Bubble bibs

My first crafty sewing project started when Koala was a baby and she just started teething. She drooled a lot and the baby bibs we had didn't match her cute outfits. I started to look for more fashionable bibs.

First, I bought some bandana bibs from Amazon from a brand called Zippy. They don't have the exact ones that I bought but these are the same except they're blue. 

I then came across scarf bibs. 

When I saw this I thought, 'Hey I could totally make this.' So I bought some material and went to my mom's to use her sewing machine. After a really long time and I think even a broken needle, I made my first scarf bib. It definitely wasn't the best- the stitching was crooked and a couple times the thread bunched up, but I did it. And it looked so much cuter on Koala than the baby bibs! I got a lot of compliments whenever Koala wore her bubble bibs. 

I started to buy all sorts of different material to make them. 

Some of the bibs that I've made

The bibs were cute and fairly easy to make so I had dreams of selling them on etsy or something. I came up with a brand name (Bubbles) and designed a simple logo. I even made labels to put on the bibs. I eventually simplified the tags and decided to stick with just black. 

And I made tags with wash instructions. 

I even tried to branch out and make boy print bibs to get a larger audience. (Buffalo plaid, super hero, sports ones, mustaches). 

As you can see, I get pretty invested in my projects.  But I lost steam when it came to actually posting the bibs and selling them. I got overwhelmed with the business end of it like copyrights and all that. 

 After a while, Koala stopped teething/drooling and she didn't need bibs anymore and my bubble bibs business was put on the back burner for a while. I invested my time in other projects like the quiet book, etc. 

Just recently, I started making the bibs again- mostly because I have a lot of friends who are having babies and I figure the bibs make a good gift since they're practical, cute and handmade which shows the thought/time I put into them.

Now that Baby Bear will be here soon, I'm working on making a stash of cute bibs for him to wear. Who knows, maybe my bib business will take off but even if it doesn't, at least Baby Bear will be stylin'.

Quiet book: Simple 8x8 pages

I wanted to use up the Pellon that I had cut up into 8x8 squares so I decided to make a smaller book. For the 8x8 quiet book pages, I had to use simple designs/pages since I didn't have much room.

Music:

I saw this music page and thought it would be fairly easy to make. 

I wanted to make my page look more like real sheet music so i started off with just black ribbon and a felt note with a bell in it. But it looked too plain so I added a treble clef. 

I attached the note to the page with black ribbon after the first one disappeared. The page is not that exciting but was easy to make. I'm hoping that later when Koala is older and is maybe taking music classes, we can use it to practice reading music or something.

Abacus: 

Another simple page was an abacus counting page. For this page, I poked 10 holes on each side of the page. I threaded black ribbon through the holes and on the back side I tied a knot. I put beads on each of the strings- first one, then two, etc. Then I threaded the ribbon through the other side and also tied a knot on the other side. 

I added a vertical strip of felt on each side to make the ribbon more secure and to give the page a cleaner look. This is another page I think we'll use more when Koala is older and learning to count. 

Shapes:

I made a simple matching up shapes page. This isn't the most interesting page but was easy to make. 

I modeled it after this quiet book page. I cut out two of each shape/color. The first set, I sewed to the 8x8 sheet of Pellon and then added a Velcro circle. 

Initially, I just attached the second set of shapes to Pellon and put velcro on the back. 

But as I discovered, loose pieces get lost easily so I eventually attached each piece to ribbon. 

I was impressed how Koala immediately matched the pieces to the correct spot the first time she played with it. It's not a page that keeps her attention for long right now since she's mastered matching the pieces. I'm now starting to use the page to teach her the names of the shapes.

Stop, slow, go:

On the backside of the shapes page, I have a stoplight page modeled after these pages: 

Stoplight 1

Stoplight 2

It's a fairly simple page with circles attached by ribbon.  This was one of the more recent pages I made and I used snaps instead of velcro because I found that velcro really wears out the felt. The downside to snaps is that they're so small that Koala has a hard time snapping them on. But I think in a little while she'll be able to do it with no problem.

When Koala matches the colors, I try to teach her that Red means stop, yellow means slow, and green means go. Since it's so new, we've only done it a couple times so we'll see if she catches on.

Dog collar: 

Some pages like to teach coordination or skills like zipping a zipper or fastening a buckle. I was going to make a page with just buckles and zippers but thought that was not very creative and I'd rather have a page that's cute but uses the zipper or buckle. So I searched and saw a popular page was a dog collar or even a belt. I decided to do a dog collar page. 

