One of my favorite hobbies is knitting.  I love the yarn, the patterns, the knitting needles and especially the accessories.  One thing that I tend to collect is stitch markers.  I really like the beaded ones and ones with charms.  I know that my knitting project is the same when it is finished whether or not I use pretty stitch markers.  I know that I don’t need to use a cute tape measure.  I know that I don’t need to use cute little sock shaped point protectors on my needle.  I just like them and they make me smile!

For me, part of the fun of knitting is the stuff that goes along with it.  I enjoy the feel of the yarn between my fingers at a yarn store, the look of my stitch markers on the needles and using a cute tape measure brings a smile to my face.  I have two Knit Kits which works out great since I usually have a couple of knitting projects going at the same time and the tools in the Knit Kit are usually enough.  However, for me, I really, really enjoy the pretty accessories too.  In the end, I usually have my Knit Kit and a big pouch full of too many knitting accessories.

When I was in Target the other day I came across these two adorable Mary Englebreit tins in the dollar rack.  I have always liked Mary Englebreit’s artwork and when I saw these cute little tins I knew that they would be perfect for my knitting accessories.

The first thing that I did was spread out all of my knitting accessories into two groups.  This way I could put together two tins of accessories and have one for each of my projects.

Once I decided which items would go where I just put them in the tins…

…and closed the lids.

I find knitting even more enjoyable and relaxing with these cute little accessories.  It is even better when these accessories are only $1.00!  So simple, yet so satisfying!

Happy Knitting!

I found this great key fob tutorial on Pinterest awhile back and decided to finally give it a try.  The original tutorial can be found here at the Creative Little Daisy blog.

These are the materials that I used:

12″ length of 1″ wide webbing

1 3/4″ x 12″ piece of fabric

1″ d-ring

1 jump ring

I started out by folding the long raw edges of the fabric into the center of the fabric and pressing them in place.

I then took my fabric piece and placed it on my piece of webbing with the folded side of the fabric against the webbing.  I stitched down each lengthwise folded edge to attach the fabric to the webbing.

I slid my d-ring onto the fob at this point.  Make sure that the flat part of the d-ring is under the webbing and that the rounded side of the d-ring is on the fabric side of the fob.  Otherwise your d-ring will be on backwards once your sew your seam and turn the fob right side out.

I then folded my key fob in half and slid the d-ring over to the folded side.

I stitched the short raw edges together with about a 1/4″ seam…

…and turned it right side out.

I then slid the d-ring over to the seam that I had just sewn and I stitched another seam as close to the d-ring as I could.  I had to use my zipper foot for this step.

The last thing that I needed to do was to attach the jump ring and my key fob was all finished!

This little key fob made up so quickly that I think I will make a bunch of them up for Christmas.  They are so easy to make I may even make some up for the other Holidays and Seasons as well.  I hope you enjoy making your key fob!

Happy Sewing!!

WELCOME

to the first What’s Hot in the Firehouse Linky Party.

Each Wednesday I will feature a few links from the previous party, some of my favorites and the some of the top viewed links.

THANK YOU FOR LINKING UP TO WHAT’S HOT IN THE FIREHOUSE!!

Guidelines:

1. The item must be made by you. You can also link to your Etsy shop. Please no link parties or giveaways though.

2. Please link directly to your blog post, not your blog’s home page.

3. I would love it if you would grab my button on the sidebar and post it somewhere on your blog or in your blog post. If you would like to follow my blog or follow me on Facebook or Pinterest, I would love that too!

4. We all love comments on our projects so please stay and visit and comment on some of the other links.

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Click here to enter your link and view this Linky Tools list…

Happy Mother’s Day!  I hope that everyone is having a great day!  We had a nice sunny day here with warmer weather so that made it very enjoyable.

On one of my many, many visits to Pinterest I saw this great tutorial for a fabric basket by the Pink Penguin and I decided to give it a try. I took pictures of each of the steps while I was making the basket but it seems that I have now lost my camera! GGRRRR! Fortunately, I took a picture of the finished project on my cell phone and sent it to my mother so I have a nice picture of the fabric box finished. However, I am missing the step-by-step pictures.  The original tutorial, though, has good pictures so if you would like to make one of these fabric boxes I would visit the Pink Penguin blog and read through her tutorial. Hopefully I will find my camera soon and can upload the pictures that I took. So, I apologize in advance for not having the step-by-step pictures.

