Stitched with Love for our Wesonator

More powerful than anything sitting on a table, faster than a basset hound,

able to climb on furniture in a single bound,

able to melt his family into submission like a handful of Play-doh. He's a long napper (YEAH!). He's a heartthrob (just ask his mom)....

He's our Wesonator!

This little man with purpose will be outfitted with an appropriate cape for Christmas. If you can sew a straight line, then this child's cape tutorial is right for you. I made Wesonator's big so it can be loved for years.

One side has something similar to a Superman logo. (Thanks T for modeling)

On the other side there is an impressive W for The Wesonator.

We are ever thankful for our Wesonator, whose most impressive quality is the ease at which he makes our world go 'round. How's that for a superhero?

Scripture Markers

We're keeping things super simple this Christmas.  {HOME}made is a running theme around here.  I've found some simple, inexpensive ideas that I'll be sharing on our blog.  I hope that even if your penny pinching, you'll find some worthwhile projects here that are budget friendly.  I'd love to hear about what you have in the works too!

Christina's awesome Beehive advisor gave these scripture markers out to the girls one Sunday...probably with a lesson on scriptures.  I traced the inner part of the marker and came up with my version of a pattern to share.  After picking Christina's teacher's brain, these are the directions I came up with....

1.  Use patterned paper for the inner portion of the marker

2. Do a test run of the pattern at the bottom of the post.  If it doesn't print out just right, following the dimensions below, map out the inner part of the markers on your pattern paper.  If your test run works out then print the pattern directly onto your paper. (Christina's teacher printed a scripture reference directly onto the patterned paper, but this can be an added embellishment)

3. Cut out each rectangle marker.  Leave the rectangles and circles inside each marker in tact.

4.  Glue each marker onto card stock & embellish if desired.

5. Cut out each marker again.  Christina's card stock goes about 1/2" beyond the patterned paper all the way around the marker.

6. Laminate each marker.

7. Cut each scripture marker out.

8. Using an X-Acto knive, carefully cut out the 2 black rectangular shapes.  The large one is for marking large verses of scripture, and the smaller one is obviously for marking a single line of scripture.  Use a hole punch to punch out the circles.  These are for marking the scripture reference/verse #.

9. After cards are all cut, if there is any separation in the laminating, run the card(s) through the laminator one more time to seal them nicely.

I love these homemade scripture markers.  I thought they'd make great stocking stuffers, gifts for primary teachers or students, or as with Christina's class...lesson handouts, for Relief Society too!

 In case the pattern doesn't download correctly (I'm working on it),

the inner scripture marker dimensions are:

Inner marker (to be glued to card stock): width: 2 1/2", length: 5 3/16"

large rectangle: width 2", height: 1 1/8"

small rectangle: width: 2", height: 1/4"

FINISHED MARKER: width: 3", height: 5 9/16"

Blog Design Tutorials

I've spent way too much time these past couple days sprucing up our family blog.  It's a project that's hard to put down, but it's much more fun than my depressing current read, C.S Lewis,' A Grief Observed.  With blog design, the margins gave me grief (no matter how hard I try I can't escape math), but hey, this is progress, and I'm kind of proud of myself for deviating from my plan of giving this project to Wayne, the resident computer nerd.

I love my nerd!  

I used photoshop to make my header (ok, Wayne helped a bit there) as well as all of my sidebar titles and quotes.  I also used tutorials from the blog, Chocolate on my Cranium.  This link is post #7 of 7 tutorials, and it lists links to all of Cocoa's other blog tutorials.  Cocoa does a great job of simplifying code and tricks to make your blog personalized.  So, have fun cracking code and tweaking your bloggity blog.  Just don't ask me to explain what I've been doing on the computer for the past two days.  It's all a blur.

Resources:

Shabby Princess

Two Peas in a Bucket

Lettering Delights

Sophia Sarducci

Blog design Resources:  

Blogger Buster

Blogging Basics

and the Chocolate on my Cranium posts mentioned above

Check out Wiki's color reference for "web safe" colors.  Just pick the colors you want and copy/paste the hex triplet (ex. white is: #ffffff) to various places on your blog html.

My colors are:

Header and main wrapper border: #444499

The blues on the blog: #99b6dd

Sidebar text: #999966

All best,

  

Painting T-shirts

I saw these fun shirts and thought it would be fun and cheaper to make them.  Here's my finished product:

For "initial" shirts for my boys I found plain t's (gray and kahki) on sale at Target.  I think I spent $6 for both.  I made super size initial stencils out of plain old poster board and purchased white fabric paint at Michael's.

To make the t's, you can use a stencil brush, a paint brush, a piece of sponge, etc.  Just make sure that it's large so you're not painting all day.  Slide a piece of cardboard in the shirt, so you don't paint through to the back of the shirt.  Don't put too much paint on your brush...you don't want to soak your shirt.  I pressed down on the stencil while painting the edge of the letters to make a clean line, although I wasn't going for a perfect letter.  I like the well worn look.

After you've got the letter painted, air dry.  I put a dish towel over the painted letter and using a hot iron, heat set the paint....and That's It!

Martha has a couple of great tutorials as well....

Martha's Potato-stamp Shirt

Martha's Potato-Print Baby Clothes

This is such a fun project. We did this for Christina's birthday party.  The girls did a great job.  Potato stamping would have been less time consuming and probably uses less paint.

Happy Painting!

Tutorials: Button clips and Embellished flip-flops

As a follow-up to my post on Christina's Project Runway party, here are tutorials if you're interested in any of the crafts we did....

Besides her Michael Miller Etsy fabric store, my sister, Julie, offers a perfect fabric covered button clippy tutorial (among others) on her sewing blog.  We only made the button clippies at Christina's party, but I plan on making more bobby pins.  Save your fabric scraps for this project...a little strip of material can make a dozen or more buttons!  One of Christina's friends asked how to put the clippy in her hair correctly, and my only suggestion was to start sliding the clippy in and then lift hair at the end of the clippy, so that when you close the clippy you can cover the metal with your hair and only the button will show.... 

For the flip-flops...the sky is the limit for how you decorate them.  I've seen them decorated with buttons, fir, flowers, fabric, etc.  In the interest of time, I grabbed stick on jewels at Michael's that were in the flip-flop decor craft section (yes, there is such a thing!).   While you're there you'll probably get more ideas for dazzling up your pair of flip flops.  I've read that craft glue is recommended because hot glue will dry too quickly and embellishments won't stay on.  We bypassed the glue drying time by using the stick-ons.  I told the girls to glue them on at home if they fall off (and they probably will).  Michael's and Jo'Ann's both had the flip-flops with the clear straps.

Flip flop embellishing ideas (links):
Flip flops from iMommies

Flip flops from Family Fun

YoYo flip flops from Making it Fun

Flip flops by Martha Stewart