I thought the dog in this blog was cute but wanted to do a more recognizable dog. Snoopy was the simplest dog I could think of. 

Not much to it, but it teaches the skill of opening and closing a buckle. I thought Koala would have more fun with this page because she used to love to play with the buckle on her high chair. But I guess the novelty wore off.

For now, the 8x8 book is complete with 6 pages including the Elmo puzzle page. I still have some 8x8 Pellon so I may add pages in the future but for now my focus is on the bigger more detailed pages.

In order to keep the pages together, I poked holes in all the pages and put in grommets. I then used 2 loose binder rings to hold the pages together. I eventually need to make a cover but that'll be another time/another blog post.

Car seat cover

I finally started to get ready for Baby Boy. My first project was turning Koala's car seat into a boy friendly car seat.

Initially, I looked up car seat covers to buy because I'm lazy and would rather just buy one. But they weren't that nice looking and were so expensive! I might as well buy a new car seat! And when I looked at them, I thought that I could definitely do a better job. 

I'm always a bit nervous to start new projects because I always think that it won't turn out. Secretly, I was hoping someone would offer to make it for me lol! But I finally decided to make it and went out this weekend and picked up some material. (I figured this would give me something to blog about lol!) 

I wasn't quite sure what kind of material to buy. I wanted something that was soft  but wouldn't get dirty too easily. I ended up finding this really soft velour type material that's used for baby blankets in the fleece/flannel aisle. I liked the color and it was polka dot (all the other materials were ugly colors or prints or floral). I was debating between that and PUL material (typically used for cloth diaper covers so waterproof and easy to wipe) but I didn't like the prints they had in PUL. 

For those who are wondering how much material is needed, I bought a yard just to be safe and ended up using a little over half. I guess if I was smart, I could've measure the pink part of the cover and figured out exactly how much I needed but I didn't. I would say that if you're going to make a cover and don't want to measure beforehand, 1 yard is plenty. (Then again it depends on how much you have to cover- I obviously was able to keep the grey parts as is.)

I briefly looked at this blog which detailed how the author took apart her car seat cover and made a new one. I thought that it was too complicated and there had to be an easier way. 

As I've said in my other blog posts, I'm not the best sewer and I'm not that crafty so I try to find the easiest way to do things. I ended up deciding that I just needed to cut out pieces big enough to cover the pink parts and sew them on. 

I took the cover off of the car seat and took pics of how to put all the buckles etc back in place correctly (my friend suggested it and I'm glad she did! I know it seems like it's easy to remember how to put the buckles back but I wanted to make sure it was correct and when I finished I did consult the pics to see if the buckles went in then out or out then in. I blame pregnancy brain for not remembering lol).

Initially when I looked at the car seat, it looked like I had to cut 6 pieces- two for the middle and 4 sides (top and bottom) and then I would have to sew those pieces all together. 

But since I like short cuts, I decided to just cut two pieces and pleat the seam in the side if I needed to. (I didn't end up needing to pleat it at all. I just tucked it in to make the creases on the sides)

Like most of my patterns for my other projects, I winged it and made my own. I used the existing cover to trace onto the fabric I had. (The picture below shows the cover on the front on the fabric, but I actually turned it over and drew the pattern on the fabric on the back. I made sure to leave about an inch around the actual cover so that I would have fabric to work with. 

Note: I did not take apart the original cover like the blog example. I just folded it in half so that I had the shape of what I was tracing. 

The smaller 2nd piece above I just marked where the grey part started and then just cut straight across (where the arrow is pointing).

I then took the two pieces and  I matched up the two rounded sides and sewed them together. I didn't mark exactly where I needed to sew- I eyeballed it approximately an inch from the edge. It ended up working out. 

Then when I had the two pieces sewn together, I started sewing it to the original cover. I lined up the seam from the two pieces I had just sewn to the seam in the middle of the two pieces of the original cover. Then I started to hand stitch them together (yup, that's right. I hand stitched the cover on. It took a bit longer than a machine would but as I've said in other blogs, I'm not good with the sewing machine so hand sewing is actually less frustrating. And also, the cover was too thick to fit under the foot of my sewing machine and I didn't want to go through the hassle of trying to find a foot and changing it etc.) When I was sewing, I made sure the needle went in where the existing seams were and that it came out on the other side where the existing seam was so that they ended up lining up perfectly. 

