Beanbag Chair

This little guy has been in the works for 3 years. I started it when my son was 2 and now he is 5. I had all of the panels sewn together, but hadn't gotten to the point of doing the applique or putting on the velcro.

Please excuse that the whole thing is not in focus.
Having the top in focus looked better than the one other picture I took that had just the red in focus

I used the Michael Miller bean bag chair pattern/tutorial and it was very simple. I didn't end up doing the applique part on the inner as they said to though. I just sewed all of the panels totally together and left an opening for turning and then just sewed that opening up after we put the beans in. You can see the stitches, but it doesn't really matter since it's inside a cover.

The best thing is that I was envisioning this as a place for my son to sit and read originally, but he likes throwing it around and body slamming on it more. Whatever. It's done and both of my kids like it.

Car/Road Mat/Rug

It seems like there are multiple names for these things.
We had the one from Ikea for years and my 5 year old decided that he wanted a new one. His preschool has a different one that he said he liked better.

I didn't really feel like paying $10 for a small little mat, so I decided to make a custom one. I found a piece of gray fake leather coated stuff with kind of a fuzzy back on it at Joann's that I thought would be good. I knew that I wanted something heavy so that it wouldn't wrinkle as much when it was out on the carpet. Having a wrinkly road really frustrates my son, so I wanted to avoid that.

 I was going to go all fancy and make the mat look like our neighborhood, but it was too hard to scale it so that the roads were the right size while still fitting a lot of variety of roads on the mat.
Instead I asked him what kind of roads he wanted on his mat and incorporated those and a lot of crazy roads. I also included some straight blocks to fill in with houses or whatever should I ever feel like adding them.

I opened up photoshop (you could also use paint), and chose a nice thick circular brush with a hard edge. I had some google maps open in the background to kind of use as a template, but ended up just freehanding most of it.
Here is the image I ended up with, which you're free to grab and use if you want to make the same car mat for your boy or girl (because girls like playing with cars just as much as boys sometimes)!

From here, I taped my fabric up on the wall with painter's tape and borrowed a friend's projector to project my image onto my fabric. I had my more tech savvy husband help me get that all set up and then just moved the projector closer to get bigger roads.

You can see that some of it didn't fit on my fabric. You can either move the image around or simply wing those areas that are cut off when you get to the tracing part. I moved my image to the left, which you can see in the picture below.

We grabbed some cars to make sure the roads would be the right size and then once everything was set I started tracing.
This sounds long and tedious, but it was not. I think it only took 30-60 minutes.
I used a black washable crayola marker and kept a spray bottle and paper towels close by (just a wet paper towel would work as well) to erase any mess ups.

My little guy was so excited at this point and wanted me to take it off the wall ASAP so he could "check it out".

Then I had to be a mean mommy and tell him that I was going to give it to his cousin and I'd make him a different one later because I didn't want him to know that HE was getting it for Christmas. This may have caused a few tears...

Once everything was traced with washable marker, I traced again with Sharpie to get the permanent outline for the roads. At this point I realized that just leaving the roads gray was going to look lame, so I tried to figure out what to use to fill in the roads. I wasn't sure if acrylic/craft paint would work better or if a big Sharpie would adequately do the job.
I ended up with a Sharpie Magnum and it was AWESOME. It worked really well on my fabric and still left me with a nice dark black.

Next was the lines on the road. I was worried about peeling and cracking, so I tried some yellow finger nail polish first. The shine/reflective effect was kind of cool, but it didn't show up as well as I wanted.
So I went for the craft paint and it was great!

Painting the lines on all of the roads took the longest of any step, but it still wasn't bad.

My boy was SO excited when he opened up his present and discovered that the car mat actually WAS for him and not his cousin! He's been loving using it with blocks to make ramps and buildings, so I feel no need to add any houses or places to it until he asks for them. My artistic skills in that realm are pretty limited and they would all be hand drawn and painted on. Doesn't sound like much fun to me!

Here's the finished product!

Magnet Frame using a vinyl stencil

Dang it I need to remember the before and after pictures!
When I was cleaning out my craft closet, this magnet board with a wood frame was sitting in there, so I pulled it out and worked on it since it would be a "quick" project.

It was previously kind of splatter painted hot pink and black. I slapped some grey acrylic paint on and was going to add a touch of yellow afterward. No big deal.

But then I thought about a lattice/trefoil design. And my silhouette. And the vinyl I had just sitting there.
But because it was already gray, but I wanted the design in yellow, I added about 6 hours onto my project time. Here is the end result! I'm happy with it, but wish it would not have taken so long.

To make this, I found an image of some fabric online and then used that on my Silhouette machine to cut my pattern out. With the pattern, the lines are the positive space (all hooked together in a single shape) and the trefoil shapes are the negative space (individual pieces). Ideally, when you do a stencil you want to paint your object what color you want your positive space to be first and then you put the stencil on and paint over the negative space with what color you want that to be.

