Gifts for twin baby girls

A friend of mine recently gave birth to two adorable baby girls (Okay, I haven't seen them yet, but I'm SURE they're adorable!) bringing their family size to a grand total of 6! Yea for families with four kids! LOL! Anywho, I wasn't really sure what they needed, so I decided flex my creative muscle & borrow ideas from all the talented crafters in blog land.

I have been wanting to use these gorgeous fabrics ever since I saw them, but didn't have any need to. Now I do! My first project: Burp Cloths! These burp cloths were made from a free pattern at You Can Make This. My kids think they look like dog bones, but they are the perfect fit over your shoulder. I used the fringe idea from Homemade by Jill to make them even more cute and for ease in sewing.
It's like a burp cloth sandwich. Tee hee.

One side has the beautiful girly girl cotton fabric, while the other side has soft flannel.

And now for something completely different...an idea of my own! Bath mitts! This was super easy & they are super cute. I may just give you a little tutorial (although I'm sure you could figure it out on your own) mostly so I can help you avoid the mistakes I made (although I'm sure you wouldn't make a mistake in the first place, right?)

Then there's the showstoppers!

Okay, that may be a bit over dramatic, but these were a real labor of love. I learned to use my embroidery machine with these. I ruined one & had to start over. I broke two machine needles. That was just for the monograms.

Then there were the ruffles.

Check out those frou frou ruffly butts! Oh my! I used this tutorial from UCreate. This was WAY harder than it should have been. I'm hoping that's just because I used satin ribbon & not because I'm a poor seamstress! :O

It's supposed to have 3 rows of ruffles each, but I stopped after just 2.
Oh, well. They are adorable now & I'm sure she'll appreciate them!

Memorial Day 2010

Yes, Memorial Day was a looong time ago, but I made this really cute layout that I wanted to share with you!

*If you see a template, digi design, or font you like anywhere on my blog, just ask & I'll tell you where you can find it too!

A New Addition

To my craft room, that is. Look at this little beauty! It's the Singer Future SES2000. It's my birthday, Christmas, Mother's Day, birthday & Christmas present all in one. Yes, it was still that expensive even though we got a great deal on it. (My husband loves me!)

This thing does it all. Sewing, serging & embroidery! I'll be honest. I haven't quite figured out yet how it does the serging, but I'll get around to it eventually. It took me two solid days to figure out the embroidery feature, but I did & I can't wait to show you what I made! I just need to take some pictures. Oh yeah, it sews too, so I've been doing a little of that.

I always thought my inability to sew a straight line was related to the fact that I can neither draw nor cut a straight line. Ha! Incredibly enough, I can sew a straight line on this machine. Maybe it's because I don't have to tug and pull my material through when there are multiple layers. And by multiple layers, I mean more than one. Who sews through just one layer of fabric all the time? Oh well, no worries now! If you have any questions about my fancy schmancy new machine, just let me know. I'll do my best to answer!

That sweet DH of mine came home from work last week to find the craft room (which is like a sitting room of sorts to our bedroom) completely torn apart, with only a small pathway to the bathroom and the bedroom. Sometime around lunch I had decided I needed to make room for my new machine & the laptop (because you have to be connected to the computer while doing embroidery), which meant I needed to bring in more work space in the form of two desks. While this is a large room, there are multiple windows and doorways to contend with, as well as keeping the outlets accessible. I had already moved every piece of furniture at least once, if not 2 or 3 times. Nothing was working. Finally we settled on something that at least seemed functional, put everything away, and called it a day.

Now I've had a chance to test that arrangement out. Yeah, um...not so much. I'm open to ideas. If you have a really cool crafting room, or you know where I can go to look, PLEASE tell me!

Words to live by

Break time's over!

I'm back! I've really missed blogging, but it took me a while to just figure it all out. I needed to decide what was really important to me (and why), and let everything else go. I'm still working on that! As it turns out, blogging is important to me, but I was doing it for other people. Now, I'm going to do it for me. Sounds a little selfish, huh? Hmm...well, I'm hoping that blogging about what I like just might be interesting to you, too. That is, if anyone is still out there. Are you out there???

*crickets chirping*

For those of you still here, there have been so many things going on here at the Beaz Hive that I will tell you all about. We have been very busy beaz these past few months! We've celebrated holidays, a milestone birthday, played and watched baseball, and we've spent oodles of hours at the library. These updates are going to come quite randomly rather than chronologically just because some things are ready to post & some aren't.

Now for the change. This blog will no longer (solely) be about my sweet, adorable and incredibly smart children. It will now be (mostly) about my love of crafting. I love to craft. All kinds of crafting. And I've discovered a whole community of crafty blogs that I can't wait to share with you. I'll be sharing whatever happens to be interesting, and for those of you who are here just to see the baby beaz...I find them interesting too! ;)

It's not really goodbye...

It really annoys me when I go to people's blogs and they've just disappeared without any explanation. That's what I've done here, and I apologize. It seems as though (although I'm sure it isn't) that the world is conspiring against my blogging right now. I really enjoy blogging & I plan on posting again in the future, but I don't really know when that might be. So, farewell for now.

A Funny Story

The other night I made cookies on a piece of aluminum foil rather than a cookie sheet (I hate doing dishes) and when I pulled them out, a corner ripped dropping several cookies down inside the oven. Today, I turned on the oven to make lunch & could smell smoke after a few minutes. That's when I remembered that I forgot to clean up the cookie mess. But when I opened the oven door, there were flames!!! The leftover cookies were on fire! I dumped baking soda on them, turned on all the fans & waved the door opened and closed to get all the smoke out. Luckily, Boo Boo Bear had dumped out half a bottle of carpet deodorizer earlier in the day, so the two smells sort of mellowed each other out.