At the beginning of this year I got all sad reading everybody’s reviews of 2011 with lists of things they’ve done.  The thing is, I did *lots* of crafting and sewing in 2011, but I did a poor job of documenting it.  And I miss blogging about everything.

So, for myself, my goal for 2012 is to blog more about my crafts.  And it only took until late January to get that goal written out!  ha!

Anyway, I love show and tell.  And although this is a brief hello, there is definitely more to come.

As evidence that I’ve been busy, here’s a picture of 4 different bindings ready to go on quilts!

They look rather patriotic together, don’t they? The red ones are for semi-patriotic quilts — I at least plan on donating them to Quilts of Valor.  The blue one is for a space quilt, and the one binding is for a very feminine floral quilt my mom made.  I called dibs on it, and she gave it to me all done except for the trimming up and the binding.  Pretty good deal if you ask me!

Don’t mind me, I’m just busily sewing putting together my daughters’ Halloween costumes.

Seriously, though, those eyelets kicked my behind until I finally went out to the kitchen and brought out the small holepunch to punch holes in the fabric instead of cutting out the teeny-tiny holes.  And of course I hammered some of them too much and needed to replace many of my suddenly mis-shapened  eyelets.  Methinks it would have been much easier to buy the plier set to put them in, but that would have meant spending $26 instead of just $3.50.

And,  now back to the sewing room to keep working on these Rapunzel costumes.  Doing 2 of them is more difficult than I imagined.

Unfortunately, my sewing machine is sick.  Poor thing.  I was sewing along on new dresses for the girls when all of a sudden there was a loud clunk and the whirr of a non-moving machine.  After I cleaned up the mess of thread and the almost-broken needle, I realized that the bobbin casing is now hitting the machine and won’t move.  Boo.  So, the machine is at the sewing machine hospital for an estimated 10 day stay and I’m here, twiddling my thumbs and fretting about the things on my sewing list.  Ahh, sadness.

With this free time, though, I was going through pinterest and happened upon some of my quilts pinned onto people’s boards, and even repinned with great comments.  Had me SO excited, and it was so much fun to see people really admiring my work!

And in the meantime, just one more week until summer is officially over and school starts for my Elena.  A first grader.  Oh MY!

Finally, since I couldn’t go pictureless, above is one of my girls this summer inspecting one of their many science experiments: white carnations in food-dyed water.  The blue water definitely worked the best!

Our new craft, shown in its natural habitat:  surrounded by other crafts!  We just received the bookshelf on the right and it has become our kids’ craft shelf and resides in the kitchen, as you can see.  It was filled within 2.67 seconds of being named Craft Shelf.

This is a little project that my girls and I made for my husband’s birthday.  I totally stole the idea from here.  (I originally found it on Pinterest through a friend but thought I’d source the original location.)  The girls chose the fabric for their handprints — they  both chose blues since that is Daddy’s favorite color.

We gave it a little late to my husband because I was, once again, avoiding the quilting part of the project.  (Do we see a theme here???)

But I needed to do it, and this time I went with a bit of a plan.  I decided to…PRACTICE.  Sounds so simple, doesn’t it?

I started with deciding how to quilt it.  I wanted the same echoing around the hands as the original, but I wanted to do something else in the remaining space.  I did practice free-motion quilting around the hands on some scraps, but that ended up too inconsistent for my liking still.  Echoing takes a lot of precision! and skill! and even more practice than I was willing to do!  So I simply sewed it normally, which was really easy, even with lots of curves, on this little piece.

As for the remaining space, I poked around a website that has some good tips and designs for free motion quilting, A Few Scraps, and found a cute little heart idea.  Perfect.  I practiced drawing it on paper first, and then practiced sewing it on scraps.  And then it really was just perfect when I quilted it on my little piece.

I’m swooning over my hearts!  Even up close they look Fab!

Thank goodness this isn’t a real quilt though and instead framed up — the back of the piece is a bit, um, knotty.

