Pot Holders

It was a homemade kind of Christmas this year.

I made a couple more, but had given them away before I took the pictures.

Guess who?

Who's everyone's favorite feline with foot fashion sense?

Why Puss in Boots, of course!

I made this Puss in Boots marionette for Shrek the Musical at the local community theater. I had been wanting to make a Cat puppet for the Babe for about a year now, and this was a good incentive. I don't like how the eyes turned out, so I may change them. I also want to experiment with adding stripes with different dyes or markers. The kids love playing with it regardless.

I made him a marionette for the play, but I prefer hand puppets, so he is a hand puppet, too! I just clipped his mouth shut on the inside. I'll probably snip the strings and keep him as a hand puppet.

He sure is a fun puppet.

Houndstooth - in progress

 I have seen houndstooth patterns all over for the past few years. A couple years ago I realized how easy it would be to make a quilt with this pattern and discovered there are TONS of examples online. Most of them have just two colors, but I like more color, so I was inspired by the scrappy one above.

I decided to finally just do it. I mapped out a size with colors that I like and have scraps of.

And I got started! I hope I can finish it soon!

Puppet flashback

Two and a half years ago I made two puppets that I never posted. Technically I never finished them, but I probably never will, so the introductions are past due. One of them has been played with a LOT. He even was given the name "monster" by my then 18-month old. Meet Monster.

He is loved at our house. In fact, I've had to repair him twice because he wasn't made sturdy enough to play with long term. His ears are sitting in my ribbon box and his hair seemed like such a big job I never got around to it.

The second little nameless Miss was intended to be my puppet that I would want to play with and use to interact with the kids. I made her eyes green like mine and her fabric red, which is one of my favorite colors. She was going to be a little bit of a diva, so I wanted to give her lips and eyelashes.

She has two major flaws. The first - I ran out of the fabric before I finished connecting the body to the head. Notice the lack of neck? There is just a few inches too little to make it look decent.

The second flaw, and this one was enough to make me not even interested in finishing her - once her hair was on, she overwhelmingly reminded me of Tori Spelling circa 90210. It's the chin and lips. I kind of detest this puppet now. Isn't that sad?

Anyway, I'm getting excited to make more puppets, so stay tuned. We'll see if it happens. I have a few other wish list projects on my plate. I plan on making a post about those soon to keep me motivated and inspired.

Play Quilt

 I finished Henry's quilt! I think it turned out pretty fun! I tried not to buy new fabric for it, and I think I only got three new fat quarters, otherwise the whole thing is scraps or fabric I already had.

My favorite square is the sun, but the mountain corner with the hills was pretty exciting, too.

Boy Quilts!

There is SO MUCH cute girl fabric out there. . . not so much for the boys. I just had a boy and two of my sisters are on the verge of having boys. I wanted to try my hand at making boy blankets.


I really love the way they both turned out. One of the best parts? The blankets are backed with minky fabric.

They're really luscious. My husband compared them to the truffles of quilts. The outside is crisp and smooth and the inside is soft.

The above two quilts are for my two sisters, but I didn't want to leave out Henry. Here is the beginning of baby boy quilt #3.

Warning: this may burn your retinas.

I made this quilt for the Babe's big girl bed. When I picked out the individual colors, I thought they looked fun together. When it was all done, it was really bright.

It's the first time I've done binding on a quilt that was separate fabric from the backing. I like it!

More t-shirts

I made some more t-shirts for a special occasion. This was the babe's shirt:

This was the husband's:

And this was mine, "Prego Peterson":

It was a fun way to make the announcement.

Quiet Book

For Christmas I made the Babe her very own quiet book.

I wanted something that would keep her happy and quiet for an hour of church. This is close.

The first page is a mailbox with removable envelopes.

In the envelopes I put flat things, like buttons and fabric flowers and stickers. She loves taking stuff out and putting it all back together.

Next page is colors and numbers. The color balloons are velcro and the numbers are flaps with fruits and vegetables behind them.

This next page is my favorite, but also the most frustrating. I never worked with metal eyelets before, but I now know they are no good on felt. They need to be used on stronger material (like canvas) or they will just fall off.

This page is also frustrating for Grace, cause she can't quite get anything on her own yet. The button is hard, the zipper has to be held at the top with one hand while you unzip with the other, the snaps are too hard, and of course she can't tie shoes yet.

But the prize for opening each element is a fun texture. In the shoe is a fleece mouse which you can't see in this photo.

The next page has a lot of potential and I plan to build on that. At this point the Babe doesn't spend too much time on this page, but when I get more clothes done, I hope she will.

The last page is a shape tree. All the shapes come off and can be put in the little blue pocket. Or piled in the corner of the closet in the office, which is where I found all the shapes last week. That is one disadvantage to having removable parts - they're bound to get lost. Luckily, these are all pretty easy to make again if it comes to that.

