Stuffed Monsters

For cb, Barracuda, and E's birthdays, and for T and M for Christmas this year, I decided to make them some stuffed monsters. I got the idea from here and pretty much followed her instructions, so I won't repeat the instructions on my blog. Just a few additional tips:

- To get a larger variety of colors, I bought a packet of paper-sized felt instead of buying it by the yard. This way, each monster required 2 pieces of felt (one for the front and one for the back) with plenty of scraps to use for eyes and other accessories.

- Don't make the arms and legs (or any other part for that matter) too narrow. The more narrow, the more difficult it is to stuff. Try to keep everything wide enough that you can fit your index finger in after it is sewn together. Even if your finger doesn't fit, you can still use a pencil or other similar device to stuff those areas.

- Once you've sewn the front and back together, make sure everything you thought was sewn together is actually sewn together. Once I started stuffing, there were a few places that I noticed holes in my top-stitching. I ended up having to close those by hand, which was really annoying.

- Also, make sure the opening you leave is as small as you can make it and still stuff through it and make sure it is on a straight edge. The closer it is to an arm or leg or other non-straight part, the more difficult it will be to sew closed because those other stuffed parts will get in the way, especially when back-stitching.

I think these little guys turned out adorably - too bad I have to wait until December (and February and June) to get the kid's reactions.

Chair Upgrade

I know I've mentioned it somewhere on this blog but to recap, a long time ago, like February 2013, I bought three chairs for the purpose of re-upholstering and repainting them in order to customize them so they'd look really nice in my house. Well, I finally finished one. Yes, it took about two and half years but I'm done. . . with one. I actually finished it several weeks ago but I've been busy so I haven't posted yet. Busy with what? Well, I'm selling the house, so I've been busy getting it in order. That was also my final motivation for finally finishing the chair.

My original plan was to do a detailed blog about how to do something like this, but two and a half years later I've decided I'm not going to go into detail. There are already lots of blogs out there with all the details so I'll keep mine pretty top level.

Overall, it was a fun, not too hard, not too expensive project.

The "before" chair just before getting started. The first steps, obviously, were taking it apart. The base of the chair was pretty easy - a couple of screws. Getting the fabric off was another story. There were lots and lots and lots of staples. Lots of staples and each had to be taken out one at a time. To do so I used a flat head screw driver, some needle nose pliers, and lots of elbow grease. I got blisters from this but it was kind of fun. Once the staples were off I set aside the fabric and piping and took the batting and cushions off. The finished chair has the same seat base with the original springs.

I decided to leave the black stuff in the middle. I think it might have some cushion in the middle but it all seemed to be in pretty good condition so I figured I would save myself a few steps and leave it. After getting everything apart I made an attempt to use some kind of liquid sand paper stuff to take off the original finish. I don't think I'll do this with the other two chairs. It was a ton of work and I'm not sure I did a great job. Plus, the step afterward is priming with an oil based primer (the same primer I used with those gross shelves) that sticks to everything. I don't see the point in doing both steps in the future. By the way, I think I did two coats of primer.

After priming I painted. This chair is yellow; it is the same paint I used on my dining room walls. I had a really hard time getting the lid off the can of paint so what was left is all dried up now so my other chairs may end up being a different color. This should be fine since they will also have a different fabric (the white backed floral in the top photo). I did two coats of paint.

For the new fabric, I kept all the original fabric (I labeled it as I took it off so I would know how to put it back together) and laid it out on the new fabric then cut the new fabric using the old fabric as a pattern. This worked out really nicely. I also used the front and back original fabrics as well as the seat's original fabric to create a pattern for the cushions. I don't have any pictures of that but it was easy enough. After the fabric was cut, I sewed the the seat fabric together and sewed the piping. For the seat's piping I used the original piping, which worked out beautifully, but my sewing machine didn't like the original piping that was on the front and back of the chair so I bought new piping for that . . . and hated it. It was a lot flimsier than the original piping so I didn't know how I was going to end up stapling it to the chair without the staples showing. Once I had everything sewed, I avoided putting it back together because I didn't like the piping. Then I had an epiphany - don't staple the piping, hot glue it. Duh, right? So I staples everything (which is so much fun - I love my staple gun!) then glued the piping, screwed the cushion back on, and now it is all done and I'm really happy with it.

