RaptorMama

As promised, here’s my first project made with the laminator!

First I cut out out a heart with my Cricut and laminated with with my awesome laminating machine.  🙂  The paper is last year’s Valentine’s line from Echo Park.

I flipped it over and marked where I wanted the holes with a sharpie.

I punched the holes with my crop-a-dile.  This was probably my favorite tool until the awesomeness that is my laminating machine entered my life.  🙂

It’s hard to see the holes in this pic, but they’re there.  🙂  I dug up a red shoe lace from one of Kate’s lacing cards and got it started for her.

She was thrilled!

I’m also considering setting her up with a yard needle and some pink yarn so she can try her hand at sewing.

Day 4: Hanging up the Christmas lights with the girls.  Crate Paper base with some October Afternoon stickers and some washi tape.

Day 5: Gymnastics!  I used a transparency (Hambly maybe?) as the base and some cool glittery Thickers.  I matched 2 photos front to back to hide the adhesive.  I also put a strip of cardstock behind the letters and used it for journaling on the other side.

I added a little half sheet with a picture of Kate writing a story with Michael.  Michael even did some journaling on the back for me.  🙂

Day 6!  More Crate Paper with a My Mind’s Eye sticker.

Another additional sheet, Echo Park this time, with an October Afternoon sticker and some washi tape.

I left the back of the page blank just because.  🙂  Stay tuned for days 7-9!

Michael got me a laminator for Christmas!  Y’all, I’m probably more excited about this than any normal person would be, but I am *so freaking excited* about this!!!

It’s beautiful isn’t it.  Best part?  It’s only $30.  Seriously!

First I cut out a bunch of hearts and arrows using my Cricut.  Side note: I’m super excited to start on Valentine’s Day crafts!

Then you put the stuff you want laminated into a little pouch.  You get 100 of them for $15.  That’s super cheap!

I was a little worried that all of the hearts could shift around since I had to tilt the pouch a bit to put it in the machine, but I needn’t have worried.  I mean, you need to be careful and go slowly, but I didn’t have to glue them down or anything like I was afraid of.

The machine sucks them through and then they come out all perfectly laminated!  Squee!!!!

When I was teaching I had an unhealthy addiction fondness for the laminating machine.  I’m working on some fun stuff right now that I’ll put up on the blog soon!  🙂

I’ve finally started working on mine!  I never did find a whole line of paper that I liked, so I’m using a bit of this and a bit of that.  Crate Paper, Echo Park, October Afternoon, My Mind’s Eye, and Authentique mainly.  It’s going to be a bit eclectic for sure.  lol.  I’m keeping the basic structure the same as my past December Dailies and October Daily: one 6×6 page front and back with additional pages added as needed.

I haven’t figured out what I want to do with the covers, but here’s day 1.  I’m not super happy with it, but sometimes you just have to do it and move on, know what I mean?  It’s last year’s My Mind’s Eye (why didn’t I buy more of that when I had the chance?!?  Still my fav Christmas line ever!) with some stickers from Echo Park, some washi tape and a Thicker number.

I added an extra page that I used the American Crafts knock-outs punch on.  I <3 that tool.  Also, American Crafts has the best costumer service ever.  I should probably write a whole blog post about that tool…  ::adding it to the list::

Here’s day 2 with the Crate Paper as a base along with an October Afternoon tag, an Echo Park number, some washi tape and a vellum tag also from Crate Paper.  I liked that it was more subtlely Christmas since these pictures look more like they were taken in June than December.

I added an extra page here too.

Only in Texas do you go shopping for a Christmas tree in a sundress.  Lol.

And of course another added page of decorating the tree.

I went ahead and left day 4 in so that you could see how the pages will look layered, but I’ll have a separate blog post with days 4-6 later.  I’m going to try to do 3 days per post so that we’re not still talking about December Daily in April.  I guess I better get cracking on those pages then!

 

I had so much fun hosting Christmas Eve!  I had a few more ideas that I ran out of time for, but I’m really happy with what I did accomplish and now I have a list of ideas for next year.

We decided that it would be fun to have a theme for the food this year.  Since we decided while we were shopping at Ikea, Swedish seemed like the way to go.  We had meatballs, salmon, marinated cucumbers, and potato pancakes on the menu as our Swedish foods and then we had asparagus, salad and rolls in case the Swedish food was gross.  Luckily it was all delish!

I seriously love plates and I probably have more than any one person really needs, but I can’t help myself.  🙂  I don’t quite have enough of these salad plates so I alternated with the plain ones.  Hopefully it looked intentional.

I made some napkins out of flannel with my serger.  I love that thing.  I also bought some red stripped juice glasses at Ikea that we used as wine glasses.

In the end the peppermint topiaries were too much with the stripped table runner, so I put them out on the island with some appetizers.  Funny story about the appetizers…  We weren’t planning on having any, but then I found these awesome bowls from Crate and Barrel that I was given last year when I was digging out my plates.  They are perfect!  That and my genetic inability to host an event without having enough food to feed a small army led me back to HEB on Christmas Eve.

I think everything turned out great and I loved the look of the red and white.  I think we’ll be sticking with that for a while.  🙂  Bonus, I just realized that I can repurpose a bunch of it for Kate’s second annual Valentine’s Day play group party!

