A gift for my daughter

I made a cute little pillow for my daughter as one of her Christmas presents.

The pattern is just her sense of humor.

The pattern is from Daily Cross Stitch.

If you're not signed up with them, you should go do it. You will get a pattern each day that is free for that day. After that, it is available for purchase. They also offer a monthly club. I'm not a member of that so I don't know really what it offers. But, the patterns are cute and pretty simple. Check it out.

Machine embroidery.....first time

Well, I've had my sewing machine for a little over a year now. It's taken me up until recently to work up the nerve to try downloading different embroidery patterns and making them with my machine.

Okay, honest? I still wouldn't have worked up the nerve to do it even now if I hadn't been forced to.

My mother-in-law loves the Pillsbury Dough Boy and has had her kitchen decorated with him for years. I've often bought her new towels and rags for her kitchen whenever I can find them with the Dough Boy on them or I've ordered many times from ebay.

Well, this year I found that even on ebay the prices have just gotten too high. I mean, really, $30 for a kitchen towel? That she's going to use daily!! I don't think so.

So, I found a site that sold sets of different dough boys and ordered them. At first my machine wouldn't read the file and in seeing my frustration my prince came to the rescue. He got online with Bernina and downloaded a program to transfer the digital file into one my machine could read. God I love that man!

And it worked!

I was nervous, too, about doing a pattern that required a change in threads because I didn't know anything about how to do it. But it turns out that it was much easier than I had anticipated.

I made these two towels with matching rags for her.

For the rags I scaled down the pattern to 50% of its original size.

I think they turned out great and she loved them so it was all good.

Who knows, maybe now I'll go crazy and embroider everything I can find. Ha!

Ugly Christmas Sweater Gift

A few years ago I bout a Christmas sweater at Goodwill for the sole purpose of making a pillow with it. Well, since then my mother-in-law has been trying to sneak it out of the house and take it home with her. I've been looking like crazy to find another one but since people started having ugly Christmas sweater parties it's almost impossible to find one. But, that's because I was always looking when it was close to Christmas. I finally found one but it was in early June.

So, I took this sweater....

And made this pillow.....

She's going to be so happy when I give it to her.

It's really just a pillow cover because I left all of the buttons in tact and operational so she can just unbutton the sweater and take the pillow out if she needs to. It's also very quick and easy to make. I didn't have to take in the sides of the sweater at all so all I did was cut it off at the top, turn it inside out and stitch the top and bottom closed. I turned it back to right side out, inserted the pillow, and buttoned it back up. Piece of cake!!

Guess I was good

I must have been a good girl this year because Santa was good to me. Actually, he was VERY GOOD to me.

Just look at what he brought me!!

It also came with an embroidery attachment, and he brought a quilting foot too.

My wonderful husband went and picked it out, bought it, and wrapped it all on his own. Quite frankly, it's far nicer than anything I would have bought for myself even if he told me to go get whatever I wanted.

He may have just earned himself a lifetime of brownie points.

I'm terribly excited to sit down and really play with it. I've done a little bit of playing but with all the family that's been at our house through the holidays I haven't been able to do much. I am so far beyond excited about it!!

Quick and inexpensive gift idea

I saw this some time ago on pinterest but cannot for the life of me find it again to give due credit. I'm sorry to the brilliant person that originally thought of it.


Anyway!!


Dax's mom has been telling me over and over that she needs a new soap dispenser in her kitchen because her other one broke. I bought her the kind that she wants, but decided that before I give it to her, she gets this one first.

I took a picture of Dax and printed it out in color on plain white paper. Then I cut around it and took it to Office Depot and had it printed in color on transparency film.

I cut that out and rolled it up enough to fit inside this bottle of soap, which I peeled all of the labels off of. I really didn't care what scent it was, I just wanted the soap to be clear.

Here's a close up of the picture.

She'll get a big kick out of it.

