Crafts

So our first baby is due on April 1 (ha ha!) and after 6 months of not really doing anything in preparation, I began to feel the urgency! I came across an excellent blog post on SewLiberated detailing a Montessori style bedroom for her new baby, Finn. When I saw this post, I was like, WOW! Very inspiring!

One of the beautiful handcrafted items featured in Finn’s Montessori style bedroom was a branch with hand-sewn birds attached. With all the wedding arrangements we’ve been doing with manzanita branches, I knew I could make something similar!

The pattern for making the birds came from the Spool Sewing blog. And I used some various fabrics I stockpiled from our recent trip to Japan.

I had a couple of sand-blasted manzanita branches (about 24″ tall) leftover from a wedding and attached the birds using a glue gun. We’re going to hang the branch on the wall in the baby’s room. Hopefully soon!

I saw these super cute Valentine’s Day tissue cozies on the wonderful blog Stitch/Craft the other day. Instead of traditional Valentine’s Day cards, which I was thinking about letterpressing, I thought these would be fun to make and quite unique! This year Valentine’s Day AND Lunar New Year fall on the same day, so I was trying to come up with some creative card to celebrate both, but I was unsuccessful. Tissue holders to the rescue! And regular Lunar New Year Tiger cards to be letterpressed later!

I printed out clear and simple directions from Stitch/Craft and
purchased cute fabric from Joanne’s – hubby’s least favorite store after Michael’s – dragged him there since it was on the way one day!

And used some of these paper heart cards I got from The Paper Source many years ago but never got around to doing anything with them.  I just had to trim them a little and ended up using the envelope as a background as well. Voila!