Lima Bean Wreath

I've wanted to make one of these for a while now after seeing them pop up around the internet. Here's the lowdown:
1) They are cheap.
2) They are easy.
3) They'll increase your hot gluing skills by 100%.
4) They are stinking cute.

What you'll need:
1 styrofoam or other wreath mold, readily available at Michaels, JoAnn's or Hobby Lobby - size is up to you.

2 bags of lima beans (a little over a dollar a bag at Walmart) - may need more or less depending on the size of your wreath

1, 582 glue sticks, or close to it and a glue gun

Spray paint, color of your choice

Nice ribbon to hang the wreath

The process is simple. Basically, glue the lima beans around the wreath - I started with a diagonal circle.


And I kept gluing and kind of piecing the lima beans together to form a nice, diagonal pattern. I glued mine to the back of my wreath just so you could see lima beans from every angle. It meant that on the back I was able to fudge the niceness-factor and not have everything line up perfectly.


Continue gluing and gluing some more.


Until the wreath is covered in lima beans. Don't worry about small gaps or seeing hot glue - that will all get covered up with the paint. However, do try to pick up all the stray hot glue strands. They don't look very pretty covered in spray paint.


Take your spray paint and on a cardboard box or big piece of paper (outside is preferable), paint the wreath until it is well coated but not drippy. Let it dry.


And then hang it up! You can paint this white for Christmas, orange for Halloween, green or pink for Easter - you get the picture. The options are endless.

Your wreath looks great Mel! Here is my little variation. I just bought a pointsetta bunch and some berries at Walmart for $1.00 each, cut them off their stems and hot glued them on to make it a little more Christmasy. I also bought a glossy white spray and after that dried added some sparkle spray.

Baby Skirt.....

My theory with sewing clothes is I will ONLY do it if is cheaper than buying it, hence making your own Halloween costumes. I rarely do "real" clothes. This project is cheap.... free if you have the materials around, and it turns out really cute.

For lack of a Baby Girl Model.... Here is Ryan sporting this CUTE, EASY, CHEAP Baby skirt! Definitely my new favorite project. I guarantee you will be able to do it in 30 minutes or less. HERE are the instructions. Homemade By Jill blew my off x 2 about a month ago, so I am not a huge fan of hers anymore... alas... this project is from her blog.

COMING SOON- Door Puppet Theater Instructions

Crayola Crayon Costume.....

Need another COSTUME idea for Halloween? My niece Jenna really wanted to be a crayon, so I pulled out my Mom's felt and whipped this up for her. It only took a few hours and if you have felt around it is a cheap project. I am not even going to post instructions unless someone is interested in specifics. All I did was measure the felt to knee length. Fashioned a Crayola felt middle, sewed ric rac on yellow felt for the "paper" ends and used the extra for shoulder straps, and made a crayon tip hat. The back velcroes on the top half so that the bottom half still opens to make it walkable. Happy Halloween Crafting!

Easy Hoodie Fish Costume....

There are 3 things I knew about this upcoming Halloween...
#1) I wanted to MAKE an INEXPENSIVE costume for Ryan. Seriously, have you seen the quality of costumes you buy at the store, cheaply made and overpriced.
#2) I wanted Ryan to be a FISH! My husband is an avid fisherman, and we are going to wear fishing vests and hats, so how perfect to have a little fish.
#3) My dude is PICKY.... he's a toddler so... I wanted to make a functional costume that he would actually WEAR and not be crying about!

I looked everywhere for FISH patterns but I didn't like the ones I found. Ryan would have never worn a huge fish on his head or one coming out both sides of his body like the patterns I saw. And once again, I wanted to keep this CHEAP. So.... it came to me. Why not buy a plain colored hoodie and fashion a FISH costume out of that. Ryan always wears hoodies so it was no biggy for him to put it on and it will be warm for the outside Trunk or Treat! So essentially I made this pattern up but I will give a few instructions for anyone who might be interested in making it. And I've got to tell you this costume was a grand total of $10.00, that's right 10 bucks. If I would have gotten the hoodie at DI it probably would have been 5$. It only takes about 4 hours of work time, it is a quick costume. Well Here Goes!....

Easy Hoodie Fish Costume

I am basing this on a size 24 month hoodie so if you are making it bigger or smaller you can adjust the material list accordingly.

Materials:

• 1/4-1/2 yard blue felt- (fabric.com has great prices on felt)
  
• 1/2 yard shimmery blue costume material
• 1/2 yard silver costume material
• Thread
• Plain colored hoodie-I got a plain blue one at target for 5$, it had a little star on the right side but the scales covered it up.
  
