12.08.2008

2008 Photo Ornament

I'm attempting to start a tradition of the annual photo ornament. I get really sentimental when I pull out the ornaments that my babies made when they were in preschool. They are by far my favorite. And now that only one child is left in preschool, I figure I need to be responsible for carrying on that tradition.
Photo Ornaments

Last year I was heavily pregnant, so we went with some store bought craft foam that we taped a picture to and added some glitter. It worked, I guess.
2007 Ornament

This year I had planned to be far more elaborate, but then I realized that it would never get done if I went along that path. So I opted for simple. We used old cereal boxes, dollar ribbon, and pictures from our printer.
Supplies

Basically, I printed the pictures on regular printer paper. I then cut out rectangles from the cereal boxes that were a bit larger than my pictures.We glued the picuters to the cardboard. I then cut ribbon to size and hot glued it around the pictures. I thought about decorating the backs with wrapping paper, but I didn't have any on hand. And we were keeping it simple, remember? So one of the kiddos wrote 2008 on the back for me.
2008 Ornaments

I had the ribbon laying around for a impulse buy at the dollar spot of a popular chain store. Unfortuneatly, we ran out halfway through. We went to buy more, but the inventory was different, so I had to get different ribbon. My mistake here was to cut the ribbon in half in an attempt to make it fit the small border. It now sheds, and I apologize to the recipeints who will have to deal with that.
2008 ornaments, set 2

Maybe if I start sooner next year, we'll get more fancy. In the meantime, I'm glad that I actually completed a project and got it in the mail!!!!

12.03.2008

Baby Quilt

This was originally posted on my old MommaQuilts blog.

I can't do anything simple. I have a history of not finishing several quilts that I've started. In fact, none of my children have a quilt made by me. The problem is that my ideas for all that I want to do get out of hand.

So I decided that this time around I'd go simple. I found a nice disappearing nine patch pattern and got a good portion of the quilt done in no time. But since I was working with scraps, I didn't have enough of the given fabric to create a quilt the size I wanted. In retrospect it would probably have been the perfect size for a baby, but I wanted it big enough to be used throughout the toddler years.
IMG_0839

So I got the bright idea that I would use Tonya's letters to add a Bible verse to the quilt. I learned a lot from this project.
Most importantly, there should be a lot of contrast between your background fabric and your letter fabric. You can see that when I was finished, I couldn't read what I had "written". Luckily, someone in my bee gave me the idea of outlining the letters. This helped some, but I probably should have used a heavier weight thread for the outlining.
IMG_0835
IMG_0837


Also, be careful with stripes. Actually stripes probably don't matter as long as there is more contrast as I mentioned above. But they didn't work for me because my stripes had white in them.

And try to avoid cheap fabric. I now know why I got these scraps for free. It took me so long to get this done, that something got spilled on it somewhere along the way. I had to wash it and some of the thin fabric shredded. This is probably also a result of my poor sewing skills.
IMG_0838

Another big thing for me is my lack of whimsy. I chose Tonya's letters because they match my idea of not needing a perfect quilt. I like the idea of free handing. But I learned that when I put the idea in practice, it irritated me that different letters where different sizes. It made it hard for me to predict how things would line up. I've concluded that I will have to do a bit of standardization in creating my letters in the future.


I don't know when I'll get this project completed, but I'm hoping that it will be soon. We'll see if it ends up getting used much. I'll keep you posted.

12.01.2008

Making Contact









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Welcome readers



My name is Erika. I'm a wife and mom living in central Texas. My career is in education, and I'm always looking for creative outlets. (Translated, this means that I have a habit of starting hobbies that I don't finish.) In an effort to motivate me to complete some projects, I started a couple of blogs.

Made by Momma
This is a blog about stuff I'm making. I honestly started it as a means of accountability for myself. My hope is that if I publicly discuss my projects, I might finish something. And if I find a need to create a post, I might be motivated to start new and different projects.
Reading With Momma
This is where I write about the non-work-related books that I find time to read as well as the related blog challenges that I participate in.