Once the middle seams were sewn together, I started sewing the sides together.

I used a stitch that I use when hand sewing the quiet book. In case anyone's interested in that stitching (otherwise skip to the next paragraph lol), 1) I start off in the back and poke the needle through. 2) Then I poke the needle through from front to back but rather than go straight back, I make it go to the side and poke it back out about the length of a stitch. 3) I then double back and poke it back through the previous hole (the end of the 1st stitch) and 4) then from the back side, j poke the needle back through the hole I just made (the end of the 2nd stitch). Then I repeat to make more stitches. Since that description is very confusing, I included pictures. They're not pictures from the car seat because it's really hard to see the thread. 

It's a bit tedious but I feel like it gives it a cleaner look. 

Once I sewed around the sides, I had to add the holes where the straps go through. Technically I think you could use the sewing machine and use the button hole technique to make the holes before sewing it to the original cover. But since I only know how to sew straight lines on the sewing machine, I had to hand stitch that too.

I started off by cutting a slit where the hole was (top right pic)  I didn't make the slit as big as the hole. Then I used a blanket stitch around the hole (once again, another thing I learned while making the quiet book. This was the blog I learned it from.)

Once I did all the holes (5), I added a strip of fabric (no pattern, just took a strip of fabric that was big enough and sewed it on) to the underside that wraps around the top of the car seat just for completeness.

Then I was done with the main cover! It took me all evening which is a lot of time but I thought it would take me days so I was happy! 

The next piece was the headrest and canopy. 

It was too hard to try to trace and cut material so I ended up pinning the fabric to the headrest and then cutting it big enough to cover the area. Then I sewed it on.

The finished headrest

The headrest had two snaps that were used to snap onto the bottom grey part so what I ended up doing was covering the snap entirely with fabric. Once the headrest was sewn on, I cut a circle where the snap was and tucked the material into the edges of the snap. Then I sewed the material around the snap so that the fabric was secure. 

For the canopy, I took material and pinned it to the pink parts just like I did for the headrest. There were two sections for the canopy- the middle section and then the small trim in the front. 

After I finished that I thought I was done until I realize that the inside of the canopy was pink! So I had to decide whether to leave it pink or cover it. In the end, I decided I had come this far, I might as well finish it. I didn't want to use the nice velour material since it was expensive so I took some white material that I had and used that. The white material was thin cotton material so I had to actually use two layers. The first panel I did was the middle and I didn't measure the material correctly so part of the panel only has one layer so you can see the pink if you look closely. 

The last panel I did (closest to the front) I had to use different material because I didn't have enough of the original white material. I also accidentally cut a hole in the material when I was trying to trim the extra material. (As you can tell, I was kind of rushing to get things done and got sloppy.) So I added two small blue hearts - one to cover the mistake that I cut and one to cover ugly sewing where I couldn't get the edge of the white material to fold and look nice. 

The finished inside of the canopy.
Like I said, you can still see the pink in the middle layer but since it's the inside of the canopy, I don't think it matters that much.

This is the finished car seat. 

Overall, I'm very pleased with how it turned out. It was a lot cheaper than buying a new car seat or even a new cover and it feels good to make something for the baby! I can't wait to use it!

Quiet book: Duckling gets a Cookie

Koala loves reading books and one of her favorite series is the Pigeon books by Mo Willems. She got this set as a birthday gift and we read them soooooo many times that we borrowed the rest of the Pigeon books (that we could find) from the library.

When I was thinking of what quiet book pages to make, I wanted to incorporate things that Koala would be familiar with. One of the first pages I worked on was a cookie jar. On Pinterest,  I saw a couple different pages with the cookie jar concept where the cookie jar opens up for the child to put a cookie in. 

Of all the different cookie jar pages, I liked this one the best: cookie jar

I traced this cookie jar and the letters (using my highlighter & computer screen) and cut out the felt pieces. I reinforced the opening of the cookie jar with Pellon to make it more durable and used my sewing machine to sew the jar on the page. 

But I decided to tweak the page to make it more interesting for Koala. One of the pigeon books is The Duckling gets a Cookie.

So I decided to add Duckling to the page just as an accent. 

