Easy Kid’s Name Sign

August 7, 2010

I promised myself I would post more often and try to catch up with all the stuff I’ve been doing…but I don’t have to explain to all of you guys how hard that is with a toddler around! This past week has been extra busy because we hosted our friends’ son for what we ended up calling “Camp Atlanta.” He stayed with us for a week, and Evan and I took him to all our favorite places and at least one new one…Atlanta peeps check out the Tellus Museum. Both Evan (19 months) and Landon (7 years) had a complete blast playing with all the hands-on exhibits and it was clearly the favorite favorite of all the things we did. We will definitely head back there on a regular basis.

Here’s a fun and really easy craft project to personalize your kid’s room.  This is a great idea for a homemade birthday or Christmas present and depending on what materials you already have, can be quite inexpensive.  I wish I had more pictures because I’ve done quite a few of these now, but here is the latest one.  I made this one for Maya, Evan’s special baby friend.  She is two months older than him and it has been so fun watching Evan and Maya grow up together.  Her parents are planning a hot air balloon theme for her room.  So I made this for her.  It was supposed to be a first birthday present but became a celebrating becoming a big sister present….congratulations Maya on your new baby sister!  Here is a picture of her name sign….see below if you want to make one yourself.

Materials Needed (all available at just about any craft store or online)

  • unfinished wooden plaque with metal hangers on the back (buy these separately if needed)
  • unfinished wooden letters
  • tacky glue used for gluing wood (that’s what I used…hot glue would be good too)
  • acrylic paint in various colors and brushes
  • unfinished wooden accents (optional, I didn’t add any to this particular one, but you can get all sorts of cute shapes…I’m making a train sign for Evan)

Steps for putting it all together:

  1. Decide placement for all your parts by putting them together before you glue anything.  For all my signs, I put the letters for the name to one side and left a blank area for the picture or accents.  Depending on the length of your name, and spacing of the letters you will have more or less room for your pictures/accents.
  2. Roughly sketch out your design on paper the same size as your sign for reference purposes.  Keep it simple!  For this theme, I needed pictures of hot air balloons to help me draw.  I just googled “hot air balloon” on google images and got plenty of help.  I’ve also found that googling your theme with the words “cartoon” or “art” will help you find simplified images or ideas if you find it too intimidating to turn a photograph of the real thing into a simple image for your sign.
  3. Before gluing, paint the base of your sign, your letters and any accents separately.  If you try to glue first and then paint, it will be much more difficult and you could end up with brush-stroke lines around the letters.  If you are mixing up your own colors, make sure you have enough to cover the areas you want before you start painting.  It is very hard to recreate the exact same color if you don’t have enough.  Let paint dry.
  4. Place the letters and accents on the sign where you want them and then picking them up one at a time, add glue and stick them on.  Let glue dry.  (Note:  for this step, make sure everything is placed correctly so that the hangers on the back of the sign are on the top edge of the sign…I learned this the hard way, accidentally making this sign “upside down” so that it was necessary to remove the hangers on the back and replace them in the correct spot.
  5. Very lightly sketch your theme image (if you are painting it) in pencil on your sign if you need a reference for painting.  In my experience, it is hard to erase pencil lines on acrylic so it is useful to have a bit of extra base color to cover mistakes, if you make any, or you can just paint over them with a little bit of an accent color.
  6. Paint your image, let dry and you are done!

Here’s a close-up of the theme image for this sign…I’m horrible at painting people, so I chose bunny rabbits as my balloon riders!  How do you like it?

By Jess | Posted in Arts and Crafts | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Craft Project: Reversible Christmas Stocking

January 1, 2010

Happy New Year 2010!

I decided to start the year off right by celebrating with some of my own personal traditions for New Year’s Day, one of which, is writing!  For many years, I have taken some time to reflect on the past year and jot down my hopes for the future.  I am so happy (and relieved) that I finally achieved my goal of getting some of my creations up for sale with a storefront on the internet and starting this business blog to go with it.  It took me six years of resolving to get this started to finally have it happen! For this coming year, I’m simply hoping to move forward…  Wish me luck!

