Tagging up the Holidays

The holidays are quickly approaching which means there will be lots of family, food, and GIFTS!!  I love giving gifts and seeing my family open them, and I'm usually just as excited as they are for their presents.  I will admit though, that I've never been a huge fan of wrapping.  I'm more about what's inside than presentation, and I like the ease and convenience of gift bags.

I was at the craft store recently and when I saw these brown paper gift bags I had a great idea!!  I decided to find myself some pretty glittery paper, use my Silhouette Cameo to create custom tags for the gift recipients, and my work would be done.  Cute, personalized gift wrapping without all the folding and trying to make neat corners and smooth out the lumps in my wrapping paper.

I just used my text tool to create a name (my sister, Tania's), added a .5 inch offset, then a .25 inch circle in the corner of the offset background for a little twine to go.  And that's all!!  Super quick and easy :)

~B
Pin It

My DIY Woven Wrap and Grad Dye- Part 2

Moving on to the fun part!  Color.  In my part 1 post I went over babywearing in general, fabric choice, and prepping my fabric.  Next it was time to dye, and since I've never dyed anything before, I was nervous.  And I experimented (and failed), but I did my best to fix my mistakes and while it's not perfectly smooth, I have to say I love love LOVE my colors!!  I'm so excited.

LOVE

My DIY Woven Wrap and Grad Dye- Part 1

I'm a babywearer.  It's fun, it's a great mommy hobby since I have two toddlers trailing me 24/7 (may as well include them!), and it's just a great way to keep your babies close and to carry them without lugging around a heavy infant carseat or loading and unloading a stroller every time you have to go to the store.  It can help you get dinner cooked when you have a kiddo who just needs to be near Mommy right this second, it can bring forth wonderful naps when you've given up hope of naps, and for me right now with a 3 year old and a 1.5 year old, it means I can actually run errands and go to the store and keep track of two crazy active littles. I'm even one of the leaders of a babywearing group here in Las Vegas; the Vegaroos.

Go me!

Hey everyone!  Remember my last post where I entered my project into Silhouette America's weekly challenge?  Well guess what?  I WON!!!!  I'm so excited, I won credit for the Silhouette online store so I can download new designs for my machine.  Yay!!!  I feel so special :)

~B
Pin It

Silhouette Weekly Challenge- Fonts

I love my Silhouette Cameo that I got for my birthday!  I've been asking friends and family if they need anything labeled or made just so I can use it and get the hang of it.  I've made stencils for shirts using freezer paper, boxes and cards out of card stock, and I'm labeling everything I can with vinyl.

Silhouette does weekly challenges where they want to see what we can do with the machine.  This week's theme is using any font on our computer, so I wanted to show how I labeled my jar of homemade laundry detergent!

It says "Laundry Soap" and "2 Tbsp per load" in Harlow Solid Italic font, cut onto pink adhesive-backed vinyl.  I love it, and on the rare occasion that my husband starts laundry, he knows exactly how much to put in!  It makes me smile every time I go into my laundry room, and that's always welcome when I'm doing laundry :)

~B
Pin It

DIY Mail Orgnization

I have a confession: I'm not a tidy person.  Clutter is something that I battle (not successfully, I might add) constantly.  I get easily overwhelmed and just don't know where to start.  Then when I do start, I have two toddlers either undoing my work or needing my attention within 5 minutes of starting.  This leads to lots of piles of mail.  All over.  Which gets really confusing, especially when it's time to pay bills.  So I decided to create an organization center with the family calendar, mail organization, etc. as step one.

I'm going to give a mini-tutorial on how I made my mail organizers out of cereal boxes!

High/low day.

Today (well, it's past midnight so technically yesterday) was C's third birthday.  My sweetest baby boy, I can't believe he's three.  My husband had to work so it was a low key day.  He got to open the truck he picked out at the store this weekend, we took him to lunch at a restaurant that serves GF pizza AND GF deep dish cookies with ice cream on top so he got a really yummy meal.  We came home, hubs left for work, and C, M, and I hung out and watched Wreck It Ralph all day while C played with his new truck.  It was a pretty good day overall.

Prayers for a friend

A fellow autism mama friend of mine had a baby girl this week at 24 weeks and 3 days gestation.  She is so tiny, about a pound, and her name is Ellie Grace.  I've been thinking and hoping and praying constantly for sweet little Ellie to grow and stabilize and thrive.  This family lost a son born at 23 weeks last year, so this is especially stressful and heartbreaking.

Back to Blogging

I've been horribly absent from the blog, and even worse, no recent pics!  I'm here to fix it.

Disneyland Trip= grumpy babies?