A Home, Made: June 2012

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Sunshine Award

I was delightfully surprised to recevie a note from Tamera at Etcetorize. She has the most fabulous blog, one I've admired for some time. There is a fun, retro flair to all her projects and I love her collection of vintage patterns on Etsy.

Tamera sent me the note to let me know she was passing along the "Sunshine Award" to me! This is an award for "bloggers who positively and creatively inspire others in the blogosphere!" What a fabulous idea and really, super fun to know someone thinks of me and my little blog that way. :) Thank you, Tamera!!

Naturally there are a couple rules involved with receiving the Sunshine Award;

Thank the person who gave you the Sunshine Award and link back to them
Answer the 10 questions (below) about yourself on your blog
Select 10 more bloggers to pass the Sunshine Award on to and link to their blog
Copy and Paste the Sunshine Award to your blog

Here are ten fascinating things about me. Did you catch that sarcasm in "fascinating?? ;)

Favorite Color? Forever and always, pink. :)
Favorite Animal? I'm going with dogs on this one. Specifically our dog; Sprinkles.
Favorite Number? 13.
Favorite Drink? Sweet Tea.
Facebook or Twitter? It would have to be fb.
Good Book or Good Movie? Hands down, good book. I love to get lost in a book.
Your Passion? My family. I love my kids, my guy and being home full time taking care of all of them. I am going to suffer from Empty Nest Syndrome in a terrible way one day, but for now I am loving every minute. Even the crappy, stressful ones. :)
Giving or getting presents? I love, love, love to give presents. I love shopping for just the right think my giftee would want, I love wrapping the presents and seeing their (hopefully) happy faces when they open it.
Favorite Day? Any day the whole family is together, when my hubby is off of work and my bonus son is home with us. Oh, and Christmas. ;)
Favorite Flower? Yellow tulips. I know, kind of strange since my fav color is pink, but there is something about yellow tulips that makes me happy.

Now you know everything about me! Hmmm, guess I have to change my passwords on all my accounts now. ;) So here are my 10 bloggers to whom I am passing on the Sunshine Award. I've been following some of these blogs for a while and some I just recently discovered. I am always inspired by these women, so you must go visit them now! Scat!!

Kristy at Hopeful Threads
Pam at Threading my Way
Jenn at Rook No.17
Holly at 504 Main
Cari and Cortnee at Two Sasters
Tanya at Craft Couture by TC
Justine at Sew Country Chic
Deanna at Little Green Bow
Allison at Feeding My Temple
Jamie at Pretty Ditty

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Car Scavenger Hunt Card Game

Like many of you this summer, we'll be taking a couple road trips. It always starts out fun and gets boring very fast for the kids, so I like to have a stash of boredom busters for them. I pull them out one at a time as needed and it seems to help take the edge off.

I was searching online for travel games and saw many ideas for scavenger hunts in the car, check lists and what not. But I thought it would be fun if, instead of a list, it was a card game. My two love card games and I thought it would also put a fun little spin on the idea of a sight game. They can each get 5 cards and the first one to find all 5 of their items wins. One can play it by themselves if the other isn't in the mood. They can play as a team and try and beat their time each game. Lots of options, I'm excited to see how it works for them.

Simple concept, I put them together in Word and used the free graphics from MS Template Designer. Nothing super fancy, but I thought I'd provide a link for a printable version of my Car Scavenger Hunt Card Game. I wanted to have the word as well as a picture so beginner and pre-readers can play.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Afternoon Quickie: Headbands

My daughter has a little friend and her mom is my bestie. She just had a birthday and we wanted to tuck something extra in her gift. My daughter came up with the idea of giving her some headbands, because this little girls does love her headbands. I love that my daughter is beginning to understand how to pick out a gift for someone and she's moving from giving them something she would want to thinking about them and what they would want. :) We (okay, pretty much I) whipped these up in a couple afternoons (one headband would technically be an afternoon quickie.)

Can you tell the birthday girl's favourite colour is purple? These are fabric covered, plastic headbands. The cheapie kind you can get at Target. They usually come in colours that matches nothing in little girl's wardrobe. :) Normally fabric is glued to the headbands, and while my love for my glue gun is just as strong as yours, I prefer to hand sew the fabric to my headbands. Its less messy, portable and I feel like they are more durable.

To make the headbands, you ll need:

Fabric, cut or ripped into 1 to 1.5" strips (you can also use ribbon)

Needle and thread

Scissors

Plastic headband

To begin, place one end of the fabric under one end of the headband and fold one edge over to the front of the headband as shown, stitch a couple of times to secure. And for goodness, gracious sake, get a manicure if you're going to put a close up of your fingers on your blog!!

Fold the other side of the fabric over the top of the headband and stitch. You want to use small, tight stitches on the inside of the headband, the part that will be facing the wearer's head. Keep the stitches tight and use the stitch to pull the fabric tight around the headband.

