QUIET BOOK

Apparently Russ has had several men ask him if I have started "nesting" yet. They told him that their wives started "nesting" (desperately cleaning their entire houses) about 2-3 days before their baby came. Well I have felt so miserable that even with the desire and drive to desperately clean my house I have not been able to do it. I instead found myself making a quiet book. Some days I would work on it for a few minutes and get bored. Other days I would have all this energy and drive to get it done and would work for HOURS. Often missing lunch and getting very sick because of it. Whole pregnancy required eating regularly. Fun. Anyway. I am now at 39 weeks and 2 days and it is officially FINISHED. YES. I made a whole quiet book. Now, I would LOVE to share patterns with you all... However, I didn't have any patterns! Except one. Which I WILL share. This was my basic process:

1. Go to Michaels and buy a ton of felt and some odds and ends like big buttons, zippers, beads, puffy letters, puff paint, etc.
2. Think of something that seems cool to do. Example: I remember we had a quiet book when I was a kid and I remember it having a braiding page. This braiding page was the face of a freckled girl with orangey-red yarn for hair to braid. So I was thinking a girls hair would be better than just some random ribbons or something... But since we're having a boy I kept trying to think of a way to make it more gender generic, so I thought "what if I did a Rapunzel theme instead?" Still kinda girlie of course but maybe a little cooler than Pippie Longstocking? So I moved onto step three.
3. Search the internet for examples of what I'm thinking until I find something I like.
4. Take the idea I found on-line and create and adapt it. This is the part that often took the longest. I would print out pictures of things from the internet or just freehand on paper. Then I would cut the paper out, place it on the felt and then cut the felt around the paper.
5. Once everything is cut out you just have to do a LOT of sewing. I am not a huge fan of sewing so I put this part off until I had most of the book done, haha. But I kept misplacing pieces of the pages so I decided to bite the bullet and just sew the dang thing!
6. Make a cover. We used some leftover fabric we happened to have and some batting. Voila! QUIET BOOK.

So here are some pictures of what I made! Nothing is brag worthy but it was a fairly fun project and I think a few pages turned out really cool! I keep thinking I could add more pages someday... But that would require making more pages! So I don't know how likely that is!! :)

 The cover... Obviously!

 A zipper and counting page.

 A cool old fashioned phone! The phone is just stuck on the page with velcro, he can pick it up and "talk" to people. There is also a little phone book with real phone numbers in it.

 A clock to practice telling time. I stumbled upon a picture of a clock with a mouse and thought it was adorable, so OBVIOUSLY I had to add a mouse to mine as well!

 Simple boring shape match. Never found anything I loved so I just did a classic!

 4 seasons. I LOVED this idea. Especially since we live somewhere with no seasons... Or real trees...

 Rapunzel hair braiding page! The people are little dolls to play with, and one is a prince! Makes it more boy friendly right? :)

 Gumball machine color matching with giant buttons. Thought it would be a more fun way to practice color matching!

 Farm! This is the one and only page I had a pattern for. I obviously tweeked quite a few things, but the pattern saved SO MUCH TIME. And the funny thing? A friend of mine made the pattern... And I ACCIDENTALLY found it when I did a search! Love the animal finger puppets!

 A weaving page that is a pie. I thought that would be more fun than just some random pieces of fabric to weave!

And last but not least I thought it would be fun to have a dress up page. To make it more boy friendly I made a bunch of outfits for professions. I have a doctor, cop, construction worker, fireman, and chef! Most of them have hats too. 

Anyway, overall I enjoyed making my book even if it turned out a bit not great. Haha. The kid won't care. And he won't care how much TIME and EFFORT it took his mother to make this for him! So I shouldn't worry too much about how it turned out. :)

Nursery

Okay we have been incredibly blessed during our pregnancy to have so many friends getting rid of baby stuff! Nothing for our baby is new. It's all hand-me-down stuff. But hey, we saved hundreds of bucks and the kid won't know the difference! One of our friends gave us this simple white rocking chair and we decided to deck it out with a nice memory foam cushion. Russ was very creative and clever when he designed this little cushy seat cover. So now I have a great place to feed the baby and WE have a great place to rock him to sleep. SWEET.

So to make this bad boy we took some chunks of memory foam, which happened to be left over from when we made that massage table back in the day, and cut it up into the perfect sized pieces for both the bottom and back of the rocking chair (that is a major run on sentence but I can't fathom how to fix it at the moment...) He then took this cute little giraffe fabric we bought and made it kind of like a pillow case... Like the pillow shams you put on your bed to make it look pretty? They have over-lapping flaps on the bottom where you can slide the cushion inside. He also attached little strips of fabric to tie it to the chair with. Simple, but it works! And it's REALLY comfortable. So there you go! Nice hard rocking chair turned into a memory foam induced comfy chair.

