Alana and I spent the day with Kellie at her house, but didn’t actually get anything done! I brought a bunch of fabric-covered buttons that I’d made recently to show Kellie and to utilize her fabulous white table with natural light pouring through the window!

Thank you so much to Kellie for these pictures! I was busy trying to keep Alana occupied while Kellie took all of these photos for me! I am not entirely sure how I am going to use them yet, but they were fun to make and I just love the different color families!

Alana was VERY interested in the buttons, putting them in her mouth for a taste-test more than once

These are some much larger buttons, perfect for some pillows, perhaps!

Last Tuesday, I spent the day at Kellie’s making this apron, of which I am quite proud!

I love it, and think I will have to make more! 

I modeled while Rich took a few shots for me! Thank you, honey! 

I particularly love the coordinating striped fabric pocket, ties, and ruffle trim at the top. Very happy.

Here are some details:

And the best part: It’s reversible! 

I always see the cutest aprons at stores I love, but never buy them. So it was super satisfying to make one using Kellie’s pattern. Thanks for letting me use it, Kellie! And thank you for entertaining a fidgety Alana! She loves her Kellie

Last week I decided that I wanted to try a set of placemats for those times when I’m in the mood for a splash of color. My dining room is black and white decor with black and white photography so I thought I could get away with 4 colorful mismatched placemats in there!

Really I just liked these bright, summery fabrics and just had to do something with them! 

Here are the resulting placemats, but careful, they are not as nice as they seem: they caused me to sustain a painful burn on my forearm while ironing them prior to sewing! 

Here is the damage! It’s healing nicely, and I guess I don’t mind a battle wound from such a fun girly project :) 

Since my mom was in town this week, I knew I wanted to learn as much as I could from her in the short time we’d have. Since I already knew how to make this basic pillow with a sham-style removable cover, I went ahead and made two of these first. I wanted a couple more that coordinated with these, but I needed to learn how to do piping and some other tricks while she was here.

So, this is the basic 18″ square pillow I made for the living room:

And this is one of the coordinating 12″x16″ inch pilows. This was my first attempt at piping, and my mom guided me through the entire process!

Front view:

And back view:

It was harder than I thought, more tedious, I guess. And I kept thanking mom over and over for the pillows she’d recently made for Alana that had piping. I didn’t realize how difficult it can be to get it all to line up correctly so that the finished product will look perfect. Needless to say, mine isn’t flawless, but I gave it my best shot and plan to practice more and hopefully, get much better!

And the second pillow! I love this fabric so much, and wanted to use it for both the front and back, with something extra fun on the front! My mom suggested a strip of coordinating fabric with a fabric covered button and I jumped at her idea! This is the result, and I am sooooo happy with it!

I can feel it: fabric covered buttons are going to be my new favorite thing!!!

The back side:

And the newly renovated look on the couch!

And this was another super fun project that I worked on throughout the week with mom’s help! We bought a pattern for this handbag and I got so excited about using some of my favorite fabrics for it! I couldn’t have done this without my mom’s help, since I am new to casing, cording, etc. She is a great teacher!

Here is one side:

And the other:

And a second, smaller handbag that I made! I love these fabrics, and want to keep practicing, since it was so time consuming to learn! No wonder these bags are around $100 - the fabric is not cheap and the work is not fast!

Another thing I’ve wanted to do for a while is to change out the curtains in our dining room. I hated the old ones but didn’t know what I did want. While mom was here, we picked out some plain black panels and found this great black and white fabric to use! I didn’t know what my mom was going to do with it, but she’s so good that I knew I’d love it.

While Rich and I were away on our date night, after mom put Alana to bed, she worked on these! This is what I came home to, and I LOVE them! Thank you again, mom! You are amazing and they are perfect!!!

Then my mom had a little fun with some fabric covered vases! She used some scraps left over from the curtains to cover these plain glass vases I had laying around!

And one for the kitchen!

Mom also made this adorable dress for Alana with a patten we’d found at the fabric store! I love it!!!

Well, I am tired just blogging about all the fun we had this week! Thank you for all of the fun learning, mom! We miss you already and can’t WAIT to see you again! I am sure there will be more fun projects to work on together!!!

