Crafts

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Christmas Crafts

My mom loves Christmas. She has over 2 dozen large rubbermaid totes filled with Christmas decorations and ornaments (not including large lawn decorations).

She also loves doing ‘grandma activities’ with the kids at Christmas time. Some years it’s gingerbread houses, or gingerbread trees. This year it’s candy trains. She starts buying candies at the after Christmas sales the year before (only the hard candies usually), and then buys the chocolate stuff in November. They turned out pretty cute.

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For her gift this year, I made a quilt. It is far from perfect but, it’s the first large quilt I have ever actually finished (I’ve done a couple baby quilts). I am lucky to have a friend with a long arm quilting machine who did all the quilt work in time (don’t worry I paid her for her time). I think it turned out pretty good, if you aren’t a perfectionist. Now my mom has a Christmas Quilt to go along with all her other decorations.

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And it’s not a craft, but my mother, me and my daughter all performed at a Nativity Festival nearby. It’s so neat to see all the different Nativity sets from around the world.

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Halloween Wreath

I love to make these super simple ribbon wreaths. This year I made one for Halloween.

You just need a foam wreath form, several spools of ribbon, and small straight pins.

You cut the ribbons into small 3-4 inch long strips. Then take a ribbon, make a loop, insert a pin where they overlap, and insert it all into the foam wreath. There are lots of tutorials online about this if you need a more pictorial walk-through.

IMG_3734As a bonus, you can get wreath forms at the dollar store during certain times of the year, so it can be a pretty cheap way to get a unique wreath for you front door.

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Lego Birthday

It should come as no surprise that my 8 year old likes the Lego Movie (don’t all 8 year old boys?). So, for his birthday he requested a Lego party.

Lego PartyI have a 1.5 inch circle punch, so it was pretty easy to make the decorations. We had this lego block banner and some lego head balloons (yellow balloons with faces drawn on in sharpie).

For activities we did “pin the head on the lego man”, a lego tower building contest, lego coloring (blank lego body for them to design a costume), and a lego pull-string pinata (homemade). For treats we had pizza, cut in squares with pepperoni lego dots, and some regular finger foods. In the thank you/goody bags we had some brick candies and a small lego set I found at wally-world for a couple bucks a piece. They also got some extra candy from the pinata. It was a hit.

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Baby Gift Set

My brother and sister-in-law are having a baby girl this month (they currently have 3 boys), so I made a small gift. The sweater is from the pattern “Helena”, but I made it with buttons instead of a tie closure. The booties are “Furrylicious Baby Boot” pattern. These are actually the 3rd pair I’ve made from this pattern. Super cute and fairly easy to make. And the bonnet is “Béguin de Printemps”. I liked how the picot edging matched the sweater. Hope my new niece likes it!

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Genealogy Scrapbook

For Father’s Day I made my dad a family history/genealogy scrapbook. It has 5 generations of info. I don’t have a lot of family photos, so I filled it mostly with documents and records I have found online. I translated the stuff not in English. At the back of the book I also added a 9 generation fan chart. I used Shutterfly, to make it into a book. I made almost all the pages individually in photoshop, with templates I created just for this project, and digital scrapbooking freebies from around the web.