It's not all wine and finished projects in these parts. Trust me there are plenty of half done--half assedly done--things shoved in various corners of my studio. This afghan is not destined for one of those corners (I hope). It is actually coming along quite nicely.  I fell in love with this vintage afghan that Miss Rachel from Smile and Wave picked up at her local thrift. I had been looking around for crochet patterns I could use to make a blanket for my son, but nothing seemed right until that blue number popped up. A commenter on pinterest pointed me to a pattern on ravelry called the Vintage Fan Ripple Stitch Pattern, which turned out to be exactly the same as the original afghan. I went out and bought a bunch of yarn the next day.

I liked all the blues in Rachel's blanket, so I stuck with that and threw some gray in for good measure. Ravelry came to the rescue again when I ran out of the light blue yarn I was using. The heathered light blue was by Berroco Vintage, which I had in my stash, and when I went back to my local yarn store for more they were all out. After a look on the interwebs, I discovered Berroco didn't even make that colorway anymore. Luckily there was someone on ravelry who had two skeins of it for sale! I don't know why the two rows of light blues look different in the photo--trust me they are not. Oh also there are more nerdy crochet details on ravelry. 

The other half done project is not coming along as nicely. The first time I made the Wiksten Tank it was nice, but it was a smidge small.  So I cut a medium this time. Well turns out the first one wasn't small, it was just that the material I used didn't have any give to it. The medium is too big everywhere and if I try to take the sides in, the wide set straps make me look, umm, beefy.  I can't shove it in the corner because this fabric was expensive as hell. So here's my plan: I'm going to cut this tank apart, cut the small from it (a little lower down), and then add a band of color to the bottom. What do you think? I picked up some navy linen that I think will work. I'm hoping it won't look hackneyed.

I took all the homemade, wonky, gluey hearts down from the wall in my kids' room and it looked so sad and bare. The room needed some cheering up! First I was thinking I would let the kids go crazy with washi tape, then I thought maybe we could make some paper flowers and tape them up, but then I saw this amazing wall.

My daughter and I headed to the craft store to buy some [faux] flowers. I'm usually not down with fake flowers--or even buying that much plastic at once--but I have to admit some of these flowers are very,very pretty. The weedy looking ones are my favorite. I do believe I'm the only woman in the world buying plastic weeds.

Luckily all the fake flowers were half off, so we went a little crazy picking them out. My daughter fell hard for the bubblegum pink roses covered in fake water droplets. I was not so smitten, but she was so in love. When we got home I was messing with the flowers to see if I could get them to look a bit more natural and when I pulled back the petals on the rose, it turned into this absolutely gorgeous bloom. You can see how the rose looks closed and open above.

To hang all the flowers on the wall, I cut the bunches apart with a wire cutter and trimmed most of the leaves off as well. Then marked five rows on the wall. Working from the top down I simply taped each flower up so it was in line with the one above it. My rows aren't perfectly spaced or perfectly straight, but the it's the contrast of orderliness and nature I was going for--that's what drew me to the first photo of flowers on the wall. Also, it's just plain awesome to have a field of flowers on your bedroom wall.

For 20 dollars and an hour of our time, we managed to get spring to come a bit earlier in Wisconsin. Not bad, not bad at all.

Wow, sorry. I didn't mean to be gone for two weeks. After the craziness of Christmas, the littlest got a horrible stomach bug. Then this past week I came down with a crappy case of strep throat. Remind me to be extra nice to my kids when they have a fever, because it is super sucky. I am finally on the mend and I know it's a little late for a 2011 retrospective, but I was sick so indulge me. Here is my favorite project from each month of last year:

1. beach bracelet  2. sledding party  3.  balance board  4.  the awesome bag  5. crazy pants  6. may day crown  7. flock top  8. wiksten tank  9. toy boxes on wheels  10. giant glittery 6!  11. waxed leaves  12. cloud bed

It's nice to look back and see what I made--see what I liked making. Every January my creative energy goes out the window. All through December when I'm making things for everyone else, part of me is dreaming of January when I can make whatever the hell I want. But then January comes and I'm overwhelmed with all the choices: I could make clothes for me, clothes for my kids, start that huge embroidery project, crochet an afghan, or a hat, or a sweater, tackle the mending pile, the list goes on and on. On top of everything, my studio is a disaster. I hate that feeling when I can't get a project started. Do you know what I mean? What do you do?