Since the book was about the right size, I made the template for the Duckling by tracing the Duckling on the front cover. Then I glued the Duckling and the letters to the page. I also made a felt cookie. 

The cookie goes in Duckling's hand and in the jar. 

I added a snap to the back of the cookie and to the page so that the cookie snaps in place so that Duckling is holding it. 

Since this was one of the first pages that I completed, it was a learning experience.  When I was all done, I let Koala play with it and I learned 2 things. 

1) Loose pieces need to be attached with ribbon

Koala seemed to like the page right away and immediately knew to put the cookie in the cookie jar. As much as she liked the page, she really LOVED the cookie! She kept it with her and carried it around with her which is how the first cookie got lost. I made a new cookie and attached it with ribbon to the page. Koala was furious at first that the cookie was stuck to the page because she couldn't carry it around but she eventually got over it.

2) Glue isn't strong enough 

When researching how people put together the pages, it was hard to find details on exactly what materials people used. So I searched Pinterest for the best glue for felt and came across a pin that said Felt Glue was the best and 'bonds felt permanently'. Duh- seems logical that the best glue for felt is called Felt glue.

So I glued everything down from the cookie jar itself to the letters and Duckling-  feeling confident that the pieces would be 'bonded permanently.' But when I came home from work the first day that I let Koala play with it, I discovered that 1) the cookie was missing and 2) the cookie jar now read "co ki". Hubby told me that he found Koala picking off the letters. I glued them back on and gave the page back to her only to find that she was really interested in picking off the pieces and I realized that I would have to sew each piece down to the page so that she couldn't pick them off. It was a bit tedious because I ended up hand stitching everything on (except the cookie jar) because it's less frustrating to hand sew and requires less concentration since I'm not very good with the sewing machine. The drawbacks are that it's time consuming and my stitching is uneven. But it keeps everything in place and prevents Koala from peeling off the pieces. She's stopped attempting to pick pieces off since she knows they're stuck on. I no longer use the felt glue because I find that once the glue dries, it makes it really difficult to get the needle through the felt. It's one less step to skip the glue.

When I added a page to the other side of the Pellon, I messed up the stitching in the top right corner so I added Pigeon to the page to cover up my mistake. It worked out nicely. 

Here's the final product: 

Christmas 2014

This year, Christmas snuck up on me. It barely felt like the holidays because we had been traveling and next thing I know, it was already December and I didn't have my Christmas cards made yet! 

The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas went by so quickly because there were so many holiday events going on and not enough time. We ended up going to a lot of things and it was fun to see how Koala was now old enough to participate and enjoy the events.

There was of course our annual trip to see the zoo lights. I love that we have such a great zoo right here- it was voted the best zoo in the US in USA Today. And the lights are always pretty to go see in the winter. 

The best thing about the zoo membership is that you get unlimited entrance to the zoo lights Mon- Thurs and one admittance on the weekend. This is great because we can go without having to feel like we have to spend all evening there to make it worth it. This year, we ended up going twice and the weather was nice both times! 

Koala enjoyed the pretty lights and was such a ham- she would stop and pose in front of statues or lights and wait for me to take a picture. 

The Botanical Garden also had their annual weekend holiday event. They mostly have local artists/vendors selling their work but Santa comes to visit and they offer free carriage/hay rides. Koala loved the horses and had a blast riding on the hay ride! Luckily there weren't many people there so she was able to ride it a couple times. 

One of the local churches had A Night in Bethlehem where they have live scenes from the Bible, real animals and a Bethlehem 'marketplace' with crafts for the kids. 

Koala seemed to like petting the animals- camels, donkeys, goats and sheep. I was also surprised at how she was excited to participate in making the crafts as well. One tent was where they made a wreath to wear. I thought it would be too hard so I didn't go in but Koala really wanted to do it and went in on her own. She did such a good job making the wreath. The part she did turned out a lot prettier than the part I did. 

Santa came to visit a local suburb and there were more free carriage rides so we went to check it out. Koala was more impressed with the horses and a balloon than Santa lol

Unfortunately, free means long lines. The line for the carriage ride was too long and it was too cold. But since I promised Koala a horse ride (always keep your promises to kids. They'll remember when you don't), we drove to a mall and rode in the carriage ride there. She had a blast- hot chocolate while we waited and pretty lights on the carriage ride. 

Of course, Christmas isn't about Santa and horse rides. Koala participated in the children's play at church. 

