Activity Board!

As I mentioned in a previous post, we created an activity board for Lucas for Christmas!
After watching him play we made a few changes. We added a door knocker, a drain spout, and painted it with chalkboard paint!
His favorite part is the springs that stick out at the top. We simply attached them with screws.

He also loves the top door that opens to a mirror. He always greets his reflection with an enthusiastic "HI!!"

The drain was a great addition. He loves anything that functions like a steering wheel.

What is included:

2 doors

One with crinkly shiny wrapping paper behind it (leftover from Christmas)

The other with a mirror (from one of his old baby toys)

3 door locks

1 hook lock

1 latch lock

1 chain lock

1 light switch

1 door knocker

4 caster wheels to SPIN, SPIN, SPIN!

4 Springs to BOING!

One pulley to pull a string through

The board is made of two sheets a plywood attached together. We screwed them together so we could take them apart easily if we ever wanted to add anything else.

The two boards allowed us to open the doors and not have wall behind.

We made the doors by drilling small circular holes in each corner of a drawn square.

Then we could place a saw into the holes as starting points for each cut without losing our square to make the door itself.

As finishing touches we used a router along all the edges, primed with grey primer, and used chalkboard spraypaint.

Our son is involved with Early Intervention because of his heart condition. The supervisor was highly impressed and said this was excellent for developing gross and fine motor skills.

So we got a very big seal of approval!

Lucas absolutely LOVES it!

Happy Birthday Storm Trooper!

My nephew's birthday follows shortly after Christmas so it's always fun to be able to carry the theme or creations from Christmas over and have a bit more time devoted to just to him.

In 2010, I made his Super Hero Cape to match the Super Monkey I made him for Christmas.

This year, I thought I would make him a Storm Trooper Helmet. It is made out of Milk Bottles! I used this tutorial. However I used white milk jugs. Unfortunately  they have an extremely different shape than the clear jugs used in the tutorial. So I had quite a bit of trouble trying to keep it truly Storm Trooper. I think it came out well despite the different shape and there was no spray paint involved. I just used acrylic paints including white that I used to cover up the hot glue from the hot glue gun. The nice part about this was that I could just wash off the bottles and start over if I made a mistake. I used black electric tape for the black band at the top and used vitamin bottle caps for the caps at the "ears." Hopefully he likes it! We are still waiting for an official fitting to put in the eye holes.

Also, at Christmas my nephew loved his Star Wars Finger Puppets, but as you would imagine as an almost 5 year old he had a few recommendations. He requested I add guns and some more "bad guys" so he could REALLY play with them.
So with some simple folded pipe cleaners and some more floss everyone was equipt with guns in a matter of minutes, except for R2-D2 and C-3PO. He said Leah should have a gun, because Luke let her borrow his. As for the bad guys he requested a Jawa and Darth Maul. So here they are in all their glory.

My mom is bringing some red pipe cleaners on Thursday so I can make his double light saber.

She is also bringing black pipe cleaners so I can make the Jawa's gun. My nephew was very specific about the gun since it has a very large barrel. He even knew what it was called. I did a google image search and sure enough, they do! I didn't even remeber they HAD guns! I really wanted gold eyes so I searched through my jewelry making supplies and found the eyes above. I know they are bigger, but I like that they make him feel smaller. Hopefully my artistic license is acceptable to my nephew.
Unfortunately we all got sick so we had to miss his big day. We are hoping to get together soon to give him his new Star Wars friends. Don't forget if you want patterns for the rest of the gang to shoot me an e-mail at mcgowan.rebekah@gmail.com

What projects are you working on over the winter months?

Free Star Wars Finger Puppet Pattern

The Star Wars Finger Puppet Patterns are now available through PDF!

They print out on standard letter size paper. I have also included the basic instructions in the packet.
Just e-mail me at mcgowan.rebekah@gmail.com and I will reply with the PDF that includes basic instructions and the patterns for all the characters shown above.
If you enjoy the pattern and want to say a thank you, donations are accepted. There is a link in the sidebar to donate through PayPal.

