Frog Quilt

This Saturday I'm hosting a friend's baby shower.  She doesn't know if it's a boy or girl and didn't want a theme that was overly froo-froo.  So I picked frogs because they painted their nursery a very bright green.  Or as her husband said - Kermit the Frog green.  And that answered what I should do for her quilt!  I knew I wanted to try something a little different than the Noah's Ark one and preferably easy because I need to start work on another friend's baby quilt as well.  Why I keep signing myself up for so many projects, I don't know.

I thought these little squares that were about 8x8 inches would be easy to sew.  Well, not really, they were hard to get exact (I'm not so good at the measuring exact part yet) and then sewing it together so that all the seams matched up.  Thankfully my Mother in Law was there to help so it didn't turn out too bad.

The goal was to put frogs on all the squares, but I got a bit lazy.  My favorite part: the one with the tongue catching the bug!  I feel so creative for coming up with that.

I wasn't going to do a border, but I thought it looked a bit unfinished, so I added the red border.  All the fabric is from JoAnn's.

My other favorite part, the super cute turtle, bug, and frog fabric for the backing.  The other bad idea on this quilt - putting a border on the back.  Ug.  Trying to get the borders on the front and back to match was impossible.  They're not quite matching, but they're close!  Hopefully my friend won't mind.  It doesn't look bad, but I want everything to be perfect.  I have to remind myself it's only my second quilt.

Now my next project is to finally finish the stupid guest bathroom that mocks me every day.  I want to find a nice painting or something for that room to finish it off from One Kings Lane.

Bachelorette Party Page

I made a scrapbook for my friend's wedding process - the bridal shower, bachelorette party, rehearsal dinner, and the wedding itself!  It was a lot of work, but fun and I'm glad I was able to do it.

My favorite page out of that entire scrapbook was for the bachelorette party.  The paper was silver glitter since we all wore sequins out.  It was kind of a pain in the rear to get everything to stick to that paper, but I bought some sticky dots called Zots for Bling and those little suckers keep everything on.  wish I had discovered those sooner in my scrapbooking life.  oh well.

I used two different cricuts to get the 'South Haven' and 'bachelorette party' words, sadly I can't remember which ones.  I think bachelorette party was from Tie the Knot.

What I love most about it though is the pictures of everyone's heads (or shoulders and up) on the left hand side.  I think that turned out the best!

My first quilt ever!

I've always wanted to make a baby quilt and luckily my mother in law does quilting, so she helped me create one.  I'm pretty excited about it.  Let me say the only reason it turned out this well is because my MIL helped.  A lot.

I knew I wanted do a Christian themed one for a friend of mine and Noah's Ark seems like a pretty basic, not too crazy idea for a quilt.  The thing about the arc and animals on here, it's not a quilting pattern, but a free stained glass window pattern I found online.  Stained glass window patterns work really well for quilting because when cutting glass, it's hard to do lot of little corners like it is in quilting.

I found all the fabric at Joann's and I think it turned out well.  I was really torn on how to pick 'good' fabric for a quilt.  I washed, dried, and ironed all the fabric first, except that of the arc.  Which I should have done as well because when I washed it after it was finished, the fabric shrank and came out of the stitching.  ARG!  I had to go back over it.

The sun with the shape of the cross stitched through it was my idea and I think I'm pretty fabulous for coming up with it!  :)

Check it out and let me know what you think!!

What's in a Name? Scrapbook Page

Our daughter is named after a couple family members and I wanted her to know who she was named after and what that person was like.  In her baby album, I created pages for each of the people she was named af

I found some photos of those people from when they were kids to adults, typed up a little bit of info such as favorite colors, favorite flowers, activities they liked, and some of my memories of them.  I think it's a nice little way to remember those people since they have passed away.  Not the most amazing layout pages, but I like the idea!

The one for my Mom, I even found a small old cross stitch that was just sitting in a box and added it to the page.

Water Baby Scrapbook Page

There's nothing too special about this specific page other than I just like the way it turned out.  I struggle with looking at other people's scrapbooks because all of the really cool, artsy ones usually have one photo.  And to quote Sweet Brown: 'Ain't nobody got time for that!'.  I mean, just one photo?  Either I'd have to start taking way better photos that encompassed everything, or my scrapbook would be way huge.

this is a page from when we did a toddler swim class with my daughter and at this same time my husband decided to sport a porn mustache.  I warn you, it's not a good look for him.  I think I used the Cricut at the beach to the make the mermaid.

I think the page turned out super cute.  I love the way the title looks and adding the orange background around the area I journaled on white paper made it pop a bit.

Tracking Baby's Travels

This is another fun page that I created to show our daughter all the places she went in her first two years.  I was originally only going to do the first year, but I thought I'd keep going. Probably will stop after two years since I'm running out of space to write things!  I got the idea when listening to a teenager tell her Mom all the places she's never been and the Mom was saying - we did that when you were younger!  You just don't remember it!

Now I have proof!  I had big plans for cutting out a super cool map of the United States, but then I found this sticker.  It was actually a bit of a pain because all the states are separate, but it was faster and easier than all the other plans I had.  I marked with a sticky jewel where she had been and then wrote where and the date.  Plus, a lot of the photos are in the scrapbook as well.

On a side note, remember those little Calico Critters?  When I was growing up and playing with them they were called Sylvanian Families.  I loved these little things so much.  I had a ton of them.  My favorites were a little mouse I named Bartholomew and a beaver who I named Misty.  Or maybe that was her given name, I can't remember.  I'm hoping they're all at my Dad's house and I can get them up here soon since we just got a doll house for our daughter.  I bring it up because Zulily has them on their site and it is taking all my self control to not buy them.  We're trying to budget right now.  :(

Hand Print Memory Page

I don't think I blogged about this one, but awhile ago, before my daughter turned one, I traced her hand on a piece of paper because she was figuring out this pen and ink thing and I thought that it would be interesting.  Well, soon it became pen and skin and clothes, oh well, she's washable right?  But it gave me another idea, what about cutting out that little hand we had traced?  Originally I had different plans, but I saw the things on pinterest with the Mom and Baby hands.  Rather than doing paint, I also traced my hand and my husband hand, cut them out, and added to scrapbook paper!

Goodness, look at that tiny litte hand, where does the time go?  I like the paper version better because paint is a little messy and I think you would have to use a lot to get it to be a really good print.

The darkest purple is my husband.  Which leads me to defend my hand in the middle - I have long fingers!  I don't have man hands!  At least, no one has ever told me if I do.  And I've always heard I have long fingers.  Hmm...now to stare at my hands and wonder why they are almost the same size as my husband's......