Latest Quilt: Rainbow

I just finished this one. It was inspired by something I saw on Pinterest but I changed some things to make it my own.

It was pretty simple to piece and quilt. The piecing is white fabric with six colored stripes. I also used fabric from the rainbow stripes to create the binding. For the quilting, I simply quilted on the outside edge of each color then quilted clouds in the white above the rainbow then some broken, straight blue lines for rain below the rainbow.

The hope was that the quilting would show a picture on the back of the quilt but that didn't work out quite like I had hoped. The back is a gray fabric and you can see some of the quilting but I should have triple stitched the quilting in order for the colors to show up better. Now I know.

Pocket Pillows

Yes, I originally saw this on Pinterest and I immediately loved it. What's better than having a pillow with a pocket? (Ok, dresses with pockets are up there but this is still super cool.) I've decided that my nieces and nephews are getting these, plus a book of course, for their birthdays this year.

The original pin I found didn't have very straight-forward instructions on how to make the pillow so I figured it out myself.

Fabric you'll need:
A - (2) 20 x 20 inch
B - (1) 11 x 21 inch
C - (1) 13 x 21 inch
D - large-ish scraps for letters (optional)
E - (2) 11 x 1.5 inch

Yes, B & C are wider than A. This will help ensure that the pocket is big enough to actually fit stuff in it. You'll also need thread and about 14 - 20 ounces of filling, depending on how firm you want the pillow.

Steps:
1. Sew both E pieces right side together on the long sides only. Turn it right side out.
2. Sew B and C wrong sides together so that three sides meet, only sew those three sides.
3. Fold over the extra fabric on the top twice (so the outside edge is the nice edge) and sew.
4. Sew your letters to A1.
5. Place A1 right side up. Lay E on top so that the ends meet the edge of A1 and the middle is on the inside (Once you place the rest of the layers down, you will only be able to see the ends of E). On top of that place B+C B side down and A2 right side down. While pinning you'll notice the extra inch on B+C; make sure the pin the edges so they meet the edges of both A fabrics. This keeps the extra inch of fabric in the middle and gives the pocket extra space.
6. Sew on all sides leaving about 1.5 inches open.
7. Turn the pillow right side out; stuff it through the opening.
8. Hand sew the opening closed.

Sharpie Art on Cavnas

I saw some sharpie art on Pinterest that looked really neat. The post I saw was for decorating small, white tiles, which I didn't want to do, so I went looking for something similar on canvas. I didn't find anything. I did however, find a blog about using sharpies to tie-dye shirts. Also not what I wanted but still a cool project. I decided to try this one on my own and I learned a few things.

My goal was to see if this would work well on canvas instead of the other mediums I had seen it on. So I went to Walmart and bought a 3-pack of 8 x 10 canvases for $3 total. I have sharpies laying around the house but I wanted to use new ones to make sure I didn't run out of any color (because the ones I have around are pretty old). Unfortunately, Walmart didn't have the big pack of Sharpie brand so I went with the Bic brand. I also purchased some rubbing alcohol and used a medicine dropper that I already had. I made sure to set the canvas on an old towels that I didn't mind having the colors bleed on to and I think that was an excellent idea. I also elevated the canvas a little by putting it (and the towel) on some cardboard to ensure that I didn't get any color on my table.

I started by coloring lines on my canvas. I left some white space between each color to allow some space for the colors to move around without getting too mixed up. Then I dropped alcohol onto the white spaces and slightly on the surrounding color. I let this sit until the alcohol was almost dry-ish. 

As you can see, after waiting, there are sill lots of white spaces where my colors didn't mix. I dropped alcohol onto just these white spaces in order to fill them with color. Again I let this sit. I probably could have filled in a few more white spaces but I dropped my dropper into my alcohol container and didn't feel like doing anything else after getting it out.

The final product is the top image in this posting which is also the image below. Like I said, I learned a few things and I have highlighted those things in my three test subjects below.

The blue circles below show where too many or the wrong colors mixed together to make kind of an ugly brown patch. I would be careful putting non-primary colors next to any other color that didn't create that color. Those colors mixing together are often (but not always, read on) what causes the brown spots.