The Materials List is:

Assorted Felt

Assorted Embroidery Floss

Embroidery needle
Pins

Pipe Cleaners

Please note: The Patterns are intended for Personal use only. They can not be produced for sale without my express permission and the patterns can not be sold privately or publicly.

Star Wars Finger Puppets

I just couldn't wait to show you!

These are for my nearly 5 year old Nephew for Christmas. They were so much fun to make!
I have made printable patterns available through PDF. E-mail me at mcgowan.rebekah@gmail.com if you would like a copy of the free patterns for personal use.

Carrie's Christmas Creation!

My oh so very talented sister-in-law is joining us today as a guest blogger! I hope you enjoy her great tutorial for making Advent Calendar Christmas Trees:

I love Christmas, and am lucky enough to have a husband who is fully on board with my Christmas crafting addiction. This year, I really wanted to make an advent calendar. I love the sense of anticipation that comes along with an advent calendar but have been totally bored with the cheap paper or chocolate options available in stores. During an extensive Google and Pinterest search, I came upon some adorable options. (Here's a great roundup of ideas) My hesitation with most of the options I found was that they were aimed at families or took a far greater investment of time and money than I was up for. I knew I wanted to make some paper crafts, so I decided to re-purpose one as an advent calendar.

During my search, I stumbled across these adorable scrapbooking paper Christmas trees. I decided to make two of them and add pins to the bigger one from which to hang ornaments. This would be my grown-up friendly advent calendar.

First, I found some great holiday scrapbooking paper, double-sided is ideal. I bought this great pad of Martha Stewart Crafts paper. I also picked up some additional open stock pieces of green paper. I used this great tutorial, with a few minor modifications.
 Since I don't have a punch of any shape, I used a scrapbooking cutter to cut ovals about 1.5" long. I was also cutting out circles at the same time to make garlands, so I used an always handy cupcake tin to separate the colors and shapes. (I don't know if I would have made it through the cutting with out my husband's help!)

For my large tree, I used only shades of green but for my small tree I went for more variety. Once I had approximately a ton of ovals cut out, I wrapped the bottom and the top of my paper mache tree forms in dark green cardstock. Then, using a Sharpie marker, I curled the ovals about 1/2 way up. On the flat part, I put a dot of glue and then pressed the curls onto the tree form in a random order and in overlapping rows. I just used scrapbooking glue because I don't have a glue gun and it worked fine. When I got to the top of the trees, I cut a few more ovals in a smaller size to fill in the gaps.

At this point, my small tree was complete! Into my large tree, I stuck 24 white round head pins (pulled from my sewing kit). This was remarkably easy to do. I placed them so there would be enough space for the ornaments to hang. The final step was to make tiny ornaments for the advent calendar. Again, I cut little ovals using scrapbooking paper and wrote the numbers in black and silver Sharpie.

 I used tiny silver and brass jingle bells and snowflake buttons for the ornaments.

 Using a tapestry needle and thin ribbon, I strung each ornament with a date tag and placed them in a little bowl by the tree.

Each day, my husband and I enjoy finding today's ornament and slowly decorating our little paper Christmas tree.

Thanks to Becky for letting me write this guest post! I write a cooking blog, and couldn't figure out how paper trees would fit with the theme! I hope you are all having a great time getting in the mindset for the season. Do you have any favorite Christmas crafts that you return to year after year? Ones that it just wouldn't be the holidays without?

Happy Holidays!

                                                          ~CM
If there are any more talented crafters, aesthetic bakers, hand stitchers, crocheters, knitters, masters of the sewing machine, or creative people of any capacity or variety who would like to have a guest post, please feel free to send me a tutorial or post along with pictures of your work! I would be happy to consider you as a possible future guest post!

The Goose is Getting Fat!

