Birthday and Valentines Cards

Now that I have returned to work, my crafting time has come to almost a complete halt…dang government for wanting money for everything.  I did however sneak in some time to make a few cards after everyone else was in bed for the night.  I was also able to make some valentines for K’s class, since she insisted on having Alvin the Chipmunk (her current obsession) on her cards and since he isn’t “IT” right now, there was nothing in the stores, so I had to make them for her.

 

My hubby’s 42nd birthday was on the 12th, so I made him cards from both K and I.  The one from K was one I just made up in Photoshop Elements, the owl one I made using both Photoshop and just a paper cutter.

Valentines day card that I designed using SCAL3 and my Cameo.  The pink is an overlay on a solid red background.

I ended up making 18 of these Alvin the Chipmunk Valentine cards for K’s class. Only took K 3 hours to write her classmates names and her name on the back of each of them. granted that was spread out over the whole weekend, but ugh, what a pain that was, maybe I should have just been like the majority of the class and filled them out myself for her…but we were asked to let them do it so they could get the handwriting skills in, so I did as was asked, but when your child has ADD, it takes patience on all ends to get through such a simple task, something we all need to work on here.

And Life Happens…

With our return to WI, and closer to being “back home”, we have attended a family reunion, K has started 4K at school, hubby started a new job, I have returned to work, a year earlier than planned, but  more financial issues reared their ugly head and it became a necessity for me to do so.  I have done some work on a few odds and ends projects. I have hemmed some pants.  I have made some more crochet hair clips for a friends daughter back in CA.

I have made some washcloths.

  I made some Halloween treat boxes for K’s new class.

A birthday card from K to her old teacher.

I made an owl hat for K and designed a skull mohawk hat for hubby.

And I am currently working on a sweater for K. It’s been ripped out about 5 times now, but it is slowly getting there, just taking longer now that I am back to work.

A Little Time To Get Back Into Crafting

We are moved!  Almost completely settled in.  I have my sewing machine set up, my serger is still in the box, as is my cameo, and my crochet hooks are still down in the basement in a box. I have done a few small sewing projects for my husband, basically making him cozy’s for some camping gear and boxing a bag he had.  Last night I made some stickers for an order from a gal on Facebook.  Tonight I managed to make a few new scrapbook papers.  If you would like other colors or sizes, please feel free to ask for them. These papers are all 12”x12” papers at 300dpi. And you can download them HERE.  ENJOY!

   

 

Hopefully now that we are almost set up completely, I can get back into creating.  I have a few dresses I want to make for K as she starts school in a week and a half. I received my CB09 blade today for my cameo, so when necessary I finally have a backup blade for her, and will be more willing to play around more with different weights and materials on her. 

Very Thankful For Family!

If you read my last post, you will know that we were struggling to make ends meet after the lay off and had no clue how we were going to get funds together for us to move. No bank was going to lend us a penny, since neither of are currently working.  We were so lost.  Let me just say my FIL is a true godsend at this time.  He was willing and able to loan us the amount we needed for our move.

I did talk my hubby into staying here one extra month so we can let our daughter graduate with her pre-K class in June.  Our house is slowly getting packed up, A LOT of it is getting purged via craigslist & freecycle & friends.

As of June 22, our place here in CA will be packed up on a truck and shipped to WI.  We will leave here either the 24th or 25th, after we do final clean up.   We will drive till we can’t handle the drive anymore, it’s a 22 hour drive to our first destination, and stop to sleep at a hotel or if we make it to the in-laws in OK, all the better to save us money.  We will stay there for a few days and head up to WI by end of the week.  Will stop in IL to finally meet a friend of mine face to face, we met on a message board when we were both pregnant 5 years ago! but living across country from each other, we never got to meet in person, and now we finally will!  Then after our late dinner with her and her family, we will finish the drive to my brothers house, where we will be staying until we can get established finding jobs and getting our own place.

