As if it weren’t crazy enough that I’ve taken on two huge challenges for myself this year (photo a day and my 73 goals), I decided to go completely nutso and I signed up for Lain Ehmann’s Layout a Day Scrapbooking Challenge for the month of February. Actually, one of the main reasons I signed up for this project is to help me accomplish Goal #21: Make at least 30 scrapbook layouts. So far I’ve managed my one layout per day which would make me happy even if that’s all I did for the month. I think I made around 4 or 5 layouts in all of 2009 so I’ve already tripled my output in comparison to last year. Here are some of the pages I’ve made so far:

Click on any of these links to see a larger version of the page: 1. Right Now, 2. Squish, 3. The President, 4. Sleepy Bear, 5. We <3 Mythbusters, 6. Wyatt’s 5th Birthday, 7. 25 Random Facts About Me, 8. the last quiz, 9. She’s Crafty, 10. Twins, 11. My friend Lisa, 12. SAHM

We’ve been having a lot of rainy weather around here and the kids have been stuck inside for over a week now. The other day, the five-year-old and I stumbled upon an easy activity that kept him busy for over an hour. OVER AN HOUR, PEOPLE! If you’re the parent of a five-year-old, you know how awesome that is.

We ended up making these things that I am calling: Tie Dye Window Decorations.

I’m pretty good at naming things, don’t you think? Also, I know it’s starting to look like we’re a bunch of hippies, but we really aren’t. It’s just that tie dye crafts are easy and fun and they give you pretty results with a fun surprise factor at the end.

All right, so here’s what you need to make these totally easy Tie Dye Window Decorations:

• A cheap-o kids water color set
• Paper towels

I bet you have those in your house right now! Sweet.

Start off by filling each of the water color thingies up to the top with water.

I found an easy way to do this is to fill up a big glass of water and then transfer the water to the paints by doing that thing where you put your finger over the end of the straw to trap the water inside and then let it go over the paints to get it out. Wyatt liked this part almost as much as the actual dyeing. You can also just fill them up at the sink, but you’ll be running back and forth a lot more often if you do it that way.

Stir the paints up to get more of the color in the water.

Now, take a big paper towel and cut it into quarters. You’ll want your pieces of paper towel to be about 6 inches square. If they’re bigger, they’re harder for little hands to handle and the paint doesn’t saturate as easily.

Fold your square of paper towel in half.

Then fold it in half again.

And then fold it in half on the diagonal, kind of like how you’d fold paper to cut a paper snowflake:

You can just leave your towel as is, or if you want it to be more of a circle, cut the end off the towel like so:

Instead of folding the towel on the diagonal, you can also fold it in half again so it’s a rectangle shape which will make the end design different, but equally attractive.

OK, so now that the paper towel is all folded, you get to start the fun part — the dyeing! Dip different parts of the paper towel bundle into the paints and let it absorb the color. The corners are the easiest.

You can fold it in half again to get the colors into the middle sections. You can also dab paint on with the paint brush.

Keep dipping and dabbing until the paper towel bundle has as much paint on it as you’d like.

Then unfold to see your beautiful creation in all its glory!

Lay towels flat to dry (we used a cookie cooling rack) and then hang them in a sunny window to catch the light!

I’ve been up to some crafty shenanigans over the past couple months and I realized the other day that I haven’t shared any of my projects with my faithful bloggy friends.

Wanna see? Sure you do!

Wrist Warmers

First up: wrist warmers!

Back in November the Craft blog had a Loom Along where the participants made a set of wrist warmers. A who in the what now? The lovely Vickie Howell came up with a pattern for some wrist warmers that could be made on a small knitting loom. Readers were invited to “loom along” and share photos of their finished projects with a chance to win fabulous prizes. The project was cute and easy so I decided to play along. This is the first pair I made:

They are garish and crazy and I love them! Peace out!

When Wyatt saw me making them, he wanted a pair for himself. I modified the pattern a bit so they would fit him better. I started off by knitting the bottom part until it was 5 1/2 inches long. Then I knit 4 rows for the thumb hole. And for the last bit, I only knit another inch. He likes to wear them when he plays Batman sometimes. Maybe because they look like gauntlets a little bit?

OK, so here’s the crazy part: I won  a prize for the wrist warmers I made Wyatt! No kidding!!