This is what I have been doing for the past few days (during Alana’s naptimes!): Kellie will be visiting her family soon, so she let me babysit her sewing machine while she is busy prepping to leave. I am taking very good care of it, Kellie!

The walls in our master bedroom are blue, yet all of our bedding is beige and various shades of brown. I’ve wanted to tie in the blue wall color for a while now, and I finally got around to making some pillows out of this fabulous fabric from Amy Butler’s Lotus line! I am pretty happy with the end result, and I think I will just have to keep going!

I like to try and use my fabric scraps as I go so that they don’t sit around for too long without being made into something! So, I decided to make some coasters after Kellie showed me how she did them, and I made this coordinating set out of my pillow remnants! Fun!

Then, for the guest bedroom, I had some pillows on the bed that I didn’t love, so I took them off and created a couple of new ones, also Amy Butler fabric. I’m on a roll!!!

This is the reverse side of the pillows…I did a sham-style cover so that they are removable and washable in the very likely event that Alana spits up on them, or, when she’s older, spills something on them

Here she is “helping” me take pictures of the pillows

And more scrap utilization! Coasters! You can never have too many coasters around the house!

I am such a sewing amateur, so I’m super excited to pick my mom’s brain while she is here! She comes in tomorrow morning! YAY!!! More pillow fun, soon, for sure!

Also, being fairly new to the mod fabric scene, I just discovered two more fabric designers that I love! Check our Jennifer Paganelli’s blog here and Sandi Henderson’s blog here!

And, have a fantastic fourth of July weekend!

I mentioned on my personal blog that Kellie’s birthday was a couple of weeks ago…

For one of her gifts, I bought her these wonderful Dwell Studio placemats, and I think they are too great not to share!

Target is now carrying a line of Dwell products, both for the home and also a line for baby! If they’d had Dwell Baby products when I’d been pregnant, I would have wanted it all!

Anyway, these are Kellie’s new placemats and napkins. I think they are so cute and I love the reverse side as well!

While I was shopping for Kellie, I accidentally bought these for myself

They coordinate perfectly in our dining room, where we have large black and white photography throughout. I love the napkins, in particular. And I love the fact that the placemats are reversible!

Okay, that is a post I cannot take credit for as far as crafting is concerned, but still!

It’s completed!

I cannot say that the last few pages are my favorites, but at least I am done with our 2007 family album!

I’m a bit OCD, so I couldn’t bear the thought of beginning Alana’s baby album until I’d at least acknowledged that she’d been born in our family scrapbook! I’m so into chronology. It’s how I think, how I scrapbook, and I may as well embrace it!

Here is my “scrapbooking nook” in our master bedroom, where I keep all of my supplies. Whenever I get on a scrapbooking kick, I simply move all of my supplies onto our great big dining room table and leave everything all spread out until I am ready for a break. Then I move everything back onto this bookshelf that my dad built for me in college (to store all of my textbooks). I love it! It served me well then, and I’m so happy that I still have a perfect use for it!

Vertical paper storage in the closet!

So, these are the last few pages of the 2007 Smith Family scrapbook, and I’m so glad I can move on to another project. Like using all of my fun new Amy Butler fabrics to make some handbags, coasters, and pillows! More on that really soon!

…The pages that conclude 2007 for our family!!!

Again, not all of my pages, but a sampling. As always, there are so many more photos than there is scrapbook space! We have about ten times more pictures from when Alana was born than are in the album, but I suppose that is the beauty of having the blog for posterity as well!

Thanks for visiting! Happy scrapping!

On Thursday, Kellie, Alana and I ran back over to the fabric store so that she could grab some fabrics to fulfill an order.

This fabric store photo is blurry, but hey, I like it anyway! It speaks of fun girl time!!!

We happened upon a few Amy Butler fabrics that we didn’t already have, so we snatched them up and talked to the store owner about the shipment of NEW Amy Butler fabrics that they are waiting on. We are soooo excited, and have lots of fun things in mind to do with them!

