My first quilt

This is kind of embarrassing. Remember my first quilt? My only quilt thus far? It's this one. Be sure to check the date on that post. Yeah. Over 3 years ago is when I finished the quilt top. It was a present for my friend's daughter, who is now 3 and has a little sister. Sooooo...yeah. I finally got it done. Hooray!

This is the back- it's the only picture I took. There's a patchwork strip with a border and an applique in the bottom corner. I actually like the back better than the front, which helped me realize I really love more modern quilt designs. The traditional ones are beautiful and I still love them, but there's something about the modern ones that just makes me want to make one. So I am. So expect another post like this in about 3 years. 

Giant script name

I had a clean slate after I finished painting Eleanor's room. It was great. I had taken down everything and I planned on nothing going back up for a little while, until I could think about things. I knew I wanted her name up on the wall somewhere, but I didn't really want to go with anything that was out there already. Then, one day, inspiration hit. I realized I wanted to cut out her name in some kind of script font in one big piece and hang bunting behind it. I really don't even know what made me think of it, but I went for it.

First, I had to think about how to get a template. I ruled out free-handing it almost immediately since I wanted it to be script and I just don't have the skills to do that, especially since there were 2 of the same letter (I figured being consistent would be a big problem). I thought about using an overhead projector and asked on facebook if anyone knew where I could get one. There were some ideas, but then a friend offered to print it on a large format printer, so that was taken care of. If that's not an option for you, I'm betting there's a way to print something that big in pieces using Photoshop or Illustrator or their free counterparts, Gimp and Inkscape.

The total size of the template was about four feet across and eighteen inches high (give or take). I taped it up in place to see how it looked and I loved it. 

Once I confirmed that the template was the right size, I took it down and taped it to my 3/8" thick mdf and traced it, then removed it. Handy tip: use a yardstick or other straight edge to correct any tracing mistakes made on a straight line.

 Then I jigsawed it out. The employee who helped me at Home Depot gave me another really great tip- he recommended laying my board on top of a thick sheet of styrofoam laying on the floor and cutting through both. I'm so glad I bought that styrofoam. Trying to maneuver this big sheet around on sawhorses and supporting the parts I had cut out would have been a real pain. Plus, now I have this styrofoam for all my jigsawing needs.

Another tip: make sure you get a jigsaw blade for cutting curves. They're daintier than ones that are for mostly straight lines and it really makes a difference with how sharply you can turn.

After it was cut, I used my Dremel with a coarse sanding drum to smooth out any rough spots around the edges, then sanded it lightly by hand. Finally it was just priming and painting and I was done!

Except for hanging it. I used these: 

and a laser level to make sure it was hung nice and straight.

And then...

Ta-da! I love it a lot.

Eleanor's room- in progress. Plus, my favorite flea market!

It's been awhile. We've been busy over here, with summer playing and family coming into town and working on the yard- good stuff. As of late I've been getting back on the DIY wagon and it's kind of like, "oh yeah, I love doing this stuff!"

Eleanor turns two on Sunday and I thought as a birthday gift for her I'd paint her room. Also, I wanted to paint her room. I had this mood board (it's the last one in the post) for her and I was finally not sick of painting anymore (after doing the basement by myself, I wasn't really chomping at the bit these last months), so I picked a color and went for it. I used this room by Emily Henderson as some inspiration, too, because she is just the bee's knees. Thanks to pictures of that room, I went a lot brighter/happier with the wall color than I had planned and I do not regret it.

So here's Eleanor's room, post paint but pre everything else:

It's been hard for me to get an accurate picture of the paint color. It's called Teal Ice and is by Behr (when I sent Mike to get another gallon, he told me the paint mixing guy said, "Now that sounds like a Pinterest color!"). It's a bit brighter and a touch greener in real life. I totally love it.  And I'm so excited about the other stuff I'm planning for this room. EXCITED.

Now, about my favorite flea market. It's called fleaology and their blog is HERE- I may have mentioned them before, like here and here. Anyway, I'm going again at the end of the month- I'm even delaying leaving on a camping trip because I refuse to miss it (I missed the last one because Mike was out of town and life was crazy). I'm so excited- I'm going to be scouting out textiles, jewelery, and all the awesome home stuff. Huzzah!