That's it! I made two of these books at the same time, which consumed TONS of my time right before Christmas. I didn't get any pictures of the second book, but it's basically the same. In the future, if I ever make one of these again, I need to remember to reinforce the fabric for the pages. The thin fabric needs a thick interfacing or I need to use a thicker, stronger fabric. This just feels too flimsy to stand up to some of the velcro dots, unfortunately. I hope it will last, anyway.

Valentine Cards

I {heart} fonts. I know a lot of people who shop at my work site do too, and it's my job to keep that love alive. Here was some inspiration I made on how to use fonts awesomely for V-day.

Check out the blog here.

I got Jimmered

We're big Jimmer Fredette fans around here. I made these shirts at the request of my husband. We used printable iron-on fabric transfers and I designed the graphic.

If you are a Jimmer fan, I am happy to share my images with you if you want to make your own shirts just let me know. Go Cougars!

Some work project miscellany

I'm back! Hurray! Don't be fooled by my lack of posts, I really have been working on lots of projects and experiments. I'm a little bummed at myself that I don't have many of them documented, but I can back-track a little, especially for the ones I took photos of. The obvious ones I have photos for are work, so I'll start with that.

Below is a card I made in July for a blog post. I threw it together quick with whatever paper I could find. It's a little hodgepodge, but I like the way it turned out.

The below image also represents a blog post I did for work explaining how to make digital stickers with dingbats in Photoshop for digital scrapbookers. Writing tutorial type blogs takes a lot of effort! Probably the most elaborate effort I took for a blog post tutorial was this one from last year about making calendars. Whew, I'm exhausted just looking at how long it is. But it inspired some people, and that was the point.

This photo below is my niece, Sofie. I designed the frame(s) as a product to sell and I really like how they turned out and how they work together on this photo. This "shabby chic" style is still popular after going strong for like five years. I still like the style myself, but I'm anxious to see what predominant fad will come next. (As a designer, I always want to be on top of those sort of things.)

For another work blog post I went a little mason jar crazy. Below isn't even all of the labels I made, these are just the ones I have photos of. My canning adventures with tomatoes and peaches will have to wait for a different, non-work post.

Another product I designed that I was pleased with was a dingbat designed to be used as simple jack-o-lantern patterns. To demonstrate, I had to carve one myself, of course.

I also did a whole shebang of Halloween decor, but I've already blogged about that here and here, so no need to beat a dead horse.

More to come... when I have time...

Last minute

card for work.

A sign for Grace

I like these kind of crafts, the kind that take less than a half hour but look nicer than that.

I'm not really fond of the font I used for "GRACE" so one day I might change it. I really like the font for "finds beauty in everything" and if you're interested you can find it here.

Wallflowers

Shortly after we moved in, I decided I had to make big flowers to add some color to the vast whiteness in the Babe's new room.

I had envisioned just what I wanted, but decided to look online to see if there were some examples of how to do it. I couldn't find any examples of just what I wanted. I found some tiny wire flowers with stretched sheer fabric, but I wanted quilting fabric. So I made it up.

I must say, I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out. They've really cheered up the room. I still want to make a few more smaller ones to trail around the wall, but I probably won't get to them for awhile.

I used 20 gage floral wire to keep the petals stiff and assembled them all together in floral foam. They were easy to hang on the wall--I just poked a hole in the foam and voila! As I was making these I wondered to myself how many hundreds of people had made the very same sort of thing, but any photos just hadn't made it to the top of the google image searches. All the supplies can be found at Walmart. I wonder these sort of things about my crafts often... "how many people are making this very same thing right now..."

Baby puppet

The family is comlete!

This is the baby, my personal favorite of the family. It took longer than I planned because I accidently packed some of my sewing/craft equipment away before I meant to. It feels good to have them done!

Cousins Book and scrapbooking

My family is having a reunion this summer and it will be the first time the Babe will meet cousins, aunts and uncles. To help her not feel like everyone is a stranger I made a book just for her.

Every family has a two page spread and every cousin has an individual photo. It's a pretty simple book and was quick to put together. Some of the pictures are poor quality, but I'll take new ones this summer. I took many photos from the computer where the resolution is 72 dpi and printed them, where the resolution is 300 dpi. But I don't care. The point is to recognize faces, and the babe LOVES the book. It's totally cute how she points at faces. To fill up the book I printed a couple other pages that I had made in the past that I thought might interest her.

As I was looking through digital scrapbook pages I had made over the past two years, I realized how many pages I'd actually made. I make pages for work periodically to advertise whatever fonts we are currently promoting. Some of my layouts I do in a rush and am kind of embarrassed with the final, but many of them I like and they just sit in folders on my computer collecting digital dust. I thought I'd post some of those for rememberance sake.

This silly face layout I printed and added to the Cousin book. The Babe seeks out this page and points at each face and sticks her tongue out. It cracks me up!