Fabulous Fabric Gift Tags

Brooke over at Inchmark posted a lovely tutorial for gift tags made with fabric scraps. Being as I realized a little too late that I needed to give C's teachers gifts, I thought these would be perfect.

I did find that the project was a little trickier than I was expecting. I'm not the best paper crafter so I think that slowed me up. That combined with not being able to find quite the right adhesive (Tombow permanent adhesive ended up working best, but I used 2 rolls and still ran out. Spray adhesive was too messy and glue stick, well I didn't have any) and I spent about 3 hours making 60. Good thing they turned out cute.

the two unnamed girls

A friend contacted me and asked me to make dolls for her twin girls. She had asked that they have little houses/nests/sleeping bags of sorts to rest in; a banana for one and a pea pod for the other.



They turned out rather cute. Their little cocoons are pretty basic, but when the dolls are nestled in them they look pretty cozy.



The dolls themselves are made from a recycled wool sweater with pretty fabric to make the dress/body. The hair on both of them is wool, but they're stuffed with fiberfill. I sort of feel like the hairline on the black haired girl is off and she looks a little funny, but when I tried giving her bangs it was a bit of a disaster so she stayed like that. In retrospect, maybe she needed a side part and a ponytail instead of pig tails.



What's funny though is that I name almost all my toys. They usually have a little tag with their name and a short back story like "I love to jumprope and I think bugs are gross." or the like, but this time I just plain forgot to name them. Hopefully these two girlies don't stay unnamed for very long.

The Christmas Quilt Finally Finished...Almost

I think I might have too many responsibilities in my life to keep up a crafty blog. Between my personal journal, our family blog that we post for OOT family members, reading everyone else's crafty blogs, catching up on message forums and facebook and actually crafting (not to mention those pesky things like children and housework, lol) I just don't know if I'll ever be able to post regularly.

At any rate, it's been busy, busy here as I prepare for Christmas. Some years I only do handmade gifts and other years (like last year) I get awesome deals on cool stuff through co-ops and get to take a break. This is year is a crafty year and I'll be sharing those pictures after people receive their gifts (not that any of those people actually read this blog).

Most importantly, the Christmas quilt is finally almost done. The saddest part is that I don't love it.



I didn't realize I didn't love the direction it was taking until the blocks were pieced and I was trying to arrange them. Once I got to that point I realized something wasn't working for me. I love all of the pieces separately, but someone the whole is less than it's parts.



What I do love about the quilt is:

A: The back. I think it turned out much more pleasing to the eye than the front.


and

B: The free motion quilting I did along the border to spell out Ho, ho, ho, Merry Christmas.



I used my friends frame and quilting machine for it and I must say that it was amazing and I am coveting one now. I suppose first on the list is getting the motherboard for my machine fixed before I start planning on how to spend thousands on another machine.

What's left to do is adding little french knots to dot the "I's" and using a few beads to decorate the little tree I quilted into the corner to take up the space where the words didn't quite meet.

All the fabric I used in this was from Michael Miller's Christmas collection last year, with some Ta-dot mixed in. I have plenty left over though and am thinking some matching pillows and a table runner might be in order. Maybe in time for Christmas next year.