Felt Zebra Rug

Way before I found out I was pregnant I spotted a tutorial for this rug made out of felt and it immediately caught my eye. Once I was designing my nursery I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to make one. Zoe's bedroom has wood floors so it needed a little something down there.

Here is a link to the tutorial I used. I made sure to buy the felt at Joanns with coupons! If you can't tell from the picture I used a deep purple for the stripes. I also just used regular fabric glue to put it together. I thought about sewing around all the edges (stripes included) to give it an extra-finished look but I got to this point and I thought, eh... good enough. I'm sure we all feel that way sometimes!

The tutorial also calls for paper with gridlines on it. I hate it when projects call for specialty things like this and was reluctant to scour Joanns to try and find something like this. Luckily, while I was contemplating this, I bought some cheap wrapping paper from Walmart and on the back it had a grid of 1 inch squares on it! The tutorial calls for 2 inch grid so I made it work. As soon as the rug was finished I fell in love! I hope you like it too.

I'm not going to lie though, it isn't the most durable rug... it's already looking a little worn and fuzzy, but it has been a year.

It looks good though... right? :)

Homemade Stamps

For a while now I've been really interested in making my own stamps. I think this stems from my love of fabrics. Printing my own fabrics is a distant dream of mine. I ended up buying some rubber blocks and a lino cutter and went to town!

First I literally traced my image on some vellum off my computer screen. I used a soft pencil and then pressed the paper against the white rubber and the pencil left a very good reverse image. Now you may think, well it's backwards so it's no good, not true! Because it's a stamp you want the image backwards, true story. I did a little experimenting with the cutting tool and it was surprisingly easy and fun! Like cutting butter. The rest seems to be common sense, I carved the crane first, then cut off the excess and had enough to make an additional "Zoe."

Now I just need to get a better ink pad, lol. I guess the dollar store isn't always the quality choice.

I decided to use some fabric paint and make a little onesie for baby Zoe. I'm into paper cranes right now.

And here it is on an adorable baby model!

Feel free to comment with any questions.

New Format

I figured that since I spend so much time in the blogging world, I might want to start contributing to it.

I stopped blogging because I felt like it was pretty pointless. I post more pictures to facebook then my blog and I didn't think anyone read my blog that wasn't my friend there. Also I started my blog when I lived in Utah and was away from family and now we live in California, under a mile from my parents and Chase's parents are moving 1 hour away to Sacramento.

So I thought I would make a few changes. After a good discussion with a friend in Hawaii I decided that it might be fun to post some things that I have made for my home and family. The plan is to post mostly before and afters, some how-tos and maybe a full blown tutorial. If this isn't your cup of tea... well then just stick to browsing my facebook. :)

I'm starting tomorrow!

Watch this!!!

A Birth Story

I've been putting off posting about Zoe's birth because frankly it as too much typing. Well last night I made a little video that pretty much sums it up. Enjoy!

http://youtu.be/bHd_D8G00gc?hd=1

I had to link to it because the video would not fit in my blog. It's worth the copy and paste!