The only materials that I needed were two pieces of fabric (one for the main color and one for the lining) which were each 13″x7″ and one piece of fusible fleece which was 14″x8″.  The original tutorial used cotton batting but I chose to use the fusible fleece because I had that in my stash.

The tutorial is very easy to follow and it did not take long at all to complete.  One thing that I did at the end of the tutorial was to top stitch my four corners.  When I just top stitched around the top of the basket it left the corners looking very round.  Once I top stitched the four corners it caused the basket to have a much better shape.

This little basket is so cute and you could use it for almost anything.  I like to drink tea so I put some tea bags in mine.  It could also be used to hold spools or bobbins of thread, scissors, pens and pencils or pretty much anything small.  I think that it would also be nice to give as a gift if you put something inside of it like tea, fancy pencils or small things like that.  It’s also a good way to use up some of that fabric in your stash.

Happy stitching!!

You can also view this project at:

I’ve been seeing these little bracelets all over lately and I think that they are a great idea.  It is simply a little beaded bracelet for a child but some of the beads are number beads that make up your telephone number.  If your child becomes lost and does not yet know his/her telephone number they can just show somebody their bracelet so they can call you.  I made up a bracelet for each of  my boys but instead of using our home telephone number I used my cell phone number.  Since I almost always have my cell phone with me it would be the best, and fastest, way for somebody to reach me.

I used craft elastic that I found on the children’s craft aisle at a local craft store.  I also found some numbered plastic beads.  I used colored beads for spacers and to fill in the ends of the bracelet.

I started out by setting aside the numbers that I needed for the bracelets and I used spacer beads inbetween the area code and first three numbers and then again in the middle of the telephone number.

Once I had my beads set aside I strung them all onto the elastic.  I then put a few more colored beads onto the bracelet and knotted the elastic a few times. 

 I was planning on measuring the bracelets on the boys prior to knotting them but I ended up not having enough time to make the bracelets before they went to bed.  The bracelets are so simple to make up that you can make them in just a few minutes.

I hope that we will never need to actually use these bracelets but it will be nice to have them on just in case.

We finally made it up to The Little House at the Lake for the first time this season! The boys were thrilled and could hardly wait to go. I had packed everything up the night before so that we could leave when I picked Gabriel up from preschool.

The boys were so good on the ride up there.  I could tell a big maturity difference in their ages this year versus last year.  Last year there was a lot of impatience and whining on the car ride up there but this year they were much more content and were more focused on talking about getting up there and fishing so we hardly had any whining.  This Mama was happy with that!  Gabriel kept looking over at the GPS to see if he could see the Lake on it and the boys played their Mobi-Go games for a little while and they even took a short nap.  When we arrived the boys were practically leaping out of their car seats.  As soon as we went in they took out the toys that they hadn’t seen since the Fall, scoped the place out, checked the cookie jar which Mimi had left filled with homemade chocolate chip cookies and then they began to play while I unpacked.

The weather was beautiful that day until about the time we arrived and then it rained for about an hour.  That wasn’t too bad and it did not damper our spirits.  Once the rain stopped we decided to go to the store to get Matthew a fishing pole.  Gabriel had his from last year and so he shared it with Matthew and they had been practicing at home with it but I knew that they would each need their own.  I could tell that there would probably not be much sharing of the fishing pole when it came time to actually fish.  By the time we got back to The Little House, ordered some pizza and the boys had their baths, Mimi and Papa had arrived.  Now the boys were pretty much jumping off the walls because they knew that Papa was going to teach them how to fish.

They put their life jackets on over their pajamas and headed down to the dock with Papa.  They were so happy!  All we did was attach little floats to the end of their fishing lines to add a little weight to the line so that the boys could cast and they were perfectly happy with that.  They casted, they reeled it back, they casted, they reeled it back again, and again and again.  They were not happy when it was time to go back in for bed.

The next morning they were ready to go with their fishing poles.  It was too funny.  When my nieces came up later that day they were shown the fishing poles and how they worked by the boys.  At one point over the weekend they were all trying to catch water snakes by dropping the fishing line down by the side of the docks where there were some harmless water snakes.  I wasn’t worried since there was still no bait or hooks on the fishing line.  I was grossed out though by the snakes but the kids were all having a blast and would get so excited when they saw one.  EEWWWW!

