Mr. Potato Head Quiet Book Page

     When I was a kid, I loved Mr. Potato Head.  I thought up endless ways to create my own potato person and kept myself entertained for ages.  So I thought, why not make a quiet book version?  I made my patterns and set to work :)

     First step, trace pattern pieces on newspaper.

     Next I cut out the pattern pieces and grabbed lots of felt.

     Then I cut my background piece of felt down to the size I wanted it like I did with my other pages ( Football Page Long-neck Dinosaur Page and the Matching Game Page).

     I pinned down the potato piece and the arm pieces to my background piece and sewed them down.

     Now the page itself is done and all that's left is to customize your Potato Head :)

     I also made girl pieces like a flower for her head, a purse, heels, etc.  I forgot to take a picture though before I gave it to its new owner.  Whoops.  You can make as many pieces as you want for lots and lots of options :)  That's all there is to it, super simple!

Happy sewing friends!

     -Katie

Workout Tank Top With Bows

     First, I would like to apologize for the crappy picture.  I was freezing cold and didn't want to take my warm and comfy sweatshirt off to model this tank top...sorry bout that haha  it really is cute though, promise.  And super easy!

     All you have to do is follow these simple directions and you'll end out with a workout tank top cute enough that you'll want to workout just so you can wear it ;)

     Cut the collar off, it doesn't have to be precise, you'll come back and cut more from here later.

     Next cut one of the sleeves off.  When cutting, curve near the bottom of the sleeve, but straighten out the cut as you go up or you'll have a funky lookin shirt.

     I wanted the sleeves to match so I took the one I had cut off and lined it up on the other sleeve and cut them to match.

     Then I trimmed the bottom seam off of the shirt because I was going to wrap it around the back like a lot of people do with their diy workout shirts.  Of course, I changed my mind AFTER I had cut it off...silly me.  If you want to go that route, by all means cut the bottom off.  I'm saving mine in case I decide I want to change it later.  Slightly indecisive huh?  Anyway, next you'll want to trim your collar a bit more, until you get the neckline like you want it.  Nothing particular you have to do, just until you like the way it looks.

     You can kind of see that my neckline is a bit lower than I started it with, but I didn't go too crazy.  Unlike my sister in this picture:

what a goofball!

     On the back I didn't quite like how it laid when I pulled the sleeves together, so I trimmed more off the back of the shirt by the sleeves.

     Then I folded the edges in until I would be able to wrap the fabric around it for a bow (or three...I made a few more than planned).

     Remember those sleeves you cut off?  Now you're gonna want to snip some strips of fabric from them for the bow(s).

     Just tie the bows around the back and you're almost done.

     I wanted to make sure the bows stayed on in the wash so I whipped out a few stitches to hook them to the shirt to finish it off.  All done! :)

Happy crafting friends!

     -Katie

Quiet Book Matching Game

     For this quiet book page, I wanted to do a game of some sort.  I decided on a matching game and I think it turned put really cute!  I haven't decided on what the background color will be for this page yet,  but here's what I have so far :)

     First I cut out all my pieces (my favorite part haha) and laid them out so I could see what I had and where to start.

after cutting out the pieces

When I was finished cutting everything out, I had:

2 red hearts

2 green triangles

2 orange circles

2 blue squares (small)

2 yellow stars

2 black 'x's

24 white squares (large)

     I started with pinning each of the colored shapes onto a large white square.

     Once they were all pinned to  white square, I sewed each of the shapes down.

first two done, woohoo!!

     When I was finished, half of my white squares had shapes sewn onto them and half had nothing on them.

     I took one shape/white square piece and one blank white square and set them aside until they all had a blank buddy.  Then I stacked them all with their partner shape, just because I wanted them organized somehow (and they were taking up a large portion of my table).

     Next, I sewed each of the colored shape/white squares to their blank buddy.  I did this so the shapes couldn't be seen through the back of the white squares when playing the game.  No cheating allowed!! Hehe

stacked up with their partners again :)

     Now they're all set and ready to play the game!

Happy sewing friends!

    -Katie

No Sew Fleece Blanket

     It took me ages to come up with a gift for my boyfriend for Valentine's day.  Ages and ages.  Finally I decided on a blanket, and since he's an MSU fan (Go Spartans!!) I of course went with a green and white MSU blanket.  So I headed on over to Field's Fabric and came home with this (and possibly a few other things...it's kind of like a toy store to me haha):

  I  set to work cutting off the weird little edges that the fleece always has.  Since the green and white is an official college print, it had extra writing on the edge that needed to be trimmed as well:

     That was the fastest part of the whole project.  When I was done I had a pile that looked like this:

     I set that to the side to save for later and laid my green fabric out with the right side facing down.  Next I took the MSU printed fabric and laid it on top of the green with the right side facing up.  Using my trusty (and very pointy and sharp today) pins, I pinned those suckers together around the edges.  Because I knew how long I wanted the ties to be on the edges, I placed the pins 2 inches in on each side (Yes, I did measure them.  Every.  Single.  One.)  I can be awfully particular about things I'm making, so this really isn't necessary, you can just eyeball them.