Family Tree

Everyone keeps asking me what we are doing in the nursery. And honestly? I have no idea. We painted it green LONG before we knew what we were having. I'm not super girlie, so neither would my girl be. We are having a boy however so it really doesn't matter. Anyway. So the one and only thing we have done to decorate is make a giant, vinyl family tree. It is actually insanely cool. Russ got me a silhouette for Christmas (these things seriously rock) so we used a program called Inkscape (FREE by the way) and designed our tree. I had found a tutorial here that explains exactly how to use Inkscape to make a family tree. YAY. She made some sort of wall plaque while we cut out giant strips of vinyl. We did about 5 generations and made the tree about 4 ft by 4 ft. It's quite largeand AWESOME. It was quite the project, it took several hours over many days and effort on both mine and Russell's part. But it was TOTALLY worth it. It really is cool. Someday we will finish it by writing where everyone was born on the leaves, but as of right now, we're done. So now you can admire our handiwork.

 These are the largest names we printed out.

 Strip number one! We had two strips of vinyl this length.

 Print out of what Russell had done on Inkscape. We used it to make sure we put all the names in the correct place and lined everything up perfectly.

 The skeleton of our tree...

ALMOST finished. Like I said, we need to add where everyone was born. And our child's name... Which is currently undecided. Which is totally fine right? We have what, 5 weeks? :)

Valentine's Day gift for Russell

So I was trying to decide what to do for Russell for Valentine's Day this year... The day of. One, because I am pregnant and forgot that it even WAS Valentine's Day... And two, because it is so stinking hard to come up with gifts for men for such a girlie holiday. It is definitely a holiday for women. The men are in trouble if they don't do something for their significant other, but do we as women REALLY have to do anything? No. I don't think Russ would have been surprised OR disappointed had I done nothing. But I still felt I should do SOMETHING. It was our last Valentine's Day just the two of us! So. I searched the internet high and low for some kind of idea. And I found out that you can use sharpies to write on mugs. I thought "that's cool! I can use that!" So I bought a cool mug (only white one I could find) and wrote a bunch of reasons why I loved my hubbie all over it. I put it in the oven to bake as the instructions said and felt quite proud of my accomplishment. Only to have Russell pick it up a couple hours later and smudge my love across the mug... IT DIDN'T WORK. I was a bit distraught that after all my hard work Russ still didn't have a gift. I tried to come up with some way to salvage my beautiful piece of artwork. Each idea was worse than the last. I began to despair until Russell, my sweet, loving, wonderful husband found a solution. Or it may have been me. Don't really remember :). But we found a solution. Albeit a slightly expensive one. Oil-based sharpies.

Apparently when THEY are used on ceramic and baked THEY are the ones that stick. So we washed my words of love down the drain and bought some slightly expensive markers... So that I could make my once only 8 dollar gift into a 15 dollar gift... That took much more time and effort than originally anticipated. Although if you had the right markers from the get-go, this really would be a fun and simple gift. So pitch in the extra couple bucks and DO IT RIGHT the first time. :)

Throw some of your hubbies favorite red candies and a V-day card on in that mug and you have a fun gift. Remember: OIL-BASED SHARPIES. Okay. I'm done now.

Clothing

I have started trying to make my own clothes on occasion. It's kind of fun! But it is pretty hard for me to do it and do it well. :) I'm still learning. My first two skirts I made with the help of a friend in Logan, Paulina. Then yesterday I decided to just make a dress, all by myself. It is not perfect, but I am fairly pleased with myself! I also, with Russell's help at the end, was able to make another skirt, WoOt!
**skirt #3 is still under construction... to be updated at a later date! :D**

Skirt #1

To make this skirt we took one of my favorite fitting skirts and just used it to make up our own pattern. We cut it nice and wide at the bottom and pleated the top. We also added in a layer of fabric underneath as a type of slip and added a zipper to the side. I was lucky enough to find this cute pattern fabric at Joann's. They have a bunch of similar styled patterns there. So check it out if you want to try and make your own cute skirt!