 

The yellow circles highlight places where you can see my pen mark. In most cases, I think this could be avoided by coloring the marker on thicker. This is especially obvious on the last image below.

The gray circles (sorry they aren't easier to see) are where you can see my alcohol drops. This is really only an issue when I dropped single drops on just one color. It gave the canvas kind of a polka dot effect and I don't care for it. I fixed a lot of it by adding more alcohol so there would be some more interesting shapes.

 

The green circles (above image only) are where two primary colors came together to make another color, I really like these spots.

The orange circles (below image only) are where two non-primary colors that I probably shouldn't have put together actually look ok. The image below was my first attempt, where I could just do stuff to see what happened. I started with purple and green because I like that color combination. (Some of the colors below look like pink and turquoise - they were purple and green before I put alcohol on them. The alcohol changes the colors a bit.) I think there isn't more brown with these two colors because this shade of purple often drowns out the shade of green I used.

Overall, this was a fun project. I don't think I'll ever do anything more than 8 x 10 because of how long it would take but I think the rainbow canvas and the primary colors canvas both turned out nice.

Latest Quilt: Bright Triangles

The quilt I finished this week is for my cousin who is due with her first later this month. (The baby shower was several weeks ago. I had the quilt pieced and the triangles sewn to the back but it wasn't quilted yet. Sorry it's late!)

This is the first time I used my triangle tool. My goal was to create a quilt that was 40 x 40 inches so I figured I would do ten 4 inch triangles across the bottom. That didn't work out how I had planned. The 4 1/2 inch line on the tool is 4 1/2 inches in height (my quilt would have been the correct 40 inches tall but that didn't work our either - more on that later) but the triangles were almost a full 5 inches wide at the bottom. The quilt did end up being about 40 inches wide but that was only because I cut off some extra width because the quilt back was already cut to the right size.

So, now I know the triangle's height is not equal to its base's width.

If you look really closely, you can see that my pieced triangles are blunted at the top, squared instead of pointed. The goal was to have the triangles come to a point. This didn't work because I didn't piece the triangles quite right. In the picture below you can see two of my triangles pieced together - a blue and white one and a multi-color one with hexagons and diamonds. You can see that the point of the blue triangle is far outside the seem allowance for the multi-color triangle. When I pieced the next row of triangles, this not only made my triangle tips blunted but also made the quilt a little shorter than I had planned.

So, now I know to piece my triangles so they line up properly.

It took me a long time to decide how to do the quilting for this one. I still wasn't sure when I first basted it. I ended up quilting around the solid orange, solid blue, brown, and diamond green triangles with the same color thread as the fabric. Unfortunately this wasn't as easy as I had hoped it would be because it required almost constant rotating of the fabric as I quilted. I thought about doing it free-hand with the embroidery needle in the machine but decided against that because I didn't think my lines would end up very straight.

Because of the colors, you can't see the quilting very well on the pieced side and it is also pretty subtle on the back - and I like that. I like that the back ended up with subtle, random triangles quilted into it.

Overall, I really like this quilt. The colors were fun to work with and I learned a good deal about working with triangles.

Latest Quilt - Blue Corners

This quilt was made for J2.0, who was born just a few days ago.

The piecing on this one was really easy, just a bunch of long, thick rectangles. The quilting was pretty easy too. Other than the dark blue stripes, every stripe just got a straight line near the seam. The dark blue areas are quilted with circles, which were easy enough to do but I will probably never do anything like that again because cutting all the strings between on the circles took forever and nearly gave me blisters.

I learned that all the little quilting can pull the fabric. After the quilting was done, but before I did the binding, you could see that the blue stripes were a little shorter than the other stripes. Not a big deal but good to know for the future.

Activity Days: Journal Writing With M&Ms

We had an activity on the importance of writing in journals. We talked about how it can help us remember things, help our ancestors understand how we lived, and how it can help us think through what is going on in our lives.

Writing in a journal can be difficult to do so I wanted to help give the girls some motivation for what to write about. I found something similar on Pinterest and adapted it for my group. The one I saw only had about six colors of M&Ms; each color represented something you could write about in a journal. I didn't think that was enough. I came up with 11 general things that 8 year old girls could write about in their journals.

