New Project July 11, 2009

This is my newest crafty endeavor

Yes that is a bib. No I’m no pregnant. This is a start of several for a few friends and family members who are expecting or just had little ones. What do you guys think? Should I fill in the frosting on the cupcake? How bout the wrapper? This will get snaps and then its ready to go. I have a couple more ideas- smart@$$ed as well that I will share as I get them done. I would really love some feedback on this one.

I am a champion February 9, 2009

I’ve paid my dues -
Time after time -
I’ve done my sentence
But committed no crime -
And bad mistakes
I’ve made a few
I’ve had my share of sand kicked in my face -
But I’ve come through
(And we mean to go on and on and on and on)

I have my good days and my bad. I have days where I sit at the bottom of a pool of anger, despair, self-doubt and fear. They are very few and far between, but I believe that everyone has them from time to time. I also have days where I’m soaring at the top of my game, world, life. I love everything and everyone and have no doubts or worries. These are more common but also somewhat rare. Most days I spend in a happy medium. I am concerned about things like my health and our financial situation, but am happy to have what I do- a wonderful home, husband, family and friends.

I am a curious person. I want to learn anything and everything. I am also opinionated and outspoken. It earned me a great deal of dislike in high school when I first moved back to Missouri because I was never content to sit there and listen to other students give wrong answers if I knew the right one. I wanted to be a teacher and thats what I did- I taught along side my teachers. After the first year the really bitchy girls were gone and a lot of the kids recognized the benefit of having someone who spoke teacherese and teenager and my explanations of difficult problems helped them out a lot. I still give random lectures at home to the J’s because they take correspondence courses instead of going to public school so they don’t have the benefit of a teacher every day. Some days I’m digging biology and I might explain DNA to them and on other its history or literature. Its how I am.

I spend a lot of my time doing for others. I cook, clean, and craft for other people. I like to believe that I am kind and generous altho I will be the first to admit that I can be a bit jealous of our resources when they are limited. I still share more than I keep for myself. With my husband I take my younger siblings in law into our house on a weekly basis.

I am quick to judge, but I am willing and eager to change my judgment if I realize that I was wrong. I am always willing to admit I was wrong in arguments because people who hold out just because they can’t say they were wrong irritate me.

I am like a pit bull when it comes to perserverance. As stubborn as a mule, but not stupid. I will attack a problem from every side until I either decide its not worth my time or solve it to my satisfaction.

Some of you (okay most of you) will be wondering where this random seeming resume of me is coming from. I received a very negative and unpleasant message aimed at my heart over the weekend from an annonymous sender who aparently really dislikes me and I don’t know where the attack came from. I don’t know whether it was from a friend, family member, reader, or complete stranger and I don’t care. I do know that I wasn’t so upset by it as I was curious about it, but I’m going to let it go.  So if the sender is reading this, this is all the coverage you’re getting. As I finish typing this, you are gone from my mind. I had my say to you and now I am done.

 

2 weeks December 18, 2008

It doesn’t seem even the least bit possible that there are only two weeks left in this year. However as unlikely as that seems, even more unbelievable (for me) is the fact that theres also only 2 weeks left in my 22 year. This year has literally flown by and I don’t know where it went.

We’re finished with all of our Christmas shopping and I’m nearly done with all my Christmas crafting. There will probably be a large section of time after this coming Thursday when I won’t want to even set foot in my craft room- thats how sick of all this work I am. However I still need to finish 1 purse, 1 crayon/colored pencil carrier, and about 50 bajillion of those silly picture ornaments. I had been sewing them by hand in the evenings while watching tv but I was watching my little stash of embroidery thread diminish at an alarming rate not to mention that I would only finish about 4 each night before saying Screw it I don’t want to do this anymore. So today I broke down and started using the machine.

I walked into a shelf this morning. I was coming out of my husband’s game room and he has some display shelves on the wall and I happened to be just the right height to narrowly miss my eye and hit my eyebrow instead and now I have a big old bump. We have a family Christmas get together on Saturday and I’m just praying that it doesn’t bruise too badly because its actually step family and I don’t want them leaping to the worst possible conclusion. Seriously who’s going to believe I actually ran into a shelf? My husband tried so hard not to laugh when I told him. Especially because when I walked out of the room after telling him, I ran into our bathroom door. Can we say accident prone?

Speaking of Jarell, he got me Christmas and Birthday presents this year which may not sound like much, but usually in all the rush of Christmas he has a hard time remembering my birthday because his family doesn’t celebrate due to the whole Jehovah’s witness thing. This year he got it all done ahead of time and I have no clue what I got and I’m ecstatic. I’ve always been good at guessing gifts and always considered it a curse. For me theres nothing worse than looking at the present and knowing what it is, especially if I know I won’t like it, and having to still act surprised and happy when I open it. One notable exception being when he got me my sewing machine for Christmas last year because I just couldn’t wait to get it open and start playing with it.

