I made a light box! I used the instructions from here. It was really easy.
Does it make things look better? Although I do love the warmth of my kitchen table, it's often hard to get enough lighting. What I like most about it is that when I'm not using it I can fold it up flat and store it away. I'm excited!
Now that my daughter is of preschool age, I've become acutely aware that my days of choosing her Halloween costume for her are quickly coming to an end. Figuring this would be my last year to pick a costume, I wanted to make her something cute, easy, and easy to wear with normal clothing. After a morning at the zoo, I thought a peacock would be within my skill set.
I cut out the felt and glued it all together - no sew! I figured I could make the peacock's tail feathers attach to her with elastic bands for her to wear like those fairy wings people buy. The tricky thing was getting it stiff enough to stand upright. For that, I bought some boning (like they use in corsets - ended up a little more $$$ that I expected) and glued it in along with some quilting padding to make it soft.
For the headpiece I first thought I would make her a headband, but it ended up working more as a visor. She also happened to come home from preschool with an a paper she had glued googly eyes all over. She let me take two of them to add to the visor and there we have it! An adorable, spunky peacock. It's amazing what you can do with felt and hot glue!
For my daughter's birthday I wanted to get her a play kitchen, but I didn't want to spend a lot of money or get something that was going to take up a lot of space. We had an old dvd shelf from Ikea that was the perfect height for a toddler, so I cut up a bunch of felt and glued it into two panels, one for a stove and another for a sink. I used silver pipe cleaners to make a sink spout and wooden buttons for knobs. The thing I like best is that I attached it to the shelf using velcro, so when we don't need for a play kitchen anymore, we can take it off and use it for a shelf again!
I made a Halloween costume for my little strawberry girl. Her favorite food right now is strawberries, so I thought it would be so cute to turn her into a little strawberry. I got the idea from a magazine where they just glued a bunch of stuff onto a sweatshirt - no sewing involved! I cut out leaves to go around her neck and yellow seeds and hot glued them on. With the leftover scraps I make a little "hat" of extra leaves and a little stem and attached it to an elastic band so it would stay on her head. In short, the costume ended up looking ridiculously cute (but maybe it's just because I think my kid is ridiculously cute). It's amazing what you can do with felt and hot glue!
I made a quick solution to one of our baby proofing problems: the fireplace. We have a lovely gas fireplace in our house that we don't ever use. Right now my daughter is walking all over the place and poking her little fingers in everything. Once in awhile she bangs on the glass door of the fireplace, and the other day she figured out how to slide the door open - yikes! What to do? I put a child lock on the handles to keep the doors closed, but how do I protect the glass doors?
Aha! I realized that a flattened cardboard box that we had laying around our house was the perfect size to go over the door. To make it pretty, I bought some cute upholstery fabric and hot glued it around the box. To add a little cushioning for the glass, I stuck a layer of quilting padding underneath. To stick it to the glass, I just used a bunch of painter's tape to make sure I could remove it cleanly when our childproofing days are over.
Not bad eh?