To get a total of 11 different colors of plain M&Ms, I bought a pack at Costco with the usuals then went to Zurchers and got some individual colors (which, by the way, are a lot more expensive than I thought they'd be).

Here's the list of things I thought the girls could write about.

1. Something interesting that happened today (or since the last entry).
2. Something you do well or did well today.
3. Something interesting or fun you remembered today and what made you think of it.
4. Something about school.
5. Something you learned today/recently.
6. Something you are grateful for.
7. Something you did for someone else or something nice someone did for you.
8. Something you have a question about or want to understand better or an answer you received.
9. Something you want for the future.
10. Something about your family/friends.

For the activity, I gave each girl a small pad of paper, a colored pen (they thought colored pens were the greatest), and a bag full of M&Ms. I had the girls choose an M&M, use their guide to figure out what they were supposed to write about for that color, then gave them some time to write (which was pretty difficult for some of them). Then they ate their M&M and chose another one.

Recipe: Shredded Meatballs

Meatball sandwiches are amazing. CJ and I have them semi-regularly for dinner. The biggest problem is keeping the meatballs on the sandwich. I devised a remedy for this: Shredded Meatballs.

The inspiration for this recipe came from a slow cooker chicken Parmesan sandwich recipe that we tried but weren't impressed with (found it on Pinterest but apparently I didn't keep the pin - that's how uninterested I was in it after trying it). My first thought upon eating the sandwich was - this would be better with beef. So I tried my own version with beef.

Ingredients
1 beef roast - about 3 pounds
1 can/jar spaghetti sauce
1/2 cup water
Italian Seasoning

Put everything in the crockpot and cook on low for 8 hours or high for 4 hours. Using two forks, shred the meat as soon as you can to help get the flavors on ever possible beefy surface.

Serve on buns with mozzarella and/or Parmesan or add to spaghetti or put on pizza or put in a casserole. Anywhere you can use meatballs, you can use shredded meatballs.

Enjoy!

Activity Days: String Art Temple

A while ago we had an activity on temples. Since 8 year old girls don't sit still or listen for very long, I decided to do a craft along with the lesson. I had seen string art all over Pinterest and thought it could work for a temple.

One of the issues, however, was that the tutorials I saw all involved nails on wood boards. I was very much uninterested it handing nails and a hammer to the girls and I was also uninterested in doing all the hammering before the activity since I was never sure how many girls were going to show up (I think 2 showed up for this activity).

While walking around Jo-Ann for ideas, I came across these small, square cork boards and figured they, with push pins, would be perfect for 8 year olds. (I bought the clear push pins at Walmart because they were significantly cheaper there than Jo-Ann.)

Unfortunately the push pins didn't fit really well, they were longer than the cork board was thick. This means that the pointy end of the push pins would hang out the back or we had to be careful not to push the pins all the way through.

For the shape of the temple I drew out a few different designs on paper. The girls chose their design and cut it out. Then we placed the design on the cork board and put the push pins in around the edges of the design. Taking the paper out afterword was not as easy as I thought it would be so we ended up leaving a few scraps in there figuring the string would hide it. I had pre-cut long pieces of string and let the girls go to town filling in the shape.

Overall, it was an ok activity. I probably wouldn't do it again with this age group - maybe 11 year old girls - and I would definitely make sure the cork board was thick enough for the pins.

Halloween Cake

I made a cake for a Halloween party I went to. The host was going to make all the desserts herself and wanted to do a black and white cake that was a couple of layers and fancy with a spider web decoration but didn't have time and asked the rest of us to bring dessert instead.  I decided to stick with her black and white cake theme but didn't have the time and/or energy to try to make the fancy cake she wanted so I winged it ("winged", get it? 'cause it is a bat cake?) by using a bat cookie cutter and bat sprinkles to make a black and white bat cake. After frosting the cake with white frosting, I simply put the cookie cutter in the middle of the cake, put sprinkles inside the cookie cutter, and gently pressed the sprinkles into the frosting to keep the bat shape.

Latest Quilt

Here is my latest quilt made for a nephew, M, who was due in late September but decided to come a little early.  One of the bonuses of coming early was I knew what his name was before I was done with the quilt and could applique his name on the quilt.

