Holiday Bazaar!!!

The Holiday Bazaar is on-campus today and tomorrow. I can't wait to go and "borrow" ideas from the vendors. Here's a link to the holiday fun.

Recycled project

My cat is fat. He also poops a lot. Because of this, I go through a bunch of litter and end up with a bunch of litter buckets. I don't want to throw the buckets away because they are perfectly okay, but one can only have so many buckets in her closet before it begins to overflow. To remedy this, I have started using them as pots. They are a whole lot cheaper than the $14 pots than the discount chain stores sell. The only problem is that buckets with "Cat Litter" printed on them aren't very attractive for your house.

Did I also mention that my cat likes to sharpen his claws? This isn't a new discovery for cats, however, my cat only likes to use the leopard-print scratching post. I discovered this the other day when I tried to replace his old scratching post with a new one. He would not use it.

One day, I decided to clean out the closet, which involved me pulling out the old scratching post. The cat ran immediately to the old one and started scratching, even though the rope was worn out.

Since I am stubborn, I decided I would not be bested by a cat. I also hate spending money on stuff that's not used so I decided to do an old switch-er-roo on him. I replaced the old rope with the new rope from the new scratching post. He loves the old one even more now.

I didn't want to throw the old rope away, so I decided to save it for something. Thanks to my cat, I now have a cute flower pot, made from reusable materials from my cat.


I also used some jute string I had laying around the house too.

Painting Tiles

Lately, I have also been painting tile. I've discovered that Lowe's sells 6 x 6 tile for less than $.50 a piece. Pair that with paint on-hand and some left over polyurethane from previous projects, and you have a very inexpensive craft project.




My biggest fear was that when putting a hot pot on it, it would melt and maybe even explode (It wouldn't explode, but I always imagine the worst in my theories ;) ) I boiled a small pot of water and set it on the tile and, what do you know, no cracking tile!

Here is another shot of more tile:

Free-motion quilting

I am working on a quilt now that has a solid front and back. My idea was to have a quilt that showcased the free motion quilting on it. I saw the stitch design on a quilt at J.C. Penny and decided to sew it. It turns out, someone else had the same idea, except her's is in a smaller size. Watch the video of the checkerboard pattern being sewn. If only I could sew that fast...

Previously Designed Quilts/Afgans

Here are some quilts and afgans that I have made throughout the years...

This is the first afgan I had ever made. It is made from a loop loom. Who knows how many of the loops I used. I even seperated the colors out into individual plastic baggies so that I could gather the colors so easily. The only downside to this blanket is the sheer weight of the afgan. It seriously has to weigh at least 20 pounds.

My favorite memory about this afgan is where I made a lot of the squares. I would go to work with my dad during the summer and sit under the trees and loom (if that is the correct verb) while he cut timber. Then, I would ride with him in the log truck and loom squares. Some of the loops were made from my mother's stockings. I even used socks when I had run out of stocking loops.

I don't know how I came up with some of the patterns. My favorite square pattern is the houndstooth pattern. I made this one by having 2 loops of one color, followed by another 2 loops of another color. This was done on both sides of the loom.

My second afgan was this one. This quilt is memorable to me just because it took me forever to finish (almost 3 years!). It took me that long because I was just learning how to crochet and was not very fast. I remember working on this quilt my freshman year on my way to the Beta Club Convention in Biloxi. Another memory of this afgan is the fact that my mom made some of the blocks for it. you can tell which ones she did because her stitches are a lot tighter than mine.

I didn't crochet any afgans for a while after that. I made one my freshman year, but I gave it to a lady at my parents' church. I will try to get a picture of it sometime. Here is the picture of the pattern that I crocheted. It's called the Prairie Star Afgan.

My next afgan was made from yarn I got for Christmas in 2003. I wasn't sure what I wanted for Christmas, but I did know that I wanted to make this particular afghan. My mom let me have the yarn early so that I could work on this project during Christmas break from College. I stayed up many nights watching TV and crocheting. Songs from the Wizard of Oz would pop into my head while crocheting this quilt because of the colors.

My roomate, Lauren, loved to quilt and inspired me to try quilting. This is the first quilt that I made. It is not advised to let circles be your first pattern... My squares don't line up perfectly. This pattern was called an eclipse. I didn't follow the suggestions for the colors, as you can probably tell.

I also pieced together the back of the quilt with leftover fabric from the quilt. I miscalculated and bought WAY too much fabric. I bought 3 yards of each color instead of having 3 yards total the shapes.

Because of the fabric overpurchase, I made another quilt. One would think that sewing large blocks together woudl be easy, however, that was not the case. They never line up ;).

The back of this quilt is frogs. I like frogs.

The next quilt I made was made for a boy in college... a boy who is now my husband :) He loves Megaman. I was talking about making a quilt one day and he is like "why don't you make me a quilt with Megaman on it. He was joking, of course, but I took it as a mission... a mission to make a Megaman quilt. I used my mom's overhead projector to blow up the image to be four feet tall and then traced it on wax paper. I then cut out the pieces of megaman to the corresponding color. I used sewing glue to sew the pieces together and then stitched them on the quilt. I used a navy twin-sized sheet to sew the character on and then used a light-blue back.

Now, he wants me to make him a Protoman quilt to go with his Megaman quilt.

The next afgan I crocheted was this one. I made it because I was tired of quilting. I came up with this pattern on my own. I gave it to Christopher as a Christmas present. That year was the first year that he had celebrated Christmas with my family.

This crocheted afgan is one of my favorite ones, even though I don't use it. It reminds me of a men's shirt. This is the cat's blanket. He loves lying on it.

I made this next quilt after I got a bunch of yarn one Christmas. I thought it would be fun to make a quilt with a bunch of different colors, while at the same time, using up the bits of yarn that I had on-hand.

I made this quilt while working at a TV station. The room where I worked was kept at around 60-65 degrees farenheit. That is one reason why this afgan is so large. I wanted something that I could wrap around me and keep me warm, no matter how cold the room got.

The great thing about working at 3:30 a.m. is that no one else is around. This is a good thing because this is when I did most of my crocheting. It also was a great way to keep warm.

This is another afghan I made while working at the TV station.

I made two baby blankets too, but I don't have pictures of them right now.

This is the latest crocheted afghan. I'm not sure if it is a great baby blanket since it's made from regular yarn. It is made from granny squares.

The special thing about this quilt is that I made most of it while driving to and from Cleveland, Ohio for a wedding.

Now, you are up to speed on my latest afghans and quilts... and I can keep track of what I have made over the years :)

I need to update this thing.....

So, I finished my tie quilt, officially... Here are some pictures:


The whole quilt. It's a lap quilt.



Close-up of free-hand stitching

The back... I decided to free-hand quilt on the sewing machine.

I did a flower. You can see the hand-sewn stitches in the upper right-hand corner. I gave up hand-quilting. The machine is where it's at... except when you forget where the needle is and sew your finger, like I did. It was not as bad as this person's mishap.