Crafty Intentions Quilt Edition: Pillows

When I was learning to quilt, one of the things that I became obsessed with was quilting 10 pillow shams for each season of the year.  I ended up only making about 30 of them - 10 for spring/summer, 10 for Fall, and 10 for Christmas/winter.  These are my Christmas winter ones.  What was fun was that they are so small that piecing them was not overwhelming, quilting them was an experiment and I could get creative with it.  They are envelope shams, so they come off pretty easily and we wash them after the 4 months or so they're on the pillows.  They look so festive, and I never get tired of them because we change them out with the seasons!

10/10 would highly recommend this project!

Halloween Decorations: Windows Edition

In 2011 my family moved to a new house.  It was our first big move as a family, and days afterwards my baby had his first birthday.  It was a tumultuous time with a new job, new house, unpacking, no nearby family or friends.   It took a couple of months to unpack and by the time I did, I had a hefty supply of large cardboard boxes taking up an entire room of my house and the calendar had just ticked over to October.  Instead of getting rid of the boxes, I decided to recycle them into Halloween Decor.  All it took was some black paint, tissue paper, and a trusty box cutter.  My new house was uniquely suited to monster silhouettes because of all of the windows in the front.  I made a different one for each window, and taped them in place with duct tape.  

A friend of mine shared the photo and moving box story with this website I hadn't heard of at the time -- "Reddit".  And from there it went a little bit viral.  Every year since I've seen it re-shared and re-posted across the interwebs.

Unfortunately cardboard moving boxes don't hold up over time.  We only lived in that house for 2 years.   When we moved we didn't take the old cardboard decorations with us.  In our new home, I decided to re-create the experiment but in a more permanently reusable medium: Wood.

Now set-up each year is easy and our home immediately becomes a Monster Sanctuary each Halloween season.  Take-down is also easy, and they store away flat!