Church shawl

During the summers, when it's too warm to wear a jacket to church, they turn on the air conditioning.  And it never fails to make me freeze.  So I made this shawl to throw in my church bag.

cards

more scrapbook pages

St. Patrick's Day skirt

This was using McCall's M841 pattern

scrapbook pages

I've printed out all the pdf archives on Pagemaps, and I use them for inspiration. I don't usually follow them completely, but do rely on them heavily.

Birthday cards

I make all my birthday cards, but I always use card sketches.  My children have stolen all my actual creativity, so I'm not able to design my own.  These were from the new March Cardmaps.

Pillow shrug

Last fall, Husband suggested that one of the ways to dress up our living room would be to get some cheap square pillows and make a different shrug each month.  So since October, I've made a different one each month.

I found this tutorial on Pinterest.  

Fabric flower wreath

My mother gave me the instructions to this tutorial a while back.  A friend of mine ended up giving me some extra St. Patrick's Day fabric she had, so I decided to go ahead and give it a try.  It took me about 8 hours but there were a lot of breaks in between (break up fights between children, have dinner, put the kids to bed, etc).  Maybe 6 hours of work altogether?

It turned out okay.  If I make another one I think I'll make the curve I cut on the squares deeper so the flowers have bigger lobes on them.

It's always fun to try something new.

Clothespin birthday calendar

I honestly don't remember where I got the idea for this calendar.  It wasn't pinterest though, as it was before pinterest was even around.

The idea is simple, a plaque with 12 ribbons, one for each month.  Each person has a clothespin with their name, and the date of their birthday, which is then clipped on the month.

I started with a blank wood 12" plaque purchased at Hobby Lobby.  I then glued a backing paper on it, and then letters (using Cricut's "All Mixed Up" cartridge), then mod podged the whole thing.  After that I hot glued the ribbon hanger (two 18" pieces of ribbon twisted together) and the 12 ribbons (12", with a daub of mod podge to seal the bottom end) for the months.  I used acrylic paint and a fine tipped brush to put the name of each month at the bottom of the ribbon.  The clothes pins were "mini" sized (as opposed to "regular" or "tiny." Regular are just too large, and tiny doesn't have enough room to write names), and I wrote on them with a sharpie pen.

It's a very simple, rather cute solution to the problem of trying to remember too many birthdays.