Happy Holidays!

Yesterday was 12.12.12 and our third anniversary! I seriously cannot believe how fast 3 years has gone by. Time flies when you have so much fun!

It was weird thinking about where we were exactly 3 years ago to where we are now. I am so lucky to have such a sweetheart husband!

Since our anniversary is so close to Christmas, we made stipulations for our presents to each other. First of all, part of it has to be homemade. Second, it can't cost a lot of money. Third, it has to go along with the traditional gifts. For your third anniversary, the present is supposed to be either crystal or leather.

I made his gift leather. This was a hard one for me. When I originally thought of making a belt, I thought it would be a walk in the park. My Abuela used to have this leather kit that I would play with when I was little. It has those stampers for leather that had letters and numbers and cool designs. I thought that I would borrow that and it would be simple. Wrong! I should have known that crafting is never that easy! Well, someone ended up borrowing that leather kit a long time ago and it is officially lost. I was so bummed out! I loved that leather kit.

I looked everywhere online. Seriously, everywhere. I know I'm not really supposed to spend a lot of money, but I figured that I would use that again for crafting, so I didn't think it would count. :) Well, it didn't work out. I ended up finding letter stamps on Amazon that ended up being even tinier than I expected. But I made it work! I work a love letter on the belt with the stamps and then I stained the cow hide so that it was a darker color. The cow hide stripe didn't come with the belt buckle, so I went to the D.I. and picked up an old belt and took the buckle off of it.

The belt is a little rough around the edges, but it turned out pretty good!

His gift was way cuter though. He always beats me on the anniversary gift! Remember the glitter shoes from last year? Man, that boy is creative! Well he chose to do crystal. He did a play on words and did crystal clear. He used the Mac to record himself singing some of our favorite songs and put them on a disc for me. Is that so cute or what? Oh man, I love that kid.

This fall I haven't been great about posting. A lot has happened! We spent about 6 months this year house hunting. That is a hard job! Even with putting in full price offers, we got out bid again and again and my heart would break again and again. We had to move out of our apartment for a bit and we stayed with Steven's grandma, but now we are back in the same apartment complex. There is nothing like walking through your own door! Even though we are sad that we didn't get a house, we feel that everything happens for a reason. Our best friend told us, "This just means that your dream house wasn't ready for you yet!" I love that!

This is the wreath I made for our front door. Aren't the reindeer ornaments so cute? I have wanted one since I made some for our moms last year.

The first thing to go up in our new house? Our tree! I love love love our tree and have it up for as long as possible. When I say it was the first thing in our house, I literally mean that it was the first thing in our house!

We decided to redo a lot of our decorations. We decided that since we now know that we are going to be in this apartment for a while, we are going to make it exactly how we want it. This was one of the first things that I made for our new wall. I will post more pictures when I get the wall collage all finished. We are also going to sand and paint our table so I will post about that too.

Our best friends also moved during the fall, and this is the house warming gift that we gave them. I love making wreaths! If you are into making wreaths... remember that awesome gluing tip I talked about last year?

I just had to share this cute little picture. I just love this picture! We had our families over for diner last Sunday. This little lady is our baby cousin and she loves her Teddy and we just love her! It is so fun to be able to have our own place to have our families over.

And tomorrow... we leave for our CRUISE!!!! We are going with our best friends and I have been so excited that I haven't been able to sleep all week! I have been crafting like crazy for cruise things. Last night I made luggage tags for our bags. I used these wooden squares from Hobby Lobby and some modge podge.

I also used the beach bag pattern from tinyseamstress to make this cute cruise bag that I am going to use for my carry on! Ah! I'm so excited!

Our cruise will take us all the way to Christmas Eve, so I won't talk to you guys until the New Year! Have happy and safe holidays and I hope Santa brings you everything you want!

Festival of Trees

Hello there! It's been a while. :) I have so much to catch you up on!

First and most important, the Festival of Trees...

This year marks the 10 year anniversary of Steven's grandma Julie's passing. All of his cousins wanted to do something special for her. What's cooler than a tree in the Festival of Trees? If you haven't ever done one before, let me tell you.. It's a lot of work!! But so worth it.

We started working on this last year, the day after Christmas in fact. We went to all the stores and got all the ornaments and the tree on sale. All through the year we worked on it. We went to all the work shops and decorated our little hearts away.

We kept the whole thing a secret from the rest of the family, which was the hardest part! On the last day of the Festival of Trees, we set up a scavenger hunt for the family that led them to the Festival. They were so surprised! Here is what our tree looked like...

It sold! It sold it sold it sold!!! We were very excited about this. :)

Our theme was nerds. We wanted to add our specail touches to the mix of the Christmas ornaments. We made felt ornaments that had to do with nerd type of things.. computers, floppy disks, etc. We also added nerd glasses to the tree that we spray painted to match.

This was one of my favorite parts of the tree. We had gone to the D.I. and picked up some keyboards. We ripped them all apart and made them into Christmas sayings.

This is Julie. She died 2 years before I met Steven. I am sad that I never got to meet her but I love her family so much, so I know that I would have loved her too!

All right, credit to our boys! They helped SO much. They drilled the tree together and got all of those requirments taken care of. They also made this awesome snowman and the tree topper. They made the snowman out of chicken wire, which they would like to say is not great material to work with! But look how cute he turned out! And the star is incredible. We had old mother board from a computer that they drilled the star out of and then added lights to. What would we do without our guys?

