Messiest House on the Internet

So for some reason last fall I felt compelled to share a picture of my messy craft room at a blog called My Life and Kids. The blogger (also an Anna) is hilarious and her blog is awesome. Well she was looking for photos of real life houses. You know, so many craft rooms and house pictures these days look picture perfect on blogs and Pinterest, well I don't know about you, but mine doesn't (my house or my craft room!). So for giggles I submitted my craft room while it was at the height of chaos as I was getting ready for a craft show plus working two part time jobs and being a mom & wife, and trying to keep the other parts of the house clean. Not to mention distractions of Pinterest and blogging and Facebook :). Well, Anna from My Life and Kids decided to do a contest with the submissions she received. Yesterday was the first day and I made the second round. And while winning a messy house contest is not the first contest I'd pick to win, well at least it's something I might have a shot at! LOL Not to mention there is a pretty nice vacuum for the winner! Anyway, if you'd like to help me out head on over to the contest at this link http://wp.me/p24MP6-1zJ and vote for "Tutu Messy" (It's in the last matchup on the page!) Thanks for helping friends!

Classmate Valentines

So, DH got me a wonderful wonderful Christmas gift this past Christmas... a Cricut!  It wasn't the top electronic cutter on my list, but I'm not complaining as having one is definitely much more fun than not having one!  :)

So I got to put it to use for some sweet, simple and quick Valentine's for my little guys preschool class.  Although, it was a little bit of a pain because half of my project kept cutting wrong (straight edges on hearts instead of curved, see picture below) even though it looked perfect on screen... hmmm...  Anyone else every run into this problem???

I use Cricut craft room for all my cutting purposes so far.  I actually find the thought of cutting without craft room, straight from a cartridge a little daunting. Not to mention it's nice to use different shapes from different cartridges at one time.  So I used several different heart shapes (in part trying to get pasted the distorted cuts) and then layered on two very small circles.

Twice as many cuts later as it should've taken we had cute little hearts that we stamped with FROM Hunter and slid some little Valentine's day suckers in.  Ta Da!  Sweet simple Valentine's for classmates.

The little guy and I are working on some cute cards for grandparents etc, hopefully we can get a post up about them sometime later this week!  :)


Another fun think we did this week was attend our area's March of Dimes March for Babies family team kickoff event.  This will be our family's 5th year walking in memory of my daughter and my son, both who were born prematurely and passed away soon after birth.  Something I decided to do this year to help raise money for our team was to create some tutu's for our daughter Morgan and do a big fundraiser through my Etsy store.  So, if you are in the market for a tutu (or know someone who is!) please keep my shop in mind as 50-75% of sales for the next 2.5 months will be going to the March of Dimes!  You can read more about our babies stories and our past 4 walks at http://gerardfamilyteam.blogspot.com/.

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Handmade Gifts

Hope everyone had a wonderfully Merry Christmas!    Ours was so busy it passed by even faster than usual.  We had 4 Christmas get together's with different family members from Dec 23rd - Dec 25th and then 3 more up north the weekend before New Years.  And I was frantically finishing up Christmas projects almost right up to each gathering!

Christmas 2011 I did a few handmade gifts but (huge fail) I didn't take a single picture.  Ooops.  This year I did slightly better and got almost everything!

Here it all is...

I actually made three variations of this necklace.  (see still slacking in the picture department!)

I have been LONGING to do a quiet book.  I started a felt doll dress up quiet book last year before Christmas but I got stuck on it and never finished.  This mini quiet book was sort of a last minute decision that I busted out in two evenings.  I can hardly wait to make more.  It was fun and I think it's cute.  And it was a total stash project.  I did not buy a single thing for this, it was all on hand from the ring I used to bind it to the lightweight vinyl for the photo page!

I have been planning a superhero project for my nephew for Christmas for months.  For my little guy for Halloween I made him into a superhero... his name is Hunter and he had a green camo cape with matching mask.  He was a "Super Hunter."  His cousin T thought it was cool so I made him his own superhero outfit for dress up.  It's reversible so it's extra fun!

These were another last minute decision.  I had been browsing Pinterest and saw some t-shirt "rope" infinity scarves.  Shortly after I was working with some fleece remnants I had picked up and noticed that this particular kind of fleece curled very similar to the t-shirt material used in the scarves I saw.  I sewed one up and loved it.  I ended up making a total of 3 for gifts (the third one not shown was the blue and a a dark brown with no buttons) and I have strips cut to make one for myself... someday!

You may have read my fabric labels post...  We gave out about half a dozen rosemary olive oils with homemade artisan bread and about twice as many vanilla's with a homemade brownie mix.  All pinterest inspired.  As a matter of fact, after all my pinterest inspired Christmas crafts, my dear husband decided pinterest was quite possibly useful and now he has an account AND he has used it!  :)

Love those DIY snow globes I've seen.  The person I made this for was my boss at work.  I actually made one the week before Christmas and was putting a finishing touch on it the night before our last day of work and yep, you guessed it, I broke it.  So she had to wait for this part of her present until this past Wednesday since it took some time to dry and she was off between Christmas and New Years.  I actually like this second version better as I thought to use a mirrored candle plate instead of cutting cardboard and trying to perfectly glue it inside.  

Dear Husband's dad can be hard to shop for, and after hearing his tally of DS games which we often buy him or get him gift certificates for (25!) and not getting any helpful hints from him or significant other I decided to make them travel pillows as they do a fair amount of travel.  I actually bought DH one for Christmas so I could use it as a pattern.  They didn't turn out too bad for a first time project by a novice sewer just loosely tracing out the pillow for a patter.  :)  I made removable covers so they could wash the covers.  I made a third one of these for my almost 16 year old cousin who will be traveling to Italy this spring with a class from school.  The third one turned out even better.  

Handmade gifts are time consuming, often stressful (especially if you are a procrastinator like me!) and sometimes a little nerve wracking in this day and age of gift receipts.  But they are also fun and satisfying.  It's very satisfying to put so much thought and love into a gift for someone.  Hopefully everyone who received one of our handmade gifts will enjoy it!


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