Giveaway Over at Creating from the Heart

A very talented Melissa over at Creating from the Heart is doing her annual end of the year giveaway.   For you paper crafters this is definitely one you will not want to miss entering, but for any crafter, why would you pass up on the chance to just get that wonderful Michael’s gift card?  The drawing will remain open until Jan. 1st, 2012.

Here is all that she is giving away. 

~ A $150.00 Gift Card to Michael's Craft Stores

~ 1 Copic Air-Brushing Starter Set System

~ 1 Copic Color Swatch Book

~ 36 Copic CIAO Marker Set!

Been a Busy Month

Been a crazy month, with K’s birthday, K’s first dance recital, being not only a paper cutting test cutter but also a sewing pattern tester, and Christmas, it’s been non-stop go go go here.  I am unable to show off the test cuts or the sewing pattern testing I have done yet, but I will post them once I get the ok from both designers.
Here are some of the photos of crafts from K’s party. We had an Under The Sea theme.

Treat bags

Cupcakes

Party Hat

Fish Net

Made some Christmas Subway Art to hang up on my wall.

 

Christmas Cards I made for the family.

I decorated K’s door with streamers for her to run through in the morning when she woke up on her birthday.  She was all sorts of confused and called for us to get her out when she woke up.  I plan on running and getting some red and green streamers to do for Christmas morning too.


I really wish I could share my test cuts and pattern testing dress I made, the dress is a definite one that will have several made for her throughout the years.  I love it!!  But soon enough, she is still testing out size fittings for the other sizes, hopefully it will be fairly quickly.

Thanksgiving Crafts

Thanksgiving came and is now gone, and I finally have time to post some of my most recent crafts.  K’s last day of school for this session was the day before Thanksgiving, and she is now off till the 9th of Jan.  Before she was done, they had a Thanksgiving party.  I made some skittle sticks for the kids in her class with some turkey tags that I created, in retrospect, I should have made the beaks a bit bigger, but oh well, they still turned out super cute.

I also made her a new little “fall” skirt.  She loves the panels with the owls.

And next weekend is her b’day party, so I am trying to get things set up for that.  I decided to make her her own little party hat to wear.  I think I still want to make a “4” to attach to it, but for now this is it.

Halloween Pumpkin

We finally got around to carving our pumpkin this evening.  Because K is obsessed with “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and with Jack Skellington in general, we decided to do a Jack carving on our pumpkin this year.  As I was cleaning up the cuts and widening others, one of the mouth “stitches” was cut too long and when I went to cut the chin area, the mouth dropped so I had to stick a toothpick in there to hold it together.  Other than that, I am quite pleased with the way it turned out.

Halloween Korker Bow

I made my first korker bow today.  I wanted something to go with her Halloween skirt I made her.  I didn’t have all the right colors, but did have enough of others to make it look good.  I think it turned out pretty good, after a bit of frustration of trying to tie it together with elastic cord, which broke on me 3 times before I gave up and went to wire to assemble it.

Halloween Skirt for K

Tonight I did up a skirt for K for Halloween.  I was going to do a dress, but I couldn’t decide on the style I wanted to make, and since I had bought a cute ribcage with candy pieces shirt for her, I figured I would just make a skirt to wear with it.  I ended up doing just a simple skirt with ruffle.

Halloween Treat Tubes

With Halloween coming up next week and my K being in her first year of pre-kindergarten, I had to go all out and make some goodies bags for her classmates.  I made 2 different sets of tags, but then decided I didn’t like the way that the pumpkins turned out, they should have been on a different color background.  So I ended up scrapping them, ok didn’t scrap them, just put them away for K to play with.  The goodies bags will all have a Halloween themed pencil, a pumpkin & bat eraser, a mini notebook with a ghost on the cover, a pack or 2 of candy Smarties, and the treat tubes that are filled with candy corn.  She has 25 kids in her class, plus teacher and helper, so I needed to make 27 of these things, and let me just say those dang candy corns were being difficult to go all the way to the bottom of the dang bag tubes.

These are the tags that I ended up scrapping.

The finalized tags and treat tubes.

Baby Blanket

This blanket was long over due.  I made this for my friends daughter who is now 4 months old.  It’s only a little late (oops)  I owed my friend big time for watching K for me one day when my regular sitter was unable to take K while I was in class.

 

Customized Comforter Cover

A friend of mine was looking for a comforter to go with her sons bedroom, she wanted one that she could easily wash, and best way for that was to do the IKEA comforters with the removable covers.  However she was unable to find a Cars theme one.  She asked me if I would be able to help her out.  She bought some full size sheet sets, the twin size comforter, and we customized a cover for her.  The photo shown is a preview, as she is waiting on his new bed to arrive later this week, so right now it is tucked in and laid onto the toddler bed, she will send me more pictures when the new bed gets here, but for now, here is the final result.

