December Daily - Day Four

Day Four: what  a busy day full of family and celebration. We all got together today to celebrate my dad's birthday (which is tomorrow). For his birthday dessert we did apple dumplings instead of a cake. Apple dumplings have been a long time favourite in my family. So today I documented the process of making them. My niece and nephew were really excited to help out and we had a lot of fun including them in the process. My mom , my sister and I were all involved in the production too with an appearance by my sister-in-law to be helping by dealing with Stan. What a fun day! This also has been my favourite 'page' so far.

Since there were so many pictures of the process of making the apple dumplings I made a three page fold out collage of the photos and numbered each photo. Each of those numbers correspond with my numbered list on "How To Make Apple Dumplings".

Here it is opening up.

 This is the left page fully folded out.

On the back side of the collage I included a photo of the original recipe in it's book and on the other side, machine stitched a piece of transparency onto the page to make a pocket for the typed out recipe.

On the opposite page is the description of the photos in the collage as instructions on how to make the dumplings and I used the red machine stitching again to underline the title.

End result of this event... delicious dumplings and a small sugar induced coma.
Mama T.

December Daily - Day Three

Day Three: We got up early, quickly finished packing and got on the road to the metropolis of Harriston Ontario for Oz's high school hockey team tournament. While I was waiting for the game to start I ran out to the pharmacy to pick up some cologne for my dad's birthday gift. They didn't have any there so I asked where in town I might go to get some. She told me to drive to the next town over lol. Anyway, back to the arena we went. Occupying a 10 month old at an arena is no easy task but when the Zamboni came around Stanley was glued to the glass watching it make its rounds. 

A full page photo of Stanley watching the Zamboni. I over laid the picture with the lyrics to "I Want To Drive  A Zamboni" then machine stitched in red around the chorus of the song.

Here I made a little collage of hanging out at the rink and did a little journaling on the back side of the transparency.

After the game, Stan and I headed to the farm and sent my dad to pick up Oz after his last afternoon game. Then after supper all together, Oz and I left wee Stan with my mom so we could go visit my good friend Matt B. and Mr. and Mrs. B. joined us. A great day in all.

See you tomorrow,
Mama T.

December Daily - Day Two

Here we are at Day 2. It was a busy one with all the baking, packing up to head to my parents farm up north and also working on this page a little. Today was all about the cookies and baking I'm doing. Each year I make a whole whack of cookies to sell - good for some extra Christmas spending money.

A photo collage of some of the cookies I made today.

I ended up drawing and colouring a picture of each of the cookies that will be in the Christmas cookie boxes and cut them out.

Tomorrow we're off to a hockey tournament for Oz's high school hockey team, then to my parent's for the night.
Good night!
Mama T.

December Daily - Day One

So far so good. One day down and thirty more to go!

I also updated my day 2 foundation page.

Whitewashed update

So I meant to post after my last quilting class to let you know that I did get my quilt top together! I forgot to take a picture to show you the whole thing put together but the pictures from before give you the right idea. I ended up adding a 6" border of the dark brown with small white polka dots so that it would make the quilt just a little bigger so it would fit nicely on a twin bed.
I was pretty excited by the backing that I chose. It has an old architectural drawing look to it. I can't remember the name of it either to look up a picture online, however, when I get my quilt back I'll be sure to post lots of pictures.
So I sent my quilt to be machine quilted which I find incredibly interesting. This is the first time I've seen a quilt through from beginning (cutting out all the pieces) to the end, having it quilted and then binding it. So you have to choose your batting (the filling between you quilt front and back) and then what thread you would like to use (variegated, shiny, dull, which colour etc.) and then you have to choose which pattern you would like quilted over the entire thing or if you'd like a border quilted on it or if you would like something custom done. So because I'm not made of money (quelle surprise!) I went with an all over pattern, (no border) with a taupe thread in a dragonflies and loopy pattern which I think will look nice to soften the very modular look of the quilt. So in a few weeks I should hopefully have it back! Stay tuned!

Mama T.

December Daily, here I come!

