Ashley - Monsters Inc. Easter Eggs

Hi there! I have been seeing that you guys have been loving the Minnie Mouse eggs from last year so I thought I would start on ideas for this year. Melody is IN LOVE with Monsters Inc. so that's where I got the inspiration. It's a bit hard finding Easter eggs in January is a little hard lol so this is all I could find (dollar tree) and I figured I could give it try and try to get the designs off the eggs I wanted to use so I took some Q-tips and some acetone based ail polish remover and guess what... it worked! 

Once I was done cleaning the eggs up I set up my work station. for this project you will need:

blue and black paint

purple, white, and black felt scraps

glue gun

white yarn

scissors

paper hole savers (for notebook paper)

and toothpicks

The first egg I started on was the Boo egg :) first of all the nice part about these eggs I found was they have holes in the top part of the egg to stick the tooth picks into. This will come in handy later.

I first made the mop for the top of her costume. I made a little yarn pom for the top. Just take a length of yarn, and wrap it around your fingers, then you will take the rings off your fingers and tie them together in the middle. Then you will cut the loops on both sides and have your mop :) Here's pictures if my crazy wording didn't help lol. 

Now that you have your mop take your glue gun and glue it to your egg. After your finished with that you can place and stick your toothpicks. And the final touch is to take your black and white felt scraps and and cut out the lamp/ eyeballs and glue them to your work :) And there is your first egg. 

For Mike all I did was take a hole punch saver and line it up to the holes on the top of the egg and place it. Then I took a little blue paint and painted the inside of the hole punch saver and made it look like an eye. The final touch was I broke off the ends of a tooth pick and glued them in for Mike's little horns. 

And then last but not least for Sulley. At first I was just going to paint his spots on but as you can tell after painting Mike's eyes you have to pile that paint on. So what I did was I just took some felt that I had that was the right color, cut out blob shapes and glued them on. It turned out well I think :)

And that's it! Here are the finished products in the little backdrop I made for them lol. 

This project was quick and easy, give it a try! 

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Ashley - DIY Santa Bag

So with this Christmas party for my husband's battery is tomorrow, and no matter where my poor friend searched she could not find a bag for Santa to use at the party so I got on my ipad, looked on pinterest and found a blog where a woman did this really adoarble Santa bag. Here is her site and full tutorial so you can make your own. http://www.crafterhoursblog.com/2011/11/make-santa-bag-tutorial.html

 

I put my husband's unit flash and crest on it to put a little extra special somethign to it and there you have it! Tomorrow I will take better pictures I promise but for now this mama is hitting the hay :) Enjoy!

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Ashley - Mini Stockings tutorial

Ok I am back on the straight and narrow writing posts for all you lovely people out there :) This last week I had a meeting with some of the other wives and my husbands command to start planning their annual christmas party. I was asked to make little miniature stockings for all the children attending. The original number was 35 so I made a few extras and I started out making my 44 stockings, but then there was a phone call and I was asked to make a few more lol so I ended up making 51 total. So if your wondering why it looks like there are more finished ones then what we started with that's why.

What you will need:

1yd of red felt
1/2yd of white felt
I ended up using 4 spools of the striped ribbon (3m spools)
And I only went through 1 spool of the red ribbon I used for the hangers.
Thread
Scissors
Felt tipped pen

 

So the first thing I did was I made a pattern out of a piece of cardboard. I made a 6in x 4in rectangle and then cut the shape from that to makesure I didn't make the stockings too big. Look for an update and I will scan in the pattern I used and you can always jsut use that if you don't feel like you can good a good shape on your own.

 

After I had my pattern I grabbed my yard stick and my red felt. I folded felt in half width wise (72in wide piece of felt) and then trimmed the edge so that I could have a nice straight line to start using my pattern on. Then I took my yard stick and my felt tipped pen and started drawing lines on my felt the height of my stockings. When that was taken care I place my pattern down on the felt and started tracing out my stockings.

 

 

 

 

 

Now the easiest way I found to cut all those out was with scissors. I have not yet completely mastered the art of the rotary cutter lol so it may be eaiser for you that way but with the tight spaces I preferred the scirssors. Once you have thsoe all cut out I laid my white felt out and 1 1/2in by width of the stocking to add the white up top.

 

 





Now it's time to bust out the sewing machine. I started with a normal running stitch but I notice in my test stocking that it made it really bulky right there and the stocking didn't look right and I hated it so my solution to that was I used a zigzag stitch to connect the red and whiteand that got out of that problem made the stockings sit so nicely. I had the tension on my machine at 4 just as an FYI and it shouldn't take you too long :).

