Christmas Present Adventures, Part 1

I have been busy busy busy lately putting together my Christmas presents for everyone. But I am so excited about some of these presents that I couldn't wait until after Christmas to blog about them! So here is a little preview of a few things that I have been working on:

These are the gift tags that I made for the presents. I had a beautiful 2009 Calendar that I wanted to use somehow, and then I thought I would cut out cute little bird shapes from the pages! I'm going to write on the wings to mark who the presents are for.

Now, the first actual present that I'm going to share with you is something that I made for the sons of my two cousins. Each are about 4 years old.

I got the idea for this present from the awesome blog Collecting the Moments...One by One that I subscribe to. I thought it would be great for Noah and Lucas!

One thing that I did add to the project was crafting a box for the boys to store their chalk! I found these wooden hinged boxes at Michaels and painted them. I also found the wood letters at Michaels, and thought it would be a cute way to personalize them!

When you open the chalk box, you can see the little eraser that I made for each of the boys. I simply folded over some felt scraps that I had and sewed some lines to create texture for easier erasing. It works great! I glued a little piece of velcro in the lid so that the eraser would stay in place. I love it!

That's all for now, I don't want to ruin any surprises for people who read this blog! But here's a little taste of what's to come...

Adventures in 1920s Costume Making!

This past weekend I attended a 1920s themed Murder Mystery party! This was something that my group of friends has wanted to do for a long time, and it was SO much fun! My character was "Madame MeMe", and I owned several nightclubs with my husband. My character information instructed me to dress 'flashy yet classy', so I did my best to sew a costume that fit that description. I was on a very limited time schedule, so I wasn't able to do quite as much as I would like. But I was still pleased with how it turned out!

The skirt is made of a super soft, furry fabric that looked really neat next to the shimmery red fabric. I used the leftover furry fabric as a stole, which added to the 'classy' aspect. The drop-waist dress was really easy to make--I basically used a t-shirt of mine as a pattern!

It was a really fun and quick costume, and a fantastic party! My next sewing project is going to be a little bit more intricate, so wish me luck! It's for a New Year's Eve party, so I'll be blogging about it soon!

Adventures in Earring Reconstruction!

Wow, I can't believe it's been almost a month since I last updated! I promise that I have been very busy with little craft projects, but I'm keeping them a secret until after Christmas :) However, there was one project that I was inspired to make last night and I just had to share with the rest of you!

I call this post 'earring reconstruction' but really I should name it earring DEstruction! My inspiration came about last night as I was going through my overly crowded jewelry box. I have never really sorted through my jewelry box, and I have so many earrings that I never wear anymore. As I was gathering up these earrings, I started to think about how I could tear them apart to make new earrings. Then, for some reason, I was reminded about these paper beads that I played with this past summer. So I decided to combine the two! I was so excited to try this that I put off my big stack of grading and just dived right in!

I created these paper beads out of various colors of paper, and then created the individual earrings out of the beads and the bits and pieces from the earrings I tore apart. I looove how these turned out, so much better than I originally imagined! I will definitely be giving these out as Christmas presents, so if you get one--act surprised!

More Halloween Costume Adventures!

I know I just crafted about some of the fun crafty costumes I saw on Halloween, but I keep seeing blog posts on amazing costumes and I just HAD to share a few with you!

I absolutely loved "Where the Wild Things Are" as a kid. So I was super excited to see these amaaazing costumes from the Craft Magazine blog!

I mean, they are just incredible!

I thought this "low resolution" costume, also from the Craft Magazine blog, was awesome!

I found this "Big Head" costume on Gizmodo. It was my husband's personal fave!

Definitely click on the link so that you can read about how he made this costume. Simply amazing!

All of these awesome costumes are inspiring me to go all out for next year. I've got a year to come up with something totally awesome and craft-tastic!

Halloween Costume Adventures!

Hopefully everyone out there had a fantastic and fun Halloween--I know I sure did! I thought I would blog about some awesome crafty Halloween costumes that I saw and helped with yesterday. The first one was my friend Jessica, from Sweet Athena:

She dressed up as the Bee Girl from the Blind Melon music video for their song "No Rain". Here's the original Bee Girl, in case you don't know what I'm talking about:

Didn't she do a great job crafting her costume??? I loved it!

Next is my other friend Jessica, who went as the Easter Bunny:

She made her ears and belly out of felt, and I made her a cute pom pom tail!

And now here's my costume! I decided to go as a kind of Mash-Up of different Lady Gaga songs. For her song "Just Dance" I wore a tutu dress and sparkly ballet slippers. For "Poker Face" I attached a poker hand to my sunglasses. For "Love Game" I created a 'disco stick' out of a Christmas Ornament. I also wore my camera around my neck for "Paparazzi". It was a fun costume to put together and I really like how it turned out!

Here I am with my wonderful husband, who came as Mrs. Doubtfire!

I can't believe that it's November already! I've got to get back to work making Christmas presents!

Crafty Present Adventures!

I gave my friend her crafty present yesterday, so I can finally blog about it here! Remember the Facebook gifts that I blogged about in August? Well, it turns out that I forgot about someone! I felt so bad that I kinda went overboard with this crafty gift. Once I started making fun crafty things I couldn't stop! So here are all the different parts to her present:

First I covered some colored pencils in dictionary pages that had their different colors on them.

This was my first time trying this, and I love how they turned out!

I also covered some more pencils in security envelope liners. I love how they look. I definitely want to continue making these!

I was going to stop there, but then I decided to make a pad of paper to go with the pencils. I took some pages from an old daily calendar and tried a new way of making a pad of paper. This pad will allow each of the pages to rip away quickly and easily!

For the back of the pad I used some cardboard from the packaging for my husband's Kindle. The letters were done in a gloss coating, so they only show up in the light. I love how it looks!

Again, I was going to stop there, but then I got another fun idea. The last time that this friend was over to my house she commented on how my paper butterflies would look really cute as hairpieces. So I decided to do just that!

I like how you can see the word "Introduction" going through this butterfly

And the butterfly with the feathers and netting looked great in her hair!

So this would have been a logical place to stop, right? But then I wanted to make some kind of bag to put everything into. So I went through my fabric scraps and found part of one of my husband's old shirts that I had previously used to make a skirt out of.

I used the existing buttons as the closure for the bag, and then re-stitched the pocket to the front of the bag.

The pocket was just perfect to put the pencils in!

I had so much fun putting together all of these little crafty gifts! Sometimes having a reason to craft is the best way to get inspiration. Right now I'm going to focus on putting together Christmas presents, which I probably won't blog about here until after they have been received. But I'm sure I'll have enough side crafty projects to keep this blog updated between now and January!

Paper Star Extreme Adventures!

I have been so busy lately that when I find time to get some crafting done I can't find the time to blog about it! This last weekend I folded up a ton of these origami stars--I can't stop!

There are dozens of them around our house, it's fabulous! Right now I'm working on a crafty present for a friend, which I will reveal after they have received it. I'm pretty excited about it!