Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Pinterestin'

I'm making my own verb: pinteresting. I've been on project hiatus. School is wrapping up, we had a garage sale, and loads of other end-of-the-year things going on in our lives. While I may be on project hiatus, I have certainly not quit blog-hopping. Since I've been stalking some pinterests, I decided to make one of my own.

My favorite pinterests to stalk:


It's so fun! I've always saved magazine clippings of inspiration. Now You can just "pinterest" it!

Monday, May 16, 2011

Etsy Love

Cute, cute Etsy shop: The Wheatfield

Some of my favorite prints:

Prairie State
My home state :)

Dairy Land
My honey's home state

ABCs 8x10
Cute for a kiddo's room, huh?

How Does Your Garden Grow 8 x 10

Love this. My garden is growing really, really slow...
Why can't everything be full size in one growing season?


You should check it out (the Etsy shop, not my garden. My garden is lame)!

Monday, May 9, 2011

Flowers!

May Day around here was pretty rainy. Back in Illinois we would take a little bouquet of flowers from the garden or (and more often) a coloring page bouquet to our neighbors, ring the door bell and run.
One of my students came into my room with this pretty little flower ring made out of pipe cleaners. It made me think I should've NOT used the rain as an excuse and put together something for my neighbors anyhow.
Go to these sites to see some FUN flowers to make:

IMG_3212
This peony pin is my favorite from Skip to My Lou's post of 10 fabric flower tutorials. (Personally, I'd go pink...it's a peony after all..)


Last week at    Jones Design Blog she threw:
flower-week

I'm loving her spunky button bouquet.

button flowers


So many options! NO excuses next May Day!

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Baby Shower Corsage

My mother-in-law showed me a cute idea for a corsage for the mom-to-be to wear at her baby shower. It's always hard to tell who is the one being honored, right?
The base of the corsage is a bib.

I unvelcroed (making up a word folks) it and bunched it a little at the top. Then I put a safety pin through that. This is the same safety pin that will hold it on the shirt. The next part is the curly ribbon! Attach that with a safety pin too. 
Next, you just start tying in other doo-dads. I used pacifiers and bows. I also safety-pinned a rattle in the back (can you see it?).
I never got a pic of the mom-to-be in hers! Oops! She looked so adorable too!

Here is a pic of a mom-to-be wearing one I made back in the fall:

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

At Long Last....


...we finished the headboard!! I went back to find my first post about the headboard and it was in FEBRUARY! Soccer season has finally ended (the girls went to the state tournament...not to brag but they were third in state out of 238 teams). Poor Erik, the minute he finishes the season I've got him working on the headboard.  You can find the first part of the headboard building process here.


That leaves us at the wood frame. Unfortunately, I don't have pictures of the next couple steps. We added upholstery foam that was 1" thick and cut it down using a box cutter to our shape. Using wood glue, we attached it to the wooden headboard. Batting was next. Our upholstery foam wasn't all one sheet. To make it smooth once the fabric was on, we put batting over the foam and stapled it.
We were attempting to imitate the Raleigh headboard from Pottery Barn. I found the above fabric at Childress Fabric Outlet. I also needed nice, big nailheads (about an inch in diameter). Those are not so easy to find. I don't want to share where I found mine. That sounds rude, but the company I ordered mine from was all kinds of drama. It took over a month for them to arrive and numerous phone calls, e-mails, etc. So see? I'm trying to be polite by not ragging on them using their name ;)

On top of the upholestry foam and batting we put our fabric. Because of the camelback shape we were nervous about getting it smooth. We stapled in the following order: bottom middle, top middle, out to both corners of the bottom, out to just before the corners on the top, then finally the sides. For the corners we just tugged and pulled until we could get it in one fold. My father-in-law was absolutely sure we were going to screw this part up. : D



The headboard looked pretty awesome at that point. I LOVE nailhead though. We used a yardstick and pushed the nailhead a little bit in at each odd number inch.

Next I got to play with the mallet! Don't use a metal one or it'll damage your nailheads.
(um...the white stuff on the sides of my face are the "G" from my shirt...I thought I must have really big, pale cheeks when I first looked at this pic)



Look at that baby!!!
Erik and my father-in-law hung it on the wall using a French clip.

It's ready for its closeup!

This picture is kinda dark...but it was kinda dark when we got finished. The black ball of fur is my puppy Charlie.
Not too shabby for a knockoff, right? We could go into business if people didn't mind waiting an absolutely ridiculous amount of time to get their headboard.