Paper Doll

One of my Christmas gifts this year was a paper laminator, but I hadn't opened it until this idea came to me.

We had just received the Paper Doll Dress-Up Cartridge (thanks to Grandma!) and Aidan's cousin's birthday was the following day {she's the one I made the Feliz Cumpleaños card for} so I decided to make her a little princess doll to decorate her gift. Laminating it made it so she could keep it as a decoration/toy.

I started out by making the doll, using the Paper Doll Dress-Up Cricut cartridge. I used glitter paper for her dress and then an even more glittery paper for her necklace and crown.

I believe I used the DCWV Neutrals Mat Stack for her base and hair. The shoes were made with some eyelet patterned paper.

Then it was time to laminate. I have to admit I was worried, I've never used a laminator myself.

This was one of those Christmas presents I'd picked out myself. It was a great deal at Costco. There are 100 laminating sheets to get you started.

I'd probably better read this...

The "Guide" wasn't all that helpful though. It explained the basics but...that's about it.

It's pretty simple though. You put your paper in the sleeve and then once the machine is warmed up you can slide it in, it pulls it through and you're done.

I had to cut her down to size, of course, which was a bit confusing because I didn't want to cut into it too closely and have the lamination be ruined, but I wanted it to be as close as I could get it....the "Guide" doesn't explain this at all.

Pretty!

I'll be using this laminator more and more, I think!

Truck Quilt

Like many things I do, I started this at least a month ago, but I'm finally done with part of it!

I was looking into making sheets for Aidan's bed, because I like having a flat sheet for him on top of his fitted one, but it needs to be at least half fitted because he'll pull it off if it's not. Anyhow, I was looking up patterns and came across this technique for making quilts, particularly crib/toddler size ones.

Here's the finished product:

The idea is if you take three different colored sheets of fabric the same size and fold and cut them a certain way, you have three quilt faces out of the same fabrics by rearranging the pieces. It's quick and pretty easy!!

I ruffled through the material we have in our collection and found a few similarly textured pieces that went together:

That's after cutting the pieces as directed in the pattern above.
I wanted the finished quilts to be 56 by 42 inches, so I decided to make the corner squares 9x9. The idea is to have your side panels be rectangles with the same length as your corner square lengths.

To achieve this, I first cut the fabrics each into 42x56 rectangles. Then I folded them first to divide the 56 inches in half and then that was folded to divide the 42 inch sides in half. From there, I cut the width and length each 9 inches from the edges (see link for better description) and separated the pieces into the piles seen above.

I rearranged them into suitable combinations for the three quilts. From there I sewed the pieces together first in vertical sections (the top, middle, and bottom strips were created by adjoining the sides to the center pieces) and then I sewed these three together on the bottom and top of the large middle section (again, better description in the pattern).

Then, I got distracted and let them sit for a month. The plan was to make patterns for the adornments on the quilts out of cardstock on the Cricut machine. So, when I finally picked this back up on Friday, that's what I did.

The large truck required the Cricut Expression's 12x24 inch mat and some giant cardstock. Otherwise, the smaller trucks were done on 8.5x11 cardstock. I made them as big as I could by using the "Set Paper Size" feature to let the machine know how much material there was to work with, then I used the "Fit to Page" button to let it decide how big it could make the trucks.

I used the Everyday Paper Dolls cartridge to cut out the truck shapes.

Looks pretty good with paper, now to cut out the patterns on the fabric. I used yellow because it was the closest matching in texture and hue that we had, if I had bought fabric for this I probably would have chosen something different. Still, looks decent to me.

I used a dot glue runner to attach the cardstock to the fabric. It made cutting things out a lot easier. I tried using pins and that failed pretty quickly.

I used a pencil to trace the details on the truck.

Cutting out the windows and tires wasn't so easy, but since it's hand made I feel like a little messiness adds to the rustic value. Maybe...? Works for me.

I've heard there is a possibility to be able to cut the fabric straight on the Cricut. I'll have to do more research and figure this out, because that would have made this a lot simpler.

Here are the three trucks, all cut out.

Now, I started pinning the trucks on to sew. I did them one at a time, when you're sewing them and turning the fabric a lot you'll have to move it back and forth through the sewing machine; pins in all that extra fabric is a bad idea.

Here's the first one, sewed on. I decided to sew the details as well, I was thinking of using fabric paint to draw them on permanently but wanted to finish this without a trip to the store. I like how it turned out.

The big truck.