The girls were thrilled with the final product, and their Daddy liked it too.  As he told Julia, “now you really will be 3 forever!”  (He often asks the girls to not grow up and stay 3 or 5 or whatever age they are forever.  Julia insists that she *has* to grow up!)

Yup, she’s 3 forever…

I definitely didn’t want to start with the space quilt — I like it too much to ruin it.  So, it was time to pull out a charity quilt and start quilting.

This quilt has problems, but it really isn’t wavy despite its appearances.  It’s just the grass making it appear that way.

And my goodness, although I seem to have finally conquered my tension and thread-breaking issues, I definitely have a long way to go with my quilting.  My stitch length is extremely erratic and I couldn’t seem to decide where I wanted to go and when.  And then the thread I chose ended up being a bit too dark and shows up SO much instead of disappearing into the quilt as I wanted.  SO. VERY. FRUSTRATING.

These blocks are vintage sheets I received from an exchange.  As you can see here, some are pretty thread-bare.

The ladies at my craft get together rolled their eyes at me and my dramatics, but I know I’m not satisfied.  I’ll definitely be doing another practice quilt or two before I start the space quilt.

I also need some work on my 100% machine binding.  This one was tons better than my previous attempts.  I’ll definitely be hand-stitching the binding on quilts I really care about, but I know some charities have asked for machine bindings and I thus wanted to practice.

And really, this quilt isn’t crap.  It will be given to charity and I think it will be well-loved and won’t fall apart.  I just need to get better.

This time we all sewed, and sewed a lot!

One of the group did baby blocks for her little one, another worked on a quilt for her little one, and the other did a wonderful flowing skirt for herself (after announcing that her little one had more than enough stuff at the moment!)  (Sorry, no pictures of any of it!)  And me?  I worked on a little dress.  A dress made of penguin fabric.

The funny thing about this little dress is that the girl moving away loves penguins and has a newborn daughter.  And she was so intent on her project that she never once noticed that I was using penguin fabric!  And of course thus also never once noticed that I was making a little gift for her!

The dress won’t fit for quite a while — it is a size 1.  But it was terribly fun to make, and even more fun to give!  (And yippee!  I did it all start to finish at the craft night – thank goodness!)

And yes, you’ve seen me do this pattern before.  Probably 5 or 6 times now.  It is New Look 6796.  I adjusted the sleeves in the same manner as I did last time.  Hopefully they’ll be sized right since I was just making up the size of the straps as I went along.

Oh, I also had a tool recommendation: the Fasturn.  If you have to turn a ton of straps inside-out (as seems to be the case with making little girl dresses), this tool is awesome.  Just makes things much easier.  Thanks Mom for giving some to me!

Happy travels C!  We’ll miss you crafting with us!

1. Elena has previously lost 5 teeth, and 4 of those times the tooth fairy paid her $1 for the privilege of getting her tooth.  However, when Elena lost tooth a tooth at Disney World this past spring, the tooth fairy paid out a little more: $5.  Elena was not too excited when the tooth fairy went back to paying just $1/tooth.

So when she lost yet another tooth last week, this time Elena left a note.

It reads “$5  I love [apparently you, although she forgot to write that]  End  Elena”.  That is her tooth in a little treasure chest on the pillow.  Elena got the treasure chest when she lost one of her teeth at school.

And the tooth fairy, a particularly masculine one who felt the creative note deserved a reward, paid out the requested $5.  Elena proudly showed it off to me, telling me all about “I TOLD YOU it would work Mommy, and you didn’t think it would!”  Hmmm, I think Mommy was overruled.

2. Elena took her newly-earned $5 and spent it at….the rock store!  She’s the proud owner of some crystals and some geodes.

Trying to break the geode.

3. The geodes were pretty fun, and the rock store was surprisingly big, busy and interesting, with all sorts of crystals and fossils, etc.

4. Elena was at the pool this week telling some girls about her note to the Tooth Fairy, etc., and the girls proceeded to tell her that “We think our parents are the tooth fairy!”  I’m not sure yet whether their comments were damaging to Elena’s beliefs.

