5 Ridiculously cute ways to use up fabric scraps

We know them, we hate them. We love to hate them. What are we talking about? Those tiny bits of fabric left over from sewing projects. We hold on to them because they might be perfect for something, we feel bad because we’re throwing out perfectly good fabric. Plus some of those patterns are just too darned cute (or special, because I used them to make baby clothes for my kids who are not so much babies any longer) to purge.

And we’re too busy to start on another quilt.

So what else can we do with them, besides let them take up space in our cupboards?

Personally I just throw the not so special ones in a bucket for my kids to play with. They make great blankies for the Barbie dolls, and opportunities for my girls to practice hand stitching.

(psst! there's more waiting for you on the original article... You can find that here)

Melted crayon easter eggs

So if you've been around this blog for a while you know I have a thing for melted crayons.
And an oddball desire to never use the same technique for decorating Easter eggs.

So what happens when those truths get married? Easter eggs decorated with melted crayon. I'll bet you saw that one coming.

Anyway.

Here we go. After the eggs were done cooking, I took them hot out of the pan and put them in these mini muffin tins for the kids to decorate. That way they wouldn't have to chase them all over the table.

We tried out a couple different techniques, but by far our favorite method was to color slowly over the egg, giving the heat from the egg time to melt the crayon wax, then when the artist had enough color on his or her egg we took a paper towel and smeared all the streaky lines together which also blended all the different colors together.

Fun, right?

And stinking cute. 

Creativity for a cause

I recently published an article in Rhythm of the Home titled "How to promote creativity in children". If that article helped you find this blog, welcome, it's so nice to meet you.

While it's true that I am passionate about instilling a love of all things creative in children, I'm even more passionate about teaching children to use their creative pursuits to make the world a better place. Most kids come with a dynamic little package of natural creativity, love, acceptance, and generosity. We, as parents and community leaders, need to capture that energy and run with it.

We need to learn to focus our children's creative efforts outward, not inward. We need to stop thinking in terms of having our children make "Sunday school crafts" or things that they make on Sunday mornings and are thrown away on Sunday evenings, and instead lets turn our energy towards coordinating "creative outreach events".

What exactly would it look like if your child's creativity sessions yeilded more than just a pile of papers to hang on the fridge for a few days before rotating it out for the next project. What if they made their creations as a way to encourage others in their community? Stick with me here, I'm thinking more than just telling them to make something for Grandma and Teacher.

Don't get m wrong, we love Grandma's, we love teachers and principals, they all need to be encouraged. But lets not stop with people we know. Lets take a real look at the big picture and see who really needs the love and encouragement that our children have to offer. What if they took it upon themselves to make something creative to encourage the elderly in the nursing home, or people serving in the military? Do homeless people in your community need a reason to smile? What about those ladies at the battered women's shelter?

In addition to the boxes of stuff we've taken over to the senior center, I personally have had my girls help me make fleece tie blankets for foster kids and battered women. And all of my kids (and my mother-in-law) have helped me make hats and mittens for people living in Pakistan. The sky is the limit as to what your children can create, and the joy that they can bring.

The list of hurting people on our planet far outweighs the tonage of goofy art projects (I mean wonderful acts of creativity) your child will ever be able to make. Look around and identify groups in your community that need what your child has to make. Make some phone calls.

Go forth and create change.

Have ideas for creative change to share? Post a link so we can see how your child's creative expression has changed someone's day.

Hello old friend...

Guess what.
I have a sewing machine.
It's a little dusty, but I do have one. I can't remember the last time I used it.
Oh wait, yes I do it was last September. 

As I was wrapping gifts for Christmas last month I realized my stash of fabric bags and embellishments was woefully inadequate. When I went to make myself some more (on Christmas eve, no less) my sewing machine just laughed at me as it messed up stitch after stitch. Of course. So now that my life is a little calmer, and I have no real use for red and green striped bags, I dug the half made bags and other projects out from the bottom of the pile and got down to business. Wouldn't you know my machine worked just fine? Typical.You can check out my little tutorial for making fabric gift bags and reusable embellishments from the beginning of my stash I started last year.

