My 6 year old, Alivia, came home from school recently and informed me that her best friend, Minae, is going to be a witch for Halloween and she will be her cat. Finally! I thought, This is the costume-making opportunity I’ve been waiting for!
I sewed the skirt with tail, ears, and fur wristbands. At C&T Publishing, most moms and grandmas make the kids their costumes. Until now, I’d always just taken the easy route and bought the kids their costumes. After all, the store costumes are cute and never too expensive. Alivia really changed my attitude this time: She was so proud of this not-so-great costume just because her mommy made it that I am already looking forward to making Alivia’s costume next year.
One of our editors, Liz Aneloski, forwarded a link to the Quilt Trails website to the CT Staff. I enjoyed it so much I thought I’d share it with you all.
In the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, sits picturesque Yancey County, full of old tobacco barns and winding trout streams, just off the Blue Ridge Parkway. Here you’ll find a completely different summer quilt experience, part of a barn-quilt movement that has swept across much of the country in recent years.
One of the densest and most creative examples is the Quilt Trails of Western North Carolina. In just two of the participating rural counties, Yancey and Mitchell, there are more than 130 bright-colored wooden quilt blocks mounted to the sides of barns and buildings along highways and country roads and in small towns. The blocks range from two to eight square feet and are painted either in timeless patterns like Ohio Star, Log Cabin and Dresden Plate or in original designs reflecting their surroundings (the quilt block for the Burnsville Hosiery Company, for example, features socks in a star pattern).
Back in 2001, a woman named Donna Sue Groves decided to paint a wooden quilt block on an Ohio barn in honor of her mother. Now people in at least 24 states have organized efforts to decorate local barns and buildings with quilt blocks, both to celebrate local traditions and bring in tourists.
—excerpt taken from Stops Along the Summer Quilt Trail, Wall Street Journal (May 23, 2009)
Check out all these quilt blocks that can be found along the trail!
As a designer, reading about design in relation to quilting is interesting. I recently picked up Katie Pasquini Masopust’s book, Design Explorations for the Creative Quilter. There were a lot of great ideas for creative inspiration, composition and color themes. I found a technique that I learned in photography but used in a different way for quilting. I thought this was so cool.
view finder or cropping tool
These are her basic instructions: Start with a photo of a landscape, animals, buildings, plants. Use an empty slide mount or make your own 1-3/8 x 7/8 window within a piece of white paper. Use your view finder to find a good crop for your composition. Trace the shapes within the frame. Here’s the part that’s a little different. A line must connect to other lines to create complete shapes so you always have closed shapes for your pattern templates.
Today I was looking at Fearless Design for Every Quilter by Lorraine Torrence and Jean B. Mills. This is a book that you’ll want to read cover to cover. This book teaches you how to improve your work by sharing insights in critique groups. Critiquing can be difficult both for the person critiquing and for the person receiving the feedback. The way the authors teach you about creativity and critiquing makes interesting reading. The authors set up 10 exercises or assignments that 8 real students have participated in. The students share their thoughts on their own pieces as well as on the other students’ work.
One of the lessons that I plan to use for my own work is about design sources and inspiration. The authors suggest that you start several inspiration sketch books:
- shape sketch book: start with simple thumbnail shapes – circle, square, triangle – and change them minutely each time you draw them.
- line library: straight, curvy, broken, zigzag, parallel
- visual record: patterns, color combinations that you like
- journal of quotes, words, phrases, poems, and headlines that inspire you
I like the idea of organizing your inspirations in different notebooks. How cool would that be to open a sketch book filled entirely with all kinds of different lines or shapes.
Super Hudson showing off his super muscles in his bat cave
You saw the invitations in my previous post. Now for the fun part, the party.
Every super hero needs a cape and mask to hide their identity so I made one for each super hero.
The masks are a simple oval shape with slits for the eyes. I used a black satiny fabric for the front, fast2fuse for the middle and a gold velvety fabric for the backing. I used stretchy black elastic for the strap. I just sewed around the outside of the mask and eyes to hold it together and keep the strap on. I don’t think they look great but the kids thought the masks were cool. It just shows me that my work doesn’t have to be perfect for the kids to have a good time.
The capes look cool. I sort of traced a cape that my son already had for the basic shape. I folded the sides in and sewed all around the outside edge of the cape to make a hem. I used velcro on the top to hold the cape on. You could put stars or the initial of each child on the back.
The bat cave. I made this out in our back yard. We have a gazebo in the center of our yard, so I covered the entire thing with outdoor black fabric netting and a big tarp. My husband spray painted a huge bat on the front of the tarp. I hung a bat in the middle inside the bat cave and put the capes and masks in there. The cave was really low tech but with a little imagination, it was real! Hudson was bringing all the guests into his bat cave to “fly” with him. He was so cute.