I hope you were able to celebrate this day with your own traditions!  May 2010 be a great year and decade for all of you!

Now here’s the craft project I’m FINALLY catching up on… better late than never, but here it is:

A reversible Christmas stocking.  This is the first thing I’ve made with my own pattern.  I searched and searched for a good one, but couldn’t find one as simple as the one my own mom made for me.  So what did I do?  I took construction paper and traced around my own stocking, added some room for seams and voila!  I tried to improve on my stocking, remembering how I never had enough room for stuff in the foot, but ended up with pretty much the same sized one, maybe even a little narrower.  Oh well.  Evan will complain about Santa not being able to cram as much stuff into his stocking too.  The project took me a lot longer than I expected also, but was worth it in the end.  I need a LOT more practice in applique (putting on letters or decorations) so I won’t be making personalized stockings for sale next year unless I do.  I could definitely make some plain ones though.  Next time, I will make a pattern with a slightly bigger foot.

So if you want to make your own, here’s the jist of the steps I took (keeping in mind that this project requires a basic knowledge of machine sewing):

1.  Find a stocking you like and create a pattern by taping pieces of construction paper together to make a piece big enough to trace a wide margin around the edges of the stocking.  No margin around the top.

2.  Using your pattern, cut out four pieces of fabric, two each of coordinating prints or colors.

3.  If you want to personalize it like I did, cut out letters for your name, one in each of the selected prints.

4. Iron all four stocking pieces and zigzag the edges to prevent unraveling.

5.  Applique the letters to the front side of your stocking (if you want a reversible one, you will have two front sides).  I appliqued my letters by first ironing in Stitch Witchery tape to hold them in place, and then zigzag-ing the edges with a very short, tight stitch.  This was very difficult and time consuming, but I learned a lot.  Hoping to master this skill in the future with more practice, and perhaps lessons!

5.  After ironing again, and with right sides together in the first print, stitch the sides.  Do the same for the other print/color so you essentially have two stockings, one in each color/print.  I used as small a seam allowance as possible.

6.  Turn right sides out and place your “two” stockings together, one inside the other.  If you have two personalized stockings, you have to do this so that the finished stocking is truly reversible and the name shows on the outside both ways.  My brain was addled during this process and I almost ruined my stocking, so be careful with this step!

7.  Zigzag around the top of the stockings so they are stitched together.

8.  Finish the edge with bias tape in a coordinating color.

9.  Use bias tape to make a loop to hang your stocking and you’re finished!!

By Jess | Posted in Arts and Crafts, Seasonal Decorating | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments off

Easy Birthday Party for a One-Year-Old…COOKIE MONSTER!!!

December 6, 2009

cookie monster cake

I started planning Evan’s first birthday party (better known as the Celebration of Surviving the First Year of Parenthood) a few months ago.  I fantasized about everything from inviting every playmate he’s ever met this year and having a baby extravaganza to doing barely anything (because a lot of what I read said they don’t notice the theme and who cares if they don’t remember it anyway).  I settled on a small party at home with some fun ideas collected from around the internet.

Before we get to the specifics, I just want to say that all the stuff I read about your baby not noticing or caring about decorations is hooey.  I am SO glad I decorated with streamers and balloons, the works…Evan LOVED it.  He noticed it the moment we came downstairs and looked, pointed and babbled about it all day.  We enjoyed lots of rare giggles (he doesn’t often laugh out loud) as he chased balloons around the house and played with his giant helium balloon.  And who cares if he doesn’t remember it, we got it on video and in pictures…so he’ll get to experience it all over again when he’s older, and that he will remember.