And really, it only cost a couple of bucks to do. I think it would make a fun gift for anyone, even if the picture isn't this silly. It would be great for grandparents with pictures of the grand kids, or teachers, bachelorette parties,  or just about anybody and you can put any kind of picture in it. (Just remember that you might have to have someone else copy the picture when you take it in. HA!)

Ornaments as gifts

I hope that you all had a wonderful Christmas, or other holiday that you may celebrate. I just love the times that family gets together because we have such a good time.

I made these ornaments for my mother-in-law. She loves things that are made with the kids' hand prints on them. I started doing it when they were little and since they just turned 13, I'm starting to run low on ideas that will still work.

When I say I'm running low on ideas on the hand print gifts I am totally serious. We have done everything I could think of on my own....reindeer with hand print antlers, hand print Christmas wreath, footprint fish, footprint ghosts, to name a few. It's been so hard to think of new things that when they were still little I put paint on their little butts and sat them on a t-shirt and turned those prints into butt-erflies. LOL Thank goodness for other crafters out there to keep me going with this. I wonder how much longer I can get my kids to still participate in this madness. HA!

Anyway, thank goodness for pinterest! ....which is where I saw the idea for these.

This is a Rudolph ornament made with a thumb print.

And these are snowmen ornaments made with three fingers. Their hands are too big now to do it any differently -- unless, of course, if I had bought giant ornaments for them to do these on. lol

I also made her a set of coasters but didn't get a picture taken of them before they got wrapped up. Then I forgot to do it after presents were opened. But, picture this: I used tumbled marble tiles from Lowe's that were about 4" X 4". I printed out a variety of pictures of the grand kids (both our kids and Dax's sister's kids). Using mod podge I glued them to the tiles. The pictures didn't take up the whole tile but I mod podge-ed the whole tile so that it would all be sealed good. I think I went over the top of the pictures with the mod podge three times to be sure to get them well attached and well sealed. I hope that putting a drink on them won't mess them up. (fingers crossed). But, my mother-in-law liked them. She couldn't wait to take them to work and show them off!

Last minute gifts

Two of my girls are cheerleaders for the school year that's just around the corner. If I make it through the whole year without doing harm to their cheer coach it will likely be a miracle. I've already been somewhere past livid with her and the year hasn't even started. Lord help me!


No, really, I mean that. I'm going to need help.


Okay, back to the point of this post. When I picked the girls up from practice yesterday afternoon they informed me that they needed gifts for their 'big sisters' for today.

Seriously? (Don't get me started again!)


Now, you need to know that I live kind of out of town of a small town. The next town is about 25 miles away. My gift choices here in town are the dollar store, the grocery store, hardware store, or feed store. Not many options right here for gifts a teenage girl might want. I didn't have the time, energy, or gas money to head all the way back into the bigger town again. The cheer coach's suggestion is always candy, but Addison's big sister is seriously ill and can't have the sugar right now so that wasn't even an option.


The girls threw out a lot of different ideas so we settled on these.

For Abigail's big sis I made a bracelet and a pouch to put it in.

 I had a Diet Rite can for this bracelet. Fortunately I already had the bracelet part made. I had another project in mind for it that didn't work out the way I had hoped so it was a quick project for this. All I had to do was make the charms and put them on there.

Then I made her this little pouch to put it in.

The picture does not do this fabric justice. It is a whole lot brighter than this. Think 70's psychedelic. Abigail picked it out of a bunch of scraps I had.


Addison decided to go with a pillow made from a tie dye t-shirt that I had in with my stash.

I thought the pillow was too plain when I got it finished so I cut two little scraps of fabric. On the top piece I put her name with a paint marker then used black thread to stitch it to the other piece. I sewed them onto the pillow with my stitch hidden under the the top piece and left the raw edges out. Addison put a little bottle of hand sanitizer from Bath & Body Works in a carrier and tied it around the pillow. Lizzie can't be around germs any more than absolutely necessary so Addison thought that good smelling sanitizer was called for.

I finished the two projects somewhere around midnight. I left the dishes in the sink so that these could get done. Wonder if anyone else did those for me today!

I hope the girls liked their gifts.