Paper Charm Swap Deadlines

I have decided to set the deadline for sign up for Oct 15th at 11:59pm PST.  If you wanting to join in, you have till Saturday to do so. 
We also decided to go with no set theme, so any general theme of your papers. There will be 5 designs, with current sign up, 4 papers of each design.  1 set of papers will be cardstock, 1 set will be general paper, the other 3 designs can be in either cardstock, general scrap paper, vellum, foil, etc. as long as they have some image or embossing to them.

Charm Swap

Looks like I will be doing the paper charm swap, since that seems to be the consensus of the feedback that I did get.  I will get a sign up going first and see how many I get signed up before I decide on how many patterns each participant will do. 
Cuts will be 6”x6” so there will be 4 squares from each sheet.  I will most likely set it up where everyone will do 3-5 different patterns (depending on how many we get signed up) and will have you each send in enough for 2 of each pattern for each participant.  That would mean, if we have 10 people sign up, we do 3 patterns each, 5 sheets of each pattern will have to be cut up into the 6”x6” squares and sent to me.  So you would need 15 papers total to cut up and send, and you would get a total of 60 squares sent back to you. If we do 5 patterns, 25 sheets to cut, and you would get back 100 squares, etc.
I have created a Flickr group so everyone can post a photo of each of their patterns they will be sending so we don’t get duplicates of papers. There will be no theme, however, there will be NO solid color papers, each will have some pattern on it, whether it be an embossing of some sort, or a full sheet of say snowmen, but each sheet must be of pattern of some sort. As for a deadline to have your papers to me, we will see how fast we get enough people signed up for this.
I am excited, I have never hosted anything like this, or for that matter have seen/heard of a paper charm swap, but what the heck, let’s start a new trend!  Lets get this sign up started!  Will aim for 10 right now and then if we get more interest we can always add more to the list. I will edit when I get sign ups to add you on, so if you can provide a blog address, if you have one, that would be great. I will also need a way to contact you, so please make sure I get your email address as well. Your email address will also be the one I send the invite to for the Flickr group.  Sign up can either be in the comments here or by sending an email to myself at socalcraftingal@gmail.com  
When you send me your squares, I will also have you send me a SASE to send the squares back to you. Make sure that envelop will be big enough and have enough postage on it to get them all back to you.

The participant list!
1. Kami
2. Patricia
3. Shalon
4. Dana H.
5. Jill
6. Tammy
7.
8.
9.
10.

Knit Ruffle Dress

I got K’s new dress made. This is the first garment I have made using knit fabric.  I usually use cotton.  Last time I worked with knit I hated it!!  It is so stretchy and always bunched on me in the machine, so I dreaded working with it.  I found a pattern though that K just loved, she literally would walk around hugging the pattern package, so I knew I had to overcome my hate for knit and attempt to make it for her.  I got a suggestion from a friend to buy a walking foot, and I have to say it was definitely a godsend!  Worked like a dream.  Knit, you are again my friend, well except for cutting you! 

The pattern I used was the dress from New Look 6961.  I didn’t put the applique on it, only cause I don’t want to do that in knit because of my fear of it going all crazy bunchy on me, and I didn’t have the right interfacing to attach to it.  I am not completely happy with it, I think either the bottom ruffle needs to be shortened, or the middle ruffle needs to be a bit longer, it just looks off to me.  Also not fond of the material I used for the bottom ruffle. I am thinking of cutting off that fabric and attaching more of the plaid fabric or maybe I will pick up some yellow for that layer, if I can get it off of K that is…she wore it Sunday, I washed it that night after she was in bed so she could wear it again today (Monday) for school, and she still insisted on wearing it to bed tonight too.  I think she really likes it, hehe.

Thoughts On My Mind

I had a friend recently participate in a fabric charm swap, and it got me thinking of wanting to do one as well, but I can never seem to get into one on time before they fill up.  So it got me thinking, well maybe I will just host one here.  My only concern with that is, I don’t think I have the right following base to host a fabric swap, I believe most of my followers are paper crafters instead of fabric crafters.  So I got this bright idea, what about a paper charm swap?  Doing 6”x6” charms, we could get 4 out of each sheet of paper, or going 4”x4” charms we could get 9 out of each sheet.   What do you guys think? Would you be more interested in doing a fabric swap or a paper swap? Depending on how much interest I have in it, will determine the amount of sheets or yardage of fabric you will need to send.  Please leave some feedback and let me know what you all think. Would you like to participate in either of these types of swaps?

