Edited to add: For all of you lovelies who are visiting from Abby’s fabulous blog, welcome! I hope you enjoy your visit. 
So I saw this surprise ball and decided I had to make one of my own. And I decided to fill it with cute trinkets and a gift card and give it to my niece for her wedding shower (and then I wouldn’t have to attempt carry a blender with me on the airplane). You basically wrap lots of tiny things in crepe paper, turning and turning as you go, until it’s a ball-o-goodies. (It will probably help to look at the link up there, so you can see what I mean.)
I got all these trinkets to go inside:
I found crepe paper and used my chef’s knife to slice it in half, so that the strips would be thinner. Then I started wrapping!
I was worried that it wouldn’t be ball-shaped…
But it worked out in the end.
My niece unraveled it bit by bit…
It took quite a while to get to the center, but it was fun to watch. Surprise balls are my new favorite thing. I think they’re the only gift I’ll ever give from now on.
Yay, we finally have Halloween photos to share! So just to give you some background, our friend Bud always does an elaborate costume for Halloween. This year he asked us to be a part of it, and our group grew and grew. Then a documentary filmmaker became interested in it, and so she filmed us as we made the costumes, donned them, and paraded down 6th Street. It was so much fun!
Our theme was Steampunk Oz. Steampunk is a genre of sci-fi/fantasy that is based on the idea that in the future, steam power is used for everything. It involves a lot of gadgets and gas masks, leather and velvet, goggles and clocks.
Our cast of characters:
- Toto/the Flying Monkey – Bud. He crafted a HUGE Toto, and Bud’s head was actually the head of the flying monkey that was riding on Toto’s back. He was able to turn Toto’s head from side to side and open and close his massive jaw. One eye was a flashlight, so Bud would flash it on every so often.
- Dorothy – Lex. Bud actually made her wig out of yarn. He’s that cool.
- Tin Man – Justin. He was on stilts all night (which I was VERY nervous about… I was so afraid he might fall or get tripped in the crowd), and made his costume himself. Bud sculpted the mask, and Justin painted it.
- Scarecrow – me! I put my costume together from thrift store finds, hula skirts, and my dad’s way cool painter’s mask.
- Lion – John. Bud sculpted John’s mask, and John found the awesome dreads for his mane and beard.
- Wicked Witch of the West – Liane. She had an amazingly tall hat, and her skirt had a huge bustle in the back.
- Glinda – Kelly. She joined us only about a week before Halloween, and looked great with her corset and crown.
Hope you enjoy the photos!
Hi folks! It’s Sunday night, and I’m procrastinating on laundry and getting ready for the workweek. So, I’m doing my favorite thing, writing a list.
- On the food front, we’ve been eating lots of simple meals at home from some of our old favorite recipes. I posted the recipe for this soup four years ago, almost to the day! It’s still just as delicious, trust me.
- Also yummy was a broccoli-tomato-garlic saute with pasta and Parmesan cheese. Yum.
- I’m so excited, because this Thursday is the first day of the Austin Film Festival. If you need me at any time between October 22 – 29, I will be at the movies. Please leave a message.
- Also, Halloween costume? Check! I pretty much finished it this weekend, madly sewing and attaching and inserting and threading and making. I still have just a couple small details to add. I’m pretty excited about it, and no, I can’t tell you what it is. But I promise, I will post photos after Halloween!
- This week (on top of all the film festival goodness), I’m going to my friend Nicole’s place for a pumpkin-carving party, to my friends Bryan and Jason’s place for a welcome-to-the-new-loft party, and to my friend Chad’s for his 30th birthday party. Exciting, maybe a bit overwhelming for one little week, though…. we’ll see how I hold up.
- On Friday night, my friend Rachel and I sat at the bar at Vino Vino and chatted and drank wine until the wee hours. Then we went for a walk and chatted some more. Then we went back to her place and chatted some more. Then we woke up the next morning and chatted some more. I love those kinds of friends/nights/talks.
- The weather has been fabulous lately… it feels like autumn. I bought a pumpkin spice candle today, because it’s officially okay to have your house smelling like pumpkin spice now that it’s October.
Hope you all have been doing well, and that your October is also lovely.
Happy (belated) Halloween everybody!
Last night we went to a friend’s loft for a costume bash…lots of fun. Then of course we had to take a stroll down 6th street to check out the crazy costumes. There didn’t seem to be many original ones this year, though…probably because our friend Bud, who comes up with outrageous costumes, wasn’t in town this year.
My friends Bryan and Bru did a great job on their costumes as Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield from Pulp Fiction. They had the EXACT shirts that John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson wore in the film, as well as a briefcase (with glowing wonder inside) and the famous wallet. Hilarious.
I was a bee…
And Justin was a bird (he made it all himself)…
So together we were the birds and the bees.
Hope everyone had a safe and fun Halloween!
My boss’s birthday was last week…I usually bake something yummy for office birthdays, but my boss has been adhering to a strict weight loss plan for a while now, and I didn’t want to tempt him with anything sweet. I still wanted to give him something homemade, so I crafted these wine charms for him.
They were a lot of fun to make. I used regular old Shrinky Dink material, cut it into rectangles, and rounded the corners. Then I traced the words (I chose words that are often used to describe wine, and sometimes used to describe people) from a sheet I had printed and colored them in. I punched a hole toward the top and baked according to the directions on the package, and voila! Wine charms. All I had to do then was attach them to a jump ring and a wire loop, which I found in the jewelry section at Hobby Lobby.
Next time I think I’ll opt for the slightly more expensive but easier-to-use printable Shrinky Dink material, so that Justin can design something fabulous on the computer and I can just print and shrink away. For now, though, I have about eight pages of Shrinky Dink to use up, so I’ll be scouring the web for some fun crafty ideas to draw by hand or trace. I’m liking the whole charm thing…maybe I’ll make some silly pendants or keychains.
Random fun link: 3191…A year of evenings. Gorgeous photographs from two very talented ladies.
Just look at this baby! Isn’t she fabulous? This is Freya, the daughter of my friends Courtney and Mark. She’s a little over two months old now, and she’s smiling, holding her head up, and generally looking cute.
I started embroidering onesies for her a few weeks back, and I bought them a size too big so I would have enough time to finish them before she moved on to the next size. This was a Sublime Stitching pattern, but I made three more…an elephant, a penguin, and an octopus. I used one of my trusty Japanese craft books for the design, then free-handed it to make it larger. I suppose I could have used a copy machine, but I was impatient (we don’t have a scanner, either). Doing these made me remember how much I enjoy embroidery…but I seem to run out of things to embroider. You only need so many tea towels, you know?
