Friday, January 11, 2013

Nightmare Before Christmas Advent Calender

This was my "hush hush" project that I did over the holidays. I work with my cousin Landon and his favorite movie is Nightmare Before Christmas. It was pure torture not being able to share my progress on Facebook because I didn't want him or any of his siblings to see it before it was done. So now that Christmas is over I can finally blog about it!

I had been mulling around this idea in my head pretty much the whole year! I didn't know how I was going to do it, and I changed my mind about a thousand times on what I was going to do, but finally at crunch time I had to decide and it all just fell together so nicely. There was one night where I was just stumped and had no clue what to do, so I sat down and watched the movie to get inspired. I'm glad that I did. I didn't use any of the ideas that I originally thought of, go figure. 

 Some of the details that I love about this project. 
  • The spider web material over Christmas tree material.
    • This stuff was a bugger to find! I was dumb and procrastinated, and it was the day after Halloween and I panicked! If I was going to go forward I needed this fabric fast! I drove out to a Joann's about a half hour away from my house, and looked EVERYWHERE for fabric like this. This was not what I was originally looking for, but i found this,and just in time too because right after I nabbed it some lady gave me a guilt trip and wanted it. But I stood my ground, and got it.  
  • Felt ornaments
    • I love felt! If you read my blog you know that. So I made all the ornaments out of felt, some sparkly felt some not. There is a little pocket in the back of each one for a piece of candy. That is one thing I should of planned better. It was kind of hard to find candy that fit after I was done. Luckily I did find something, but they just barely fit. 
    • All the ornaments hook onto the ribbon with tiny close pins that I covered with white sparkly felt and a cute little glittery sticker thing that I happened to run across one night at Michael's.
    • The wooden numbers were a find! I was going to stitch the numbers on but that would of taken a ton of time, and I was already hand stitching all the ornaments together. So I found these wooden numbers online. It was probably the most expensive part of the project but I think it made it look "finished" for lack of a better word. The only problem with them was they were actually brown. So I was going to spray paint them, but its cold outside and I can be really lazy. So I ended up just using a black marker and coloring all the numbers.
  •  The Black Frame
    • I actually have had this frame for years. Its been sitting in my closet since I was married. Originally I was going to make it all fabric so you could roll it up during the non-Christmas season. But, I'm not that great with a sewing machine yet and that would of been pretty ambitious to try. So randomly this idea popped into my head. So the cardboard that comes in the frame is what I upholstered with the Christmas tree and Spider web material, and attached everything to that. 
    • Once again I had the problem of a wrong color, the frame was originally a reddish wood color. My mom is craft central, so she loaned me some black paint and I painted it one night, she even had gloss to spray on it so it made it look better. Thanks Mom!!

  •  The Picture in the Middle
    • This was my big headache! I originally bought an iron-on transfer that I found on ebay. Well it came and I totally screwed it up! And I didn't have time to get another one. So my husband was like, "just print a picture." Well....ok. So I found a picture on line and luckily I do have a pretty nice printer, and it printed up really good, and I just attached it on. I think it could of been better, but I just didn't have the time.

So in the end I think it turned out great! It was a really fun project with a lot of learning and improvising. But that is what I love about crafting! I can always learn something new!


Christmas Book Bags

For Christmas this year I decided to make all of my 10 nieces and nephews book bags for the library. I used a few different books and got a lot of cute patterns, and in the end I think they all turned out super cute.

Resources:




These were all extremely helpful books. I think I used Happy Stitch and Super Cute Felt the most, but From Felt to Fabulous has some cute patterns in it also.

These first 4 bags were for Hyde, Hattie, Liam, and Elias. They live over in China so I had to finish these fast and get them shipped. It worked out perfectly, they arrived on Christmas!  I think my favorite one out of these 4 is Hattie's. The flowers have buttons in the middle and its just so girly and cute. The Fox is also really cute. I was informed that they loved them and they carry all there toys around and the baby even wanted to sleep with his.






The next 4 were for my two brothers kids. The owl is probably my favorite, even though I love the bees!! The owl goes along with a stuffed animal I made my niece a couple of years ago. The kids were all sick this Christmas so we didn't get to have Christmas until the following weekend. So luckily I had time to procrastinate a little and get these done. I finished David and Jonny's last so I didn't get the best pictures of them.





 The last two turned out sooooo cute! I think I was originally going to make just two bags for Christmas. It was these kids that gave me the idea in the first place. They go to the library all the time so I thought this would be fun gift. Then as I started thinking about it I figured I would just make all the kids one, because they all love books!
The green bunnies for Magnus is due to the fact that when you ask him what he dreams about he will always tell you green bunnies. So right from the start I new I had to do green bunnies. Clive's bag actually was the only one I didn't use the books that I listed. I found the picture on line and just blew it up, and cut it out. The crocodile is because we call him Clive-a-dile. 


The first time they used the bags they were so sweet to send me a picture.