On a side note, I am working on a couple sewing projects, so look for those updates and photos in the next week or so.

 

Edited to add in a brief description as to what a "charm" is:

When you do a fabric charm swap, it is a precut piece of fabric normally in a 5”x5” square, and each person would get 2 or more of each fabric submitted, depending on the number of participants. Every person will receive back what everyone else submitted, and they would use those pieces to create an item, and then submit a photo of the item created using each piece/pattern. In the case of a paper charm swap, I would have everyone send me their sheets of paper along with a SASE, I would do either a 6x6 or a 4x4 precut charm and then I would send those stacks out to all participants in said SASE.

Skirt and Anniversary Card

My 4 year anniversary was on the 31st of August and I made a card for my hubby.  I was happy with the concept, as it turned out as I wanted it to, however I am not happy with the papers I chose for some of it, the frame flourish should have been a different, darker paper cause it blended way too much with the background.

I also had a very happy, yet sad day on Tuesday Sept. 6th, as my little sidekick K started school for the very first time.  My little girl is now a pre-kindergartener!  I made her a new skirt over the weekend and she insisted on wearing it for her first day of school. So that she did.  I used this tutorial to generally make it, I did change it up and fully line the whole thing and I will make further changes on it for the next one, but that is the general idea that I used to make it.  I was quite surprised that I found the fat quarters at, of all places, Big Lots for a buck! I bought 6 of each of these patterns, I cut up 3 of each and still have plenty of them left over.  K wears a 2T in shorts, 3T in pants but only for the length, has a 19.5inch waist, so she really doesn’t need that big of a round.  I had sewn a bunch around and then I measured it up to her, I wrapped it around and doubled over 2 of the strips to give it a little more fullness and a bit of twirliness effect to it, since she so loves to twirl.

And of course I have to post a photo to document K’s first day of school. She looks like a deer caught in the headlights in the photo, but still my little cutie.

Wow On A Roll

I am on a roll with papers this week.  5 new designs were created tonight. There are several different colors done up of each design in the download folders.  You can find them at their link here: Center Floral, Checked, Faded Floral, Plaid, & Vines.  All 5 paper designs are 8”x8” and are 300dpi.  Enjoy them.

 

 

Seeing Spots With An Abstract Eye

2 new sets of papers this evening.  I See Spots and Abstract Eye.  Both sets are all 8”x8” 300dpi.  Please feel free to go grab them.

Superpoints

I am usually not the type to try to get people to help me out on joining a referral type program to help me get “points” to go towards items, but this one actually would really help me out to get money saved up for K’s Birthday & Christmas gifts, and who couldn’t use help with that when you are on a fixed budget and have young children? Anyhow, if I could get a few people to help me out by joining Superpoints under me and just taking 3 minutes a day to click your mouse button a few times to try to earn yourself points to go towards gift cards or other items, please let me know and I can send you an email referral to join under me.

I save my points up and buy Amazon Gift Cards, to which I just add to my Amazon account and am able to buy anything on Amazon my little K’s heart desires.  How could I resist my little K when she has learned that little cute trick of “batting her eyes” at me and daddy?  I just can’t do it!  Can you? 

Remember, you gain points, and I can get extra points from any points you earn on your “super lucky button” so it is really a win win and if you can get other to help you out, you also can earn more points from them as well.  What could be better for a few minutes each day?   So if you are interested in helping out with a few extra funds/gifts for us both, please either email me directly or you can leave a comment below with your email address and I will forward you the referral link.

Letter Size Papers

I decided to test out how others would receive and use an 8.5”x11” 300dpi paper. You can find them HERE to download for personal use.

New Dresses

I have made 2 new dresses.  One for K and one for my great-niece who is a year and a half old.  Since K is so tiny in structure, her cousin, K², are basically the same size, so I was able to make the dress for K² to fit K. Are you confused yet?  Since I finished the dress for K, she has refused to take it off, I have to peel it off of her if we need to leave the house.  They are both available for purchase for $45 each, however, I have yet to list them in the Etsy or Facebook stores. If you are interested, please contact me.

K²’s dress, same pattern as the Super Twirly Dress I made K below.

K’s dress is called "The Gem Dress" by the same designer Brynnberlee.  I bought 5 of her patterns, so there are more to come in the near the future. I did alter the pattern a bit for this one, I added a bottom ruffle to it, to give it some extra length and a bit more flair. Because the photo is kind of blurry, you can’t really see the fabric pattern all to well, so here is a better photo for that, as well.

K loves it!! And has gotten several compliments on it the night we went out for dinner while she was wearing it.