Here's the machine I'm using. It's programed by that old school GameBoy Pocket. Remember those? Yeah. But, it's still way more high tech than anything else we have to sew with and it does some pretty awesome stuff. Like zig-zag stitch, and it lets me adjust the length and width of said zig-zags.

Next, a dump truck.

 Then I attached the backing. I used the same sheet of yellow, luckily it was big enough to complete the project. I decided not to use batting on this quilt because 1. I didn't have any and 2. I thought it would be nice for summer to have a cover for Aidan's bed that wasn't too warm.

 I attached the front/back wrong-side-out to sew them together.

 I sewed everywhere but this last half of the corner block here. I triple stitched the edge of the opening to make it strong enough to work through, and then began to cut the extra fabric off the sides. Not totally necessary, but it makes the finished product here look a lot nicer I think.

Then I turned the work right-side out through that not-yet-sewn corner. I used the tip of the scissors to gently poke out the edges.

I ironed during all of these steps before cutting any fabric, you should do this to make sure things aren't out of sorts later. For the backing, I ironed again to get the edges lined up straight and then pinned through the front and back along the borders of each block/rectangle. This was to make sure the fabric was lined up right so I could sew along these borders to keep the back from twisting around later.

 Don't forget to sew up your inside-out edge.

 A clearer view of the pinning/stitching lines:

 With this, the project is finished.

 Fits pretty nicely in the crib/on the toddler mattress.

Now, I'll have to make him a set of sheets and pillow case to match. We'll see about that, I get distracted a lot.

Velvia Photoshop Effect

I have (finally) picked up my DSLR again and started working with Photoshop to make them B-E-A-utiful!

I found this tutorial and it did wonders for this photo:

And I employed this effect for the following:

-and-

-plus-

Then, I looked elsewhere and found this tutorial to alter this:

Brotherly love!

Christmas Scavenger Hunt

I'll trust you can keep a secret...we're giving someone special an 18 speed bike for his tenth Christmas!! I'm excited! I hope he will be.

I decided instead of trying to wrap the bike or just having it out in the open in the house I'd have him go through a scavenger hunt to find it. Hopefully this will make it more memorable for him, though I still remember when I got my first 18 speed bicycle, without a scavenger hunt involved then.

To give it a little more pizazz I decided I'd kind of decorate the clues a little, I went with a pirate/scroll theme.

Blackadder ITC is a great font for this kind of stuff, it screams pirate. I used a peach/tanned colored paper in 8.5/11 size to print my typed up clues.

In Microsoft Word you can create multiple columns for type on one sheet. I changed the page set-up to landscape and used the columns button to divide the page in two. I didn't want a huge sheet for each clue, so 1/2 sounded pretty good.

From there, I used scissors to trim the edges and give them a "scroll" type look. I considered burning the edges for a while....but that was risky and I wanted something that was (mostly) fail-safe.

Once I had all 14 clues cut out I noted where each one went and rolled them up. After tying them I made a little note of the clue number on the outside, so I could put them where they go without messing things up or undoing the scrolls.

He'll probably be disappointed at first when he sees this little box is all that's left...

...but it contains clue #1, leading to...

The big gift!! I kind of led on that it's too big for us to take out of town with us, but also said it wouldn't make sense to carry all of his gifts back and forth, on top of not having room for his brothers' things and his at the same time.

I'm getting excited!!!

Oh yeah, I made that bow. Pretty fancy, for what it started looking like.

I just took some ribbon with wires on the edges and folded it over on itself several times, back and forth, making the length a little smaller with each layer. Kind of like the old printer paper that was connected and had the holes on the edges....I'm too  young to know what those machines were called off the top of my head. But like that, folding continuously to make layers.

Then I stapled the center of the folds together, underneath the top layer which was folded into a circle so there wouldn't be an end in the middle. I twisted the wrong-side-out layers right-side-out and twisted and shaped them into the circles seen above. Perhaps one day I'll take photos of this process, but my fingers were borderline frostbitten by the time I finished my work.
Oh and I tied on the tails afterwords. It seems to jazz it up a little.

Hopefully I'll get around to making more gingerbread cookies and sharing the recipe (and modifications) I've found with you, but I try to be a little flexible with Christmas. I have obvious goals like shopping and wrapping, but one batch of cookies (ok two, I've frozen some oatmeal ones ahead too, just in case) and store-bought rather than home-made cards just might have to do, in favor of sanity and sleep.

So far, wrapping a few more things tonight and making cookie dough tomorrow is the goal. We'll see how successful I am...