I FINISHED- and just in time for Christmas :)

Hooray! I stitched my last stitches at 9:30pm Christmas Eve. I have put probably over 50 hours into this baby designing, sketching, sewing, stuffing, beading and embroidering! I'm so happy it's such a hit with my sweet little girl who loves to sing her ABC's :)

Penelope finding it under the tree

Excitedly flipping through it and pulling her favorite little turtle guy out of his pocket shouting "A TOORRRDLE!" (She rolls her r's and d's) :)

Back Cover

Detail on back cover.

For closer pictures of the little figures look at these posts here and here

HOPE YOU HAD A MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

A little something for my niece

This is something that I sent my niece for Christmas. I'm pretty sure she doesn't read my blog- so I'm not worried about spoiling anything ;)

She loves LOVES to read and write. She keeps a journal with her where ever she goes so she can write down her poetry as inspiration comes. Her favorite colors are red, black, and white so when I saw this journal at the store I had to get it for

her. I added little quotes and drawings inside it and made this bookmark for her out of felt. The little red-headed girl was inspired by one of my felt pieces I made for Pip's book. Instead of making her holding an xray of herself I added pretty embroidery and bead work. :) This little present was a fun way to spend a day and now it's on her way to her for Christmas. I'm crossing my fingers it gets there in time.

(Detail on the little red-headed girl)

(Back inside cover) One of the drawings

I put in with a favorite quote of mine.

More ABC dudes

I have now finished the little ABC figures and made the pages and pockets of the book. I just need to sew it all together! I hope to be finished by Christmas so I can give it to my sweet Pip! I have put so many hours into this project and it has been very fun and fulfilling.

ABC fun

Well it finally happened... I got the urge to start a project after quite the dry spell. :) And of course it has happened the way it usually does- I get knocked over with a few ideas at once and it consumes. I'll post as I finish, but for now here is one of the projects I am working on. I want to make a present for my little Pip for Christmas. She absolutely loves when we sing the ABC song so I am going to make her an ABC felt chart. Well at least it was going to be a chart until about 2 hours ago when my friend suggested I make it into a big felt book- PURE GENIUS! :) Then she can take it with her where ever. I have a feeling church will be more bearable with this book.

So the way it's going to work is that each letter has it's own pocket. Inside each pocket will be a felt plush object stuffed with cotton. That way she can play with the pieces and they'll hold up well. She can put them in and out of the pockets all she likes and they wont get lost because they will be attached to their own pocket by a string. I can't tell you how tempted I am to buy an embroidery machine because of this project. I usually do these sorts of projects with my sister (she's got an embroidery machine) but I think she has sworn off this sort of madness for a while.

Here's a sneak peek at some of the little felt objects that will go in the pockets. They are much more 3 dimentional then they appear in the pictures with detail on both sides. It's fun because I can get as detailed as I like because I am only making one of each- not like my advent calendars where I was making anywhere from 4 to 12 pockets at a time.

My Life Turned Upside Down

This Autumn Witch was illustrated by my fabulous husband and all rights go to him.

It's my favorite time of year (well besides Christmas- and I do love spring) :)

Anyway- I would have usually began designing and sewing costumes for Halloween June or July-ish. I would have been making Halloween paintings or some Halloween craft beginning in August because I would be just too excited and have the house decorated by the beginning of September. This year we have been living out of suitcases since May. My husband had a contract job at Blue Sky Studios in New York/Connecticut area animating on the movie "Rio" that comes out this next year and my girls and I joined him for a lot of it.

It was quite the experience seeing as how up to this point I had never been more east than Denver, CO. I didn't even know how to imagine so many trees. I absolutely loved it! We were crammed in a one bedroom apartment just outside of New York City in a sky-rise corporate temp housing. The girls and I spent quite a bit of time in upstate New York with family in Palmyra visiting many wonderful/historical/church sites. I took them to New York City many times on fun outings as well as Boston (several times), Concord, Salem, Sleepy Hollow (a couple of times), Niagara Falls, Rhode Island, Philadelphia, Washington DC, and Virginia while living on the east coast. We went to the beach every week as well. They got very use to car rides and traveling. We stopped at many wonderful places along the way out east and back again to the west hitting all the historical church sites we could possibly fit in. In all I have driven almost 11,000 miles in the last 6 months and most of that was all by myself with my girls with no dvd player, cd player, or game devices for the majority of that. We talked about life, my girls wrote stories, made up songs, and talked about beautiful trees and rock formations. For the first few trips I thought we'd all want to hang ourselves with how boring and hard it was to get use to driving, but by the end we absolutely loved our time in the car. We'd be settled somewhere for a week or two and then I'd say, "How about a road trip?" Within 30 minutes my girls would have packed their suitcases and be ready to bring it all out to the car. hahaha. We felt like little pioneer/vagabond/gypsies- free to go where the wind blew us.