I've been watching this project be done by others for a couple years now and by the time I decided I wanted to last year we were already into December. So this year I started quite a bit earlier. The project is called December Daily where you are challenged to journal the month of December. It can be about the things that happen daily, about traditions involved in the season, favourite recipes or whatever comes up in December and the holiday season.
Ali Edwards of Ali Edwards Design is the genius behind this project. She's been doing it for quite a few years now. You can follow along with her December Daily 2011 project and you can also follow along as I do mine here.
So I got my foundation for the book pretty much complete which means I have the template printed for each day. the book is 6" x 8" and each day consists of a 'spread' and a transparency between. You'll see what I mean as I post.
I just took a picture of each of my foundation pages and will give a little description of each. There's 31 days to go through here, so bear with this long picture filled post!

 Front cover: I found a chip board with clear embossed dots on it. My intention here is to put an outline of a white reindeer. My first attempt ended badly as the paint didn't stick to the dots and the more I tried to fix it the worse it got.

 Title Page: at the end of the month I'll maybe add a couple photos here.

 Day One: just some glittery chipboard letters

 Day Two: not entirely sure what I'll do here. Maybe a ruffly red ribbon from top to bottom with a number 2 attached somehow.

 Day Three: every third day my transparency has a strip of paper up one side which was a way of using up the left over transparencies - less waste from the project. I zig zagged the red over some metallic thread to attach the two and added some white sticker letters

 Day Four: a simple page - just the wood grain transparency with the glittered word four in red. Now to figure out a way to get all the extra glitter off the static-y page... hmmmm.

 Day Five: not my favourite transparency or my favourite page design but it will do.

 Day Six: used a bracket border to trim the edge of the striped cardstock and added the glittered chipboard letters.

Day Seven: a simple page day with just the seven icon and a little bit of papery string wrapped around a few times.

 Day Eight: I wasn't in love with this flocked dark brown letters transparency but turns out you can scrape some of the letters of pretty cleanly so I scraped some of the 'f' off, took out the 'd' and the 'j' and added a little top to the 'I' to make a 't'. Genius! Oh yeah, and some festive ribbon.

 Day Nine: one of my favourites! Three lines of red machine stitching attached the polka dot cardstock to the  lattice transparency. Then some more of my favourite sparkly chipboard letters.

 Day Ten: Just a tag that I spray painted over some punch out numbers, then outlined those numbers with a white pen, then stitched the tag on with red thread.

 Day Eleven: a simple day - just the green flocked snowflakes with the simple 'eleven' tag.

Day Twelve: red bazzill paper stitched on with metallic thread (doesn't work well with a sewing machine and paper). I'm not crazy about this page,... feels like it's missing something.

 Day Thirteen: I really liked the contrast of this tag and added a little metallic thread for some sparkle.

 Day Fourteen: I took a piece of white card stock, stamped on JOY, added the '14' punch out then hand stitched it to the transparency with the metallic thread.

 Day Fifteen: zig zag machine stitched this berry cardstock to the transparency then framed the number '15' with two puffy black bracket stickers.

Day Sixteen: nothing is done here yet but the plan is to do a black and white photo strip up the left hand side and then maybe a simple number tag stitched or stapled to the right lower side. I do not like this transparency - too busy and bright for my liking.

 Day Seventeen: more green flocked snowflakes with a simple cardstock ribbon and number '17' icon on top.

 Day Eighteen: another favourite of mine in the book. Fairly simple but I loved the hand stitched metallic thread with tails hanging off and the cork numbers in the corner with the wood grain transparency.

 Day Nineteen: maybe some room for photos or journaling on the green strip?

 Day Twenty: no idea what to do here. Maybe more ribbon strips?

 Day Twenty One:  a strip of neat cardstock that looks like old holiday ads. Added puffy black sticker numbers to the corner.

 Day Twenty Two: I cut out a simple silver ring of paper to circle the number '22' then ruffled some red ribbon by pressing it onto some double sided tape.

 Day Twenty Three: simple red and black '23' icon cut out with a green cardstock bracket.

