I’m not Martha Stewart. I’m not trying to be. I don’t think I ever really want to be.

But I do have to give her props with her creativity and skills. I decided this year that I hate our Christmas tree decorations. They were mostly shiny balls and nothing of character (in my eyes at least). So I decided that I wanted to start making some ornaments for ourselves as well as for presents.

These ones were slated to be part of the presents I was going to give out, but I didn’t figure out the most important trick to these things until AFTER I already mailed the other ones. So I just stuck them all on my tree this year.

It goes off of the whole paper-mâché idea, using watered down glue and letting it dry over a balloon to make a shape. Instead of paper I used string and wound it around a partially filled balloon and let dry.

Here’s the big problem though.

The glue really stuck to the balloon, and when the balloon was popped so I could just have the string the whole thing just crumpled.

I made about 20 of these the first time around so I was really upset after all that work and glue was wasted because ALL of them crumpled.

So I popped them all, threw them away and sulked. The glue just stuck too much to the balloons, and the glue was not making the string stiff enough to hold its shape when the balloon was popped.

Then I had an idea. It needed some sort of barrier between the balloon and the glue that would still let me get the balloon out when it was dry.

Petroleum jelly!

I do have to say, I think Husband was a little creeped out that I had glue, balloons and petroleum jelly on the table when he woke up that Saturday morning (I get up earlier than him).

I tried to apply it with a paint brush, but found that to be to gloppy and not very effective. Then I thought about how else I could do it and decided on the smooth edge of a butter knife. I was able to use the knife to spread a nicely even and thin layer of the goo around the balloon. Worked like a charm!

-How to-

Materials:

• Balloons
• String
• White glue
• Water
• Petroleum jelly
• A way to hang to dry.

Method

1. Blow up your balloons to roughly the size of an orange. Take the time to shape them into a mostly round shape. I initially thought to use water balloons, but used the regular sized ones since I couldn’t find the others.
2. Using the flat side of a butter knife (or a popcicle stick would work too) spread a thin and even layer of petroleum jelly over the entire balloon. Make sure to do this project over a covered surface!



3. Mix the glue and water in a cup or bowl. You don’t want it too thin so I suggest a ratio of 2:1 glue to water.
4. Cut a length of string and dip it in the glue mix. Get it saturated with the glue and then squeeze out just enough of the glue to the point where it won’t drip when you hang to dry. Leave it a little wet but not super drippy.
5. Wind the string in a random pattern over the greased up balloon. Try to keep it as even as possible around the whole thing.



6. Hang your balloon somewhere safe to dry. I had a metal rack in my office that I used laundry clips to secure it to the sides of the rack. Since your hands might be covered in glue, I would suggest clipping it to something that wont be damaged if a little glue transfers to it.



7. Let dry until completely dry. Carefully pop the balloon and remove using tweezers if needed. Mine came out in one big piece.



OPTIONAL: spray the string balls with spray glue and sprinkle with glitter. I kept mine plain. I was lazy.

8. Hang using a ribbon or string.

With everything going on in life, its been one of the roughest years I can remember.

So with that said, I’m taking an official leave of absence from writing until the first of the year.

This doesn’t mean I haven’t stopped making and creating, but rather need a break from committing myself to anything.

I will be back after the first to show all that I’ve been working on.

Until then, be safe and enjoy yourselves.

She’s been under a lot of stress lately and sometimes you need just a pick me up. I had planned to make this for her as a wedding present, but I decided her birthday would be better since it was sooner.

She’s a very girlie type, likes the pink colors and frilly things. So I chose pretty pink fabrics with some greens as well just to give it a little pop. I’m not sure of the dimensions, I forgot to measure before I left, but Husband (who is holding it in the pic) is almost 6′ so its taller than that since held it above his head, but wide enough to cover someone if they are laying down.

I chose a neutral backing, letting the top shine through. I wanted it to be very subtle, girlie, and traditional.

The quilting part wasn’t so bad if I do say so myself. I haven’t strayed farther than the stitch in the ditch method, but I think it really lent itself to the look of the quilt that I was going for.

She lives in a different state than me, so I shipped her a giant box of goodies to make her laugh. The quilt was wrapped at the bottom of the box, in Christmas wrapping I believe, covered in 15(?) other gifts. There were a few others that I made myself and I’ll share later, but this one was her main gift.

She loved it.

The Husband had been sick for two weeks when suddenly I started feeling it… The exhaustion, the tickle in my chest, the sudden need to sleep for hours. Damn…

It’s been about two weeks since I first came down with it, and now I am finally feeling better. Last week sucked because I was feeling better, but not good enough to do anything worthwhile. I spent hours watching Hulu, finding new shows, and just letting my brain melt until I felt well enough to do anything.

