Baby Shower Quilt

I co-hosted a baby shower for a dear friend. We decided to try something I'd never done before. As we talked the idea evolved and we came up with this. Each guest that came traced their hand onto a piece of fabri backed with "wonder-under". We cut out all the hands afterwards and I took them home. Then began the real work... and real fun.

The center of the quilt says "Helping Hands" to remind our friend of everyone who is here to lend a hand when needed.

This is a detail from my favorite part of the quilt. Using my darning foot I was able to quilt butterflies around the border of the quilt. How fun is that! To add a little more fun I used the thread that changes colors as you go from white to lavendar to purple and back again. Too much fun!

I then went in and quilted in the names of all the people at the shower onto their handprint.

You can see "holly" pretty well on this hand.
I loved getting to play with my quilting skills on this project. I may struggle with the straight lines, but curly and crazy ones are a breeze. Oh well, we already knew I wasn't normal.

On the bright side of Mono

At the end of July I found myself to be... S-I-C-K. The doctor suspected mono and I found myself on the couch for several days. Gracious friends brought meals and cared for kids. When I wasn't sleeping I found a great way to pass time. Card making! it worked out great because when all was said and done, and I was back on my feet again, I had plenty of Thank You notes ready to go!
Props to Stampin' Up and their Template to make 16 cards out of one 12x12 patterned paper and 8 solid 12x12 cardstock pages.

Cute stamps, right? I love finding stamps at Garge Sales!

Picture Puzzles for Sunday

So, I had so much fun with the picture puzzle idea that I had to take it a step further. This is the same idea as my previous post, only I used some images that would be fun for church or Sunday afternoon. I included a family picture and the boys favorite temple... Salt Lake. I also had to have a picture of Daniel the prophet...
I also through in some other favorites. Here's how it turned out.

Puzzle Pictures

Props to my friend Chris for this great idea and how to do it. Using 12 abc blocks I was able to put together a 6 sided puzzle. Since I have three sons I though it would be nice to place a current picture of each of them on one side along with a baby picture of each of them. Using Adobe Photoshop I dazzled up the pictures with a little digital scrap-booking. After printing, slicing and dicing, the images were ready to be adhered to the blocks with a little Super 77 (My FAVORITE brand of spray adhesive). After everything was in place it was time to go old school and get out the Mod-Podge. That has protected the surfaces and kept all the pictures in place when the kids play with them. Right, you thought they were for decorative purposes only? Is anything just for decoration when you have kids? No.

Chore Chart

The day I found an laminator / bookbinder on clearance at Wal-Mart for $20.00 changed my life. No, not really. It has been a lot of fun though. One evening I went looking for a great chore chart to print out and had no luck so it was off to the old drawing board for me. I put together this little octopus and laminated it. Each leg has a chore written in dry-erase marker on it. When the chore is complete the leg can be put in place on the octopus. Pretty simple, pretty fun, and really pretty effective. The boys look forward to seeing what new chores will be posted and enjoy putting the octopus together.