Under the tree we had presents wrapped. All of the boxes had blankets in them. Usually when companies buy the trees, they donate the presents back to Primary Children's Hospital. That's what we were hoping that they did. I had put some of my blankets on my blog already in this post and this post.

We had so much fun doing this! We decided that we are going to do this every 10 years. In 2022, it will be the 20 year anniversary of Julie's passing and the 10 year anniversary of my grandma Beth's passing. Steven and I thought it would be so much fun to be able to do this tradition with our children. If you haven't ever done a big project like this, I totally recommend it.

 Like I said before, it takes a lot of time, but it is so worth it.

It's all her fault :)

At the beginning of October my Grandma graduated to heaven and officially became our newest guardian angel. I was very lucky in my life to have two fabulous grandmas that were both really crafty and talented in many ways. I like to think that I got some of their talents. :)

When I was 8 years old, my Grandma started me on scrapbooking. She talked to me a lot about how important it is to keep journals and records to give to our children. I started scrapbooking that day and never looked back! Whenever Steven would laugh and joke about how many scrapbooks and journals I have, I would just tell him that it's my Grandma's fault! :) In fact, that is part of the reason I started this blog. I wanted to be able to have a record of all the fun things that I have made and since it is online, I could hopefully reach some of my family that isn't close by.

For her funeral I was put in charge of pictures. I love pictures, probably too much. When they say that a picture is worth one thousand words, I say that a picture is worth one thousand gold bars. The amount of pictures I have on my computer will proove it!

I didn't want to do just some plain old frames for my Grandma. She was a sweet, fun lady. She couldn't have just plain frames! But another issue was that there were too many pictures that I wanted to share. Being the problem-solver that my husband is, he suggested that I get a board and "cutesy is up" (those are actually his exact words, he is adorable!). I went to Walmart and got a plain cork board and covered it with yellow fabric. Easy!

I added a few rosettes and a bow and called it a day! We had her scrapbooks out and her high school year book. We displayed her blankets that she made. I'm telling you, she was an amazing crafter!

Ironically, I had found this quote on Pinterest just a couple of days before she left us. I think that it fits perfectly with all our loved ones. Pooh Bear comes through again!

Recipe Apron

Last week was my sister Alexa's 16th birthday! Seriously, I can't believe she is driving and dating already. Alexa loves to cook and bake and she is dang good at it. One thing that I love about Alexa is that she is all about the homemade kind of gifts. That's my kind of girl! :) So I decided that she needed her own apron, but I wanted to add something special for it.

Here it is! Cute, right? (Her and the apron!) I wish I could give you a pattern. I am new to the sewing world so following a pattern is still a work-in-progress, let alone making a pattern! I just eye-balled it. I would sew a part and try it on and fix it. (And repeat!)

I got this cool pattern on ebay. There are cute cooking fabrics in a lot of stores, but I wanted something that looked vintage-y to go along with the next part that I did. I thought the fabric worked perfect.

I took recipes from my mom, grandma, and abuela. I scanned them into my computer and printed them out on fabric paper. I wanted to make this a generation apron, so hopefully she can add a recipe and maybe give it to her daughter one day.

One of my favorite parts is that my grandma had written a note to Alexa on this recipe. I think that it makes this more special to her.

I had a recipe from my abuela that I had done on the right side of the apron. Well, I'm not sure if the paper was too dark or what, but it didn't show up on the fabric. I spent some time taking it off and when my hand started cramping, Steven took a turn for me. :) Crafting involves a lot of mistakes and retakes! A good crafter also is quite skilled at covering up their mistakes!

And that is why there is a heart on the side now. :) But actually, I thought it was pretty cute with the apron. So I just have to get another recipe from abuela so that I can add that to the apron.

Happy Birthday Lexie-Lou! We love you!

Witches Night Out

Happy Halloween! It's not too late to get a costume together if you haven't already started! My sisters were going to Witches Night Out at Gardner Village last weekend and they wanted some fabulous hats.

Here is what we came up with!

First, we started with a plain black hat from Walmart. They were $1.39. There was a gray wig attached, so we just cut that off and hat the perfect hat for a steal of a deal!

This first hat was made with a green boa and a big green feather (both from Hobby Lobby). I had gone to Tai Pan and they had a sale on all of their Halloween decorations. That purple skeleton was part of it, so I got it for $.99. Sales are a beautiful thing!

This hat also has a boa and giant feather. The skeleton was from Tai Pan. It came in a four pack for $2.50! What I love the most is shopping after the holidays and getting everything super discounted. Then you can use it for next year's crafts! Torri also used a silver skeleton for a necklace and it turned out so adorable (in a scary skeleton sort of way!). :)

I think that this last one is my favorite! I had this scrap fabric to use. I started trying to wrap it around the tip so that it was smooth, but that wasn't working out. (That is the OCD in me!) But then I started to wrap around all gathered up and I think that it ended up cuter that way. I just hot glued the whole thing on and it stuck on really well. All those spiders came in a package from Walmart. And isn't the tulle fun? We made it so they could pull it over her face or it could drape the back. So fun!

Happy Halloween everyone! (It's the best time of the year!)