Even though she didn't practice, she enjoyed being on stage and she seemed to follow the cues like when the shepherds talked about the sheep wandering off, she wandered off lol. She also was very interested in Baby Jesus and was gentle and even gave him a kiss. 

I was in charge of desserts for our Christmas lunch at church so I did a little baking- Reese's pieces cupcakes (chocolate cupcakes with peanut butter filling), thin mint truffles and a red and green velvet cake with buttercream frosting and crushed candy canes on top. 

Although the desserts did not come out as pretty as I wanted, they were more tasty than I expected- people kept saying how good they were. I guess ugly good tasting desserts are better than pretty bad tasting desserts lol. One day I'll perfect both and have pretty, yummy desserts. 

This year, I wrapped family presents in reusable Christmas bags again (which I apparently tied too tightly which made it hard to open lol. Oops). I like how easy they are to 'wrap' presents and they look good. Plus I love that they are reusable and better for the environment than wrapping paper. 

For Christmas, Koala decorated her first gingerbread house which was part of our second annual gingerbread house competition. Once again I didn't think she'd enjoy it as much as she did. She was really into decorating and using the sprinkles. Every now and then she snuck a bite of the toppings lol. 

Koala's gingerbread house. She had a little help from mommy and daddy. 

The finished houses. 

I love the holidays and all the fun activities so I'm a little sad that the holidays are over. Only 356 more days until Christmas 2015! 

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving! 

I LOVE thanksgiving! And this year I was especially excited for the food after being in Korea for so long. 

My Turkey Veggie platter 

I made a cornucopia based on this link from Pinterest. 

My cornucopia turned out to be smaller than I thought so I had leftover pizza dough and I made cheesy bread too. 

This is the cornucopia prebake.

Cornucopia & rolls: my brothers said I should have had more color contrast but I didn't feel like preparing something to put in the cornucopia 

I was also inspired to make more mini pies. This time I made pumpkin pie (for the first time! Thanks Maria for looking up the recipe for me when I shopped for ingredients!)

My mini pumpkin pies prebake, midbake and post.

My brothers deep fried a turkey for the second year in a row- tasted even better than last year 

Pre and post pics

The finished products (fried turkey and baked turkey- both were delish!) Koala approved of the turkey. She didn't really eat much but she ate a lot of turkey!

And the sides! Ah my favorite! I was sooo stuffed & satisfied after eating. (Garlicky Butternut squash, green beans & green bean casserole, mac n cheese, ham, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, stuffing, chap chae)

Carbs, carbs, carbs! Yesterday at my doctor's appointment, I was given my slip for my glucose test for my pregnancy. Thankfully, they said I could do it next week which meant I could enjoy all the carbs I wanted for thanksgiving! 

Decorations were simple this year: gold chargers and pumpkins!

Aside from being thankful for the food, I have many things to be thankful for- so many things but I'll list just 5.

1) I'm thankful for my Hubby. This year he went on a business trip- I think the first trip since we had Koala. I realized how much I need him and how much he helps out around the house. I'm thankful for him because we make a good team together. He's a good husband and dad. 

2.) I'm thankful for Koala- she is such a gift from God. She brings so much joy to our lives and makes me laugh even when she's dramatically crying. 

3) I'm thankful for Baby Boy and that he is healthy and the pregnancy is going well. I can't wait to meet him and see how he grows.

4) I'm thankful for my parents. They are so sacrificial and loving and I'm thankful that I live close to them so that we can spend time together. It was great being able to travel with them recently. I love that they adore Koala and love to spend time with her. I'm so thankful for my mom who watches Koala all the time and offers to help me out when she knows I'm tired, even though she's probably tired herself. She says that she is amazed at the mom I am and I say that I'm only the mom I am because I'm trying to be half the mom that she is. 

5.) I'm thankful for my siblings and the friendship that we have. I hope that Koala and Baby Boy can share that type of friendship when they grow up. 

Oops that's 5- I'll just list 2 more:

6.) I'm thankful for my friends who go the extra mile! Too many examples to list and I don't wanna forget anyone- I should thank them personally! 

7.) I'm thankful for my new job. Hubby told me that I don't complain about work anymore and I told him it's cause there's nothing to complain about. I'm thankful that God opened up this job at just the right time. 

I'm thankful for this time of year that I can remember all the blessings God gives me! I know I should be thankful everyday! 

Give Thanks!