• Wiggly Eyes- Can buy set of 12 at Walmart for 97 cents.
• Buttons for Back of Eye- Optional
  

Material Note: Jo-Ann fabric is selling their costume material right now for 1/2 off. It is cheap fabric anyways, usually 2-3$/yard. There are endless possibilities to the kinds of fish you could make using the same concept. Just change the fabric to shimmery red and yellow and you could make a clown fish. Or to all silver and you could make a shark!..... Just choose a hoodie color to match your concept and a matching felt color as well.

Instructions:

1) Fashion a "fish scale" out of felt and cut 45 matching pieces.
2) Cut costume material to size with the scales and sew the pieces together. ( I zig zagged mine but if you have a serger by all means serge the scales.)
3) Starting on the bottom of the hoodie sew the scales on a layer at a time until you reach the bottom of the hood on the back. (I used about 20 scales on the front and 20 scales on the back because I overlapped them)
4) Optional- I zipzagged the top of my scales down twice to give it a more decorative look in case the scales flip up and you see the top.

Note: When you sew the scales on the front just take care to not sew too close to the zipper or else you want be able to zip up your hoodie. I also did a few half scales on the side.

Tail- For the tail of the fish costume I just cut out a piece of felt that looked like a tail, on the front I did my blue fabric and the back my silver. On the ribbing bottom portion of the hoodie I sewed the tail on.


Head- The beauty of this costume is by using a hoodie you have a built in head!
1) Un pick the hoodie seam from 2 inches back until 1 inch from the base of the hood.
2) Fashion a fin with the felt and decorative material, insert the fin in the opening you created, flip inside out and sew the hoodie back together.
3) Reinforce the edges on the inside and flip back out! Voila a perfect fish head!

For the EYES I just sewed on blue buttons and hot glue gunned wiggle eyes. So easy and cute!

Finished product! With a very cute model! Ryan has been saying FISH, FISH every time he sees his costume so hopefully he stays excited about it. I have been thinking I just might make hoodie costumes every year for my toddlers. Think of all of the things you could do! A pumpkin, all sorts of animals!..... There are A LOT of possibilities.

If you come up with a unique HOODIE costume I would love to see it! E-mail me your pictures and any questions to emandbart@gmail.com. Happy Halloween Crafting!

Freezer Paper Stenciling....

There are a LOT of different sites that have info about Freezer Paper Stenciling. I HIGHLY suggest you visit them if you are really interested in doing this project because they have better instructions. I am just giving the BASIC overview here.

Here are some good ones... HERE and HERE

Step One: Pick a design, saying, picture etc. that you want to have on your shirt. Trace it or print it on freezer paper. Better yet........Have an awesome friend with a Cricut and a progam called Sure Cuts A Lot. My friend Jana cut ALL of the pieces of freezer paper for my shirt. If you don't know someone with these resources and you have a simple pattern you can use an exacto knife to cut out the design.

Step Two: Peel out the inside letters that got cut. It will look like the picture below.
Step Three: Iron the Freezer Paper on with the waxy side on the shirt.
Step Four: Iron on all of the "insides" or pieces that need to go inside the letters.

Step Five: Paint! This is the fun part. You don't even have to stay in the lines.... just don't go off of the freezer paper onto the shirt. I used TULIP brand. My friend said that she has washed her shirts multiple times and they still look great. I used 2 layers of the Tulip paint on each shirt.

Step Six: Let the shirt sit for 4-6 hours. Peel off the Freezer Paper and the little "inside pieces" and Voila an AWESOME shirt! The possibilites are endless!
Last Step: Heat set the shirt, use a piece of cloth and iron over the dried letters so that they won't crack when you wash them.

Camera Strap Cover

Well, this is obviously not very hard, but I just got a new camera and wanted to use some of my fabric scraps to make a cute camera strap cover to cover up the ugly yellow words on my existing camera strap.

Basically, I just cut a piece of material twice as wide as my camera strap (plus seam allowances) and about 1 inch longer than what I wanted to cover. I ironed on some pellon to the fabric, hemmed the two short edges about 1/2 inch up and the sewed wrong sides together down the long seam and slid it over my camera strap.

This would work for any kind of strap you can remove, like a guitar, camera, etc.

Repentance Handout

Well, this isn't really a craft but I put together this handout on Photoshop for a Sharing Time I am doing on on repentance. I thought I'd attach it here in case it would be useful to anyone else.

Here is a link to a google document with three pencils - multiple copies could be printed out and cut to hand out to the children/youth.