April Challenges

Seasonal Crafts: Mother's Day

This blog is all about homemade bath products and is a great place for ideas. She has a cool tutorial for whipped shea butter and a new post on lip gloss. She also lists places you can buy things like essential oil and all that stuff.

This is a cool site for the the advantages of handmade lipbalms with some recipes. It is a project that is easy enough to do with kids

Vanilla lip balm, hand/feet scrub, facial mask

Bath salts

A few more fun bath recipes



Self (and possibly child) Craft: Refashioning and Publish Something

Here are almost 30 posts on the Make it and Love it blog on repurposing. She has dresses, skirts, shirts, leggings, pants and stuffed animals for boys and girls

The ever popular men's shirt-to-little-girl-dress
button up the back with ruffle (seriously cute!)
Made did two versions here and here
Two super cute jumpers, love the first one especially here and here

This girls shirt is so darling and it is made from an old men's t-shirt

I can't wait to make this cute ruffle skirt from an old tee.

And for the boys a sweater vest and boxer shorts!

Sorry, most of these are for kids! There are lot of ideas online for refashioning or embelishing clothes and blogs that are dedicated to refashioning alone. If you want to make clothes last longer, tweak them to your liking etc etc, give refashioning a try. It really is pretty fun and the possibilities are endless. I have started looking at our wardrobes in a new light. I think twice before I throw anything out or give it away.
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Blurb books and Lulu.com are great places to self publish. They produce high quality books of all sorts (photos, cookbooks, family history, journals, you think it up and you can print it up!) for a reasonable price. I've done two books through blurb so far and am in the middle of my third!


Child Craft: Quilts
I love myself some Crazy Mom Quilts.
She no longer blogs (so sad!), but her blog is still up and she has some wonderful ideas and tutorials for modern quilts. If you need ideas for the actual quilt, head to her site.

Straight line quilting tutorial


Free motion quilting tutorial video

Binding tutorial


Doll quilt tutorial

Grid quilting tutorial


Recipe Recommendations:
Resurrection Rolls (Easy Easter cooking with Kids)

Crash hot potatoes

These are delicious. I also made them with sweet potatoes, and I almost think I liked the sweet potatoes better (though the red were quite delicious too!). Oh, and I used crushed dried rosemary because I didn't have fresh handy. To make sweet potatoes I just peeled them, chunked them into big pieces (about the size of the red potatoes, maybe a little larger since the tend to cook faster than regular potatoes) and boiled them with the red potatoes till they were fork tender. Then I followed her directions after that. YUM! It was a nice, new way to have potatoes.

Blurb books

For Christmas I made a blurb book of my grandparents' posterity. I'm hooked now. No more paper crafting. No more scrapbooking. It's a simple, low frill way to do photo books.

I just finished Dean's first year. For a 102 pg. image wrap, hardcover book with premium pages (7X7 book), I was able to print 385 pictures for $40 total after delivery. The last time I printed out photos from Walmart it cost over $30, and I definitely didn't order 385 pictures! And then I had to pay for scrapbook paper and spend the time putting them in some sort of order.

Another great thing is you can purchase multiple books as gifts (mothers' day) or if you wanted a copy for yourself and your child(ren) you can do that too. Others can buy their own if they want. You can do soft cover, dust jacket, or image wrap. Regular or premium paper. You can make money off your books if you want. If I'd done a soft cover book it would have only cost about $20! Anyway, I sound like an add for them. Like I said, I'm hooked.

You can preview the first 15 pages or so of Dean's book here.