I gotta tell you, last  year I started the whole wrapping with fabric kick because I thought it would look pretty and be more earth friendly than wrapping with paper. This year in the days before Christmas when things were just a little too insane to think about "pretty" I was so glad to have those fabric sacks to shove gifts into.

While I was plopped in front of my sewing machine, I also happened to make myself some little girl goodness, for some little girlies who may or may not be turning 8 on Friday. Eek.

Digi scrapbook give away

Our first sponsor that I'm rather excited to tell you about is a scrapbook software called My Memories. My Memories is easy to use digital scrapbooking software, that comes with thousands of papers and embellishments to use on your pages. I found the software easy to use, and was impressed by the variety of options (patterned paper, page embellishments etc) already available for use.

What I liked:
Access to an active online community / blog for tech support and access to others who are using the same software. I spent a few minutes skimming the articles and really learned a lot about taking the software to the next level. Impressive.
The program is a simpler version of adobe, (which is what I use for my graphic elements). You can do almost everything that you can do with adobe, but it's more user friendly.
In addition to the millions of preprogrammed page options that the software comes with, the My Memories website ofters a large variety of free page elements that you can download. I was also able to use page elements from other sources, which I really liked.
I've also had a chance to chat with the people in tech support. They were very prompt at returning my emails, and very helpful with answering my questions. 

What I didn't like:
I'm an adobe girl, and I like creating my own and importing paint brushes. This software doesn't let you do that. Not a crisis, especially if you don't need to make your own brushes.
I also had difficulty saving my work as anything other than an .mms file, while it is possible to save it as a .jpg, it takes a little figuring to get it to work. But again, there is an online community to help dunce's like me to figure these things out.

So now that I've told you what I think, I am busting at the seams to give away a copy of the software to one lucky reader, so they can see what I'm talking about. Software is valued at $40 (which is a steal in my opinion), and can be downloaded directly from the site, so you can start playing in moments. Sooo... if you want to win, leave me a comment before midnight (eastern time) next Friday (Jan 13) and I'll enter you in the drawing. Winner announced on Monday January 16, 9:30 AM Eastern...

Upcycled window display board

Hi! Still in Russia! Having a blast with my old man and my little man. Since I'm on "vacation" I'm turning the reins over to today's guest writer, Kelsey Apley who has a fantastic craft for us. If I wasn't in Russia, I'd totally make this. 


Here is a fun craft, I decided to make. Now let me say I found this old window at a Flea Market for ONLY $1 the other day! The glass was already out of it, and I thought, WOOHOO what a find!! This whole craft only cost me $2 Note, that most of this stuff I had around the house! The only thing I had to buy was chicken wire, and the window!

Here is how to make this fun craft

Start with an old window - with the glass taken out of it! 

Take a scraper and take off the paint that is loose. After you get all the loose paint off, you can choose to leave it how it looks or you can paint it however you would like. In my case I chose to keep it with some of the old paint on it, and make it look old.

Cut your chicken wire to fit around the frame. Once you have the chicken wire the right size, you can take a stapler or a hammer and small nails and secure the chicken wire around the border of the frame! I used hammer and nails because that is what I had on hand.

Then once the wire is secure you can hang it on your wall! I decided to put old kitchen utensils in it, along with a few pictures, and a recipe. You can put whatever you want for your decor. I used clothespins to secure the pictures on the wire.

That simple! A fun and easy decor DIY project! Love to here your thoughts on this project, or idea's on what else you would put in the frame as decor?