I was pretty surprised, to be honest. I am only a very beginner knitter and I can’t do much beyond a garter or stockinette stitch. I can sometimes manage a rib stitch, but I usually mess it up by purling when I mean to knit at some point (or vice versa). So honestly, I think that it was a random drawing, though the contest rules didn’t state that specifically.

In any case, the prize I won was a book called Knit Aid by Vickie Howell. It’s a portable guide to knitting basics and I’ve already used it on this next project which is….wait for it…more wrist warmers!

OK, I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve gone a little crazy for the wrist warmers. I like the loomed warmers, but all things considered, I would have preferred the knit to be a little denser, so I decided to try to make a pair on regular knitting needles. I just knit a flat panel and then sewed up the sides leaving a hole for my thumb. I also added some ribbing at the top and bottom. It turns out that I made them a little too wide because they kind of flop around on my hands a bit but they’re fine for watching tv or for when I’m out for a walk. I also think they’re pretty good for having just made up the pattern with an educated guess. If I make another pair, I’ll adjust the gauge a bit, but I think I might be done with the arm warmers for awhile. Really, how many pairs of arm warmers does a girl need?

Incidentally, finishing this set of wrist warmers was on my list of goals for 2010, so I get to cross that off. Wooooo!

Felt Food

OK, so after wrist warmers, my obsessive craft tendencies switched to felt. I decided that I wanted to give Augie a bunch of felt food for Christmas, so I bought some fantastically gorgeous wool felt from Purl Soho and went to town.

I started off with a chicken drumstick (inspired by this tutorial), which might just be my favorite of all of these:

I also made a fried egg and a couple of pieces of bacon. The bacon pieces have a pipe cleaner running down the middle of them so you can make them all crinkly. These were made using the tutorial at Wee Folk Art.

Then I decided he needed a donut for breakfast. Vanilla with chocolate frosting and lots of hand embroidered sprinkles. (I used this excellent tutorial.)

It makes for quite the heart healthy breakfast.

Other Felt Stuff

I’ve been following Betz White’s blog for awhile and you really only need to read it for about 5 minutes before you start getting the itch to felt some thrifted sweaters. After a short while, I couldn’t resist any more, so I went over to my favorite thrift shop (Thrift Town, yay!) and collected about $10 worth of wool sweaters. At home, I washed them in an extra-hot washing machine and machine dried them and they all shrank up to about half their original sizes.

The first project I made with my new felt was an apple ornament for Wyatt’s kindergarten teacher.

I used the sleeves of the felted sweaters to make these coffee holders. Coffee jackets? Coffee sleeves? What in the heck of the world do you call those things, anyway? Those things that slip onto paper coffee cups so your fingerprints don’t burn off. But they’re made of reusable felt instead of cardboard, so they’re more environmentally friendly and a whole heckuva lot cuter!

These babies couldn’t be simpler. You just cut off a chunk of the sleeve that’s about the right diameter, clean the edges up and you’re all set. Where you cut the sleeve will depend a bit on the sweater you’re using. Some will shrink up a lot more than others. On this one below I used the very bottom of the sleeve, but if your sweater was really tiny after felting you might need to cut the ring up near the elbow. You can just use them as is, of course, but I felt (Ha ha! Get it?) the need to cute them up a bit, so I added decorations.

This little cutie is for my husband who loves aliens. I cut the head out of wool felt, embroidered the face and then quickly stitched it onto the sleeve.

This one is for me. The flower is also made out of felt (surprise!) and the idea comes from this tutorial on A Hoot and a Holler. Hecka sweet, huh?

What are you working on? Any fun stuff to share?

Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a fantastic December and enjoyed their holidays tremendously!

As is often the case, the new year has spurred me to do a little reflection on my life and look at some places I’d like to make some changes. Most people refer to these ideas as “resolutions”, but I much prefer to think of them as goals. In the past, I’ve had some grand ideas about how I would make change happen in my life — lose weight! spend more time with friends!  de-clutter the house! do more creative stuff! — but my follow through on those nice ideas has been less than stellar.  Last year I set some much more specific goals and I’m happy to report that I actually achieved (and even surpassed) many of them.

This year I want to get even more granular in my goals. One of the big things I feel like my life was lacking last year was self-fulfillment. My lay-off and the subsequent transition from career-lady to stay-at-home-mom left me floundering a bit. I could write a whole big post about this topic, but for now I’ll just say that I found myself dedicating the majority of my time to satisfying other people’s wants and needs and significantly less time doing things I enjoyed and that made me happy. So this year, I’ve compiled a list of small, achievable goals for myself. Most of them are fun and all of them will make me happy in some way. I’ve grouped them loosely into five categories: cooking, crafts, kids, organization, and personal projects.