Skirt #2

For this skirt we cut rectangle strips and triangle strips. We sewed it in a pattern of every other shape. First a rectangle, then a triangle, rectangle, triangle until we used them all. We had all of the triangle tips in the same direction so that the top half of the skirt is skinnier than the bottom half. We then just sewed a strip of stretchy material into the top so I didn't have to add a zipper! :)

Dress #1

For this dress I used a nice stretchy fabric, like a t-shirt fabric. I took one of my favorite fitting stretchy t-shirts and a skirt that was nice and wide at the bottom. I tried them on to figure out the way I wanted the dress to fit and then laid them down on my fabric, which was folded in half. I then traced around the outside of the dress and skirt together, with the bottom of the skirt as spread out as it can go. Then I cut out one side of the dress, folded it in half so that it met up with the other half as closely as possible and cut it out. I cut out separate fabric for the sleeves, I think that looks better than having them sewn all the way across the top. Anyway. Then I just pinned it all together and sewed it up! BAM. Pretty, casual, purple dress.

Skirt #3

Russ and I found this awesome shiny fabric at Joann's a while ago and I was hoping to use it to make a maxi dress but I didn't have nearly enough. And afterwards I decided it wouldn't have worked well for that style of dress anyway. So I decided to make it into a skirt! Since the fabric has no stretch to it whatsoever I had to make it nice and loose so it would actually fit. So we bought a pretty stretchy fabric to use on the waist and we cut the shiny fabric into slightly slanted squares and sewed them together. We added buttons to the front to give it a little more life. And ta-da! Skirt #3! :)

My husband is now a masseuse

So when we were in California on vacation Russell started massaging my foot and I was like "man, what I wouldn't do to have this every day..." And my husband, the sweetest man in the world looked at me and decided then and there that he wanted to give me a massage everyday from then on. Okay, my husband is amazing, I know. So for about a week after our trip he DID give me a massage everyday. But it was making his back hurt pretty badly! So he decided that he needed to make a massage table so he could give me a real massage everyday. Don't get too jealous now, he doesn't still give me a massage EVERY day. But he does give them to me often. So here is the massage table he just up and made. I helped him with parts of it, but it was mostly him. He was pretty proud of himself in the end! :) All we have left to do is add a handle to it so we can carry it like a suitcase when we want to move it!

So to make this table Russell basically just made a table that was plenty long to lay on. He used wooden slabs and hinges. Then we used this super intense spray glue to attach a layer of carpet padding and a layer of medium thickness memory foam bed padding. Then we wrapped a thick vinyl fabric around the top and used a staple gun to attach it to the bottom of the table. We also made a few pockets out of the vinyl and attached it to the bottom and legs of the table. Places to keep our massage book and massage oil. And we have a massage table! Yay! It works fantastically well and is quite comfortable. So definitely look up a basic pattern for the table but the padding is fairly simple and straight forward if you ever wish to make one of these beauties for yourself! :)

Happy Halloween!

This year for Halloween we planned on dressing up like we were going to a masquerade ball for our costume. However, we ended up not doing anything... Which was super lame. But I made a mask for my costume before we ended up doing nothing. So here is my attempt at a cool masquerade mask.

Bookmarks

Remember the bookmarks I made back in the day? Well I lost one of them so I decided to make a new one! Shabam!

 

Table Cloth

Our table is square shaped and APPARENTLY they don't make table clothes for that shape. SO we decided to make our OWN table cloth. We found a fabric at JoAnn's that has like a wax coating on it and sewed it up. It ended up costing WAY more than we expected because apparently this is a really nice fabric... Oh well, the table cloth is good and solid and I think it will work well. Even if the pattern is a bit crazy, haha!

Outdoor Blanket

Russ and I decided to make an outdoor blanket so we could use it on picnics and whatnot. It turned out pretty good.

These types of blankets are super easy to make. Just pick some fabric, really any type will do. If you want it to be indestructible to children make sure to get a sturdier fabric. We chose to do two different patterns of fabric, you will want two pieces to make this blanket strong enough for outdoors. Just pin up Your pieces of fabric and sew around the edges. Take some yarn and yarn needles and consistently through the entire blanket push the yarn through the fabric and tie it off. This just make the blanket a little sturdier... And it's kinda cute! :)

Bird Nest Necklace

Last month the Visiting Teaching message was all about being a good visiting teacher. HAH too bad we have the hardest time getting a hold of the woman we visit teach! So my mom gave me this cute idea. You made a necklace that looks like a bird's nest and add a quote: "Watch over your sister's like a bird watches over her nest." So here is how my nest necklaces turned out!
You can find the tutorial here.

Duct Tape Wallet

I have always wanted a duct tape wallet. I think they're way cool. So Russ and I decided to make one and it turned out pretty good. We used a smaller roll of duct tape so it wasn't as easy to put together as the regular duct tape would be. It is starting to fall apart a little bit. BUT it's still really cool and I think it will be easy to fix. :) here is the tutorial we used to make these suckers: duct tape tutorial. The girl may come across as a bit of an airhead. Okay, maybe more than a bit... But she explains everything really clearly, so her tutorial is very easy to follow! Good luck!