Fantabulous Friday: My Crafty Endeavors of Late

Having an 11-week-old does not afford excessive amounts of time for creativity, aside from creatively pinned diapers, creative songs about Her Royal Sweetness, and creative ways to keep one hand on Her Royal Sweetness while cooking dinner with the other hand.  So I guess it affords a different kind of creativity, but rarely enough time for...crafts.


I, however, need to do crafts in order to save that little part of Amelia which, in recent past, devoted a least a little part of each day to fabric or paper or buttons (mostly involving Pink Things).  In light of this need, I am attempting to spend at least 30 minutes per day completing either a small-but-cute/functional project or working on a larger project (like baby clothes).

One thing I had to do was reorganize my crafting space.  You see, I have a lovely corner down in our basement in which I can stash my patterns and fabric and other supplies, but it was such a disorderly mess that it was taking me an hour to find my seam gauge and by that time Harriet was making her presence known (she doesn't like to craft yet).  It seemed like a good use of my time to organize the space, and so I did last weekend:

I moved some tables around, sorted all of my fabric into a dresser, and organized my thread and other random supplies into plastic-drawer-things.  And I put a pink table cloth on my sewing table and hung Happy Things up on the wall (i.e. pictures of Steve and me, a picture of Harriet, a verse, and a calender from Ireland.  Oh, and my Phantom poster is up there, too, along with a painting of Steve when he was Frank Butler).  I think my creativity is increased when I'm working in a better space.

Here is a really quick but really splendid little project that I found on create...breathe (check out this blog for very fun ideas):

I made this huge rosette out of green hem facing and hot glued it to my favourite brown headband to create my Favourite Headband of All Time.  It took about 15 minutes.  And Harriet slept.

(I wore it once - on a day of fabric-and-junk-store-browsing with Mom - and then came home and accidentally sat on the headband and totally broke it.  Sadness.  But it was my Favourite Headband of All Time while it lasted.  I need to make another one.  I have some fantastic pink dupioni scraps that are begging to be displayed prominently.)

Our craft at MOPS last week was creating Resilience Boxes.  These boxes are made by decorating an old shoe box in a way that reflects each of our individual personality. Then each month we add something to the box which will increase our resilience as mothers (like chocolate or 30-minute meal ideas or nail polish or the like).  I didn't get very far on decorating mine at the actual meeting (uh, perfectionist tendencies don't always lend themselves to efficiency), so I took 10 minutes and finished the box here at home with my own extra thingies:

I like it, especially because the shoe box has a handy little cardboard latch on it which keeps the lid from flying around.  I think that when I am done Resilience-ing, I'll stick some thread or buttons in the box.  Organizing in cute things is so much better.

Gotta go babysit the Heathens.  Have a great weekend!