Now, to beat all the other customers who are also waiting on this shipment! We asked the store owner to accidentally email the newsletter to just the two of us before she remembers to email it to everyone else! I don’t think she was overly amused

And this is another fabulous potholder…this one Kellie made for me! I left my fabric at her house because she’s the one with the sewing machine (that’s next on my wish list!), and she made this perfect potholder out of my fabrics! Thank you Kellie! I LOVE it, and now my pub mirror in the kitchen has a potholder for each hook! They’re simply too cute to put in my drawer!

And below is the reverse!

And speaking of the awesome coriander fabric below, check out the Pink Roses Etsy site for one of the cutest little jackets I have ever seen! Yep, she used this Amy Butler fabric! I want to buy this for Alana soooo bad, but the smallest is a 2T, so we’d have to wait at least a year and half until she could wear it! I don’t think I can afford to start buying things for her that she can’t fit into for that long. Ugh! The dilemma!

Well, I am near completion on my 2007 scrapbook, which was sadly ignored as things have been in major transition for the past year! I worked on it slowly throughout 2007, and recently got a focused burst of energy…and after a few up-too-late nights, it is nearly complete! I thought I’d go ahead and post some of my best memories from 2007 reflected in the pages below!

The album is made up of 45 pages, and I think I posted about 25 of them! My scrapbooking style is very simple since I view it as primarily utilitarian; as a way of preserving memories. I enjoy the creative aspect of it, of course, but I am much too impatient (not to mention limited in terms of time and money right now!) to take the time to make each page a masterpiece. I leave that job to my dear friend Kellie! Her pages are incredible. Mine, I just enjoy getting my memories into an album for posterity — and try to make them look good in the process!

I love using Creative Memories (CM) albums, since they are so incredibly durable and the binding is impeccable! I used to be a CM consultant, but then I met Kellie, who helped me to branch out and try lots of other scrapping products: distressed papers, rub-ons, and she insisted that I try (gulp) ripping my paper to give it a raw, torn look and to even put fewer photos on a page.

I have enjoyed this new, different style but still haven’t branched out too far. I still like symmetry, I still like neat and orderly, and I haven’t done much sewing or stapling or bought much ribbon or felt! We shall see where my next album takes me! For now, here are come excerpts from the 2007 Smith Family Album!

In these pages, I have used tons of Basic Grey paper, lettering, and tags, along with lots of perfect, amazing little tags from Every Jot and Tittle…my dear friend Kellie’s Etsy store!

And believe me, I know that my point-and-shoot photos leave much to be desired!!! I am about to build a light box so that I can get much better photos of all of my crafting!!!

Kellie and I spent all day together Tuesday.

A gloriously long day getting started on some “do it yourself” projects we have been talking about.

We recently bought some yummy, fabulous Amy Butler fabric, and I shamelessly stole Kellie’s awesome DIY potholder idea. I saw hers last week, and just had to make my own this week. That’s just one of the great things about Kellie. She isn’t in competition, she let’s me steal away! She’s got so many great ideas brewing in that head of hers, I hardly have time to invent my own!

So we started off by making these fresh, totally fun potholders, and I can’t wait to make more. Who said anything about needing that many? These puppies are too fun to pass up!

This was my first project: the bird for my first potholder. Here, my birdie is in progress; pinned and ready to sew…

And now completed!

This is the reverse side of the same potholder:

This is one of my absolute favorite Amy Butler fabrics. I cannot wait for our local fabric store to receive a shipment of her new line!!!

And the reverse:

Yet another potholder:

And the other side:

And then Kellie totally surprised me with this one, made especially for me with an “H”!!!

And the reverse, with the “H” shown stitched through!

To me, Amy Butler is to fabric what Basic Grey is to scrapbooking paper. It’s the best! The cutest, most creative, and the most aesthetically pleasing! Modern, and just plain great.

{Speaking of scrapbooking, I have made tons of progress finishing up my 2007 album that I abandoned in the later stages of my pregnancy, so I will be sure to post some of my favorite pages soon! Now that I am nearly caught up, it is time to work on Alana’s Baby Album, which I will also be posting about}.

We also had fun with some DIY onesies…and we have some great ideas for more. We haven’t had a chance to photograph those yet, so that will have to wait until next time! There may even be some for sale soon, we shall see how it goes!