Father's Day Flag - the Beginning

My life has become an utter whirlwind lately.  Summer this year is the busiest that I've ever had to deal with.  There are swim lessons, trips to Six Flags White Water (which is 5 min from my house), trips to the lake, holidays to deal with, choir obligations, etc.  I've been flying from  one to the other with no thought to anything else, including crafting.  I did finish the final sleeve to Mystere, but haven't blocked it yet.

However, since there is one holiday coming up, Father's day, I did start one project.  The kids and I have put our heads together and come up with something for my Dad, whom they call PawPaw.  Since he lives at the lake and has two boats, we decided to make him a giant flag for his pontoon boat.

 

This is where I am right now on it.  This is nylon fabric purchased at JoAnn fabrics.  I bought one yard of the orange and 1 yard of navy blue.  I did not cut down the orange fabric, just used it like it was.   I've hemmed all four sides - first with straight stitch and then with zigzag to secure it.   

To the left of the flag, I plan to use grommets.  In order to make the flag stronger, I used a piece of cotton twill tape that was cut to the size of the flag, folded the seam completely  around it and then stitched it down.  Always doing the straight stitch first and then going over that with the zigzag stitch.  I will be inserting the grommets into this part of  the flag.

We plan on using the blue for the lettering.  I went to my trusty word program and put in the phrase "PawPaw's Yacht" and did this in a size 500 font.  I wanted the words to be huge.  I then traced these letters onto the blue fabric and cut them out.

I also traced the kids' hand prints onto the blue fabric and cut those out.  

The next step is getting everything onto the double sided fusible web and cutting it out.  Once I do that, I will adhere it to the nylon (on the coolest setting) and then applique it with my sewing machine.  This flag is going to take a beating.  I want to make sure that none of the lettering or hand prints flies off at the first sign of wind.

So that's where this project stands at the moment.  It will be Saturday before I can complete the darn thing.

Why?  Because of more summer craziness!  I'm off to another state for 2 days and then have to race back to help prepare for a week long boy scout camp and then on Monday I will be singing the National Anthem and Canadian National Anthem at the Atlanta Braves game with my choir.  So yeah, there's just a few crazy things going on in my life right now.  :)

How's your Summer going?

Aging Paper

The Eldest has a project at school coming up where he will portray Paul Revere.  He has to give a speech and dress like him (haven't dreamed up a costume yet) and do something creative.  We put our heads together and came up with several ideas.  The one he wanted to do involves him doing a one act play basically.  It's going to take place on an evening during his "great ride" where he has reached an Inn.   While at the Inn he's going to take the time to write his wife Rachel a letter.  He'll be pretend to be writing the letter while speaking aloud.  The letter will also be his creative part of the project.


So, The Eldest and I started to age some paper for his letter.  This was a pretty fun project and here's what we did.

To Age Paper:

1.  For this project we are using legal size copy paper so that he can roll it up.

2.  We mixed a solution of water, tea and lemon juice.   I boiled a small pot of water and threw in a family size tea bag.  Then added in the lemon juice.

3.  In a jelly roll pan we placed the paper and poured the above solution on top of it and let it sit for a while.  Warning:  If you let it sit too long and then don't handle it with extreme care, the paper will tear.

4.  After sitting for a while in the solution, move the paper to another cookie sheet and put it into an oven that has preheated to 200 degrees F.  This serves two purposes.  It dries the paper and ages it a bit more.   If you leave it in too long, it will brown too much along the edges.  I'm not going to give you a time here, oven temps vary too much and you will be far better off by checking the paper frequently until it is aged like you want it.

5.  We did one more thing to age the paper.  Once it was completely dry, we took some cinnamon and rubbed it into a few spots.  You can still see some of it clinging to the paper in the final pic: 

Next we will run it through our printer (carefully) and use an old calligraphy font.  Once the ink is thoroughly dry we're going to crumple it up several times to finish the aging process.

The Eldest loved it.  It's not often that he gets to do something so fun for school projects!


Anybody else out there have any more techniques for aging paper?

Disney Collage

I've never been able to get into the craft of scrapbooking.  I tried to, I really did, but it's just not something that I knew I would keep up with and the expense of doing it was just a little too prohibitive.  Yet, I look at all the cute things that people come up with and how cute their kids' pictures look and my fingers itch to have something that cute too. 

Here's my solution, which happens to go with my walls needing some love.

I went to JoAnn's (cause there was a sale) and grabbed a cute collage frame.   It was 50% off!  12 bucks spent.  Not too bad.  Then I went over to the scrapbooking section of the store and found some really cute Disney stuff that was 40% off.  2.99 spent.  Again, not too bad.

I gathered my stuff and headed to my computer to print the pics out.  Here's where I had some trouble.  The places where the pics go are not necessarily standard sizes.  My software (microsoft crap) wouldn't print out custom sizes and flickr only measures in pixels, not inches so I don't know how to use it for something like this.  I went on the internet and downloaded a photo resizer, but again, it didn't do what I wanted it too.

Another restriction that I ran into during all of this was trying to get as many of these onto one page as I could to save on printer paper.  This printing stuff was supposed to be the easy part of the whole project.

My solution?  Microsoft Word 2007.  Who'd a thunk it, huh?

I put my pics in, resized them, set the printing to best photo and whammo!  It worked.  My pics were printed, cut out and put into the frame.  The Youngest helped me figure out where to put the stickers and we were done!

Our cute Disney Pics:

It's been a while...

Yes, it's been forever since I've posted anything. But, lest you think that I've been idle, here's a little of what I've been up to:

To combat being cold, I made a "Snuglet". It's a blanket that you wear over you that has sleeves in it so that you can be warm and still have your hands free. I used the leftover fleece to make draft stoppers for our doors. It's made a huge difference in the temperature of our house.

I also made a ton of reindeer ornaments. I would highly recommend these at Christmas if you work with preschoolers or early elementary age children. I had about 70 kids make these in an hour. It was pretty awesome and cheap too! I hit a thrift store, bought three puzzles (100 piece size) and spray painted them brown. The whole project, including the spray paint, tiny red pompoms, small googly eyes, yarn and puzzles was around seven dollars. I used the leftovers that I had and made about twenty more for my son's kindergarten class and still had more leftover. You can get about 100 ornaments made for around $7.00 or less. You can get the directions on how to make these here. Personally, these are cuter without the legs and much easier on everyone if you leave them off. If you're in a hurry and are using regular school glue, the pieces tend to slide off. If you add the legs to the ornament, that's just more pieces to have fall off and you'll end up with some really upset children.

We've dealt with a bout of the flu with our oldest child. He had to miss his class party, so I went for him and took the ornaments with me and got his goody bag and gifts from classmates.

During this time, I managed to finish my youngest son's sweater! The first sweater that I've ever knitted! Kinda proud of myself, since this is only my second ever knitting project. Here's a pic of the little guy modeling it:

We also made it through his first birthday party. He was born on New Year's Eve, so we held his party in the evening and combined it with a New Year's party. We called it "Reece's New Year Jammy Jam" and asked that everyone bring their children in their pjs so we could put the kids to bed and the adults could ring in the New Year. It was pretty fun. Here's the cake that I made (he's really into Blue's Clues) and a pic of him and his brother with the presents.