**Sidenote: if I were making another one, I would make the cuts larger than two inches for easier tying at the end**

     When the last pin had been stuck in my pinky and then the fabric, I was left with a bit of an overhang.  Apparently the last person to cut this fleece wasn't very keen on straight lines.  I just snipped off the excess so that it lined up with the other fleece piece.

     For the ties, I was going to do a particular width.  Then I realized that would drive me insane.  There were like a gazillion ties to cut.  No freaking way was I measuring them all.  I decided to wing it.  Definitely not a me sort of thing to do.  I cut my 2 inch gashes in the fabric all along the sides.  When I reached a corner, I just cut a square out like so:

     After I finished cutting all the ties, I was left with this:

     To tie all of the little pieces would have been difficult to do without an anchor of some sort.  What I did was tied a couple of them on each side before I removed the pins so they'd still be lined up after the pins were taken out.  I just took all the pins out after I had tied a couple...well almost all.  I managed to find the one I missed with the same pinky that got pricked earlier.  Woohoo.  After everything was tied, the blanket was finished!  Super simple but a bit time consuming.  It was hard to get a picture but you can sort of see how they're tied.

     Now that my blanket was done, I moved on to the "ribbon" I wanted to keep it rolled up.  The long pieces I had left over from earlier:

All I did was tie the two green pieces and the one white one together at one end.  Then I twisted the green and white together and let the rope twist back on itself after I had tied off the other end.  Now I have a twisted rope twice as thick as when I started.  I just rolled the blanket up and tied it tight:

Happy crafting friends!

    -Katie

Menu Board

     Anyone who knows me knows that I am EXTREMELY indecisive when it comes to deciding on something to eat.  Extremely.  So I came up with a solution to the problem.  A menu board.  My cousin made one and I really liked how it turned out so I thought I'd give it a shot and gathered all my supplies:

     Well, almost all my supplies.  I made a few more trips up and down the stairs to get a hot glue gun and two empty crayon boxes.  First I glued my scrapbook sheet of paper onto the foam board I had leftover from another project.  I let that sit overnight to dry:

     I weighed it down with a few things, and as you can see, our family enjoys candles :)  My favorite is this one:

It's apple cinnamon and smells wonderful!!  These candles have a cool story behind them too, you can check it out here.  After letting the board dry, I folded the edges of the paper over and taped them to the back of the board:

This is the front at this point:

     I then figured out where I wanted my ribbon on the board and made a small mark on the back/edge to line it up to.  I taped the ribbon down as well:

     Next I got out some brown scrapbook paper (sticking with the neutral color theme) and covered my crayon boxes.  I added a bit of ribbon to them as well to jazz it up a bit.  Just seemed too boring without anything on them :)

     I lined them up where I wanted them on the board as you can see in the picture above and secured them to the board with packing tape as well.

     Then I set to work on my clothespins to hold the menu choices on the ribbon.  I was going to just hot glue them to the board, but it was pointed out to me that the clothespins might rip off if pressed too hard.  So on the ribbon it is!  I cut 7 rectangular pieces of brown scrapbook paper and 14 small squares of white paper:

     On each strip of brown paper I marked where I wanted the white squares to go.  I used two squares for each clip and I turned the top square so that its corners were on each side of the bottom square.  I found these really cute stickers to put the days of the week on the papers (it would have driven me nuts if I wrote them when the menu choices are typed up...odd duck I know).

I put the stickers on each of the white pieces and they turned out like this:

Using some glue, I attached the white pieces to the brown rectangles and then the brown rectangles to the clothes pins:

     I decided that I needed some way to hang my board up without putting a hole in my pretty little project (or the walls), so I used a hot glue gun to make a bow out of some ribbon.  Cue the impatient wait for it to dry.  I attached it to the back of my board.  And then took it off.  And reattached it.  Over and over again until it was (to my mind) perfect.  I may be a slight perfectionist.  Maybe.

     Now all that's left is to put the cute little clothes pins on the ribbon and add my menu options I've already made up:

Tada!!!  Here it is hung up on a command hook in our kitchen:

Happy crafting friends!

    -Katie