It's feeling like Christmas around here and we have been very busy little Elfs lately!
In addition to our looming list of homemade gifts to make I of course had to make a few Holiday creations for Lucas.

We had a rod iron rack that held rod iron baskets of vegetables and towels next to our fridge. Unfortunately, the need to toddler proof forced us to take this down as Lucas loved to try to pull it on top of himself. We suffer from the same plight as many others. We neglected to realize that Stainless Steel is NOT MAGNETIC! Now that the magnetic black side was finally available for play, we wanted to give Lucas some much needed magnet fun. I had some magnet sheets from an old project in my craft drawer and I always have felt lying around so I decided to make Lucas some magnets. I started out with ABC. then used the scraps to make triangles, eyeballs, a line, a tounge, and a circle. I had also made him a felt tree with felt ornaments and a star and had attempted to hang it on the livingroom wall. Lucas immediately ripped it right off the wall along with some of the wall paint! We felt the fridge was a little safer. So I used the remaining magnet scraps for the back of my tree. There literally wasn't a scrap of magnet left in the end. I love that you don't need to put anything on the backs of the ornaments or star since felt sticks to felt. The new magnets are a big hit and they wander over to the non-stainless dishwasher from time to time as well.

We also have been working tirelessly on our Christmas presents. Some will have to remain secret of course, but I can reveal that I finished my pattern designs and began cutting on my StarWars finger puppets for my nephew.

This idea was born from talking to my nephew and then watching him play. He had recently seen Star Wars III for the first time and apparently it changed his life much like thousands of other little boys and girls across the world. He later found Lucas' finger puppets and instantly began an extravagant narrative with them. So I thought what better thing than to combine the two! Of course I thought this was a completely original and brilliant idea until I did a Pinterest search. Low and Behold others had come up with the same idea. Luckily I could only find a decent Darth Vader that seemed to be a worthwhile pattern to work from. This left me to be able to make my own designs for the others. I hope they come out as awesome as they are in my head!!

My little niece turned two back in September. She adores taking care of her baby dolls and Lucas whenever she can get a chance. So I thought for her I would make my first quilt. I actually can't believe I've never made a quilt completely on my own, but with the power of Pinterest and Youtube I made it through!

I only have the hand stitching left to do around the binding. I had a wonderful time making this little piece.
If you have never made a quilt and are looking to get started I highly recommend using a combination of  this tutorial for the construction , a quilt tying tutorial - you will need a curved needle- I used a 2", and I needed this youtube quilt binding tutorial inorder to really understand what they were talking about. I will try to add the quilt tying tutorial I used. I forgot to save it to Pinterest and unfortunately they have shut down their search feature at the moment.
We have also been stirring up a little Christmas fun in the kitchen as well! I planned to make a cheese log using this recipe. However this was for a vegan, gluten free party, so the cream cheese was Tofutti. I found that it doesn't harden as well as regular cream cheese so it wouldn't keep it's little square package form on its own like the recipe intended. So I just put it in a small bread dish I had from our wedding and topped it off similar to the tutorial. I used green onions for the green bow. I found they curl best with an actual pair of scissors and if you run it along the inside of the leaf rather than the outside.

 We also made our version of the santa hat brownie bites pictured here. Again since we were going for Vegan/ Gluten Free we ran into a few road blocks. It turns out you can not use Egg substitutes with boxed Gluten free brownie mix. It will end up a crusty, overflowing, undercooked, and somehow overcooked mess. At the last minute we decided to just go Vegan and drop the attempt for Gluten free. I used my favorite Wacky Chocolate Cake recipe (no eggs, no milk, yet super moist and rich) in a mini cupcake tin, frosted with Pillsbury vanilla frosting (no eggs, no milk, no gelatin) and topped with strawberries. Excuse our messy creations as we were unable to purchase tubed frosting since it typically has gelatin products and I still haven't overcome my fear of making my own piping in a pastry wrap tube. So we frosted with a knife and then used fondu forks to decorate. Bill ended up frosting most of them so I could get dressed for the party. What a great guy! He thought it was pretty awesome so he didn't mind the silliness or tediousness too much.