I am so thankful for family in our time of need, and honestly do not know what we would do without them.  They will never know how much this truly means to me and my immediate family.

Our daughter is so excited about moving, she asks me at least 3 times a day, if we are going to Uncle T’s house now.  Every time we get in the car, she thinks we are going, and gets bummed when I tell her it will be another 2 months before we go.  Of course at 4, 2 months is 2 hours later..  She is so excited to play with her cousin.  And so excited to be able to go spend the night at grandmas.  I have decided that I am going to make a calendar to help her understand and mark off the days till we move. 

So there you have it, things are looking up so much in the last week.  That being all said, the sewing machine is already packed up, the cameo is still out, but will be packed up soon. I do have a friend wanting me to make her daughter a couple hats, so I will keep out my crochet hooks and the yarn, but other than that my crafting is pretty much put on permanent hold till after the move, and possibly till after we find our own place.

Where has all my crafting mojo gone?

This is a pretty personal post for me, so if you would rather not read about my personal life, then you may want to skip this blog post.

You may have noticed my crafting blog here has completely been lost in the last few months.  Why you may ask? Well stress is the answer.  In December, my husbands job downgraded and he got put onto part time.  He knew it was coming, sorta, they are always slow around Christmas, and there really wasn’t anyone else they could cut, as they were already down to their bare minimum of employees, all they had left were managers, including my husband, but he was what you would consider middle management.

In late January, I was diagnosed with depression and was put on antidepressants.  I never got to the point of wanting to hurt or kill myself or others, but a mild case of depression in the least.  I had lost all motivation to do anything, crafting and doing anything with my daughter were feeling like chores to me, instead of fun and an outlet.  I sat on the couch all day, didn’t care what my house looked like, that the dishes piled up, that the house really needed to cleaned, spending time with any friends, let alone leave the house or even want to shower, none of it mattered to me.  I was sad all the time, I wanted to sleep all the time, and every little thing just got me flustered and irritated and I would have loved to just stay in bed all day long, but I couldn’t, I had a family to take care of.  Things are better now, I still have days when the meds just aren’t enough, but that is my choice.  My doctor wanted me on 40mg of the med, but I noticed a huge difference in my mood and motivation at just 20mg, so I told her I would not go up on my meds unless I don’t feel it isn’t working.

In March, we came to realize that my husbands company isn’t picking back up this year, and I was finally able to talk him into moving back to Wisconsin where my family is located.  We started looking into moving companies to move us across country.  The quotes were a lot higher than what we expected them to be, so on a tight budget we went so we could save up for the move. 

April brings us to our current state, 2 weeks ago, my husband got laid off. Stress has super kicked in.  We don’t know when his unemployment will kick in, and here in CA, they have a cap on the amount you can receive on unemployment each week, which happens to be even less than what he was getting working part time. Funds were already tight, now I have no clue how we are going to save up for a move, let alone even make bills.  Once we get out of CA though, things will be better cause we won’t have the ridiculous high rental costs, so things will definitely be less stressful, but we have no clue how we are going to get the funds to do a move now.  Which leaves not only myself stressing, but my husband as well. 

And that is where things stand, we have been selling items we are not planning on taking with us for the move, FreeCycling other items that aren’t worth much, but still have plenty of use left in them. We have also decided a lot of the items we were planning on taking with us, will no longer be going so we can downsize the costs of the move.

Valentine’s Day

This year, with it being K’s first year of school for Valentines Day, I had to put my hand forward and make her “cards” for her. I had to make a total of 40 of them, 27 for her class, and 13 for a party we have to go to after class that day. I used my cricut to cut a file found on SVGCuts.com named Sweet Treat Bags.  I need to add some more embellishments to them, just need to find something in my many stashes as to what I want to use. I bought some 3x4 bags and a stack of K&C Valentine paper over at Michael’s.  I filled the bags with some sweethearts and some valentine M&M’s.

 

I also printed up some Subway art for the walls that I found over on Pinterest, I am addicted to this site!

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.