Oh and Happy New Year!

This whole redoing the kids room thing is taking forever to finish. It might have something to do with the three kids living in it.  It doesn't help when you paint the dresser, hate it and have to paint it again.  The After pictures are coming I promise (here is the before) it's just taking a leeetle longer than I thought.

So what are all these leaves doing on the wall? I couldn't figure out what to put on the big wall between the two windows. I wanted to get this awesome ice cream print, but the big map was on the neighboring wall and it would have been too many big things in such a small room.

I decided to leave it blank and use it like a classroom bullitin board-- putting up little crafts my kids make or things to celebrate the season.  First we had a pompom garland up (which you can see in this post) then some bats (behind me here) and now leaves. I had my kids run around the block collecting leaves, then I dipped them in wax, and we stuck them up with washi tape.  I had envisioned the leaves laid out in straight rows like a scientific collection, but the kids had other ideas.

I first saw the wax dipping thing on Martha Stewart (of course) but she uses beeswax and ooof that stuff is pricey.  Then I stumbled on this post where the leaves are dipped into plain old paraffin wax (2.99 at the grocery store and apparently you can wax your snow shovels with it?).

After about a week up on the wall, the leaves are starting to curl a bit, which is a bummer.  If you have the patience, you should probably press them over night or even after you dip them. Maybe dipping them twice would make curling less likely? They are pretty nonetheless and I think they would make a beautiful thanksgiving garland.

Part one of my daughter's 6th golden birthday is here.

When we went to the craft store for all things gold (for the golden birthday party) the gold pipe cleaners were kind of an impulse buy. It's hard to resist sparkly, fuzzy gold wire. Turns out a bunch of pipe cleaners = room full of decorations in no time. I knew I wanted to do something like  Terri's awesome wrapped pipe cleaner font project, but I skipped the yarn and spelled out Happy Birthday.  Writing with pipe cleaners is ridiculously easy (though knowing cursive comes in handy for once in your life).

Hanging them on the other hand is more difficult than it seems. There is just a lot to balance. Nothing a spool of thread an lots of tape won't fix. Taking a photo in front of three sunny windows is also difficult, so you get the child's eye view of the banner. A golden merry christmas would be very pretty I think, or even better something like this in gold pipe cleaners!

There were a ton of left over pipe cleaners, so I wrapped them around a star cookie cutter and voile! Also, crazy easy. And also would look lovely hanging all over a christmas tree. Seriously, I'm 33 and in love with gold pipe cleaners. I am so rock and roll.

Here is the banner and table on the evening of her party. The pipe cleaners and giant glittery 6 all sparkled in the light. I thought it was pretty magical, I'm pretty sure my big 6 year old did too. Oh, yes and a tiny gold bunting on the cake, because why not?

The littlest in the family is crazy for Ernie these days. He calls him oooo-nee, which is unbearably cute. So what the hell, why not make an ernie shirt? Dana even has a tutorial for one. I didn't print out her pattern, but I did look at her shirt as I cut out all the felt bits.  She adds a little embroidery, which is a nice touch, but I was feeling lazy, so I just top stitched instead. Now that I think about it my kids don't have any licensed characters on their clothes,  but the baby, well the baby always get what he wants doesn't he?

ernie doesn't mind if you pick your nose

Right before kcwc took off this year, we celebrated my daughter's golden birthday. The theme was gold, because we are original like that. It was a fitting theme, but a little odd--not a lot of golden party games (oh I found one though)--so we went a little crazy with the decorations.

