Turn the Page

Last week I posted about the first page in the baby book that I'm making for our daughter, this week I thought I'd share the second page.

I knew I wanted to share about my pregnancy and where we lived in the book as well as the highlights of her first year. After all the time spent growing her was a pretty big moment in our life.  So I had plans for four pages of information.

The first is a map of where we lived at the time she was born (we have since moved out of state twice).

I used a tourist map that had been sitting in our glove box for over a year and a half. Upon inspection I was able to cut it into a 12 x 12 square and was able to mark  almost all the important places that I wanted to showcase.

I used scrap red paper, tooth picks, and glue to make the flags. I broke the tooth picks into thirds, and used the two pointy ends. Then I cut little triangles out of the red paper, wrapped the widest edge around the tooth pick enough to hold it into place and glued them together. Then I glued the flags into place.

I marked our home with a little house shape, used dotted lines to show the military base my husband was working at the time, used dotted lines to show our favorite walking trails (I walked almost everywhere while we lived in California- I miss being able to do that!), and used arrows to show the direction of places that we would go to often that weren't on the map.

I have flags showing:
The hospital Mia was delivered at
The movie theater we went to ofter
The shopping center
Other tourist-y places in the area

It was so easy to put together compared to the first page- lots less writing and it took a lot less time too! It's also my husband's favorite page in the book so far.  

A Shelf Can Be an Awful Thing

Our townhouse's almost open main floor layout doesn't allow for much space to hide toys, and I'm not comfortable letting our 13 month old, Mia, play in her room upstairs unsupervised. So a good chunk of her play things reside in our living room. We have this nice little window space that once held a fabric tote of toys, her little chair and her lion....

Well it worked for a long while, and never looked terribly messy. Until the toys started reproducing. My husband loves legos, as does Mia. And he is more than happy to spoil her with duplos. What started out as one box of duplos became two overflowing boxes of duplos, a large plate, and an alligator that eats them (Okay- I'll admit the alligator was my birthday gift to her). Then her birthday and Christmas came and suddenly there was so much the poor girl couldn't even get to anything.

*sigh* The OCD part of me is so embarassed by this mess, and the Mom in me can't believe my girl is big enough to be able to play with toys.

We did some research and tried to figure out the best solution, knowing that the living room arrangement will change once we finally find that perfect sectional for the right price (so before this new year is over) and also knowing we don't want to give up the empty space we have in the living room by getting a coffee table or ottoman that has a lot of storage space. My husband discovered that Ikea's expedit shelf had the perfect dimensions to fit in the space, so we decided to go get one.

We grew up in an area with no Ikea's nearby, so let me first say for two HGTV addicts with plans to purchase an old home someday and spend years remodeling it,  their showroom floor was pretty awesome. We got so many new ideas for Mia's "Big Girl" room. We tend to like older furniture with character, but it was still a pretty neat experience. 

We got home just in time for lunch and a little bit of play before it was time for a nap. It turns out the box doubles as a slide for toddlers. Mia kept climbing up it then letting her body slide down backwards.

We found our first piece of Ikea furniture to be really easy to assemble. We got it done with plenty of time to spare before nap time was over.

Then we quickly loaded it up with all the fun stuff.

I didn't want to pay $18 a basket, so I'm still on the hunt for baskets. The fact that the shelf comes
above the window ledge also bothers me more than I want to admit. So ironically even though we bought the shelf because it fits that space I'm considering moving it.

And how did Mia like her new toy shelf? 

She hated it.

She saw it as soon as I was bringing her downstairs and immediately started crying. When I set her down and tried to get her to play she started throwing herself to the ground and wailing. I've no idea if she was still tired, didn't like the change, or mad that we did it without her help but honestly it was a hilarious reaction to a new shelf.

Does anyone have any stories to share of ridiculous reactions kids have had to any changes in the home? And does anyone have any suggestions for baskets that will utilize the maximum space in each cube without an almost $20 price tag?

My DIY Baby Book

Before my daughter was born I knew I wanted to take the time to document her first year in a scrap book rather than the traditional fill-in-the-blank style baby book. I wanted to be able to easily add all the mementos and photos I could, while still making the book easy to flip through.

The first page of her book I wanted to hold a bunch of facts from the year she was born (2011). Inspiration struck when I finished rereading the Harry Potter series for the umpteenth time (I'm a huge fan). I decided to make the layout of the page like the front page of the wizarding newspaper. I was unable to come up with a unique title that I liked for my newspaper page- and wanting to start the project NOW I named it the Daily Prophet- like from the books.