5 adorable things to make with fabric scraps

I am the worst when it comes to fabric scraps. You should see my stash. It's scary. Really scary. I've featured a few ways that we've used our scraps in the past, but over the weekend I was toodling around on pinterest and found a couple great ideas for using scraps that I thought I'd share, on the off chance that I'll have the time and energy to make some of these things when we get back from Russia.
Not that I'm dreaming or anything.
But here they are - go look at all that fabricy goodness.

garland
You know I love my garland, so versatile. In addition to draping my fireplace with it, wrapping it around objects for interesting table displays, gift wrap. Yeah... Here's an article with 10 new ways to make some rocking fabric scrap garland. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Fabric garland tutorial

As art in embroidery hoops or frames.
Ok, that's just stinking cute. I'm such a dork about putting odd things in my frames, this is just right up my alley.
Here's how they did it


key chains or zipper pulls.
Gulp.
Check it out

mobile
So my new son s not a baby, but do you think he'll mind if I make him a mobile anyway? Probably. Welcome to the family kid, your mom is a dork.
Mobile that my new 7 year old might like

magnets
they made letter magnets - cute way to practice our letters with Max, but I'm thinking about making something without so much detail to sew around like squares or something, then gluing on felt letters maybe?
Cute magnet ideas

So there you go. Who wants to make these things for me?

Somedays are like that...

There are days when you set out on a promising crafting adventure. You pile the table with dye, glue, baby wipes, and tinfoil. Your project starts out as tie-dyed baby wipes, which ends up as an epic fail because wipes absorb liquid.  Whether there's a rubber band around them or not. Drat.
So since the glue is out you grab it and see if you can redeem your crafting session by making colored glue paint. Only to find out the watered down dye from the tie-dye project makes your colored glue super runny, and doesn't work for detailed masterpieces. So you pitch the pink glue in favor of untainted glue which is easier to draw with. After a handful of spiderwebs drawn from glue you decide it's really more fun to just spread pink glue all over the place with a pop-sickle stick.
Which makes a huge mess.
And Mom finds the end of her willingness to experiment in the name of creativity.
Because there's only so much mess a mom can take.
Somedays at the end of the craft session you're left with nothing but runny pink glue covered pieces of tin foil. And a better understanding of your craft supplies.

Some days are like that. And we don't mind a bit.

Book Shelf - Crafters addition

I love a good craft book as much as the next mommy blogger, and frankly spend more time reading about crafting than I actually do creating. Eek. I know
Here are a few of the ones I've picked up recently you might enjoy looking at


Mamarazzi: Every Mom's Guide to Photographing Kids by Stacy Wasmuth.
A mom photographer who writes to other moms who want to capture their life beautifully. It's really hard to find photography books written with moms in mind. It's really really hard to find these books that are as well written as this one. Go find it. Good stuff.

Signature Styles: 20 stitchers craft their look by Jenny Doh
While this book leans pretty heavy on fashion (which I don't particularly care about) it featured some great crafters and interesting craft projects. I made at least one of the projects featured in the book. I also enjoyed checking out the links to these crafters blogs. Great eye candy. 


100 pretty little projects : pincushions, potholders, purses, pillows, & more by Valerie Van Arsdale Shrader
Yes 100. And they're so stinking cute.All of them. The Bed Sack is a spin off of one of the projects featured in this book. 


Happy crafting!

Seat Sack - revisited

I already showed you one incarnation of our version of the Seat Sack, here's another one.
This one I affectionately call the Bed Sack

There is nowhere for a boy who sleeps on the top bunk to keep his books and pens and such. I could put up a shelf, but what fun would that be.
Bed Sack to the rescue.

When I was designing this thing in my head, I contemplated making a bag that would go over the rails of his headboard or foot board and tie together, like the last one did, but I had these cool caribbeaner clips that we found at Walmart in the back-to-school section that I really wanted to use. So I made a little bag that could clip he could just clip to his bed instead.

On a side note, you know what happens when you let your 9 year old dig through the fabric stash, he's going to come up with the most god-awful print from the 80's. Yes he is. But since it is his, and it does match the rather god-awful red bunkbed (which was free, so what can I say) I just went with it. 

I constructed a rather simple bag, parrot fabric on the outside, with a plaid lining on the inside to make it a little stronger. I didn't really have a pattern, I just started cutting and stitching :)

- after I cut two pieces of fabric that are the same size, I cut a pocket and measured and stitched it onto where I thought the front center would be.

- Then I sewed the outer layer into a bag shape and the lining into a bag shape.

- then I pinned the lining into the bag, stitched, around the U of the bag, and sewed around the top shut to join the two pieces
If I had been intelligent I would have added the straps as I was stitching the top of the outer shell to the lining, but I didn't. So I stitched them into the inside of the bag.

