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This has been the longest and most ambitious project to date. Last December (2006), I decided to make an upholstered backboard to my son’s bed with the houses from spongebob on it.

I started by getting a large sheet of plywood and marking the size that I wanted the finished board to be. Then I drew each of the houses on the board.

I used these drawings as the template for all of the pieces. I started by roughly laying out the roads and walk ways.

Then I made the background and laid the roads out on it.

Then I used white tissue paper to make the patterns of the houses. It was around this point in time that I panicked and stopped working on the houses. I wasn’t sure how to put the stuff together to make it look right. Looking back on it, that was probably the right thing to do. I was able to move on with some other sewing projects and got a little more experience.

I picked the project back up in January (2008) and was determined to finish it before my son outgrew spongebob.

I put together the three houses.

Patrick’s was the easiest (being a rock) and squidward’s was also not too bad.

Spongebob’s house had a lot of detail to it so it took a little longer to put together.

I used fabric glue to attach ribbon to the cut out fabric, to give that pineapple look.

Then I made the top to the pineapple.

Once all of the houses were sewed, I needed to permanently attach everything to the background. Once again, I turned to my handy fabric glue. Since all of the houses were stuffed, I had to weigh them down during the gluing process.

I was also happy to give my old physics book and my husband’s old os/2 book a purpose in life again.

With the fabric part of the project done, I needed to turn my attention to the frame that it would live. I used foam batting to upholster the wood.

Then I covered the entire thing in a twin sized vinyl mattress cover (I wanted to try and make this as allergy friendly as I could).

Then I needed some assistance. The actual upholstery job ended up taking 3 people. Here is my mom while we were working on attaching everything to the wood.

And at last…after almost a year and a half it was finished.

We attached it to the wall, put the bed next to it and it ended up a very spongebob happy place.

So when I started doing embroidery, my mom gave me all of her old embroidery floss. I was super happy to get it…except all of the floss showed up in a big bag. So really what I had was a giant tangled mess.

This wasn’t a great situation so I started looking around for solutions to my problem. I happened to find a great floss case in my local craft store. I was thrilled. I started by getting one box, but it really didn’t take too long to realize that I needed two. It took about 2 weeks of winding floss on to bobbins at night while watching tv (And that includes help from my husband). But the results were worth it.

I made this warning label yesterday using warning label generator…. It makes me laugh.

One of my goals this Christmas was to make all of the christmas gifts that I gave to adults. And I think they turned out pretty good this year. I’ve been extremely busy making stuff and I’m just now catching my breath from trying to turn out so many different things. Here are some of the things I made:

I crocheted two wraps. One was a fuzzy pink and the other a glittery gold.

I embroidered a set of cloth napkins with designs from sublime stitching. They were made using the monkey love pattern and I think they turned out super cute.

I’ve also been doing some sewing lately and put together these placemats with matching napkins. I’m rather new to sewing so this was a bit of a learning exercise. But I was very pleased with the results.

I purchased a vogue craft pattern (V7986) several years ago, and just got around to making some of the items this year. I’m so happy that I got this pattern when I did, because it seems to be out of print now.

The 1st item I made was a mantle scarf. I’m still rather new to sewing, and I was a little concerned about actually being able to make it. But it was easy and turned out really nice.

(Just in case you were wondering, the beautiful topiaries were made by my mom)

After conquering the mantle scarf, I moved on to a table runner. The table runner was super easy to put together. Infact, I was able to make it one evening after work.

How much do I love Doctor Who…Enough to knit a Dalek. When I saw the pattern for Extermaknits I knew I needed to make one. The timing of it happened to work out well, so that my mom ended up receiving the finished dalek for her birthday. Happy birthday Mom!!

So I’ve tried my hand at amigurumi and it is fairly easy. I started with just a regular bunny amigurumi pattern. Then once it was finished I made a halloween costume for it.

Making the costume was easy. For the hat I started with just a flat circle. I left two holes in the top of it for the ears to stick through. Then I picked up a circle of stitches where I wanted the base of the hat to be and just worked up decreasing to give it a pointy look.
The cape was even easier. I started at the neck and made a chain long enough to tie around the bunnies neck and make a bow. Then I picked up stitches in the middle (enough stitches to go around the bunnies shoulders. Then I increased every row until it was the desired length.

Easy and Cute!

With the summer tempertures reaching close to a billion degrees, I haven’t really been doing much knitting. I’ve been sticking with embroidery. Once I finished up all of the towel projects that I had put together, I was looking for something else to work on until it cooled off.

I actually got these felt applique ornaments 6 or 7 years ago. I had made some of them, but then I discovered knitting and I haven’t worked on them since. Well, I finished off two packs of them.

There are these cute bears

and these sequins ornaments.

They look nice and my goal is to eventually have nothing but hand made (or heirloom) ornaments on my tree.

I’m also really pleased to have finished up two packets of projects. I just need to finish up the other 3 packets of felt applique now. At least I’m almost half way finished with them.

Unfortuately the temperature has now dropped below 90 so I’ve started knitting again. Maybe I’ll get the rest finished next summer.

So after 5 years of knitting, I finally decided that it was time to learn to crochet. My first project was a scarf of crochet flowers.

Crochet turned out to be pretty easy, but I can see how it would be difficult to crochet with any type of textured yarn. I am looking forward to making some nice open mesh sweaters.

I just finished up some ribbon embroidery. This was one of the plaid ribbon embroidery kits.

I like the plaid kits alot. They are great for a type of embroidery that I’ve never done before. It contained instructions and all the stuff that I needed to finish up my project.