On the way home we stopped for ice-cream and we shared a nice big bowl of it.  We had Yellow Cake Batter ice-cream and Buckeye Bites ice cream.  So good!  We are all looking forward to a great summer at The Little House at the Lake!

Where, oh where, is my camera?  I had it just a few minutes ago.  Oh wait, look, there it is…the boys have it!  OK, let’s see what these guys have found to take pictures of

Their favorite umbrella

Gabriel

Matthew

Feet

My sewing machine

Railroad tracks

Busy little boys!  It looks like this Mama is going to have to be a little more careful where she leaves her camera!

We went up to the lake this weekend for the first time since the Fall and we were excited to get back up there!  One of the things that the boys like to do while we are there is to pick up shells, rocks, sticks and things like that.  Instead of the usual sand bucket or plastic bag I decided to make the boys treasure bags,

I found the pattern in Handmade Home by Amanda Blake Soule.  She used a screen to make her bag but said that mesh would work well too.  I was going to purchase some of the screen fabric that I had seen at the fabric store but I decided to just use the mesh fabric since i had some in my stash.  By the end of this project I had made two treasure bags using nothing but supplies that I had in my stash!

I used fabric for the front panel on the bags, mesh for the bags and fabric (instead of webbing) for the handles.

The bags took me less than an hour to finish each one of them.  The boys really liked their bags and used them right away for collecting their shells, rocks, etc.

I really liked how simple the pattern is to follow.  I had actaully forgotten about this project and then did finally think of it at the last minute.  I was amazed at how easy it went together and glad that I was able to make everything out of the stuff in my stash!

The mesh fabric was very slippery to work with and, since I didn’t use enough pins, my front panel on the shark treasure bag moved slightly and I ended up sewing it on crooked.

In the end I think that the little bags are cute.  They serve their purpose and the clean-up is simple.  When the bag gets dirty I can just stick it under the faucet and rinse it out and let it line dry.  These little bags are working out great and the boys just love them.

You can find the Treasure Bags at these parties:

My entry into TTO is sponsored by Appliances Online and their Fridge Freezers

Thanks for stopping by for a visit!

The other day I was in the mood to work on a small project and so I decided to check out my Sewing board on Pinterest.  As usual, Pinterest did not dissapoint me and I ended up deciding on a tutorial for a CD Pocket on Mushroom Villagers that I had been wanting to try out.

  I was able to use scraps of fabric that I had in my stash to cut the required rectangles.

The tutorial was very simple to follow but I did make one change.  The tutorial had you turn the finished project right-side-out and then insert a heavy interfacing inside before you stitched it closed.  I used Fusible Decor Bond and ironed it on before I stitched the bottom and sides of the CD Pocket.  I cut the Decor Bond about 1/4″ smaller on each side so that my seams would not be so bulky.  Once I ironed on the interfacing I stitched the pocket and then turned the right-side-out.  Ironing the interfacing on first made turning the pocket a bit tighter but it was easier for me to do it that way instead of inserting it later.

One other thing I found was that if you only use two fabrics you should cut rectangle A and C out of the same fabric and then rectangle B and D out of the same fabric.  That way every other pocket has a different fabric.  The way that I did my CD Pocket caused the top half to be one fabric and the bottom half to be the other fabric.  I would have preferred to alternate the fabric.  However, when I realized how it was going to be sewn together it was too late because I had already cut out my fabric.

Overall it’s a great tutorial and very simple to follow.  I think that I made the CD Pocket in only about 30 minutes.  The center console of my car now looks so much more organized.

BEFORE:

 

AFTER:

 

 

While I was working on this project Gabriel was cutting up some of my scrap fabric.  He cut some pieces and taped them together and heh told me that it was a doll.  He asked me if I could sew it together for him so I sewed the pieces  together that he had taped so carefully.  Here is the first doll that Gabriel ever made

As many of you know I have been part of the Curves Complete program for the past month. I have been very happy with it and have been blessed to find such a supportive group of women.

The Curves club that I belong to will be participating in the American Cancer Society’s Making Strides walk in May. As one of their fundraisers they are having an auction of donated items. Since I have been making dolls lately I decided to make a pink doll to donate to their auction. I based it on the Simplicity Raggedy Ann pattern that I used here. I wanted to do this to show my appreciation to Curves for the help and support they have given to me and to help support breast cancer research.

I just want to take this opportunity to remind everyone to please, please, please stay current on your mamograms and to do monthly self breast exams.