A Very Merry Christmas

Christmas is always great, and this year we had our stockings and presents right by our bed.  It was so fun!  I took some pictures so I can remember this year.  Felipe and I put our stockings together Christmas Eve before we went to bed (and we got the stuff together, so there were no surprises in the stockings) and Christmas morning Felipe woke me up asking if we should dump out our stockings...the ones we had put together just a few hours previously....but we did :)  Mostly we just got candy for each other for Christmas, since we probably don't even have our own apartment.  But it was still great!

Felipe got this great scarf from Keith and Dixie. 

Sewed Baby Blanket #1

Since Katelyn has made her pregnancy known to the Facebook world,  I can put up the baby blanket I made for her Rumpelstiltskin baby. My heart of hearts told me she is going to have a girl so I made a girl one, but I'm going to make a boy one too, just in case my heart of hearts has been misinformed. Now I am hoping she has a boy so I can keep this cute blanket :) I basically just copied the picture of a blanket a former co-worker made for her friend's baby, so I didn't have any measurements to go off of.  I just made an arbitrary decision to have the squares be 15 inches and went from there.

I stuck a little bit of fluff in between each square...

...and then pinned the sides.

After the square was sewn I sewed an X down the middle, which was actually trickier than I thought it would be  with the minky material. 

After enough squares for a row were sewn, then I sewed the squares together to make a row,.

I left a little bit of the edges so I could rag the blanket afterwards.

Finally it was put all together and I was able to rag it. Probably this is not the best picture, but believe me, it's pretty cool.  Hopefully Baby Bo Peep loves it!

My New Favorite Thing

This right here is my new favorite thing and it is so easy.  I really like having a candle lit throughout the day and hated throwing away the empty jars until I thought up a way to re-purpose them. My first try I boiled the mostly empty glass on the stove but it was such a pain to get the wax out of the pot afterwards that I gave that up.  Now I boil some water and then rinse the glass clean with the water by taking it all outside and pouring the boiling water into the glass, then draining the water/wax mixture into the ground.  It only takes a couple pours to have a clean container. Now I have some nice little decorations for our garage living.

Oh, Portland...

I was trying to find tickets to the Moth radio show in Portland and was sad to find that the show coming to Portland has been moved back to February.  While I was looking for Moth dates I ran across the website for Portland Center for Performing Arts.  I've been wanting to go to a play or symphony concert for a while and was looking at the different suggestions when I ran across this gem: "The Most Wonderful Season, performed by Portland Gay Men's Chorus". All I could do was laugh and be reminded of another gem.  Thank you, IT Crowd.

Stockings a la Katelyn

Katelyn posted on her blog the stockings she made for Christmas so of course I had to do it too! It was so fun, quick and easy that I'm sad I can't make millions of them all the time. Turns out there is such a thing as too many Christmas stockings.  But with the extra material I'm going to make some baby stockings for my little Sunbeams.  I love them so much!! (The stockings, all though the Sunbeams are fun too.)  Felipe and I went to Goodwill on Friday and picked out two sweaters that we liked (I wish I had seen his first-but I am loyal to the one I picked) and let me tell you, Goodwill is getting pretty high and mighty.  What I wouldn't give for a little DI right now, with their $3 sweater vests.

Felipe's is on the left and mine is on the right.
 You can't really see it, but his sweater has great buttons!

Turn the sweaters inside out and trace the pattern you want-I loosely followed the little generic stocking.
I didn't turn Felipe's inside out because we wanted to use the buttons, so I just drew the black lines bigger than I would have and cut inside of them so the lines wouldn't show.

After cutting and sewing, we have the final project! I just used some extra  material to make the loops at the top.  Mine has a bit of a Seuss-y look at the bottom but it endears it to me. Loved this quick and fun project!