So for two weeks I starting planning all the things I wish I was doing, itching to do. I missed my fabric and sewing machine.

Projects I’m planning:

• Finishing my current quilt.
• Sewing some Dammit Dolls (more on that later).
• Custom camera purse.
• Every day purse.
• More postings on all of my blogs (more later).

There were just so many things going on in my mind…I was going nuts! I’m now finally starting to feel better and starting to work on projects. I’m still in recovery, so projects will be slow going but I can share some past done things while I’m working.

I have all these projects swimming around in my head, waiting to be started or completed, but I’m just too darn sick to actually do them.

Here’s to having a week of getting better so I can start making/finishing things again. If it wasn’t for Hulu.com, I think I would be going absolutely mental. Well at least more mental than I am right now.

Ugh.

This was especially true when I started doing the Quilted Wall Hangings for Christmas presents. 2″ squares. Lots of 2″ squares. In a “random” pattern. I really should have known what I was getting myself into.

So I created my own design board.

So here’s the great thing about having a design board. The fabric pieces stick without needles!

Anyone who has worked with either flannel or felt realizes that EVERYTHING sticks to it. It’s great material but it can be pretty annoying. Here, I used the annoying qualities of flannel to my advantage because I WANT things to stick to it.

Because you can go from non-random patterns…

…To really awesomely random patterns. Plus the pieces will stay up there and you don’t have to worry about moving your pieces and losing your pattern, or worry as much if the breeze hits your small pieces. Some of the pieces might fall if a wind catches them just right but for the most part it works pretty darn well.

So how do you go about making one? Here’s what you need:

Start by laying out your foam core and cutting it to the proper sizes. Depending on where you’re putting it, you might have to piece it together.

When I pieced it together first on the good side (the one without the giant stickers) I used masking tape to hold the seams together. I then flipped it over and started with the glue gun.

I glued in the cracks and then tried to smooth it down with my finger. Yeah that kinda hurt but I got used to it, if you let it sit a second or two it won’t be as hot. I then covered those spots in more masking tape to help hold it together.

At this point I got a little too into the project and didn’t take pictures, but I’ll explain what happened next.

It seemed pretty sturdy at this point but I wanted to make sure that it would hold up as well as make it harder for me to start making holes in my closet door with pins, so I spray glued some poster board to the back. That made it extra sturdy!

I then gave the front side a light spraying of glue and spread some batting over the top. I just wanted to give myself more options to stick pins into and the batting is a little easier to stick pins into than foam core.

Finally, stretch the flannel or felt over the board and secure in the back with either the glue gun, duct tape, or both! I used both. You want to make sure its snug and smooth, much like you would upholster a chair.

It turned out so awesome. I use it every single time I make a quilt. Sometimes the quilt I’m making is too big for the board so that gets a little annoying, BUT its much better than the alternative of taking up floor space and stepping all over my pieces.

Then hang it. I had to make loops of yarn and glue/tape them to the back of the board so I could hang it on hooks. It actually is good that I did that since, if needed, I could move the board and store it somewhere. I haven’t had to but I like that my option is there.

I have a feeling that when we finally move into our “perfect” house that has my “perfect” sewing/craft room that I’ll have an entire wall dedicated to a design board. I don’t know what our perfect place is, but I know we’ll find something eventually.

So I went through the whole unloading of my creative crap into the living room, and now its all clean! Look at that!

Now for the nickel tour…

This has to be the most used part of my room. It’s my cutting/crafting/everything else table. It’s 35″ or so high so its a good height to have so I don’t mess up my back leaning over it while cutting or crafting or gluing or…whatever.

The second most used area. Sewing table! The rack to the right is new, but everything else is just been organized and cleaned.

Ah, the closet. The scariest part of the whole room. It houses so much stuff that I just don’t know what to do with half the time.

The drawers hold all of the fabric, as you might remember. The one thing about these plastic drawers is if you put anything with any weight on top, then they have a tendency to warp. This isn’t good since I wanted more storage space above the drawers.

The husband and I fixed this by putting a piece of MDF on the top, cut to fit at the hardware store. It supports the smaller drawers on top and doesn’t sag. Sweet.

The other part of the new rack fits in the corner of the closet and holds more of the odds and ends. It just barley fits in the space, but it works well.

The other half of the closet has my larger pieces of fabric, and more odds and ends. I just have so much stuff. I can’t believe how much stuff I’ve accumulated over the years.

It takes forever to get things the way you want them, and its an even harder task to keep it the way you want it.

Hope you enjoyed the tour.

Fantastic.

Wonderful.

Why in the world did I figure I should do the same thing to the ENTIRE ROOM?