Well, I hope you are having a VERY merry Christmas season!
I have consulted with 2 potential creative cohorts who have said they may be willing to do a guest blog showcasing their amazing holiday creations while I try to keep my current works under wraps.
So keep posted for some gorgeous hand made crafts by Carrie and Heather.

Merry Christmas,

                                                           The McGowans
P.S. That Party I was talking about, well it was a crazy Christmas sweater party. And as you can imagine, we won.

This Post was brought to you by the Number 6

Here is another little Home Decor creation to brighten up our little hallway to the Studio.

It's amazing how changing a door can change everything. All of a sudden, the hallway was about light. In the evening, that light story was a sad one. So we needed to change out the light fixture desperately.

I wanted something like this. 

However, my budget was closer to $5 than hundreds. I also had only about 8.5" to work with.

I started Googling and Pinterest searching for DIY Capiz Shell Chandeliers, and I found one.  However, her tutorial though fabulous is only a series of pictures and is for a much larger chandelier. This left me with a general idea and a large number of questions.

I did purchase a 5" lampshade at Christmas Tree Shop for $1. I bought 2 rolls of wax paper at the Dollar Tree.  I purchased a 1.5" circle punch with my 50% off coupon at AC Moore.

However, I couldn't tell how she attached the circles to the shade, and my hole punch was just making a frustrating mess until it finally jammed completely.

So here are my written instructions to make an

8.5" Faux Capiz Shell Chandelier

My apologies for my lack of images. Feel free to check the original tutorial for any images.

Materials

5" lampshade

2 rolls of standard size wax paper

1.5" circle punch

wire cutters

wire

2 small brass hooks

low wattage bulb (we used the type that looks like a candle)

standard single bulb light mount

 (similar to the ones found in a closet or unfinished basement)

Take 6 large sheets of wax paper.

Layer them ontop of eachother.

Cover with fabric.

Iron until the entire area is fused together.

Cut lots of  circles with 1.5" circle punch.

 I returned my Fisker for a Paper Shapers. I was pleased as PUNCH. Insert silly giggle here.

If you have punched your way through about 1.5-2 rolls of wax paper, you are doing great.

Rip the cloth off of your lampshade.

Cut out the bulb holder with wire cutters.

Find the mid line of the shade, and add a center wire line.

Determine how many circles long you would like each row to hang, then double that amount.

My top row is 5 long so each chain is 10 circles long

My second row is 4 long so each chain is 8 circles long.

My bottom row is 3 long so each chain is 6 circles long.

I also added extra 8 circle chains to the top row to add depth and a bit more layering at the end.

As suggested in the tutorial, I used a cupcake pan to seperate out each strand for sewing.

So first, I filled my tray with 10 circles in each holder, then 8, then 6.

I sewed using the same technique shown in the original tutorial. She includes a video. I just fed each circle into the machine one after the other to form the chain. I did back stitch at the beginning and end so they wouldn't unravel.

Then begin hanging the chains at the midpoint of the chain on the wires of the upside-down wire shade.

Keep hanging until you get your desired look.

Install your standard single bulb light mount.

Attach your brass hooks to the ceiling on either side of the light mount.

Hang your upsidedown shell covered shade to the hooks directly against the ceiling.

Enjoy!

I was pleased that it doesn't look overly DIY and really changes the whole feeling of this space.

Why was this post brought to you by the Number 6?

A. Because I've been watching too much Sesame Street with Lucas.

 B. Because this entire project was a frustrating mess until I finally used 6 sheets of wax paper. Less sheets looks more sheer and shell like, however the punch worked perfectly with the extra sheets and it still left a shell like look. 

Now I only have 1 project left for this hallway! I want to add a mirror to the bathroom door.

So this was yet another DIY hang up do to a little quirk in the process.

What's your magic number?