The giant golden 6 idea came from this post for a fringey monogram. The fringey detail is super cool, but it also takes quite a bit of time, so I took a short cut and used wrapping paper--glittery, golden wrapping paper! I drew a huge six on the wall with chalk, taped the wrapping paper over it, and then cut right inside the line I drew.  The whole thing took about 1/2 hour + 1 1/2 rolls of wrapping paper.  It looks wrinkley in the photo, but the paper (and my baseboards and my floor and my hands and my face) was so glittery that I didn't notice until I took the picture.

The humongous glittery six looked a little plain, if you can believe it, so I added those shooty out lines all around it.  Blazzam! Then with the extra bit of wrapping paper I made a golden paper chain for above the picnic table.  You can see the crazy, glittery texture of the wrapping paper a bit better here.

The actual present was wrapped in golden wrapping paper too of course.  I think it's a sweater...

A little friend of ours turned 3 last week. I had the damnest time coming up with something to make for him. He's got a super crafty mama, so that lucky boy is kitted out with capes and bags and awesome appliqued shirts. And all the other things you would make for little boys.

I figured the dress up box could always use a few more things, so I sewed up these felt masks. I started with a mask template I made from a paper plate and then went crazy with a bag of felt scraps.  There was a lot of white, gray, and orange felt in the bag, so out came a cat, an elephant, and an owl.

I had the best time making the elephant. His ears are extra wonky and homemade, but I'm so in love with his pompom headpiece I don't care. It was sort of a last minute addition too. If I had thought of it earlier I would have dressed him up more!

Mostly I made up the patterns as I went along except I did steal the owl mask idea from Martha (she's got so many ideas, she won't notice). These were so fun to make and halloween is coming up so fast, I might have to make some more.  I might even go crazy and write up a tutorial. But which one? Or should I make something else?

I'm now accepting sponsors for October! Kids Clothes Week Challenge is the second week in October and there are already over 150 people signed up. It looks like there are lots of new people this time around too--yay! I've got some super good stuff lined up for the week before KCWC. And there is even some good stuff after it's over too! October is going to rock your world.

KCWC has been such a big hit in the past that traffic on the blog doubles for the month. That means over 100,000 pages views! Just like in the spring, 125x125 sponsor spots for October are 40 dollars.  I'm also offering a larger 300x300 spot for $150--in case you want to go big. I really try to keep the prices reasonable so that bloggers and indie shops can easily afford it--and I hope you can.

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If you made it this far and are still wondering what the pictures are all about.  It's salad spinner art!  We did a few weeks ago and it's easy as can be: jam a paper plate in an old salad spinner, blop lots of paint on it, and spin like crazy. Even the two year old got in on the action! I admit I was waiting for my turn too. This is a fairly contained project and you probably could get away with doing it inside, but better to go outside while the weather is nice. I'm sure you know where all your almost empty bottles of paint are--this is a project for them--but I bet you are thinking, "where the hell did I put that salad spinner?..."

a few weeks back my friends and I threw a baby shower for our dear friend who was about to pop. She has since popped (!) but I thought I'd share a few of the things I made for the party. The floofs [above], as my daughter called them, were by far my favorite thing to make. There are many tutorials floating around for them--and many names--but I found this method to be the easiest.

You might recognize these painted cups from a design sponge tutorial a while back. I did exactly what they told me to do and pretty much copied their color scheme to boot.

While I had the paint brushes out, I slapped a bit of paint on some cardstock. When the paint was dry I cut circles out of the painted paper. Then invited a friend of mine over for wine and projects, so she could write (with her beautiful handwriting) all the potential baby names our friend had come up with.  We glued them together with a bamboo skewer inside and called them cupcake toppers. I thought they turned out nicely--baby shower-y, but not goofy.  And don't worry the baby is not named Moellendorf.

I made a few desserts too. They both were less than stellar because of the oppressive heat and humidity, but the lime curd cupcakes up there were very tasty--even if they did look a little worse for wear.  All in all, it was a very nice party. No horrible torture-the-pregnant-lady baby shower games, just a table full of delicious food and a house full of lovely ladies. Tomorrow maybe I'll show you what I made for the baby..