I had already painted my frame gray, which is what color I wanted the negative trefoil shape to be. I thought I would just stick the trefoil shapes back in and then peel off the lines so those would be left for the yellow paint. This took a LOT of time and I don't think I got as clean of a design (which I don't really care about). I should have gone back and painted the whole thing yellow and then stuck the lines (positive space) vinyl on and pained over the yellow with gray to fill in the negative trefoil shaped spaces. Oh well... cest la vie.

ahh! Look at all that imperfection! 

"organized" closet!

I should have taken a before and after shot of this space! It was still a wreck after all of my Christmas crafting. Everything is now back in the closet and mostly organized, though it does need more work. I'm just happy to be able to see where everything is!

I probably should get closet doors, but I really like having everything open and easily accessible. This space is just in my basement and not out in the open, so it doesn't need to look neat and pretty all the time.

One thing I wish is that I would have done my shelves a little closer together because I have a lot of wasted space. I could have fit another shelf in there! I also wish my lowest shelf was a little higher to fit my bulky things. Luckily, the case for my serger is soft and all but the handle fits in and then I just ripped off the top part of my fiber fill box to get it to fit under the lowest shelf, so it all mostly works. It just would have been nice to have it a few inches taller.

One of my goals for this year is to finish up some of those projects that have been sitting around for years.
Lucky for my etsy shop, I have TONS of aprons cut out that I just have sew, so hopefully a bunch of those will be listed this year. I also have a goal to sew more for me and my kids. I have all these ideas of cute things to make for them (especially my girly!) and have not done most of them.

As crafting is something that makes me feel happy and fulfilled after the loss of my twin sons, Isaac and Evan, I'm hoping to do much more of it as "therapy" for myself. Anything that will make you happier is a pretty good resolution to have. I hope you've made at least one goal that will make you happier in life as well!

Homemade Advent Calender

When I was growing up, we had a felt advent calender that consisted of pockets under a Christmas tree. It had the sweetest little wood vintage ornaments and we always loved taking the ornament out of the days pocket and putting it on the tree.
I wanted to do something similar for my kids, so this is what my mom and I came up with.

Last year we hit up Hobby Lobby when their Christmas stuff was 90% off. They had a few of these wall hangings that we decided would make a great top scene for over the pocket portion of an advent calender. I think we paid $2.
Of course, even though we bought it a year ago, it didn't get pulled out and worked on until about Thanksgiving.

The original wall hanging scene had some fabric "curtains" on the sides and top to make it look like a stage. We decided to take those off because they were a bit much.

We cut two rectangles of matching maroon felt large enough for the scene to fit on with space underneath for the rows of pockets.

Then we cut strips for the pockets with enough space to sew along the bottom of each row and then turn it up so there was a finished edge along the bottom of the pockets.

We then added some rickrack along the top of each row of pockets. This was an addition that was thought of in the moment and would have been easier if we had sewn the rickrack along the top edge first.

After the rickrack, we flipped the pockets up and pressed them and then marked lines of where to sew vertically along each row to form the pockets. I believe that my mom drew the lines on tear away interfacing, put those on top of the felt rows, and then sewed right on the lines. This ensured straight lines and no marks on the felt (which is hard to mark- especially if it's a dark color like maroon).

Once the pockets were sewn, we took the other rectangle of felt and put the right sides together and sewed all the way around, minus an opening for turning. After it was turned, we pressed and top stitched it.

My mom folded a portion of the top over to hold a dowel and glued on pre-cut felt numbers that she bought from a seller on Etsy.



The tree part kind of went the same. To make the background for the tree we sewed two pieced of felt together (right sides together) and then turned, pressed, and top stitched. I think we threw a layer of interfacing in so that there was more stability once it was hanging.

We started out with enlarging a tree coloring page that we like. We pinned that on to the felt and cut it out. Our original advent only had a single layer felt for the tree, but I wanted more dimension, so I drew in some swoops and cut out each portion in felt and glued them on to the base layer of felt for the tree. We used tacky glue to glue the felt on.

We decided that it's much easier for little people to put ornaments on with velcro on them instead of safety pinning them (my childhood advent was pins). We laid out ornaments first to make sure the spacing of them was all okay, but I thought it looked a little bare.
I remembered that I had bought a big package of Christmas buttons at Joann's, so we pulled those out and found all of the littlest stars and placed those around on the tree as well. Much better!



We bought a couple of packages of mini ornaments from Joann's and some clear velcro dots. We glued the dots onto both the tree and the ornaments. We used a different kind of glue, but I don't remember the name of it. It was more permanent than the tacky glue.

The final step was putting a dowel and cord on the top. I never got around to actually buying a dowel though and just stuck a stick from our yard in there which worked great!

My 5 year old absolutely loved pulling an ornament out of the day's pocket and picking a spot to put it on the tree. He was very orderly about it so we had the bottom of the tree filled first and then the top and then he filled in the middle (usually all in a row).

This was a fairly simple project, but did still take time to do. I'm excited that we'll have something that will be around for the whole of children's childhood!