tea Dying Fabric!

This is an awesome and fun way to make your fabrics look vintage, worn or rustic. I felt so proud of myself after accomplishing this tast. Besides that it brought out the arthritis in me. Just kidding, but seriously it really did hurt my hands from wringing out so much fabric.

I bought these fabrics for a room I was redoing in our house. I was trying to match them to an antiqued clock I have and they just seemed too like bright I guess you could say. I guess the correct word might be they were too "new" looking. So that's when I decided they needed to be tea dyed.

So I bought this! Just a box of basic tea from Wal-mart. I don't drink tea so I literally stood there forever just trying to decide what to get. I bought the cheapest box with the most bags of tea and the only thing you need to be certain of is that it's black tea. So this one worked great!

First I cut swatches from my fabric to test them to make sure this is really what I wanted to do and that I was going to get the result that I wished for. I used these containers to dye the swatches. It looked great so then...

I boiled a large stock pot of water and added a ton of tea bags. At first I only added maybe like ten but realized quickly that that wasn't enough. So I ended up doing tonz more. There's no specific recipe, I just used these same measuring cups and containers to check the darkness of the tea, and went from there. The only problem is I was filling a large plastic rubbermaid bin to do this project so I couldn't just go by the color in the stock pot, but rather get it dark enough to make all the water in the bin fairly dark as well. I reccommend only doing one yard of fabric at a time if possible, because it's so much easier and you can just use the tea in the stock pot to do that fabric. The problem for me was I was using a 3 yd peice of fabric for a bench seat cover and couldn't cut the fabric into yards so I had to dye the whole piece. --which is where the arthritis came in! ;-)

Prewet the fabric. This is the 3 yds of fabric I was talking about prewet and wrung out.

These are all the fabrics I was going to be using for pillows soaking in clear water awaiting their dyeing procedure.

My huge rubbermaid bin full of tea. Tea party anyone!?

I did this project in my garage because I obviously wasn't going to have this huge bucket of "stain" in my home. As you can see I had the hose there beside it and that's what I used to prewet my fabric and such. It was kind of awkward treating this fabric like dirt using the hose on it and dunking it in filthy water but like I said earlier, pretty fun!

Here's my first 3 yds of fabric in the bin. I actually had two 3 yd pieces of this same fabric, so I was busy!

Looks like a big joke eh? Like disgusting dirty water with an old rag piece of fabric in there. Little do you know it turns out to be a masterpiece. Ok just kidding, it's not that awesome but it's definitely not disgusting trash in the end!

You let your fabric soak up the tea until it's the color you desire. Could be real quick, could be hours. Depends on the darkness of the water and how dark you want it. Keep in mind that it's always going to look darker when it's wet, so if you think it's the right color, it may get lighter once you rinse it. Once the fabric is the right color you wish for, then rinse it under water until the water runs clear. Then I just put mine in the dryer at that point, but I imagine you should wash it and then dry it. I just wanted to "seal" the tea in by drying it straight from there. ??

This is a picture of my swatches at the first. You can see that they are much "dirtier" than the original fabric and that's what I was going for exactly. Unfortunately once the project was done, I had nothing to compare it too so this was the only picture I had that could sort of show the difference in before and after. And below is a picture of my fabric put to work!

Halloween Costumes!

I'm a little delayed in updating this blog, as my other one takes priority since it's my families journal in a round about way. However, this is my most recent accomplishment...
I made my first born a ROOSTER costume. It was a lot of fun to make. More complicated than someone as new to sewing as me, but I managed to get through it and I think it turned out fairly good! The feet were my favorite thing about it and unfortunately, they are filthy by the time I got around to taking their pictures. But you get the gist!

My second born was a duck! Had to keep it in the bird family. This costume speaks for itself, but I must add that I only used a pattern for the bunting. The rest was thought up in my head. Which is why it's pretty wild! But it was loads o' fun!

So there you have it! Happy late Halloween!

I have a ton of projects I'm working on right now. It's keeping me super busy for sure! So stay tuned for more homemade fun!

Welcome!

This is a new endeavor that I thought would be fun! I decided that I would blog about the hobbies I am doing in my life. It will be kind of a journal somewhat of the things I accomplish. I like to think I'm well rounded in the things I like to do, so this is my way of keeping a record of those things and finding out if that's really true! I just LOVE cooking, and I'm an obsessive gardener! I enjoy doing wood crafts and painting! I love scrapbooking but don't make enough time for it so I think this may help me to level out my priorities in the crafting world and get some scrapbooking done! I have so many scrapbooking supplies that it would really be beneficial to use them and make a memory book of my family! I love quilting though I can't say that I've finished very many quilts, but I have started my share of them. I think this will push me to finish those unfinished projects I have as well. I LOVE pictures and photography and although I don't have the equipment I would like to take amazing pictures, I have captured a beautiful sunset or two and I shall share those with you as this blog goes on. I also do spontaneous random crafts that are out of my comfort zone occasionally too and I will struggle through those with whoever is interested in following this blog. I'm excited and feel free to join me anytime here to see what new thing I may be up to. Chances are this blog will not get much action from me, but I hope that is not that case!! ;-)

This ones for you Josilyn! Since you asked me to take pictures of my frame project...

For the last three years, my husband and I have been carting around 2 boxes FULL of frames that we don't use. Just because after we started moving then we never unpacked them and found homes for them. Well I decided rather than throw out all our old frames, that I would spice up our hallways with them all. I make three collages full of frames based on the color of the frame. In reality, my husbands sister inspired me to do this because she has an awesome wall in her dining room that is chuck full of random frames! Anyhow, this project took us months because we had to order pictures and then order more because I'd forgotten some. But before we could even order pictures, we had to go through them all and figure out what sizes we'd need, and what to put in them... etc. etc. Anyways... it doesn't look FANTASTIC, but I think it's a fun change on the bare walls of the hallway. I just love to see all the pictures though regardless of anything else!!!

Oh and I made that random family sign with an old piece of wood that I had stashed with my frames, and some vinyl that was sitting in my drawer!

I'm glad this project is over cuz it was a lot of work. ;-)