Leading Me Home: Crafty Christmas

Holy moly it's been a long time since I've done this blog thing!! ALOT has happened since my last post.....but before I fill you in on all of that, I wanted to share my Christmas craftiness!

I saw this first idea in the Country Living magazine and LOVED it!

I took an old picture of my mom and her brothers and sisters, scanned it into my computer and printed it out on some printable fabric.

My materials

This is the picture printed out.

I didn't really know what I was doing, so I ended up attempting two different pillows. One pillow (the one you see below), I sewed some linen to the back of it, flipped it right side out and this is what I got. It was REALLY small. So for the next pillow I ironed it onto a bigger piece of linen, sewed it to another piece of linen and ended up with a bigger pillow. Unfortunately, the iron discolored the picture so it was very yellow.

I ended up giving this to my mom incomplete because I didn't know how to close the pillow. Oops! I guess I should have thought about that before I started this project. It was probably best, though, because we decided to use the not-ironed on picture, rip the seams out and sew a big linen border around the edges to make it bigger and easier to work with. Of course, that's now sitting on a shelf waiting for us to find the time to finish it. If we ever get around to finishing it, it's going to be adorable!

My second crafty project of the break was significantly more successful! I initiated this project a long long time ago and blogged about it here.

I needed a place to store my jewelry and stole this idea from Caroline. This was my first draft. And I must say, I was pretty darn proud.

Well, it didn't take too long before I ran out of room and had to add a couple more panels. Unfortunately, I didn't buy extra blue fabric and so I was left to try to find some more fabric that matched. It was unsuccessful. I ended up with 6 panels, three of which were brown, two were blue with brown paisley and one was cream with brown paisley. It was, shall we say.....tacky. So over Christmas break I finally got around to finding new fabric and recovering my panels. This is the final result!