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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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!!!!

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.


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.




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.


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.

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.