Then fold the fabric up from the bottom and wrap around the headband. Add a couple stitches.

Now you'll just wrap and stitch your way around the headband using small, tight stitches. Keep your stitches on the underside of the headband so they won't be seen when the headband is being worn. If you run out of fabric, just add in another strip. Since you are stitching as you wrap its no big deal. :) When you get to the end of the headband repeat the steps at the beginning, folding the fabric over the end of the headband.

Now add your embellishment! For this headband, I chose a simple, little bow. For my 4" bow, I used an 8x3" rectangle of fabric. Fold the long (7") ends in toward the center.

Then fold the short ends in toward the center. You'll want the ends to just overlap a bit.

Pinch the center with your thumb and forefinger to give it a nice, bow shape.

And sew it to the headband.

Keeping your needle and thread attached (don't snip the thread yet) take another rectangle of fabric, this time 1x2" and fold the long sides in toward the center.

This is for the bow center, you'll wrap it around the middle of the bow and the headband. Place one end of the fabric on the underside of the headband, and stitch along the unfinished edge.

Then warp it around the headband and the bow, snip off the end because you'll have excess fabric, fold the end under just a teensy bit and sew along the other unfinished edge. all the sttiches are on the underside of the headband so they don't show.

Ta-daa!! You have a cute, little bow headband!

I did one with a little fabric flower. The tut for the flower can be found here.

I also did one with 1" grosgrain ribbon. I sewed several ribbon roses to the headband and this one ended up being my favourite. I hear its the birthday girl's favourite too. :)

Custom headbands are quick, easy and inexpensive to make. If they stayed on my daughter's head longer than a couple hours before they were "itchy and headachey" I'd probably make on out of scraps of every little outfit I made her. :)

Saturday, June 2, 2012

Summer Project: The 100 Book Challenge!

Summer is here! Well, maybe not in your neck of the woods, I imagine for many of you its still spring. I see pictures of friends on Facebook in their cardis and capris all "ooh-la-la" and breezy. Not so much here in the desert, we're already into 100+ temps and I am already grumpy. You can expect me to complain about the weather until late October. :) So with school being out and the temps being up, it is summer. :)

Speaking of school being out, how on earth is a mama to sew when no one's in school?? I've spent much of the last week hanging out with my daughter. She keeps me on my toes, she is full of ideas and energy. I will say it is waaaay easier when my bonus-son is home, who knew that the more kids you have the easier it is? One of the reasons I kinda wish things had gone down differently and we were able to have more of the little buggers. :) However, most of the time I have one here which means my booty is hopping! She does entertain herself quit a bit, which gives me time to get the cleaning and stuff done. But not much time for "me." I imagine I could get her to do her thing a bit more so I could sew a bit, but she's only little for so long. As much as I want to go play on my sewing machine, I don't want to waste this time. Know what I mean?

So last week she announced that she wanted to do a "100 Book Challenge" this summer. She had this whole idea that we could read 100 books and then chart them. I thought it sounded like a great idea, and we did it last summer as well. But then, I read the books to her. This year, she's beginning to read. She knows many sight words and she is great at sounding out. She's working on getting all those "rules" down, the silent "e", when two vowels go walking, all that jazz. Mostly she needs to just practice reading. I'm pretty sure you can see where I am going with this. I told her we could do the challenge, but only if she read the books to me. With a promise to help her out on the harder words, we got to work on our chart! Making it turned out to be a fun project with lots of fine-motor-skill jobs for her so I thought I'd share it!

Later this summer we're going on a little getaway to the beach. She is so excited for her first trip to the beach and I can see we're going to have lots of beach-themed crafts this summer. We decided to chart our books on the ocean! We took two poster boards taped them together and painted them. I just used basic non-toxic craft paint. She's 5 so she's way past the age of trying to eat the paint, so I feel comfortable letting her use it now.

I dribbled the paint, light blue, dark blue and green, all over the paper and let her paint away. We decided the little brush was going to take too long so we switched to a wide foam brush.

She pulled it back and forth over the paper. I wanted to give it the dimensional look of the ocean.

We dabbed cotton balls dipped in beige and brown paint over yellow construction paper, taped them together end to end and she cut them in half lengthwise following a wavy line for the ocean floor. I printed out some sea shell colouring pages I found online and she coloured and cut them out. She pasted them onto the ocean floor just where she wanted them. As you know, I don't put my cutie pies on my blog, but let me just tell you she is adorable in this picture showing off her work. :)

Meanwhile, I sketched out and cut out 100 fish shapes from construction paper. I did a basic fish shape, a seahorse and an octopus (she chose the fish we were going to use.) My plan is to write the name of each book, and the number of the book in our challenge, she reads on each fish. Then she can put the fish on her ocean (with double sided tape.)

Pages