 

I had grand plans for an awesome post after my week off, but, well… if y’all have been reading for very long you know that I’m a major procrastinator.  lol.  It’s currently 2 AM and I just finished addressing my Christmas cards.  Except that I’m missing some addressees and I ran out of stamps.  ::sigh::  One day I’ll have it all together, right?  RIGHT?!?  All that to say that I *don’t* have an awesome craft ready to blog about at the moment.  What I do have is some awesome pictures.

We were at my brother-in-law’s house this weekend and Kate’s cousins were playing in a giant pile of leaves. They had a blast raking them into a pile and jumping into them.  Here’s my beautiful niece.

And here’s my gorgeous daughter.  I had to bribe Kate with chocolate to cooperate (she might just be the most photographed child in existence) but I’m super happy with how these turned out.  I used my 50mm 1.8 lens (best. lens. ever.) and the settings were as follows: shutter- 1/250; f stop- 2.2; ISO- 400.  I sometimes shoot in full manual mode, but more often that not (on this occasion for example) I shoot in Apature Priority mode.

I cropped these in Lightroom (which I am totally in love with) and then ran an action in Photoshop.  I don’t often pull pics into Photoshop, but I wanted to punch up the color on these a bit since the leaves were kind of drab straight out of camera. I even used the pic of Kate as our Christmas card!

In other news, I’m now caught up through December 6th on December Daily.  🙂  Hopefully I’ll have some of that to share on Wednesday.

Guess who got Lightroom for Christmas?  And a laminating machine?  😀  I didn’t even know you could get one for your house.  Let’s just say that RaptorDad is the best hubby ever.

Sorry I’ve been MIA this week, but I’ve been having a blast hanging out with my fam and playing with my new toys.  Expect me to get back on track with Monday, Wednesday, Friday posting starting next week.  🙂  I finally started on December Daily so expect some posts about that.  Any other requests?

Pretty picture.

I really wanted to make a table runner for Christmas this year, but I’m waaaaaay too cheap to buy 4 yards of fabric to be able to do so with a single piece of fabric.  Since I’m an insane person (with very little sewing experience) I decided that it would be a great idea to make a pieced peppermint runner.  First, the math.  I’m using an 8 foot table.  (At least I think I am.  I’m borrowing it from my mom.  Uh…  mom, that table’s 8 feet long, right?) I wanted there to be stripes in the runner to mimic the peppermint theme, and the magic number ended up being 54.  54 2 inch red stripes and 54 1 inch white stripes.

I cut the fabric into 10 inch sections and then I cut the smaller strips from that.  Don’t forget to allow for a seam allowance!  I cut a ton of 1 inch stips even though I had already calculated that they needed to be 1 1/2 inches.  Maybe my middle school math teacher was right and I do need to show my work…

   

My fabric didn’t really have a right and wrong side (at least not that my untrained eye could see) so I just put one on top of the other and then pinned them.  I even managed to avoid bleeding on the fabric.  What?  Am I the only one who sticks their finger relentlessly when pinning something?  Anyone?  Bueller? Right then, moving on.

And here’s my pretty stack of 54 pinned pairs.  At this point, everything is going swimmingly.  Don’t worry, it’s all about to go downhill.  lol.

Apparently I am incapable of sewing a straight seem.  Or setting the tension on my sewing machine.  ::sigh::  This is why I’m not a quilter.  Plus side, I’m related to a bunch of quilters so I remembered to sew all of the pairs first in a long chain.

Here they are.  In all there bunched up glory.  Next you cut them apart and iron them.  You want the seam on the darker side.  (See Mom! I was paying attention all those years ago!)

Then pin pairs together and sew a bunch of quads (28).  Cut, iron, pin, rinse, repeat.  I dom’t have any pics of this a. because it’s boring and repetitive b. because I was watching Sons of Anarchy while I worked on that part and I was distracted by the hotness that is Jax.  😉

I’m not sure what went wrong, but my edges were all kind of messed up.  Not to worry.

I evened them right up with the rotary cutter.  So my runner’s a bit narrower than originally planned.  Whatevs.

Time for a little double fold bias tape, which if you’ll remember from our blanket fun, I consider just about the best thing since sliced bread.

I spent a million years pinning the first length and it was totally not worth it.  I don’t know if I need a different foot or what, but by about pin number three I had to start repining as I went.  I skipped it for the next two lengths and was much happier.

And here it is!  It lays a bit oddly, but for a first pieced project I think it looks pretty good.  It has confirmed for me that I am not ready *at all* to try quilting.  I think I would lose my mind.

 

I wanted to make an ornament with the girls this year and this seemed like a fun thing to try so I decided to combine them.

I recommend putting down some wax paper first, the clay is super sticky.

I used Crayola air dry clay that I tried to dye vaguely tinted green with some food coloring.

Then I gave each girl her *own* sequins.  I find that sometimes craft time goes better when we’re not sharing.  lol.

Abby rolled her clay out all by herself, but I had to help the little girls.

We cut out trees with cookie cutters.

The girls had a blast adding sequin ornaments.

They insisted on adding more sequins to the back.  🙂

I cut a hole in the top with a straw and let it dry for a few days.  Then I painted it with some mod podge (my fav!) and put a ribbon through the hole.

I think they turned out super cute!

Kate got an awesome doll house for Christmas today.

Let’s just say that there was some assembly required. 🙂

So awesome!

She got some of the furniture for her birthday this summer. I love this stuff!

In fact I may have been playing with ever since I put it together. Which was after I put Kate to bed. Lol.