There are a gazillion things on the list already and I suspect that I’ll add more from time to time. It’s possible that I won’t complete them all this year (though I hope I will) but even if I only get to half of them I bet I’ll feel happier.

So without further ado, here is my list:

1. Actually make those pretzel crayon thingies for Wyatt’s lunch.
2. Bake bread.
3. Find five reliable, healthy, delicious soup recipes.
4. Learn to make pickles and/or marmalade.
5. Make a split the layer cake.
6. Make a twinkie cake.
7. Make macarons.
8. Make red beans and rice from scratch.
9. Assemble paper Christmas train with the kids.
10. Assemble paper Christmas village with the kids.
11. Assemble Project 365 scrapbook.
12. Do another photo-a-day project.
13. Etch glass.
14. Finish my project 365 blog posts.
15. Finish the fingerless mitts I started before Christmas.
16. Knit August a cute hat.
17. Learn to crochet.
18. Make a Santa outfit for Wyatt’s Imaginext Batman.
19. Make a softie for my niece-to-be.
20. Make a special birthday hat and get a special birthday plate.
21. Make at least 30 scrapbook layouts.
22. Make Augie more felt food.
23. Make car organizers for each of the kids.
24. Make felt gingerbread men for the kids.
25. Make some felt flower barrettes.
26. May some air dry clay flowers.
27. Set up a light box for photographing food and crafts.
28. Take a letterpress class.
29. Add five new foods to Wyatt’s eating repertoire.
30. Do a potato stamp art project with the boys.
31. Find a park with a splash pad for the kids to play in.
32. Read more with August.
33. Read more with Wyatt.
34. Sign up for a “Mommy and Me” type class with Augie.
35. Take Augie for walks around the block.
36. Take August to ride the steam trains.
37. Take my kids to Iowa in the warm months.
38. Take the kids swimming.
39. Take Wyatt to the King Tut exhibit.
40. Use our zoo membership.
41. Visit Little Farm with the kids.
42. Buy a laundry hamper.
43. Clear miscellaneous stuff off the top of the living room book cases.
44. Clear out the basement storage room and Freecycle like crazy.
45. Clear the clutter from my bedroom.
46. Get rid of half the stuff in our horrible, scary office.
47. Organize my crafting.
48. Re-organize and purge my craft supplies.
49. Re-organize and refresh bento supplies.
50. Set up a desk for Wyatt.
51. Attend BlogHer 2010.
52. Buy an every day skirt.
53. Double Wendolonia’s blog traffic and subscriptions.
54. Find a babysitter.
55. Find my copy of “Wreck This Journal” and wreck it.
56. Find some kind of exercise I enjoy and do it regularly.
57. Finish my book proposal.
58. Get a new couch.
59. Go on more than one date with Zach.
60. Go out to a grown up restaurant with another couple.
61. Go to Nordstrom for a bra fitting.
62. Hold another diaper drive for Help a Mother Out.
63. Make a bento box how-to video.
64. Make more lists.
65. Print and frame a “Get Excited and Make Things” poster for my office wall.
66. Read To Kill a Mockingbird.
67. Start Weight Watchers again.
68. Stay in a hotel alone for a weekend to sleep late, scrapbook, blog, and do whatever else I want.
69. Take a day (or weekend) trip to Santa Cruz.
70. Take periodic “days off” from social networking.
71. Take some naps.
72. Volunteer in Wyatt’s classroom.
73. Wean Augie.

I’ve already posted my list to the sidebar of this blog and I’ll be crossing them out (and likely blogging about many of them) as I complete them.

Did you set any goals for the new year? What fun, fulfilling activities are you planning for yourself?

A few weeks ago, Wyatt and I were invited to a wreath-making extravaganza by our friends Whitney and Heather at Rookie Moms. Heather and Whitney threw this crafty party along with the folks at Underwriter’s Laboratory to spread some holiday cheer while passing along safety tips about holiday decorating in general and light safety in particular.

While I knew that Wyatt would like running around with the other kids and eating pizza, I wasn’t sure if he would be all that into the actual wreath making. But he surprised me and worked his little fingers to the bone punching circles out of patterned paper and directing me to add a string of lights, ribbon, a funky gold pine cone and letters to spell out his name to his wreath. I placed everything exactly as he directed me to and this is the final product:

Not too shabby! We will be hanging this in our front window when I get my act together and put up the Christmas decorations some time in the next few days.

The high point for me was when the photographer, Erin Nelson, pulled Wyatt and me aside to take a few pictures of us together. As the family photographer, I’m almost always behind the camera and very rarely in front of it. I’ll occasionally manage to take a self portrait that I like, but it’s really rare that any photos are taken of me with the kids. So when I saw this photo in Erin’s gallery, I about died:

What mom doesn’t want a photo like that with her boy?

And this is totally unrelated to wreath-making, holiday lights or brilliant photographers, but you have to check out this turkey frying video from the UL folks. Jeebus! I can assure you we will never be frying a turkey at our house!

All photos by Erin Leigh Photography. More pictures of our wreath-making are in her Flickr set here.

Disclosure: I received wreath-making supplies, safety advice, 2 slices of pizza, a slice of sweet potato pie, a print of the photo above, and the pleasure of spending time with crafty people and a slew of cute kids at the Safe and Bright holiday party. And then I wrote this blog post. Hopefully the FCC won’t throw me in the big house now that I’ve told you all that.

If you grew up in the late 70’s or early 80’s chances are pretty good that you had a baseball shirt at some point in time. And if you had a baseball shirt, you most likely ironed something onto it. Maybe you had a picture of a kid with braces that said “The tin grin is in!” or maybe you had your name or perhaps you were one of the lucky kids who had both — one on the front and one on the back? My baseball shirt was white with pink sleeves and my mom and dad carefully ironed a unicorn picture to the front and my name on the back in sparkly Cooper Black font. I can assure you I was hot stuff in that shirt!

I bought Wyatt a baseball shirt a couple of weeks ago and since then it has been calling out for some fuzzy iron-on letters.

This should be a quick and easy project. Shall we begin?

Start off by ironing the shirt. By looking at these photos after the fact, you’ll note that there is some kind of stain down the front of it. Please ignore that going forward.

Pull the letters off the sheet. I used flocked letters because they’re fluffy and wonderful. Not quite as wonderful as sparkly letters, but these run a close second.

Scatter the letters all over the shirt willy nilly.

Ha ha! Just kidding. Did you know I use rulers in practically every craft project I do? I do! I’m a Virgo.

Start off by centering the ruler on the shirt. Then pick the middle letter in the name you’re adding  and put that on the mid-point of the ruler.

Add the rest of the letters on either side, spacing them out as evenly as you can.

Put the ruler over the bottom of the letters about a quarter inch to hold them in place and then press with the iron for a few seconds.When you lift up the iron, you may notice the T’s are stuck to the iron. If that happens, it means that you put the T’s on upside down like I did.

When you pull them off the iron, they’ll be all melty and stuck to themselves like this. You won’t be able to pull them apart to fix them either. Check the package to see if there are any more T’s. Since there won’t be any others, it would be OK to say something like, “Oh, crap-a-doodle-doo!” at this point.

Take a look at the shirt and see if you can get by with just the letters that stuck to the shirt. Consider creating a new nickname for your son, such as “Wya”.

Your next step in this quick and simple craft project will be to drive back to the craft store for another package of iron-on letters.

When you get back home put your new T’s on the shirt. Check, double-check and triple-check to be sure that you haven’t put them on upside down again.

Press the letters with an iron.

When you lift the iron, notice that there is some kind of sticky brown goo all over the letters you just drove all the way to the frakkin’ craft store to get. Say a naughty word and look at the iron to see what the heck is all over the lang dang heat element. You should notice some brown goo in the exact same shape as the T’s you ironed the wrong side of earlier. Curse your own carelessness and shake your fist at the stupid shirt with the stupid brown letters on it.

Try wiping the goo off with a wet washcloth. When that doesn’t work, get out a butter knife and scrape the brown goo off. This will work! Wipe the brown stuff off the iron and re-press to make sure the letters are properly adhered.

Enjoy your fancy new shirt and the Bad News Bear who will wear it.

(Incidentally, Wyatt loves his new shirt, despite the poses he struck in these photos. When your name is Wyatt you don’t get to pull personalized license plates or mugs off the rack in the gift shop at Disneyland, so having something with his name on it finally is pretty cool.)