I guess thats enough random babble for today. If I can get the internet to function again tomorrow, I’ll try to post again, but we’ll see.

Happy Holidays folks!

Picture Ornaments Tutorial December 11, 2008

I am sure these are a dime a dozen out there and I am certain someone has made tutorials for these as well, but I haven’t found (or looked for for that matter) any so I’m going to share my particular version of these. Actually this is more suggestions and a trial and error list of lessons than tutorial with step by step instructions.

Supplies

White cotton or linen fabric amount varies but you’ll need a square slightly larger than each one of your photos

iron on transfer paper- I used Avery and was very pleased with the results

iron

printer and computer

digital pictures or old photos and a scanner or both

felt

embroidery floss

scissors and a needle

a little stuffing for each photo to make a little ornament pillow

 

I started by cropping a selection of each photo that I wanted in my free photo editing software, Gimp. I don’t save the changes to the original photo but instead transfer the changes to a new empty document. However you choose to go about this part is up to you. I saved all my pictures into documents with a page size of 8 1/2 by 11 so that when it came time to print they would all fit on and use up one sheet of the iron on transfer paper.

I changed all my photos to black and white and lightened some of them that were darker. I then tinted them to give them a sepia tone but you could print in full color, black and white or even crazy Warhol inspired tones- its entirely up to you.

Once you have all your pictures edited to your liking print the pages out onto the special paper. I went into my printers preferences (on the print screen) and set the paper type to Photo Transfer paper but I don’t know if this makes a difference. We’ll assume it does and say thats an important step. Also since you’re using photos for this project set the quality to best or photo or whatever is the optimal print setting so that these babies come out looking fabulous.

Once they’re printed separate your photos, cutting off any parts of the picture that you don’t want included in the finished project.

Prepare your surface and read the instructions on the back of the transfer paper packaging. I did make sure that there was no water in my iron and shut off the steam but I didn’t check to make sure there were no bits of string stuck to my fabric and a couple of my photos have blue spots on them from random stuff in my craft room. Make sure that there is an even surface under your photo- if you have a pillow case under it, make sure that it is all the way under the picture- the reason being that uneven surfaces equal …. unique textures that aren’t quite right in the finished project.

It took about 45 seconds per photo for the ironing and in case you’re wondering, no you can’t reuse the photos- the whole sticky side comes off on your fabric and thats that. Allow the photos to cool fully (about 2 minutes off the hot surface) before trying to peel the backing from the fabric. Don’t iron on a surface that might be ruined by high heat i.e. that antique sewing cabinet that belongs to your step mother. (learned this at 6 am one Saturday when I was in High School- serves her right for waking me up to do something she should have done the day before)

Now to the ornaments. I made a couple of these that were larger, but as they say, hindsight is 20/20 and I would make the pictures wallet sized or just slightly larger. Trim around the outside edge of your photo leaving an edge of about an 8th of an inch-ish. Cut a piece of felt to the same size while you’re at it. Place your felt and picture together with the right sides out. Arm yourself with needle and embroidery floss and blanket stitch around the outside edge till you have only a small opening left. Stuff the little pillow shape lightly- just enough to give it some dimension or more if you wish- and finish sewing the opening shut. For a hanger you can do several things. you could attach some ribbon and go that route, you could use some extra embroidery floss to make a loop as I chose to do, or you could even take a metal hanger and hook the little end through your blanket stitches and hang it that way.

I am making these with pictures of my nieces and nephews for my MIL and SIL, my brothers and I for my parents my step mom, and even a couple of family pets for our own tree. The subject matter options are endless. I may have one of each of my nieces and nephews on the tree for them to take home from Christmas this year so that they have them as keepsakes. In addition to family photos you can add sayings to these in a photo editing software- just go wild and have a blast.

My beautiful camera assistant

Crafty spasticness July 1, 2008

Do you all ever get one of those feverish urges to create something for a holiday or other special occasion and then put them off till the last minute? No? Really! Well I coulda sworn…. oh well anywayz, I do regularly. Not so much for the littler holidays, but with increasing frequency the larger holidays bring out this strange woman who hides the rest of the year in a dusty back corner of my mind. So of course Independence Day brought this weirdo to the forefront and she has been running a little rampant. In all actuality she mostly just cruises massive numbers of crafty sites while copying free templates to her numerous craft template folders. I’m a subfolder girl who likes things organized by year make and model so this is necessary but I digress. Then this crazy lady goes into her Printmaster Pro program and finds even more crap totally neat stuff like whirly gigs and photo cubes. Fortunately again she does little more than peruse and add occasional photos and then she promptly deletes without saving the changes because she is also an ink miser who doesn’t want to waste her precious printer ink on crappy stock photos anyway. But then…. oh then she gets a brilliant idea and the heavens open and a light shines down upon her like it did on Joseph so many years ago. There is a heavenly chorus of “awwes” and a voice from above says “This is my beloved craft guru- hear ye him!” (note: I was raised in the RLDS church and thats where these references come from)