My new favorite art

I love having something a little different in picture frames, instead of all family photos all the time. I have my fair share of those, of course (I do love looking at my family's faces, after all), but it's always kind of a fun surprise having something different in a frame. Prints are great, but they add up, so finding cheap and large art that's not a photo can be tricky sometimes.

Without further ado, here's my new favorite art:

It's a book jacket! I hate book jackets (especially on kid's books) but I also hate throwing them away. This was totally a light bulb kind of moment and I still kind of feel like a genius. My daughter LOVES Fancy Nancy (it's been a Fancy Nancy for her bedtime book for months now) and this is, of course, in her room. She thought it was a pretty great idea, too.

Here's the 'tails (if you don't know what I mean by 'tails, you need to watch more Parks and Rec) :
 *I didn't cut the back of the book jacket off, I just creased it flat.
*Since the book had that cute little border on it, I attached it to the front of the mat instead of behind it.

A most excellent egg hunt birthday

My big girl, Mim, turned 4 on April Fool's Day (such an awesome birthday). It was the day after Easter, so we decided to have a big Easter eggs hunt as part of it. We have a pretty big piece of property (that feels even bigger than it is because our bitty house is just in one little corner of it) and I've always wanted to host a big neighborhood Easter egg hunt. There was one just up the street from me when I was growing up and I LOVED going there every year. Anyway, I was thinking of this as a step up to that. We've done cousin ones for the last 2 years (that were also part of Mim's birthday celebration) that I kind of considered a warm up to this one. Baby steps.

Mim wanted to invite her preschool friends and her church class, which are about 14 and 10 kids, respectively. And the cousins that were her age, which was another 3 kids. I was like, "Sure, why not? If we invite that many, it'll probably be about a dozen that show up." I was very wrong. We had about 2 dozen kids that came. Apparently the 60% attendance rule does not apply to kids. Good thing I'm a paranoid over-preparer and we had just enough of everything.

So, the first thing the kids did as they got there was decorate their Easter "baskets."

I set up a few tables in our living room (after I rolled back the rug) and scattered supplies down the center, thusly:

I tried to give them a really wide variety of stuff to work with because I wanted this activity to last for a bit so everyone would have time to show up. They had pom poms, pipe cleaners, googly eyes, cut out shapes (including but not limited to: dinosaurs, butterflies, super heroes, flowers, stick figures, lobsters, fish, and animals) and tape and glue sticks and SOOOO many stickers and NO GLITTER. I'm not insane.

{Around $20 of dollar store stickers- I planned on having extra and I needed to restock the girls' sticker supply anyway.}

After they finished their bags I gave them all one balloon in their requested color. They chose one sticker to put on it and then we wrote their names and threw it downstairs. More on that later.

{Some of the finished bags. We had them wait in the kitchen while we rounded everyone up and put shoes on- it was pretty crazy.}

Then it was time for the big hunt. There were over 200 eggs, so even though we had many more kids than I expected it still worked out just fine. I told them to stop when they had 10 eggs and help somebody else. That kind of worked. My sweet niece got a bunch of eggs, then came up and showed me, asking "Is this more than 10?" It was about 20. I told her it was a lot more and she totally started re-hiding some and I sent the kids with only a few eggs to follow her around and gather them up.

{Almost everyone.}

We came back in and did presents and then cupcakes- the cupcakes were rainbows with clouds on top.

{Don't mind the tupperware lid serving platter. My husband is a problem solver, what can I say?}

The rainbow cupcake idea came from here (if you follow the link you can see that I obviously didn't care to much about actually layering them- I just plopped in all the different colors and let things happen), but the marshmellows on top were my idea. Anyway, the cupcakes were a big hit with the kids and I decided to not even bother with the ice cream I had bought for the occasion.

After they finished their cupcakes they got to go downstairs and find the balloon they had put their one special sticker on. The twist was that there were 130 balloons downstairs in the family room and we had mixed the marked ones up with those. When they found their balloon they took it to Mike and got a little prize, then they got to play in the balloons some more.

I can not describe 20+ kids amongst 130 or so balloons. It was amazing and loud and crazy. I just let them run amok for the last 10 minutes or so until parents came and picked them up.

It was my first party for my girl and I am marking it down as an awesome success. It was happy faces all around. There are a few things that I think were crucial to making the party work and having be as low stress as possible for me:

1. Preparation. Duh. This is true about anything. I did most things as far in advance as I could, like rolling back the rug and setting up the tables the night before, making all the decorations earlier in the week, buying most things early in the week, and making the cupcakes 2 nights before. Most of the egg stuffing happened earlier in the week, as well.