I had taken a few nights and googled a bunch of information, then it was time to lay it out on paper. Not having a fancy printer or the software to be able to lay out the information on a standard 12 x12 scrapbook page I hand wrote all my facts- three times. Once as practice, once in pencil on the real page, then again in ink. My hand hurt at the end and I was so glad to be done- and happy with the end result!

My "articles" include:
What was Popular in 2011
Music that was Popular in 2011
What We Watched on TV
Big Movies in 2011
Average Cost of Things in 2011 (postage stamp, milk, car, house, gallon of gas, a 7-11 Slurpee etc...)
Big Headlines for 2011 (Osama bin Laden was found and killed, the end of the world was predicted twice by Harold Camping, the Occupy Wall Street Movement etc...)
I also included what her name was ranked by the Social Security Administration and who visited us in the hospital. 

I used a fine tip pen and a regular sharpie to give different dimension to the page. I also tried to write in different fonts and directions to help give it a less monotonous look. I chose to use a picture printed in sepia style to also give it that authentic "wizard newspaper" look.

When my 9 year old brother first glanced at the page he shouted "She was in the newspaper!" I told him that I thought she was special enough to have her own paper. 

Tutu Busy!

Happy 2013!

I didn't intend to have so much time in between this post and the last- but goodness was this holiday season ever busy! All three of us have been fighting an awful cold as of late- I feel like it's really been kicking this pregnant ladies bum. 

My crafting projects from last month included making 6 tutus for my nieces and I managed to put together a double page spread in my daughter's baby book scrapbook I'm making for her (Hopefully I'll finish that before the next little one gets here- I'm about 11 months behind!). We also got the supplies so I can make a cushion to go on the toy box we picked up for our daughter at Goodwill in the beginning of December (more on that later) and add a week of travel visiting family out of state and our month disappeared!

I'm so so happy with how the tutus turned out- and all the nieces seemed to love them.

I know there's a couple zillion tutorials out there for making tutus, but I thought I'd share a few pictures of my way of putting them together.

The first tutu I made was back in October when I made a ghost costume for our daughter. I bought tulle off the bolt for cheap and quickly found that having to cut the strips both width and length wise was not for me. As I don't have a cutting board or anything, and I'm impatient and "just want to get it done" my strips turned out all ragged and uneven but it turned out okay, after all it was for a ghost!

I attached some ribbon to the front of her tutu and also made a matching bow, which I attached to some loops that I sewed onto a plain headband. I put those loops on a plain black and a plain white headband that she has, the loops allow me to change out the bows on the headband whenever I feel like it. (Also the little chair in the background was reupholstered by my husband- it used to be pink with white polka dots. Little girl loves yellow and owls).

Despite not liking all the extra cutting I enjoyed the project and knew that I wanted to make some for our nieces for Christmas. I found a site online that I could purchase tulle on the roll for $1.65 a piece and looked around online to get an idea of how big I should make the waist bands for each girl.

Then came the actual prep and assembly.
I used one of my husband's tape measurers and some scissors. I also found that requesting my husband's help with the cutting, some hot coca and lots of episodes of the Walking Dead (thank you Netflix) were super helpful. Oh! And breaks to stretch the pregnant back are needed.

I made my strips 16 inches long. I would measure and cut one strip, then layer the tulle on top, cut to match and repeat until I had maybe 10-12 strips. Then I would move my stack and repeat the process. I used about 2 rolls of tulle per tutu, but the largest waist band I covered was 20 inches long. You would need more tulle for larger tutus.

  

The next step is the easiest part. I laid my three colors in front of me and created a pattern. I layer 3 strips of tulle and tie a knot. With the first tutu I made I used a slip knot, but read somewhere that those can come undone. So I just tied a regular knot on these. Tight enough to keep them attached, but not tight enough to make the elastic fold over.

I did a pattern of 3 color combinations: the first was the aqua, purple, aqua; the second was pink, aqua, pink; and the third was purple, pink, purple. I just repeated those patterns around until when given a stretch the elastic doesn't show too much in between each knot.

- That's where the cocoa and Walking Dead came in handy- super repetitive work calls for good drinks and good shows ;) -    

That's it! They're super easy to make :)

My craft list for the year is already pretty long- hopefully this cold disappears soon and I can get started!