The party. We started with the super hero training camp which was an obstacle course. Once the heroes completed their training the kids drove Hudson’s bat mobile to the bat cave to get their super hero gear (capes and masks) and their crime fighting tools. batman balls and spider man silly string “webs”. The kids went through the bat cave tunnels to get to the villain poster targets.
I think I had almost as much fun planning this party as the kids had at the party.
Hudson Brayden Graham
My son just turned 3. These are the invites I made for his party. They were the easiest I’ve made yet, and I think they are my favorites. I just laid out the invitation cover, saved it as a HiRes JPG photo size 4 x 6 and had them printed at Walgreens as photos for $0.19 a print. I then glued a black and white print of the invitation details on the back. How simple and inexpensive is that?
The more involved part comes with my next blog post. Planning a super fun party for a super hero. dunt dunt duuuuuuun.
Get out your scraps of fabric, felt, yarn leftovers, sequence, buttons and any other fun accessories.
We used socks, felt, yarn, googly eyes, fabric, beads, chenille sticks and adhered with fabritac.
The cape for Super Hudson is just a piece of felt turned over a piece of yarn and glued down. The mask is a rectangle piece of felt with a piece of chenille stick wrapped around a googly eye.
The hair for both puppets was made in the same way. Tie a piece of yarn into a hoop. Then take pieces of yarn and tie them around that piece at whatever length you want them to be. You can always trim after you glue it down.
We thought of all kinds of ideas for the puppets we could make like: bugs, flowers, clowns, dogs, cats, dinosaurs. We even thought about making puppets to re-enact a story like Little Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks and the Three Bears. In the end, my children (being a typical boy-boy and little princess) chose to make a super hero and a princess, not surprisingly.
On a Friday night a while back, we went out to Chevy’ s for dinner. It was the perfect night to sit outside, and I know they have a big patio area. I reminded my 5 year old that she had been there once before on a school field trip. Being a 5 year old, she says, “You mean the place that only has tortillas to eat?” I explained to her that we were just doing a restaurant tour with her school and told her about all the yummy things they have to eat, she thought it sounded great so she got all dressed up, purse and all.
We arrive at Chevy’s and who do we run into? My co-worker Matt and family. They were just finishing up as we were sitting down, so we didn’t sit with them. Had we known we could have met there, our kids are the same age and are friends, and could have kept each other occupied. Oh well, no one was bored at our table, regardless… I brought a box of craftivities! (Is that a word? Well, it’s a good description!)
I brought our little blocks that we like to make. They are the perfect size for travel or as “occupiers” while waiting for dinner.
What my Craftivity Kit contained:
- 1 1/2″ Ready-to-Go Blank Board Blocks
- Paper (precut to the exact size of these blocks. This is key because what mom has time to cut a hundred little squares? I found the paper in square, circle, heart and flower shapes in the scrapbooking section at Michael’s.)
- Glue Sticks
- Stickers
We were able to make a block and then dinner came. Perfect! I quickly put everything in the box, closed it up, and we were ready for dinner.
My plan is to turn our Ready-to-Go Indie File Box into a Craftivity Case. You may be hearing about this in a future blog post.
Decorated Baskets
Ready-To-Go® PetalPots
I donated 33 petal pots to my daughter’s kindergarten class. The teacher and I thought they would make perfect spring baskets to hold the eggs that the class will be dyeing.
I painted the pots 6 different spring colors, using only 3 acrylic paint colors and lots of white (red, blue and yellow). I used a Japanese screw punch to place a hole on 2 of the sides for the handle.
I then used artist’s tape on the inside to hold down the sides of the pot. I wanted to make sure that the pots will stay open (these are kindergartners after all and I didn’t want the eggs falling out).
Painted Petal Pots
The children each chose their own basket, and decorated with foam stickers: grass to go all the way around the bottom, one easter egg, and assorted bugs.
For the handle, I lightly twisted 3 chenille sticks and inserted in the holes. I held it down on the inside with artist’s tape.
They came out really cute and are being used as decoration for the center of their working table until their big Spring Celebration. On the day of, we’ll put grass in each basket and 3 dyed eggs for each child to bring home.
The birthday girl
My Toddler is now a young girl; she just turned 6 years old. Alivia wanted to have a tea party for her birthday so I found a cute little bistro, New Englund’s Bistro and Tea Room in here in Concord, CA. The tea party started off with a presentation about tea etiquette and what a “lump of sugar” is. The girls enjoyed tea, lemonade, finger sandwiches, cupcakes, a story about a tea party and feeling all grown up in their pretty tea dresses.
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