2. Helpers. I had two of my sister in laws there helping as well as my husband and my little brother. My little brother and his wife totally saved my butt the morning of- I hadn't found plain white or brown gift bags at any of the other stops I'd made (or had my husband make) and so planned on getting them the morning of the party. That all kind of fell apart so I called them in a panic to see if they could get them and they came through in a big way. They even brought chairs, since Mike was delayed on his errand and couldn't pick up the ones he'd planned to. My sweet neighbor also saved me in the chair department. I went over there in the morning when I realized Mike couldn't get the chairs and she sent me home with her kitchen table bench. Love her.

3. Keeping it simple. We only had three activities in the whole hour and a half. Decorating bags, Easter egg hunt, and balloon finding. I had some other backups in case things didn't take as long as I thought they would, like letting them all feed the chickens and a few balloon games, but we didn't need them.

Here's a few more shots of the party fun, since I feel like I've kept it reasonable so far:

{They couldn't wait to dive in}

{So many helpers with her presents.}

 That's how the party was, here's what I actually did:
First, rainbow streamers and tissue paper cloud pom poms every where:

 Second, a basement filled with balloons (I really recommend using an air compressor to blow them all up):

 The picture on the left is 130 balloons, which I thought sounded like a ton, but in reality it was much sparser than I had envisioned. For Mim's actual birthday, Mike bought over 200 more balloons that we blew up the night before. It was much more like what I had mentally pictured and Miriam was just delighted when she woke up on her birthday and saw how many balloons there were. Simple and fun and hours of entertainment.

Third, (and no pictures, sorry) eggs filled with temporary tattoos, stamps, some candy, the entire contents of Mike's change bowl he keeps on his dresser, plastic animals, bouncy balls, and tiny containers of goo. It was really fun to think of things to go in the eggs that weren't candy. I've seen a bunch of lists out there, but it was really simple and easy to just go to the little party supply store and grab a variety of tiny toys.

I also made a big cake for her actual birthday and let her help me decorate it with sprinkles. Fun stuff.

My daughter's favorite things about her new room

Mim absconded with my phone the other day and took some pictures of her favorite things in her new room. (That's what she told me she had done after I got my phone back from her)

The light is my favorite thing, too. 

There's just a few more finishing touches that need to happen and then I guess I'll do a full room reveal. (I feel pretentious saying that, since it doesn't really feel that grand.) Stay tuned.

More thrift store stuff

Technically, these are from a consignment shop, but it's all pretty much the same, right?
My mother-in-law called me last Saturday morning to tell me that a consignment shop in my hometown was having a 55% off sale, so away I went.

 

Tons of awesome children's books. I plan on using these in my daughter's new basement room (which might be getting ahead of myself, since it's only partially framed right now) as some functional decor. The companion library ones are really cool- they're one book on the front, then you turn them over and upside down and they're a different book!

 These were my favorite find. There were a ton more there, but I only picked ones that were in pretty much perfect shape. Because of these, I've totally been in a Christmas mood. I wanted to get the tree out and decorate, but my husband said no. So I put them all in a jar on the mantle so I could still look at them, and so Mike won't accuse me of pushing the season (because he does not notice jars of stuff on the mantle).

Another awesome scarf. I think that makes my final count 4 for this summer. It was kind of sad to bring it home and immediately put it away with the other summery stuff, but the hat rack is currently overtaken by fall/winter scarves (post coming soon).

I think I got about a dozen doilies for about 3 dollars? I have a pinspired project in mind for these that will be lovely.

I scored some other awesome deals, including some vintage floral ribbon that I just die for and a brooch that's going to be part of a necklace sometime in the future.

Happy Veteran's Day (yesterday)!

Road tripped

Well, our little vacation is over. We actually got back about a month ago. I LOVE the Oregon coast. The whole Pacific Northwest, really. Just so beautiful. So green. Foxgloves as prolific as weeds. Sigh. I do love it here (UT), though. Just not a whole lot during the summer. Too hot. It was an especially nasty shock coming back from 60-70 degree weather to the hottest week Utah's had so far, the high over 100 for several days straight. I must sound like such a whiner to all the people who live in New Mexico and Arizona. Whelp, sounding like a whiner isn't going to stop this train.