For this quilt I wanted to do an argyle pattern but I didn't want to figure out how to deal with non-right angle diamonds so I went with a modified argyle where I just used rotated squares quilted through the middle.

Putting the squares on their sides made figuring out the size the squares needed to be difficult. I got out some graph paper and mapped out the quilt and tried to figure out my measurements there but, apparently, that didn't work out very well because all my squares are smaller than they should have been. The original plan was to only have the argyle pattern with the orange border but, since my squares were too small, I ended up having to add the blue border (good thing I accidentally bought too much fabric). However, the blue border came in handy when trying to figure out how to do the quilting around the name applique - so I guess it all worked out in the end.


With this quilt I also did triangles for the first time.  I didn't have a triangle tool and I didn't want to pull trigonometry out of my head so I kind of winged the first few by taking cut squares and trimming them into a triangle where I thought they needed to be trimmed. That actually worked beautifully. Some of the triangles were a little big (maybe 1/8 - 1/4 of an inch too long) but that was fine because the excess was just cut off or sewn into the seam.

Another first with this quilt was having a border on both the front and the back - having both orange borders was planned from the beginning.  This made lining up the two sides and the batting a little more time consuming because I wanted to make sure the borders were nearly perfectly lined up so that the quilting would look good. It took extra time but it wasn't difficult (because everything was measured carefully) and I probably wouldn't hesitate too much to do something like that again.

Overall, I think the quilt turned out really cute. I like the orange, blue, and brown color combination.  I figured that since the colors were so bright I should use a more muted color for the quilting.  I went with a gray and triple stitched the quilting to make sure it showed up well.

I hope M likes it.

Activity Days: Nature Scavenger Hunt

For our Activity Days activity this week we did a Nature Scavenger Hunt . . . kind of.  In a traditional scavenger hunt the hunters take what they find; we did not take anything.  We left nature right where it was supposed to be.

To the right is the hunt list.  A few days before the activity I went out to the lake in the neighborhood and took pictures of some of the different things out there. I wanted to make sure the girls could find everything on the list I made.

Not all my pictures turned out so I Google searched for things that looked like what I saw.

After I organized everything I printed it in color and went to the local FedEx Office store to have them laminated.  Just so you know, laminating a single 8.5 x 11 piece of paper at the FedEx Office store costs $1.99.  That's $1.99 each.  I was surprised but I didn't have a lot of extra time to do some price comparing so I went ahead and did it.

As we hunted, I had the girls use dry erase markers to mark everything they found.  I debated between letting the girls keep their hunt list and keeping them for myself for re-use.  The price of lamination sealed the deal and I decided to keep them for myself for re-use.  Here's to hoping I actually get use out of them.

I think the girls had fun with the hunt.  I know I had fun.  Sometimes it is just nice to get out of the house and in to nature.

Recipe: Pizza Crust and Roasted Red Pepper and Alfredo Sauce

A while ago I posted a recipe for BBQ Chicken Pizza with Roasted Red Pepper Sauce where I also mentioned that I'd eventually post my pizza crust recipe.  Well, here it is.

I got this recipe from some college room mates that I had.  They were sisters and they made all kinds of things from scratch that I never would have thought someone would make from scratch, like tapioca pudding.

I've made this pizza dough a lot and have learned a lot about how to make it easier.  It also makes good bread sticks.

Ingredients:
1 cup warm water
3 Tbsp sugar
1 Tbsp yeast
3 Tbsp melted butter
1 tsp salt
1 tsp Italian seasoning
2 Tbsp dry milk powder
3 cups flour

Step One (First Image below): Combine the warm water, sugar, and yeast. To make sure the water is warm enough to activate the yeast but not so warm that it kills the yeast, make sure it is warm to touch but not so hot that you can't touch it for more than a few seconds.

Step Two (Second and Third Images Above): Combine the melted butter, salt, Italian seasoning, and dry milk powder.

Step Three (Fourth Image Above): Combine the yeasty water with the butter mix.

Step Four (Fifth Image Above): Add most of the flour until the dough is barely firm but not sticky.

Step Five (First and Second Images Below): Let the dough rise in a warm place, knead occasionally and just before rolling.

