Mistletoe Wreath

Its nice to be known.
Mr. SH was walking in the woods when he spied some mistletoe in the top of an oak tree. He knew that I would want it to make something, so he brought a bunch home.
And, of course, he was right. I made it into a little wreath that afternoon. Its the first Christmas-y thing I've put up and it looks lovely hanging from the door of my china hutch.
And how do you get mistletoe out of the top of an oak tree, you ask? With a shotgun, silly.

That's not what I said

I said I'm dreaming of a white Christmas, not a white... oh, nevermind. I'll take it.

If you live somewhere snowy you're probably thinking 'whoopie-doo". But snow that sticks to the ground is a big deal in this part of Oregon.

Other exciting news around here: my "baby" is two. I'll see if I can find her birthday dress and take a picture to show you.

You won't be seeing the cake. I took my eyes off it for two seconds and she took full advantage. Up until that point it was a bear.

Bookish Bag

A birthday gift for someone who always has a lot to carry (literally and figuratively):

I was inspired by this tutorial, but made mine a little larger because I wanted it to accomodate books in addition to being handbag:

I was determined to have the topstitching along the front and back, but I must have ripped it out 8 times before I gave up that dream. I'm guessing it had something to do with the way the wales of the corduroy fed through the feed dogs, but I could NOT sew a straight line. So I stitched something like it by hand with embroidery floss.

Pockets for pencils and one for a gadget. I put some ribbon on the top of a couple pockets after I realized they blended in with the lining so well, they became invisible.

And a big pocket on the other side for...stuff.

Brush Embroidery Cake

If the question of whether or not you can do brush embroidery work on Italian Meringue Buttercream has been keeping you up at night, I'm here to tell you its possible (names have been smudged to protect the innocent):

Well, my recipe is really a combination of IMBC with "regular" buttercream to make it a little easier to work with, but still. Its not as clean looking as it probably is on crusting buttercream but its pretty and a bit out of the ordinary, so I'm glad I tried it.

It was somewhat time consuming and I don't recommend that you drink a lot of caffeine beforehand as it does require a steady hand with the brush.

I was aiming for clusters of hydrangeas, but I think I missed the mark.

Its hard out here for a squirrel

There are no acorns on our trees this year. None. Someone told me that acorns are biennial, which would explain the problem but I'm not sure if that's true or not. If that's so you'd think the trees would talk it over and decide to how to stagger their vacations so we aren't left hanging.
This is annoying for me since I had planned to enjoy some acorn craftiness, both the grown-up kind and with my girls.

But I imagine the poor squirrel has that same sick feeling I get when I check my bank account balance.

Pumpkin

If you have ever referred to me as "crafty" and I scoffed at the idea, I would like to submit this as evidence to back my claim:


I was actually thinking ours wasn't too bad until I saw this. Sweet Mercy! Now THAT'S a paper mache pumpkin. Blowing the balloon up in the strings? Genius.
Okay, I did have a 5 year old helping me with this one.
If you don't know me in 'real life', then you wouldn't know yet that I lost my mind and started homeschooling our daughter this year. So this was a school project leading up to our trip to the pumpkin patch. I had the grand idea that we could talk about basic pumpkin anatomy and maybe find a coloring page to go with that. I couldn't find anything close to what I had in mind other than this, so we went 3-D. After the paper dried and we popped the balloon, I cut away part of the side so we could give our pumpkin some seeds and pulp.


I'm seriously thinking of making another this week just to try the string idea. It would be a solo project though, Buggy's squeamishness about all things sticky trumps her desire to make a huge mess.

Pettiskirt

I found it! My sewing mojo, that is. It was buried under the heap of half-finished projects on my desk.
Just in time too, since I have a couple of projects to make that have an actual dead-line. I'm making flower girl dresses and wanted to make a pettiskirt for each girl. I used KitschyCoo's tutorial, except I made only two layers of tulle since these are intended to be worn under a dress rather than as a stand-alone skirt. I used a rather wide elastic so that it can be worn with other dresses that aren't quite as long by rolling the elastic over to shorten the length.
I wanted a little bit of poof, not a bell-like skirt. See? Little poof:

This dress isn't hemmed, its a practice before I suck it up and slice into my cotton sateen, of which I have juuuuust enough to make the skirts. *gulp*