Needless to say our stuff has been inaccessible and for the most part my life has been too crazy to do my normal Halloween celebratory traditions and activities. I wouldn't trade the last 6 months for anything though. My husband's next contract job is in Albuquerque, NM working on the movie "Green Lantern" which he started almost a month ago. A few days ago we joined him. What a beautiful drive through southern Utah. It was breathtaking. It was an 11 hour day in the car and even my almost 2 year old did fine. She began crying the last 20 minutes- thankfully we were close. Our pod was delivered a few days before I arrived and Seth (along with the help from many man from our church out here got all the boxes and furniture in the house and garage) I'm trying to unpack things as quickly as possible so we can get to some of our Halloween decorations. I didn't get to sew any costumes this year- almost unforgivable for my children. I had to buy them- gasp! :)haha We do have our little Halloween advent calendar out that I made last year and we started to sew some Halloween trick-or-treat bags in Palmyra at Grandma's house before we left. We will have to finish those up this week. I'll post pictures as soon as they are done in the next day or two. I keep receiving emails asking if I am selling those calendars again this year or a pattern. I'm afraid not- we'll see about next year though.

We loved our time living on bare minimum and having nothing but each other's nutty company- but it's nice to get settled into somewhere, have our internet up and running again (as of last night), have more space, be reunited with my art supplies, sleep on our own beds, and enjoy our possessions again. (My girls are so excited to have their toys back) :)

I thought I'd share this little note I made this morning to put on my new neighborhood doors in case any of you would like to use it. Our family goes to church on Sunday and tries to keep it as a day of rest. We don't go to parties or go shopping. We don't participate entertainment like going to movies/amusement parks, or exuberant outdoor activities like swimming etc. We try to really focus on the Savior and our family and have fun things we do together at home on Sundays or invite others to dinner. My girls are really bummed about Halloween being on Sunday this year so I've created these little notes that we are giving to our neighbors to let them know that we will be trick-or-treating a day early on Saturday. If they are home and have candy and would like visitors they will flip the note over to show the drawing of the monster and put it on their door to let us know we can come for a candy visit. As a side note my husband made the pumpkins and monster illustrations on the notes- I just grabbed them from the computer and created the notes in Photoshop. You are more than welcome to use them- just not for sell in anyway. If for some reason these don't work let me know at my email kiazi44(at)hotmail(dot)com and I will email you the pdf.

(Front View)

(Back View)

Happy Halloween! Happy Halloween! Happy Halloween!

A few more fairy shoes

After giving my mom her fairy shoe for Christmas she gave me a little bin of fabric, lace, trim, flowers, thread, ribbon, beads, and buttons from mostly the Victorian era, but some are older and some are from the 20's, 30's, and 40's. She is an antique doll collector and has an entire room dedicated to doll supplies. She hand sews and repairs many of their clothes to be authentic to that particulars doll time period. She has shelves and shelves and bins of wonderful, yummy supplies. Whenever I go home to visit I play in that room by sitting on the floor and open bin after bin looking at the wonderful pieces that she has admiring the handiwork of someone 100-200 years ago. She gave me some of her prize smaller pieces so that I could make her a collection of antique fairy shoes. I love using her stuff. It's like opening a treasure box each time I open it and reminds me of being home with her.

My mom's birthday was a few weeks ago and Seth's mom had her birthday a few weeks before that. I decided it was time to make some more fairy shoes for my two moms. :) To see the other shoes I made you can click here.

This is a blue lady's fairy shoe for my mom. Isn't that flower exquisite? This blue silk was the most wonderful fabric to work with. It came in the form of a HUGE ribbon. I like to paint a lot of my shoes with a gold, copper, or silver metallic paint on the inside to hide stitching and give it a more rich feel. You can see that slightly in the picture on the left. (just ignore the chipped off pink paint on my nails- it's time to play beauty salon with my girls and get another manicure) :)

The blue polka dot shoe is my mom's other shoe for her b-day and the gold and red shoe is Georgia's (Seth's mom). Georgia's shoe isn't made from all old materials, but has some old tatting and lace on it. My mom's polka dot shoe has such a wonderful old black button that seems very art deco to me. I remember when my mom gave me that button and I couldn't wait to see what shoe it would appear on that I would make. The black beads were stitched to some old netting and the tassels on the back of the shoe are from a Victorian fan.