5. Julia’s got something funky going on around her mouth.  For no discernible reason, 4 times in the past 6 months it looks like blood vessels have burst all around her mouth.  Neither I nor the doctors can explain it, but it especially freaked me out the 1st time.  Here’s the most recent occurrence, last week:

Anyone have any experience with this?  It doesn’t bother her at all and just gradually fades away.  SO ODD.

6. The girls painted some fabric last Friday.  More on this will be shown soon.  Promise.

7. We dressed up as cows for free chicken on July 9th.  It was Cow Appreciation Day, you know!

8. Seriously, $15 worth of free food just for sticking some black felt spots onto some white clothes is AWESOME.

9. Why hello drought!

This is a fishing hole we went to with some friends.  It has obviously seen better days.  It reeked of dead fish, and they could be seen everywhere.  The hose set up in the pond is to get some more oxygen flowing in what water is left.

10. One poor little fish was caught, which all the girls delighted in, and was soon enough returned to the pond to live a nice long life…of probably 2-3 days tops at the rate the pond was disappearing.

The fish pond was not a quiet place. Instead, it was full of squealing and laughing girls as they played with worms.

And that’s enough for now!

This certainly took a lot more time than I expected, especially since the blocks were made years ago, but the tops are done!  These tops measure approximately 66” x 85” and will certainly fit a wounded soldier well.  I’ll show them in full when they are complete.  Don’t expect them *too* soon simply because I will hand them off to my Mom to quilt next time I go to Houston, and I’m not sure when that will be.  In the meantime, I’ll go ahead and cut the binding for them and maybe stop procrastinating on some of my other projects…

I recently moved one project over to the kitchen table.  I worked on it diligently at night, claiming to my husband that I moved out there so I could watch the same TV shows as him and “be” with him.  That was, in part, true.  But in fact the other reason I moved it over was because my GOODNESS, my sewing room/guest bedroom is a MESS and just look at all the space behind the sewing machine here.  Such easy sewing!

My husband called me out and wanted his kitchen table back so my project is back in my sewing room.  At this time, all the individual rows are together except for the setting triangles.  Let me tell you, figuring out the necessary size for those setting triangles made my head hurt!  The sashing seemed to make it so much more confusing.

Hopefully I’ll be done piecing these quilts soon and I’ll ship them off to my Mom.  We will be donating these quilts to Quilts of Valor, certainly a worthy organization.

A month or so ago, I picked up this blue-background floral knit fabric.  Immediately I knew it had to be dresses for my girls.  Elena especially *loves* the comfort of knit dresses and will almost always choose them over regular cotton dresses.

Elena is *starting* to smile a bit better for the camera — not quite so cheesy.

I patterned these dresses off of some other knit dresses the girls have from Target last summer.  So I sized the dresses up and sewed them together.

In the meantime, Julia looks mischievous instead of cheesy when she smiles for the camera.

The hardest part of putting these dresses together was the pink bias I made for the straps.  I used knit fabric I had on hand which is unfortunately a little thin.  It seems to stretch a little much and the dresses start sagging by the end of the day as the straps give way.  Oops.  I don’t really know how to fix this problem except maybe use a bit more substantial knit fabric for the bias.  The dresses I patterned from also have knit straps and don’t have that same problem, so…?

The girls wanted to stand *in* the sunflowers.  I was too scared of snakes to let them go any further.

I have a fair amount left of the fabric so I’ll be returning that to the free table.  Maybe someone else will come up with a use for the rest!

I always thought sunflowers were a fall flower.  I’d just always see them in fall floral adjustments and not growing out in the wild.  Turns out they are a great summer flower, and luckily I took these pictures when I did because just 2 short days later the owner of this little field mowed them all down.

In  the meantime, I have 2 very successful MATCHING (Oh NO, we have created a monster!) dresses for the lucky price of $0 to me!  Thanks anonymous donor!