Copycat Headbands

I love accessories. They're a great way to make my stay-at-home-mom gear look a little more polished. Right now it's necklaces and headbands.

I picked up this little beauty at Target for $7.99. I love the colors, but it slides out pretty easily (I have soft hair and "no hook" as a college friend once informed me - you know that little bump at the back of your head that helps headbands stay on).

I was thinking the other day that maybe one of those stay-put headbands might help keep it in place. Anyway, I have some scrap fabric left over from this great little tutorial from Make it, Love it. http://www.makeit-loveit.com/2009/05/scrappy-camera-strap.html. My scraps were pretty similar colors to the original - I have a weakness for orange, but I figured I'd give it a shot.

My scrap was about 17 inches. I ironed in some seams and stitched it all around.

Then I did some accordian-like folds and pinned it in place.
I cut a piece of an old stay-put headband, the kind with the grips weaved in, about 6 inches long and popped that in the end.

After running several seams to hold the elastic in place, I checked the length and did the same on the other side.

Viola! New headband! Or two!

Change of Address Cards

It's amazing what you can do when your children are entertained. Since my neighbor is sick, we had her two kiddos for a playdate today. They had a great time and mommy got a lot of stuff done.

I pounded out 20 cards for my friend MG to pass out at their going away party tomorrow. And 9 cellphone shaped ones for her preteen daughter. I have to say they are AWESOME. So awesome, in fact that I decided to share.

For the ground ups, I made up a little poem (I had a little help from the sick neighboor - she rhymes better than me). And included a 3-D little cactus flower and house. Here it is.

We're moving to the desert where it's toast and hot.
Please keep in touch, 'cause we'll miss you a lot.

The kid one is shaped like a cell phone and includes some text-speak the teenagers use. Yes, I had to look it up because I'm not as up on the lingo as the kiddos and not a very good texter.

Check 'em out.

The Kool-Aid Mom

I sometimes like to think of myself as the Kool-Aid Mom. The house where the kids in the 'hood like to congregate. Or maybe it's the fact that the swingset is in my backyard and that my house is in the middle of the block. But anyway, I do love it when the kids hang out here.

I remember when I was a kid and was always at my BFF's house (she had Nintendo and all we had was Atari). I also remember my mom wishing we would be at our house. I think she just really wanted to know where we were, but maybe she wanted to be "Kool-Aid Mom" too.

I had all the kids over the other day to decorate cookies. Check out the sprinkles little J used on his cookies. It was more about eating than decorating.

My neighborhood rocks.

T-Shirt goes from frumpy to OooLaLa

My family wears these silly "Happy Camper" t-shirts on all of our camping trips, which, during the summer, is a lot. We try to go as often as possible.

We got back from a trip last summer and I saw this pic of myself in mine. Yikes! Since when did I look so frumpy? And it's like P is staring at the worst part! Oh, and cut me some slack, we are camping after all.

I've been reading the Dress A Day blog for a while and figured I could take some scissors to the offensive t-shirt.

I started by cutting off the crew neck and turning into a slight sweetheart line. Next, I shortened the sleeves and length of the shirt itself.

I'm really into a banded bottom t-shirt right now, so I ran a quick straight stitch all the way around the new bottom of the shirt, pulling the string to gather it a bit. Measuring the left over bottom to fit around the upper part of my hips, I trimmed off the excess. I sewed the left over together forming a big circle and pinned it to my newly gathered shirt bottom.

A quick seam to attach the band and seam around all my raw edges, and BAM! new t-shirt.

Totally Inspired

So, my friend, KS got me hooked on pinterest.com. It's pretty freaking awesome, if you haven't checked it out. Anyway, there are so many amazing DIY pins on there that I'm inspired to blog about some of my own. I've been pretty lax as of late in posting on my blog, but I'm hoping this new inspiration keeps me going.

I'm going to start with my latest DIY project and will later document some of my older ones.

For Father's Day, I decided I wanted to make the hubs a new tire cover for our camper. If you've been camping with us lately, you'll know that the whole fam wears these silly "Happy Camper" t-shirts (stay tuned for a future post on how I altered mine).

I was inspired by a sticker my sis-in-law gave my husband for Christmas a couple years ago. It's based on the Colorado license plate.

I picked up some vinyl at the local fabric store, a leather needle for my machine and some heavy duty thread. You can use a Sharpie to write on the back of the fabric and it won't show through. I typed up the letters "HAPPY CAMPER" and printed them off on my computer. After cutting them out and tracing them (backwards) on the vinyl, I cut out each letter, pinned them in place and stitched them down. Since I don't usually sew on anything other than cotton fabric, it took a bit of adjusting to get the machine to sew correctly.

The old tire cover measured 24 inches in diameter, so I worked with a circle cut about 25 inches. I added the sides and a small track for tightening it around the tire.

Here's the final product. We'll be the most styling campers on our next trip in a couple weeks.