Anyhoo the reason for all this ramblin madness. I had a brilliant message from above err I mean idea to make those cute little chinese takeout box things for favors at our 4th of July get together and I got a couple different ones printed and decided to torture you with them share them with you. They’re really simple to make and you can find the templates for them at the following sites:

larger box: www.packagetech.com

smaller box: www.ruthannzaroff.com/mirkwooddesigns/takeout.htm

Both were fairly simple to make and I enjoy the end results. Teeny little things tho so keep that in mind. The big one is all of about 2.5 inches tall and the little one is probably half that. Fun to make and I printed them on colored cardstock (red and blue) and then simply used a paint template to make several sizes of white stars to decorate them with. Would be cute for jewelry boxes for those of us who have etsy accounts too.

Well folks have a wonderful evening and I’ll see you all tomorrow.

Just a quick note for now April 28, 2008

I run around on a lot of how to sites and today I thought I’d share a couple of fun project links from one of my favorites.
The website is called Cut Out + Keep
Here are a few ideas that grabbed me.
Rhumba earrings
Felted balls
Necktie Feathers

Try those out and check out the website as well. I may be back later, I may not. I gots a lot to do today what with the sorting of the boxes of junk and all.
Have fun children

Off we go into the wilde blue yonder March 11, 2008

Hey all its me again. We’re headed off to Florida and I’m sitting in the terminal waiting for our plane. The free wi-fi advertised all over is not functioning on my computer so I’m using my trusty fall back plan of my cell phone. I love being able to take my internet with me and can only hope I get good signal at the hotel down there. We’re staying at some Buenavista Resort and Spa– sounds fancy huh? But the 8 of us will be in a 3 bedroom condo thingy so its gonna be a little cramped. I can’t promise anything too crafty while I’m down there but I did pack a very small sewing kit and several different scraps of fabric and if you’ve seen my babies, you know thats all I really need. They’ll be hairless and unstuffed but I can embroider them. Thats my “just in case Melissa goes crazy in Florida” emergency stash and I really plan to just kinda take a break. I will however be keeping an eye out for lots of crafty stuff to bring back with me. I made sure to leave extra room in my bag . I don’t have much to leave you with but I’ll take a quick pic of my current project and post it here later.

New to this site March 4, 2008

I’m new to this blog but thought I’d give it a shot since none of my myspace friends seem particularly interested in hearing about me melting plastic bags a la etsylabs or about my little dolls scrapbooking etc. So I will try for a new audience and see what happens. My name is Melissa altho thanks to a clever random comment from my mom I have taken upon myself the moniker of HellesBelles. In other places I am known as littlesongbird17/86 or songbird86 or more recently whitecoralbelles but since there are so many names that amuse me I find it hard to choose just one. Its similar in my real life where as a newly wed of almost a year I’m still receiving items in my maiden name along with things to my married self. Its really quite confusing but c’est la vie, n’est ce pas? I have an etsy account that I’m still a bit uncertain about but its a work in progress. Its located at http://www.whitecoralbelles.etsy.com/ if you should happen to be interested but bear in mind the earlier stated work in progress comment. That said allow me to introduce myselves. I am a young female living in what is possibly one of the most meteorologically diverse states in this nation, Missouri. It was 75 on Sunday followed by a brisk 22 on Tuesday and today I haven’t seen the temp but its neither one of those. I have two and a half dogs since a) one is technically not ours she just resides here with a temporary permanancy and/or b) one is a 9 0r 10 week old puppy of unknown origins. They choose to be named Missy, Tinkerbell, and Pepper and are the queens of this 70 acres on which we live. I am as I mentioned earlier a newly wed and in fact our anniversary is on the 14th so we’ve almost made it through a whole year. Hooray! I have two younger brothers, two step-brothers, one step-sister, and 16 brothers and sisters in law. Yipes! My husband is the middle of 14 children and since his parents are currently in Mexico for their business we are taking care of the younger 4 kids ages 12, 14, 14, and 16. It is I must say a strange feeling being a semi surrogate parent to teenagers having been one myself not so long ago.
Crafts
When it comes to crafting, anything goes. I sew, scrapbook, draw, paint with acrylics on several surfaces, knit, crochet, and do strange things with random bits and ends when I find them. I can never say for sure what will catch my eye next but I often liken myself to a magpie who has tumbled into Aladins cave of wonders— so many of shiny objects, so little time. I won’t post any projects today because the kids are starting to microwave frozen burritos and that does not count as a healthy meal in this house. I must go make my copycat panera bread cheesy brocolli soup. Yum!!