A January Project

I don't know if this qualifies as a creative craft project or just some cute craziness. Earlier this month I saw an interesting idea for a perpetual calendar-journal. I thought I would try it out, but I didn't feel like cutting up index cards or looking for a basket. Instead, I decided to use a composition notebook and divide it into months and days. Because the composition notebook has only 100 pages . . . and because I wanted to have one page per day . . . I decided to make this book just for winter. . .


Of course, I can never do anything simple and efficiently. No, no, no. I have to cutify everything I touch . . . so the first pages are a winter collage made from my stash of Mary Engelbreit (the queen of cute) calendar pages. I divided the book into three sections for the three winter months: December . . . January . . . and February.

I even made spiffy tabs for each section!

The plan is to write a couple lines each day all year. Then next year I will write a few more lines underneath the 2011 entries. . . and so on and so forth. I'm hoping it will be fun to read about the past years at the same time I write in new stuff. And if it works, I plan to make a book for the other three seasons, too. Most likely, it will be so dumb I will want to do what my Mom attempted to do with all her diaries before she died--toss them! Oh well, it's more fun than putting away the rest of my Christmas decorations which is what I should have done by now.

Stuffed Octopus

As promised, here are pictures of the octopus I made for Wade. I was planning on finishing him awhile ago, but just barely got around to it today. I almost didn't finish him because I really hated him for awhile there. I finally took a seam ripper to his face and started all over on that, and am now very happy with how he turned out!

Wade loves him!

I used a this tutorial I found over at Moda Bake Shop (one of my new favorite sites!). It's the perfect scrap busting project.

Nursery Banner

Hayley should really be the one to post this since she is the creative genius behind this cuteness, but I shall post it for her. She made this banner for Lindsay for Christmas and made a matching one for mom's craft room. All very cute, all very fine stitching details, and I may not have mentioned this, but all too cute!

LuLu's Snappy Shirt

While Hay-Bop was home for the holidays we girls ventured out to Material Girls. I found a pattern that was destined for Lindsay called "The LuLu Dress." How could I resist? Well, Hayley told me to save my $10 because she saw a free tutorial online for the exact same thing. And with the help of Shelly's amazing sewing machine, I was able to make this! Doesn't she just love her amazingly crafty mommy? And don't you just love her new pink, furry boots?

Car Mat

I am in love with a craft blog called Homemade by Jill and am constantly finding way too cute craft projects to try out like this car mat. I decided to make one for edders for Christmas and include all our favorite spots like Paces (aka the popsicle store). I also had to include Arctic Circle, the doughnut store, and anywhere else we can get a good treat. All the material came from Mom's scraps and it was quite fun to try and create all these places we love to go.

Here is "The Shop" where Papa works, Eddy's House, the car wash is a favorite, the gas station, and the duck pond. I finished it off with some giant yellow ric-rac and some cute car flannel for the back. All in all it is a pretty good lookin' mat of all the places we love.