Crafty Mommy in da house!

It all started back in the fall when my Aunt sent me a link to a "project" that involved sewing 4 pillow cases together lengthwise, stuffing them with pillows and basically making a kids pillow lounge chair. Yea! Cute Idea! I don't own a sewing machine ... But she went to great lengths to bring me a bag full of my Grandfather's old pillow cases, and anyone who knows me knows that I'm very sentimental when it comes to my Grandfather. So I picked six pillow cases (I knew so little about it that I didn't even realize that each pillow lounge chair actually uses FOUR, not three), thanked her and then sat back wondering what I was going to do next. So my mom decided I needed a sewing machine (I haven't used a sewing machine since high school), I bought two more pillow cases, Mom taught me how to use a sewing machine again, and darn it, I made my boys pillow lounge chairs.

And Crafty Mommy made her debut ...

Deciding that SOME day, I am going to use my two favorite baby outfits from the boys to make Memory Bears, I decided I should probably keep my feet wet with this sewing thing because those bears aren't an easy task. So my next project was making my husband a fleece scarf, which ended up too short but turned out pretty well nonetheless. So on to my next Crafty Mommy project - cloth storage bins, which feel like they took FOREVER. Turned out nice, but a lot of steps and a lot of patience.

They are currently sitting on top of a table with nothing in them and stuff piled on top of them. But I actually MADE them, and that's the point.

I also tried some lovely non-sewing Crafty Mommy projects, which included two wreaths, one for Christmas and one for Easter. Again, extremely time consuming, but I'm really happy with how they turned out. My oldest son knew immediately that the Christmas wreath was his beloved Mi-EE! before I was even a quarter of the way through it. And while all of the colors for the Easter wreath seemed quite obnoxious, I have to say that once it was all together, it was rather pretty.

And what probably has now become my favorite (and least time consuming) project of them all, a "dining" table for the boys. We recently discovered during a trip back to visit my mom that both boys do much better at mealtime when they are sitting at a kid-sized table instead of in high chairs. When he's in a high chair, the youngest just likes to throw food over the side, especially when the cat is around so he can "share." Instead of spending a ton of money to buy a toddler-sized table, we opted to take an old end table that we weren't using and bought two plastic chairs. After a few days, I decided that I wanted to paint it (it is a light colored wood and had a big black stain on it from something), so my husband found paint that matched the color of the plastic chairs and I went on a wild goose chase to find decals to match that I would use Mod Podge to make them stick to the table and protect them. $6 for a can of quick-drying spray paint, $15 for the decals, $4 for a bottle of Mod Podge, and about 2 hours of work (including drying time for both the paint and 3 layers of the Mod Podge), and I present to you our $25 toddler "dining" table .... not too shabby if I say so myself. Considering that we started with the chairs, I find it close to a sheer miracle that we found both paint and decals that would actually match.

So there you have it - in just five short months, Crafty Mommy has been able to whip out a few decent projects that actually deemed themselves useful and/or fun (the end result, not necessarily the work :-) ). We'll have to wait and see what other fun things I can pull out of my sleeve soon.