 Day Twenty Four: this page was actually meant for day twenty seven.... but I wasn't paying attention while spelling/glittering and put four instead of seven for some reason. Day twenty seven is now much for festive looking than I had planned. Oh well.

 Day Twenty Five: Christmas Day! All the right words in all the right places. I stitched the simple 'December 25' strip on with red thread. I may still add a number 25 but I might also leave it as is.

 Day Twenty Six: I will in fact be 'Home for the holidays' so this little card was perfect. We'll be heading to my parents Christmas afternoon and staying a few days.

Day Twenty Seven: see what I mean? Pretty festive for an after Christmas day. oh well. Still need to add something here.

 Day Twenty Eight: not done yet.

Day Twenty Nine: not done yet.

 Day Thirty: not done yet.

Day Thirty One: New Years Eve! not done yet.

I will post photos each day of each spread I complete. Hopefully I don't get behind as this project was the whole reason for making the blog in the first place... to keep me accountable and to post each day as I go. Wish me luck!
Mama T.

Whitewashed

Here is one of my current projects, one that I am almost forced to complete (and I want to) because I am taking a class for learning to make quilts. So the collection of fabrics is called 'Whitewashed' and it's pretty neutral with a little bit of colour in the centres. I'm really enjoying this class and really like how it's turning out so far. 
My mom has been making quilts for years and years and somehow I have never attempted one myself. I love fabric because of all of it's different colours and patterns and textures and the endless possibilities for rearranging them into great designs. Quilts are no longer the old fashioned mixture of mini flower prints you image a little Mennonite girl to be sporting but there are a great deal of modern quilt designs and fabrics now. 
So here is a picture of how the quilt started. I cut out all 600 + pieces and arranged them on the floor until I got a mix I liked between the background colours and the centres.

All in all there will be 120 - 6" squares.
Once I got past all the cutting, prep work and arranging, things started to fly!
So now I've got 80 squares put together and sewn into rows (the rows aren't attached to each other yet).

So there's an idea of what the quilt will look like roughly. Only 40 more squares to put together and sew into rows before Thursday night which is the final class. I'll try to post another picture of the whole top put together on Friday. I'm thinking of adding a 6 inch border around the outside of it to make it just a little bigger to fit nicely onto a twin sized bed. I'll also have to pick out my backing on Thursday night then it will be off to the machine quilter's which is another whole post on it's own. 

Piece out! (I know another terrible pun... this time intentional - I need help)

Mama T.

A few of my past projects

Here are some pictures of a few of my past projects. I've tried out a bunch of different materials for art projects and crafts of all sorts ranging from concrete to fabric, paper, yarn, cake or painting and drawing. 

 This is a concrete fountain I made with a steel top. It sits in my mom's garden.

 This is a concrete table top I designed, formed and poured. The legs are only temporary. I was thinking more of a black welded frame of some sort for it to sit in.

 This is a 3D piece of artwork that has each butterfly punched out of a magazine page all showing different textures or pictures. I've done a lot of versions of this but this one I decided to keep all in cool tones.

 This is one of my charcoal drawings that I did for a friend of mine who was a huge fan of Arnie!

 This was actually a marker drawing of a picture I pulled from a magazine. 

 Another one of my sketches

 One of my only water colour paintings.

 This is a barn quilt that I helped to create for my mom. It's about 12' x 12' and now is hung on the side of her barn to be seen from the road. The pattern "Carpenter's Wheel" was painted on in different layers. I didn't have a picture of the finished product viewed from the road - sorry.

 Onto my yarn crafts! My grandma taught me the basics of crocheting when I was about 12 and I crocheted about one or two squares then quit. I rediscovered crocheting while I was pregnant and have been hooked ever since. (that was a totally bad unintentional pun). Anyway this is the beginning of the blanket I made for my son (this project is actually complete!).

So this was my very first crocheted baby blanket which took some figuring out and some ripping out here and there but I finished it! A little too girly for a boy blanket so I'll likely gift it.

I'll soon post some pictures of my current projects and ideas, until then,

Mama T.