Here’s what I did and how it turned out:

1.  The Theme:  Sesame Street with Cookie Monster as  the star – Evan has a stuffed cookie monster that his Dad got him at FAO Shwartz in New York.  He loves it, so I decided to decorate his first cake to look like cookie monster.  That being decided, the rest of the theme fell into place and was really easy since you can find Sesame Street stuff all over the place.  We had SS napkins, plates, wrapping paper and splat mat (for under Evan’s highchair).  I bought blue cups and blue and white crepe paper and multicolored balloons.  Most of it came from the dollar store (hello saving some money)!  BTW, did you know the dollar store sells helium balloons?!  They cost $5-9 anywhere else!  I also had to hang up a Spongebob Squarepants (my favorite cartoon character) birthday sign that my friends hung on our house last year when Evan was born.  I’m not a stickler for making everything match, that’s way too Edward Scissorhands neighborhood for me!cupcakes

2. Cake for Evan and cupcakes for everyone else – Go ahead and laugh at my rendition of cookie monster…I know he has issues…but it was so easy and Evan is not very critical.  As a first attempt at cake decorating, I love how it turned out.  The cakes were almost a disaster though…there’s a lesson here: never use old cooking oil!! I happened to taste the raw batter (after the cakes were already cooling) and it was awful…my oil was over two YEARS expired (can you tell I bake a lot?).  I had no idea that cooking oil goes bad, and yikes does it ever!  Thankfully, I hadn’t frosted the cakes yet and my hubby was already at the store buying other supplies, so we rescued the cake and prevented a disaster.  All I did for the cakes was use devil’s food cake mix and white frosting with blue food coloring.  The eyeballs are marshmallows (an idea from googling “cookie monster cake”) and the black icing was premade from the bakery aisle.  We forgot to get the special tip that goes on the premade icing package so I put it in a ziploc and snipped a corner off, and that worked fine.  Cheaper too!  We also got a bucket of chocolate chip cookie dough as an easy way to make cookies and add to the theme.  Evan had a grand time destroying his cake while eating a small portion (actually maybe he ate more than we thought…he was up a lot last night).  He looked like he was playing in a mudpie, elbow deep in chocolate cake!  Fun, but not a daily activity.  He went straight to the bathtub afterward.

3.  The 1st Birbirthday shirt 1thday Shirt -  Another idea I collected from cyber world and was excited to make since I just started sewing was a birthday shirt for Evan.  This is something easy to do that makes a very special keepsake for your kiddo to have later.  I bought a blank blue shirt at the hobby store.  I formed the number one using some striped ribbon I had from a belt I made and stuck it to the shirt using my new favorite product, Stitch Witchery.  Basically it’s a strip that you put between two pieces of fabric and then you iron over everything.  The stitch witchery bonds the layers together so you don’t have to use pins when you sew.  After that I went around the edge of the number one with a zigzag stitch to finish it off.  My husband wanted me to personalize the back with Evan’s name, so I decided to just take permanent marker to draw on his name and then added a simple drawing of cookie monster and a “Happy Birthday” message.  I googled “cookie monster” images to find one that was easy to draw.  The shirt was a little over-sized on Evan but that made it perfect to wear while destroying the cake (instead of his nice birthday sweater).

3.  The out-fit to grow into – One of my favorite ideas I found googling is this: buy an adult sized outfit that you can birthday shirt 2take a picture of your child in every year on their birthday and watch them grow into it.  At first, I started looking for a T-Shirt of some sort and jeans, but decided that would be too hard to keep up with and not as much fun.  Dejected, I gave up on this idea until I spotted an adult-sized Superman PJ set at Target!  Perfect!  Evan won’t mind having his picture taken in it for a long time and may even look forward to it.  When he’s old enough to fit in it, he can just wear it at home and we can spare him the embarrassment of having to wear an outfit his mom picked out when he was a baby in public.  If he turns out like me though, he may find a time in his life to wear it proudly out in public.  :P   For the  party, we just hung it up for some more mis-matched decoration.

That’s it!  Super easy…super cheap…lots of memories!  Every party has to have a hitch though; I was hoping ours was the failed first cake attempt…sadly it ended up being the camcorder not recording the Happy Birthday song, candle and cake demolition.  Birthday Tip: Make sure the camcorder is really recording!!

By Jess | Posted in Arts and Crafts, Cooking, Special Occasions | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments off