Strawberry Sisters Carry Along

This Spring Katie's tote bag she uses for American Heritage Girls fell apart. THis is the bag that she carries her book and other meeting items in. I had seen a kit that I thought might make a cute replacement bag at the Fat Quarter Shop. It is no longer available but was called Strawberry Sisters Carry Along. The kit came with everything I needed to make the bag, but I did add a layer of interfacing to give it more structure.

Here she is ready to go with her new bag!

Side Yard

This year I want to expand the garden to my side yard, we have been working on cleaning up the branches that were put there when removed a few years ago. The branches are almost gone! With the recent rain storm the weeds grew like crazy, some were over a few feet tall. This weekend was time to mow and weed whack to clean it up. Here is a look a little over half down. 

I moved the remaining branches and wood near the house to get everything down. I had a helper from the window.

A look at the finished mowing. There are still tree stumps here from the cottonwood trees that took forever to get rid of.

My brother happened to show up so he started tilling it.

Here is the finished tilled area, cant wait to get some plants in here!

Speaking of plants here is a look at how they are doing.

Super Hero Cape

Katie like most kids loves dressing up, she also love super heroes. When getting things together for her Halloween costume I found a pattern that she loved, McCalls 6626. This pattern has all the pieces needed to deck your kid out in all super hero gear. Katie loves pink and black and wanted everything follow this color palette. Most of the pieces are made of felt but the cape can be made of a wide variety of fabrics. (I also used this pattern to make Katies Darth Vader belt.) This project got set aside for awhile but Katie has not forgotten about her pink and black cape so I decided it was time to finish it and pulled it out today and ask my Mom to sew it. After that it was a matter of adding some eyelets and finishing it off.

The fabric is pink and black satin and by using eyelets for the ties it will be much stronger to handle the activities of a 5 year old.

I think she likes it and may even be wearing it to bed tonight as it has only come off her body for the pictures since it was finished. (And yes those are her Darth Vader slippers she is wearing)

Button Monogram

Time for the first craft project of 2014! I saw a craft project on JoAnns site a few months ago and wanted to try it. It was a monogram on a canvas made from buttons. I purchased a 10x10 canvas with a coupon from JoAnns and set out to find some inexpensive button. I ended up purchasing them from Oriental Trading Company for a really good price.

Here are the supplies I started with, not pictures is the glue, I used my E6000. The K was created in PhotoShop, made a 10x10 image the looked for the font and size that I thought would work.

I cut the K out and traced it on the canvas with pencil.

I then sorted through the buttons looking for the pink shades. I then set them out in the K to make sure I had enough. Next came the glue and gluing them down. 

This project took no more that 30 minutes and was very easy. Here it is on Katie's bedroom wall.

Snowmen Ornaments

This weekend it was craft time with Katie again. She chose to make these bead snowman ornaments.

The kits came with the standard beads and pipe cleaners. Katie put the beads on on and I used hot glue after each bead. The last step was to tie the ribbon scarf around the neck.

 These guys are already hanging on the tree and look adorable.

Rainbow Favors

My little girl will be turning 5 this month, it is all going by so fast! For her 5th birthday I decided to give her a big party like she had been asking for. We invited her entire class and many other friends and family. To prepare I went to Pinterest for inspiration and found a picture that looked like something we could make however I could not find instructions. After some searching I discovered pretzel bags, M&M's and Rolos to be the answer. First we sorted a huge bag of M&M's by color.

Next four Rolo's went into the bottom of the bag.

M&M's are then added by color making a rainbow.

Quickly and easily it comes together into a cute party favor.

A lot of rainbows for preschoolers to eat!

Getting Christmas Started

It may be Thanksgiving but after a long day of cooking the was right to start with some Christmas crafts. A few months ago Katie, my Mom and I picked out some Christmas crafts from Mary Maxim. Tonight we started with a simple ornament, here is the package.

It contained silver pipe cleaners and beads. We were quickly able to set it up and Katie followed the graphic to put the beads in the correct order. 

We did run out of pipe cleaners so I substituted a yellow from from our craft supplies.

Cute and easy to make, what more can you ask for!

Halloween

For Halloween this year Katie decided she wanted to be Darth Vader. She is a Star Wars fan and really like Darth Vader. Her description was that he needed to be all black and a red light saber. We started early (like August) with looking for a cape pattern. Her cape is gaberdine and lined with satin, research showed that this was similar to the actual cape used in the first movie except it was wool lined with satin. Wool would have been too heavy for my little girl. For the rest of her costume we purchased a mask, black shirt, black pants and boots. The gloves were Batman gloves but she never knew the difference. I did make her a belt out of felt and interfacing that closed with velcro. The most difficult item was probably her light saber, it had to be red and one that she could carry. Also she wanted it to light up and make noise. We looks and eventually ended up getting one at Disneyland. It was red and collapsible but did not make noise or light up. There were other colors that did but Darth Vader can not have a light saber in another color! Here is the result:

I was away at conference on Halloween so my parents for Katie ready for school. Her classmates loved her costume but she was not allowed to keep her light saber.

I did make it home in the afternoon and we soon loaded up the car and headed off to our Trunk or Treat.

One of Katies friends knew what her costume was going to be and coordinated as a Jedi. There were many battles held in the parking lot.

Katie did her Trunk or Treating and got a small collection of candy. She only likes chocolate and it has to be chocolate on the inside and outside so she didnt eat much of what she got but was super excited about getting it.

This year Katie decided Momma needed to dress up too, I didnt have time to make a costume but purchased a pirate one.

Halloween was definitely fun and my Darth Vader was the cutest Darth Vader ever. 

Pumpkin Luminaries

We have a slight abundance of large Mason jars which I rarely use for canning so I have begun looking for crafts to use with them. Coming up on Halloween I found an excellent craft on Pinterest for luminaries.

To start with we cleaned and dried some jars.

Katie was very excited about this project and was very ready to help.

Next we painted them with regular craft acrylic paint. We picked orange, white and green as our colors.

We let them dry for a day then got ready for some faces.

To make faces we drew them on with Sharpies then painted with black paint. We made white ghosts, orange pumpkins and green zombies (according to Katie, Frankenstein to everyone else). 

Once the faces were dry I took them outside and sprayed them with Krylon Triple Thick Glaze, two coats.

For Halloween we put LED tea lights in them and put them in the windows of the house. I also took some to our Trunk or Treat and set them up around the car. They came our great and we will be using them for years in the future.

Pineapple Princess

Katie has been taking a dance class at a local park for awhile now. They had their first recital this last weekend. 

Here is Katie ready for her dress rehearsal. 

We could not take pictures of the actual show but could at the rehearsal. They did a tap dance to Pineapple Princess.

They did a ballet dance to Lion Sleeps Tonight.

Here is Katie ready for the performance.

And here she is after the show posing for momma in her costume.

I was so proud of Katie. My shy and quiet girl loves to dance and loves being on stage. As long as she enjoys it we will keep dancing. She will be preforming these dances one more time at the Antelope Valley Fair on August 16th, just in case anyone is interested in attending! There are professional pictures and video coming, I will post them when they arrive.