I’m not really sure what possessed me to do it, but at least now Husband believes me when I say I’m going to take everything out of my room and clean.

EVERYTHING.

I made two large piles of stuff in our living room. Both were roughly 4′-5′ deep and towered over our couches. It took me about 4-5 hours just to get everything out of the room. I didn’t take the furniture out since that would have been a little difficult and bordering on excessive (ha!).

It was rather hilarious when we brought our dog through the house from the garage to go outside (no access to backyard from garage). She usually will start sniffing ANYTHING that’s new or changed in the room. But not this time. She just sat down and wouldn’t move.

She just kept giving Husband looks like “I don’t know what to do! I’m confused!” I felt bad for her because she was obviously weirded out but it was funny too.

But pretty much everything was out of the room.

Take a good look, it’s never going to be this clean again.

My sister was the hardest person to make a Christmas gift for (this is the last Christmas post, I promise). I didn’t think she would like one of the wall hangings I made for other members of the family, mostly because she had JUST graduated law school and hadn’t gotten around to finding her own place yet. She’ll get one later probably but she had no place to put it. We never were really close growing up and we have our differences, but I still really wanted to make her something she would enjoy despite everything.

So I saw this tutorial for a T-shirt scarf on Ruffles And Stuff a while ago and I wanted to try it with something. It looked just so cute!

I also found some really fun and fuzzy green fabric in my stash while I was cleaning that I had no idea what I was going to do with. It seemed perfect.

I swear, this Christmas was all about green and squares. I REALLY am sick of squares at the moment. I need a new shape. I had fabric to make 4 scarves so I just cut it all up, I really don’t know what else I would have done with it otherwise.

The one thing I had issues with in Disney’s tutorial was the fabric started getting stuck in the feed dogs when putting it all together. Plus I have issues getting things to go in a straight line, so I needed a guide of some sort.

I folded them and ironed them to get a nice crease. I was then able to use this crease to get everything in a straight line.

This way I could get it straight while pinning, and it was easier to make sure I actually got the fabric with the pin.

It also made sewing a lot easier! I had a rough guide for a straight line to make sure I actually sewed it properly. Woohoo!

Now for the fix for the fabric getting caught in the feed dogs. I have a large box of paper for a dot-matrix printer that I got from a previous employer, I took several pieces and cut it into thirds so I had one long continuous piece of paper. I then just put it under the fabric as I was sewing and it kept it from getting stuck. I also had to use my walking foot so that it would feed through easier.

Removing the paper is easy. Turn it over and just kinda pull on the perforation. It should pull apart rather easily. If any paper got stuck in the thread it was pretty easy to pull it out and it still left a nice seam.

Overall I liked the scarves. I’m not so sure about my sister though. When she opened the box she gave me this really doubtful look like she didn’t quite understand. I thought it was pretty, soft and fun to wear. If she didn’t like it then there really isn’t anything I can do about it, but it came from the heart.

I was really fortunate this year to be able to make gifts out of things I already had in my stash of stuff. Overall Christmas cost me a total of about $7. Which is really quite incredible for the gifts I did this year. Grandma’s quilt, quilted wall hangings, and some scarves. I do have to say the quilt was impressive but the wall hangings were by far my favorite finished project.

I made a total of 3 of these wall hangings. They were all made with 2.5″ squares and and triangles. I must have cut out hundreds of these squares. Though I’m pretty sure I’ve just about used up all of my green fabric.

It seems like all of my gifts this past year had to do with squares. I can really and honestly say I’m sick of squares.

I started the process by laying out the squares to make the basic shape. Since I was making so many of these I didn’t have a real formula for how many of each fabric I needed, I was able to swap and switch them as needed to make a seemingly random pattern.

It didn’t look like much of a tree at this point, it looked like some sort of really sad pixelated tree from an old video game.

When the triangles were added it finally looked like a tree.

For the background I used a white on white print of holly leaves. It was really hard to photograph but it almost looked like snow in the background. I was tempted to put shiny beads on it like it was decorated but I think that would have taken away from the really pretty and simple look of the tree.

I had quite the difficult decision to make with the thread to use for quilting. I didn’t want to use white and have it show up on the green, and I didn’t want to use green and have it show up on the white. So I ended up going with clear.

“Hur hur… I bet when you were younger you’re favorite color was clear huh? Hur hur…”

Random quotes from work sometimes show up in weird places. Just disregard them.

Overall I loved how it turned out. Husband wanted to figure out something else to give one of them so we could keep one of the trees. I said no. He cried.

Well…Maybe he cried on the inside.

It made me feel really good at Christmas when my Uncle opened the gift and immediately took down a pictures from the wall and hug the tree in its place. That’s when you know they loved it, when they put it up right away to show it off.