Clip it to the bed and fill it with boy junk.

Seat Sack - Peterson Style

If you have kids in public school, you've probably seen these. They are all over the schools that my mom works at. Sweet concept. But I'm to thrifty and creative to invest in such things.


Enter our version of the seat sacks.I think that this one will live on my desk chair in my master bedroom. Right where I can reach it from my bed. Bonus. It's the perfect size for a notepad and pen. Or my keys and cell phone. Or whatever I don't want to set down on my desk because it will surely get swallowed by the clutter.
So far I only have one for myself, but the kids have all ordered them.

It was rather easy to make. First I cut the fabric to fit the width of my chair, then since my chair has horizontal rungs, I made some ties and tied the front piece and back piece together through the rungs (so it wouldn't slide off onto the floor), added a pocket and embellished. Then I quickly filled it with some of the clutter from my desk and was all set.

 

I'm So Not a Digital Diva...

There's a whole side of the scrapbooking industry known as digital scrapbooking. Brushes, page elements, papers, the whole she-bang. It's not new, it's been around for years. But I'm not a digital scrapbooker, so I really had no use for any of it.
Until recently. Lately, I've been doing a little bit of volunteer work for our church in the whole graphic design realm. Making logos and graphics for various purposes. I decided to take a peek and see if there was any digital freebies I could use on the net.
Dude. There's some really stinking cool stuff out there. While most of it isn't free, I did manage to stumble upon some stuff that was. I spent most of the day on Saturday snuggled in bed with my laptop, happily downloading freebies, and putting them to good use.

This is the first thing I made...

I needed something better for our "about me" page. Originally I had 1 picture of each kid, but with the way my blog template worked I could never get them to line up just right. So being the genius that I am, I made 1 graphic and put all 3 kids in it. Lets not talk about why it took me this long to figure that out.

Kid Art - Masking

My kids are such fickle artists. They don't really like to be told what to make. (Wonder where they get that from?) which makes teaching art sort of a strange and unusual event. I go back and forth between throwing art books at them, hoping something will inspire them and racking my brain for interesting and easy techniques that will get them started.

This time I went for a new technique. Masking. Not something new to me, or them, but something we haven't used since they were preschoolers. So I thought I'd bring it out again and see what they thought of it.
The idea behind masking is to plaster your paper with stickers or tape, or anything sticky, then paint over them. Then when your paint is dry you pull the stickers/tape off and the paper shows through underneath. We used water color paper, which holds up better to massive amounts of paint than other types of paper.

They loved it. Of course. They love anything paint related....... I didn't get any after shots because as soon as they had taken the stickers away they packaged them up to take them to show some other homeschooling friends...

The fruit of a meltdown

Think back to before all the holiday hoopla, back before our fun adventures with friends, the fireworks and food. It started on Friday, but by Saturday it was full blown. And it was ugly. I admit it, I had a temper tantrum. The mother of all temper tantrums. More accurately my inner artist who was tired of being ignored had a tantrum. I tried all of the tantrum techniques I used to deal with my kids when they were toddlers. I ignored it, redirected it, bribed it... Nothing worked. I finally just needed a time out. With my art supplies.
So I'm not exactly proud of my behavior, but I am pretty proud of what I made. Wanna see?

Also, some cute little girls wandered in and were inspired by the fruit of their mother's tantrum. Here's what they made.

craft escape... fabric painting

I've been desperately seeking some time with my craft supplies lately, but life has just been pulling me in too many different directions for me to be able to comply. I had a million ideas, but my tiny art table was just too burdened with other stuff to inspire any creative thoughts. The good news is over the weekend I managed to free my table from the piles and create some little pieces for my kids that they absolutely love.

I'd seen some stuff recently about painting on fabric that got my creative juices flowing. So I pulled out some acrylic paint, some stencils, fabric scraps and a little masking tape and got to work. For Alex and Annie I ended up using some reusable vinyl sticker masks (which I bought years ago, and apparently are no longer available on the internet - which is a bummer because they're awesome). Anyway I placed the mask on my fabric, taped a square off with masking tape and went to town. To make Louisa's letter, I tried an "L" stamp, but ended up hating it, so I just free hand painted it instead.