Step Six (Third Image Above): Set dough on well floured surface.  Flour the top of the dough ball and the rolling pin.

Step Seven (Fourth Image Above): Roll dough until it is the right size for your pizza pan.

Step Eight (First and Second Image Below): Place the rolled dough on to the pizza pan. Fold over the extra dough.

Step Nine (Third Image Above): Bake the dough without toppings at 350 for about 10 - 15 minutes.  If you are planning on having heavy toppings, bake closer to 15 minutes.  If you are putting just a few toppings on, closer to 10 minutes is probably fine.

Step Ten: When the dough is done baking, add toppings and bake again until cheese is melted.

This time around when I made pizza dough I made a pizza with Roasted Red Pepper and Alfredo Sauce.  I simply pureed a jar of roasted red peppers and mixed with some Alfredo sauce.  I usually also add a good chunk of Parmesan into the sauce but I ran out after about a tablespoon.

I then added some garlic chicken and mozzarella cheese to make a delicious pizza.

Dress Alteration

A few months ago, maybe mid-December, I went to JCPenney's to do some dress shopping.  I probably tried on 30 or so dresses because I went in with low expectations.  I was sure I was only going to be able to find something that needed some kind of alteration.  Well, I found three dresses that looked good on me and (probably) wouldn't need any alterations to make them work.  Unfortunately I only had the budget for two, so the one you see here is the one I didn't get.

Fast forward a month or so and I was at Penney's again. I decided to stop by the dress section and I found that third dress on clearance for $14.  By that time I had $14 in my budget for a new dress so I scooped it up.

While trying it on it felt like it was going to be long enough but the first time I wore it it felt just a little too short.  So I decided to lengthen it.  The original hem used that fancy stitch (I can never remember what it is called) that doesn't actually show the stitching and I don't remember how to do that and I didn't want to figure out how to do that plus everywhere else on the dress had a little black lining, so I decided to finish the hem with a similar black lining.  And it was easy.  Here's what I did.

Step 1 - Take out the hem.

Step 2 - Do some measuring. I measured the width of the black lining on the other parts of the dress (about 1/4 inch) and of the stitching at the hem (also about 1/4 inch).  This led me to believe that I would need at least a full inch of fabric for my lining: 1/4 inch on each side to match the lining and hide the stitching + 1/4 inch on each side for a seam allowance.

Side note: I actually used about 1 1/4 inch fabric just to be sure.

Step 3 - Cut and iron the fabric.  Once I had a long strip of black fabric, long enough to go all the way around the bottom of the dress, I ironed it.  If you are a talented enough sewer, you could probably skip all or part of this step but I'm going to say what I did even if it wasn't necessary.  I started by ironing the strip in half width ways.  After that, I folded the outer sides into my new crease and folded them down.  That is all.

Step 4 - Pin and sew.  I started by laying the black fabric so that the ends that were sewn to the middle were on top.  I then placed my dress hem on top - right side up (this means the dress was inside out and the inside of the dress was toward the black fabric's ends).  Then I pinned.  Then I sewed.  To finish the ends together I did it kind of like I do the binding on a quilt - when I got close, I sewed the two ends together so the black strip was one big circle, then just finished sewing the strip onto the skirt hem.

As you can see in the last image, I got about 1 1/2 inches of extra length on the dress, so it should be perfect now!

New Wall Decor

I actually have something on my living room wall now!

As you can see from this first picture, it was just a big, ugly, beige wall.  From the second picture you can see that it now has decor.  It is just a cheap poster frame with some fabric in it but it sure is better than nothing.

I got the frame from JoAnn.  It was originally $60 but I had a 40% off coupon and a 20% off the entire purchase coupon so I didn't pay anywhere close to $60.  The fabric is left over from when I re-upholstered my kitchen bar stools.

The plan for the future is to paint the frame the same green color that is on the opposite wall, but I don't really want to do that now.  My goal for this iteration was just to get something up there so the wall wouldn't look so empty.

Now for that room all I need to do is replace those ugly folding chairs with actual sitting chairs. I have my eye on some old restaurant chairs that I've seen on KSL that I'll re-upolster and re-paint but I haven't gotten around to buying them yet.  Hopefully they are still available when I do go to buy them.