Crafting on Hold.

As you may have noticed, my little crafting projects have been abruptly been put on hold. This is due to the finding of two baby mice IN my craft room! There is no way I am going back in there until the situation has been resolved by my husband (who thinks it's no big deal.) So, in the meantime, I will leave you with a yummy recipe for the world's easiest chip dip. I recently brought it to my friend Jenny's Uppercase Living Block-making party and it was gobbled up quite quickly. Seriously, the world's easiest recipe. I didn't really use the measurements the recipe gave me, so I'll just write the way I made it. Ready? You probably don't even need a pen.

Yummy Dip:

2 Bars of Creamcheese

1/2 Cup Miracle Whip

Wah lah! You just mix these two things up until well blended. The toppings to put on this are endless. Here is what I topped it off with:

Tomatoes

Red Onion

Cucumber

Sliced Black Olives

Feta Cheese

Other ways to top it off could be a Taco-type dip with salsa, lettuce, and shredded cheese. Or you could do some sort of Spinach w/ Artichokes and maybe some parmesan cheese with it. The possibilities really could go on and on. So try it out and top it with whatever you like!

P.S. I did double this batch for 7 girls and 2 hungry boys. It made a lot more than I had anticipated, there was still some left after we all chowed it down! I probably could have stuck with the one batch.

Life's Little Pieces - Take 2!

Here we go! I now have a picture of the finished top piece of the t-shirt quilt. Isn't it cool? We have gotten a lot of inquiries about these quilts since we have finished this one, and have decided that we will actually make these for anyone who is interested! I am definitely making one of Evelyn's baby blankets, clothes, newborn hats, curtains, etc ASAP! How adorable of a bedspread would that be for her big girl bed that is soon to come?!? Okay, so not that soon, but like 6 months, plenty of time to finish I suppose, life gets busy..... Lots and lots of ideas for these in my head. Do you/someone you know have a million t-shirts from high school sports? Are they just sitting in a box, in storage somewhere. Well, why not actually get some use out of those and be able to look at the memories from them every day by having them made into a quilt, helloooo! Or, on a less cheerful side, a loved one passes away, and you are left with their clothes. Don't box them up for Goodwill - have us make a quilt out of them that you can use all the time and remember that person with: you don't even have to wash the t-shirts first if you don't want to, that way it will still smell like them! Kids going off to college? Adios, that's the last you'll see of them until Christmas; chop up their t-shirts that they leave behind so you can remember the good-old-days when they used to be around-haha. We are going to put up some info. at local fabric stores due to inquiries there, and if you have any questions or are interested, let me know! We're excited to start doing this!!

T-Shirt Quilt.

And so it began on Sunday - the T-shirt quilt experiment. I am not quite sure how to capture this adventure through an actual story, so I have decided to just write the steps down that we went through. Jamie purchased the book from the Too Cool T-Shirt Quilt website, which happened to be quite the live-saver! Who in the world could come up with a system like this, seriously - pure genius! Here we go:

1. Gather t-shirts you want to make up your quilt - they will be cut up, so don't plan on wearing them again....

2. Find the right size template (directions on what sizes and how to make included in the book!) and cut out the design w/ rotary cutter.

3. Organize your piles by sizes of cut out blocks.

4. Figure out how many square inches of pieces you have.

5. Using addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and SQUARE ROOTS....figure out the #/sizes of additional filler pieces you will need.

6. Cut out little pieces of graph paper to scale, to represent each piece size you have and arrange these to make your quilt map. This is like a puzzle, it could really take some time to get the pattern just right. You don't want to have any 4 corners connecting.

7. Divide quilt into sections for sewing.

8. Figure out what colors will go where, so you don't have pieces that are the same colors next to each other.

9. Figure out where your half seams will be...yes, half seams...

10. Using a lot of brain power, sew quilt sections individually and then sew the sections together.

11. Your top piece is done! Yay! (5 hours later, and forgot to take a picture of the final top quilt!) Uuuugh, use your imagination for now I suppose. Will have to post later.

Overall, it was super fun and I can't wait to make many many more of them! I just have to make smaller plexiglass templates so I can do one of Evelyn's baby things...I don't think she has many outfits that are 16 x 16.......yet......