So I had letters for everyone, what to do with them... I had an abundance of cute girlie fabric so I stitched some pieces together, and slid a cardboard insert inside before closing it to make it a little sturdier. For Alex, I didn't have anything I liked, so I ended up painting some chipboard and gluing / stitching his letter to that.

To finish off the pieces I dug through my stash and pulled out some cute accessories, and clipped them on with a key ring.

The jury is still out on what function these little pieces will hold. Zipper pulls for their backpacks? Bookmarks? Reusable gift tags? Who knows. But they're fun. And the kids love them, and that's all that really matters, right?

back to the craftiness

It's been an interesting week around here. Thanks for sticking with me as we took the time to see God's glory in the situation. But frankly enough is enough, it's time to stop crying over material possessions. It's time to get back to the crafts.
With that said, I made a project last week that turned out so cute I wanted to share it. I swiped my mother's cricut and her give a hoot cartridge and cut out these little cuties to hang in a collection of frames in my bedroom.

(disregard the less than stellar photo, I have a good reason...)

I love the look of quirky, custom made art, but frankly I can't afford it. Also, I get tired of looking at the same things on my walls day after day so it's fun to make something quick and easy (not to mention cheap!) that I can swap out in a few weeks when it's time for something new.

gift bags for a little friend

You might remember the gift sacks that I made for Christmas and
the girls birthday . I am still debating about whether to eliminate wrapping paper all together or to go full out sacks from now on. Sacks for only us? immediate family? close friends? I'm not sure I'll ever have an answer, but I did want to share a sack that I made for a friend's birthday party that we're going to later this week. For my family I know that we'll be recycling our pieces so I've been making straight up bags with separate embellishments to keep things interchangeable. But for our little friend, I didn't figure her mom was going to recycle the bag as gift wrap, so interchangeability wasn't an issue.

I started with a pre-made bag out of my stash and some felt scraps. I cut out the oval and the letters (luckily her name was short, poor Annabel will never see her name spelled out in felt), the flower was from my crafty stash... I stitched the oval on with embroidery floss, and glued the letters and flower with fabric glue. The whole thing might have taken an hour. Now little Joy has a bag to keep her treasures in.

Hats for Pakistan - part 2

So I talked a little last week about some hats we'd made for Pakistan. Well after our sewing workshop was done, I decided to make a few little hats of my own. Sadly they weren't quite finished when my mother in law had to go back to New Mexico, so we had to make sure she saw them before the flew off to the other side of the planet.

This one was taken by sweet Louisa. Didn't she do a good job?

and here are my silly children who are not cooperating.

Sewing workshop!

I mentioned a while back about making some mittens for Pakistan. Not only did I finish the 10 pairs I'd committed to making, but I finished with a few days to spare. So what's a girl to do? Make some hats. Armed with a new batch of fleece, a handful of patterns that claimed they were "easy" to follow, and a gaggle of helpers, we set to work. My mother in law and I set up our kitchen table as a work-shop area. Alex and Annie both wanted to design hats for kids their own age, so we let them make all the decisions about fabric and embellishments and the like for their hats. Good stuff.

Mittens for Pakistan

Our church is collecting items to go in Action Packs, that will eventually go to persecuted Christians in Pakistan. One of the requested items was mittens. I happen to have a huge stash of fleece scraps left over from mitten making. Coincidence? Not likely.
I've committed to making 10 pairs for my persecuted sisters and brothers. While I'm leery of doing anything that might get them in trouble (ie stitching crosses onto the front, or prayers into the linings) there's no law against prayer. My late night sewing forays are the perfect opportunity to pray over each mitten as I make it, to pray for the hands that will receive them, for the working and worshipping each hand does.
What a wonderful way to connect with my fellow believers. I'm not sure who will be more blessed by the transaction, the maker or the receiver...

Now if I could keep my children from swiping them to play with I'd be in good shape.