We don’t have many easter decorations: a few eggs, some bunnies here and there, maybe some flowers, but that’s it really. We needed something easter-y…and fast, because easter is this weekend! I came up with this giant easter bunny peaking in your front door. It’s like Kilroy Was Here got together with Donnie Darko and made an adorable bunny. You can make one too–in the next 10 minutes even!
One of the odd, unwritten blog rules is “thou shalt not blog on weekends,” but I’m crazy like that I guess. Besides tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day. And one of the unwritten rules of having school age children is “you must participate in every holiday no matter what.” Pi day? Talk like a pirate day? 100th day of school? Grandparents day? Crazy sock day? I have celebrated them all.
I have also prepared for all of them frantically the night before or the morning of said holiday. If you are nodding in agreement, this craft is for you. If you are throughly prepared with crocheted red beards and cardboard leprechaun hats or if you are genuinely Irish and have been corning your beef for weeks (or however it’s done) then you don’t need me and my slap dash craft.
I mentioned last week that I was thinking about making a summer passport. And would you look at that: I did! It was super easy and I’m going to tell you how to do it.
materials:
directions:
1. Make your cover. We went with the basic, Summer Passport 2013. You could get a little more exciting, like THIS IS GOING TO BE THE JONES’ BEST SUMMER EVAR!
2. Write something fun to do on every right hand page. This ends up being about 30 activities, which I think is doable for summer. It also leaves the left page open for writing about when you did that activity (optional, obviously).
3. Draw a box under the activity. This is where you will put the stickers (or stamp the date) when you do that activity. If you plan to do something often, make sure to draw a big box. My daughter seems to think we will be going to the pool a lot this summer. :)
4. Go do something! Here’s a list of 40 things to get you started:
list of summer activities
What are you doing this summer? Add your ideas in the comments!
For my contribution to Skirt Week 2012, I made this little tutorial for turning an old, rather boring skirt into something a bit more interesting. Sometimes you don’t need to make a new skirt, but you need to liberate one from the back of your closet. I had planned on doing a tutorial for a button placket, but then I saw this picture and could not stop thinking about it:
These pants are from a shop in New York that specializes in super awesome Japanese children’s clothes. The idea is so simple and so effortlessly cool that I had to steal it.
1. The first thing I did was carve some starts out of an old eraser. If you’ve never done this before it may sound hard, but I assure you it is not. I carved two stamps from a big eraser and two from the tiny erasers on a pair of new pencils. It took me all of 10 minutes. There are many good tutorials for carving stamps from erasers out there (this one and this one for example). The stamp you make should be quite small, so stick to a simple shape–stars work well!
2. Put a piece of cardboard under where you will be stamping, or you can iron a bit of freezer paper to the back. You need something under your design, so the paint doesn’t bleed through to the other side.
3. Start stamping! You can be as fussy or as messy as you want. The look we are going for is paint wiped on the side of your skirt, so there aren’t too many rules you have to follow. It looks nice if the stamps are concentrated a bit in one area and then fade out towards the edges.
3. After you have stamped to your heart’s content, take a very small paintbrush and go over some of the stamps with more paint. This will make some of the stars stand out better and give the design a little more dimension.
4. Let the paint dry and go over it with an iron to set it. Waalaa! a new skirt! One that will be loved and worn again!
*a note on paint: I don’t paint on my clothes very often, but when I do (like here and here) I like to use a product called fabric meduim. You mix the meduim with any acrylic paint and it makes it into a fabric paint. A good friend of mine turned me on to it. Another good friend told me to get out of the not-so-great craft acrylic paint aisle and go to the actually-an-artist acrylic paint aisle: the colors and the quality are better.
Here is a little project to spring up your home. I made this pillow in springy greens, but any colors would of course work. Ticking would look very nice, with the stripes going opposite ways. The pillow is based on a simple quilt square (does it have a name?) and comes together super fast. Happy Spring!
1. Cut your fabric 2 inches larger than your pillow. For example: my pillow was 13in square, so I cut my fabric into 15in squares.
2. Put the squares together, right sides facing. Using a straight edge, draw a line diagonally across the fabric. No one will see the line, so you can use a regular pencil or pen.
3. Sew 1/4in from the line. First sew on one side of the line, and then on the other. You will have two seams, one on each side of the line. This is shown more clearly in the photo below.
4. Cut directly on the line you drew.
5. Ta Da! You now have two squares. Open them up and press the seam to one side–the side with the darker colored fabric.
6. Now you have a choice. You can line the squares up, right sides facing, with the seams also alined like I did in the photo above. Or you can arrange it so the triangles are oriented differently on each side–the seams will not line up, but will make an X. Play around with it and see what you like. But unless you have a clear fiberglass couch no one is going to see both sides at once.
7. I am not going to explain how to do the zipper, because there is a good tutorial that does it already–Sewing 101: Zippered Throw Pillows. This is the method I use for putting zippers in pillows and it is dead easy. There are other ways that look a bit nicer, but this one is super fast and hard to screw up. I encourage you to try it if you haven’t used zippers before–you will succeed, I know it!
8. Try the pillow on your pillow form. It might need some taking in. I had to take mine off and sew it a bit smaller to make it fit. Hey look, you’re done! And you made a super chic, color block, geometric, trendy as all get out pillow. Your couch will thank you.