Anyway, before we left for our 15 hour drive, I finished a few other things. One was this:

Magnetic paper dolls! I saw them HERE and just loved it. So much so that I got the exact same paper doll book (that was just coincidence, really- it's at Hobby Lobby if you were wondering). I wanted a big set with lots of options, so I used two 1'x 2' magnetic sheet rolls. Also from Hobby Lobby. I also got all this stuff in 3 different trips to the HobLob (oh yeah. I just slanged it) so I could use the 40% off coupon all times. Because of that, my total was less than $15.

Here are my doll clothes, all popped out of the book and crowded as closely as I could manage onto the sticky side of the magnet roll.

I seriously love playing with these. So does my daughter, of course. And all her little girl cousins (it was such a crowd pleaser- all the girls from age 3 to 10 crowded around the cookie sheet at the beach house).

It wasn't as great of a car toy as I had envisioned- there were two many little bits and not enough room to spread them all out. Great kitchen table toy, though.

As it turned out, we weren't really hurting for car entertainment. My girls were both little troopers for 95% of the drive, which was SO much better than I had dared hope. I think I deserve some credit, too. I was prepared out my ear balls with stuff for both of them, and I want to share. So, without further ado, here's my

TOP TODDLER ROAD TRIP TRICKS!

1. MAGNA DOODLE. Get the giant one. 

2. Straws and pipecleaners. Mim made bracelets, rings, swords, people...I handed them back a few at a time.

3.  A blank notebook. Maybe this wouldn't work as well for some kids, but Mim loves just drawing. We did secret messages for awhile, too.

4. Stickers. I spent like 15 bucks on stickers at the dollar store. Probably more. I let her put them on herself, on her car seat (she can only reach fabric parts, where they were easy enough to peel off), in her notebook, where ever. I also made matching games with them for her to do.

5. Water bottles filled with glitter and water. After you have glitter and water in them, GLUE THE LIDS SHUT.  These were for my little 10 month old. She was pretty fascinated by them.

6. Don't give them something to do until they ask. After every stop, I made sure I didn't just automatically hand something back. Sometimes Mim would go for close to an hour just looking out the window or talking before she wanted something else to do.

7. Snacks. Of course. I did things like fruit leather, popcorn, grapes, carrots, string cheese, nuts, and Pringles. And water. No juice for us. Mim will drink 10x more juice than she will water, which would have meant a LOT more potty stops.

So that's what worked for us. I've seen a ton more lists out there, some with 100+ activities and ideas, but Mim has a pretty long attention span for one so little, so we didn't need that many more things. Not that I'll ever, EVER assume that for road trips in the future. 

Hope your vacations have been awesome! Thanks for reading.

Best aunt ever, part 2

I decided that I want mailing cool stuff to be my "thing." I now have a sister and a sister-in-law in Texas. Not to mention some very close friends here and there around the country. So when I saw THIS blog (via Pinterest, of course) I was really excited. I had no idea the kinds of things you could send through the mail! Pretty much anything can go, with regular ol' stamps, as long as it's 13 ounces or less. And when you think about it, 13 ounces is almost a pound, and there are lots of cools things that weigh less than that.

So, my first awesome thing I sent was a ball. I wrote my nephew's address right on it, Mim helped me decorate it with stickers, and off to the post office we went (we had to take it inside, since there was no way it was going to fit into a mailbox). I didn't get any pictures, though. There's one HERE on the Giver's Log, though. Imagine the same sort of thing, but with one of the even bigger balls (the 16" diameter kind).

That kicked off a whole little mailing spree. I sent a few things to my sis-in-law who just had a baby, a birthday present to my sister, and a belated birthday/kindergarten graduation gift to my niece (which I blogged about HERE). I packaged them all the same way, though, with vinyl.

{I sent my sister some flip flops one at a time, too, but didn't take any pictures. Hers are the blue and red ones, I made them the same way I made THESE.}

 With the flip flops I was originally going to just write the address right on the sole, but I got too worried about sending them through the mail unprotected, since they were embellished. If I had just sent them plain, I probably wouldn't have put them in vinyl.

Anyway, if it's hard to tell, I just took two pieces of vinyl and used my largest zig zag to sew them together. I used a Sharpie to write the addresses on and put one "forever" stamp for every ounce the package weighed (I used my kitchen scale). I have some more mailing ideas- now I just need to get things done and send them off!