 Your next step will be to add the ribbon to hide your seam. I turned the machine's tension down to 2 so the ribbon would sit nicely for me and I used a normal old running stitch and I just lined the needle up in the middle of the foot like so. I sewed along both edges of the ribbon to make it look nice and finished.

 

This was the part that took me the longest....

 

 

 

But as you can tell it really adds a nice touch to the stockings :)

 

 

 

 

The final step is to sew it all together! I used a serger type stitch it was number 6 on my machine.

 

 







Take it slow if it's your first time using this stitch and if you aren't comfy using this stitch you can always go back to the zig zag it will do about the same thing I just like the finished look of the stitch I used. Make sure you turn your tesnion back up to 4, and get to work :) I added my little ribbon for the hanger into the final seam so be sure to remember that as well so you dont have to run another seam.

 

Now just turn them right side in ( remember felt does stretch easily so don't yank on it too much or it may sit a little funny ) and your all done!!!

 

 

 

 

My stockings are all ready for the kiddos at the Christmas party :) Happy Holidays everyone and enjoy! 



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Ashley - Minnie Mouse Christmas Ornaments :)

I know that I have been gone forever and Alisha and I apologize, life has been hectic. But enough about me I want to show you something sweet.

 

 I made these darling little ornaments from these awesome cookie cutters I found on Ebay. They have this cool little stamp that stamps the faces on there :) So I found a really awesome clay ornament recipe and got to work.

When I did this recipe I used wheat flour so that the color of the Minnie faces would be the right color so I wouldn't have to paint that flesh color on the faces. So I made my dough and rolled it out and got to cutting. Then I stamped them and I decided that I was going to put them in the oven to dry them out.

 

I left mine in a little longer then a 1/2 hour like the blog said because some were a little thicker then others. But while these were baking I set out work station and got ready to paint these puppies. Once they were out of the oven I got the acryllic paint out and my brushes and started the process of getting them all painted.

 

 

 



It may take you a little while. I had alittle help from my loving man :) (I have such a good man) and we made short work of the painting.

Next I took out my gloss and sprayed them out back on the back deck and let them dry.

Then to add my own little personal touch I glued a little rhinestone into the center of the flower on Minnie's hat. Girls have to have their little bit of glitz ;) And the final step after that is put the ribbon on there and I was all done!

I have more to put on my tree but here it is so far!

I love how it's looking!!!! And I love these little ornaments!

Now get to work ladies! Have fun and enjoy!!! :) Pin It

Ashley - Halloween Wreath

Ok gearing up for Halloween and it's been my goal since I started this blog to try and start doing crafts made from just dollar tree materials. I have pulled that off for the first time and am so thrilled with how it turned out! Ok so I started by buying these plastic skulls. I bought 12 of them and then finished up my shopping by picking up some black roses, some plastic bugs, and some black stringy cloth.

I cut out a cardboard foundation to glue everything to and started by just doing a quick black layer of paint to hide the cardboard

 

After the paint dried I started by gluing down the black cloth. Take your time and really mess with draping it, it took me a little bit but I got it to work :)

 

 

Then I laid out my skulls and started to hot glue those. Next I moved on to the black roses. I glued them in between each of the skulls to help really fill out the wreath.

 

 

 

And then last but not least I glued on my creepy crawlies :) and viola! You have a creepy yet thrifty halloween decoration to put out on your door!

 

 

 

Tomorrow night I will have to try and weave in the purple lights that I bought and get some more pictures for you. Check back for the update!

 





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Ashley - 4th of July wreath

     I can't believe that it's already time to gear up for the 4th of July! Independence day is my favorite holiday so I have had a bunch of fun figuring out how I want to decorate outside. Now this is just the first of a couple different things that I want to do so there will be other posts later on. I am also going to post better pictures in the morning when the sun is up so you can actually see what it looks like.

This was super simple to make it just took a little patience because of the time it took to cut out all of those stars but all this wreath is some felt a cardboard ring ( I used a tray to trace for my wreath ) I painted the cardboard red to hide it better and then I glued all the stars on like I wanted them and took a little piece of wire and hot glied that onto the back of the wreat for the hanger. And there you have it! Like I said I will have more pictures up tomorrow so check back! And make sure you check back to see what I did with my extra stars :)


UPDATE:
Better pictures as promised

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Ashley - Mother's day wreath!

Hey Everyone! So I've been working on a mothers day project because I'm one proud mommy. So I took a few ideas off pinterest and combined them together and this is what I ended up with :)

So I made a basic tutu wreath with an 18in. wreath, if you don't know how look it up on pinterest. Then I picked up some wooden letters and some matching paint and I painted them. Then I used this tutorial to make the canvas with the picture on it. http://sarahsprojects.blogspot.com/2010/02/wall-art-for-siennas-room.html Then I just hot glued it all together :) Try it out!

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