Kalia's 1st Birthday Party : Invites

I have no idea where the last year went.  Zero, zip, nada.  I can't believe in a few short weeks, Kalia will already be a year old.  Sigh...

I'm slightly obsessed with taking pictures of Kalia.  Before she got mobile, if she was throwing a fit, I could whip out my camera and say "smile", and she'd oblige.  She'd stop whatever cry fest she was having, and smile for the camera.  I don't exactly know how you train your baby to do that, I just chalk it up to be obsessed with taking pictures of her.  She's a pretty smiley baby anyways, so I guess that helps.  Err...toddler...sigh...

For Kalia's 1st birthday invitations, I wanted to incorporate my obsession with her cuteness into the invites, but I didn't want to pay an arm and a leg for them.  So I made them myself :

Sorry for blurring out our home info - sometimes my life is like a fishbowl on here as is :-), which probably scares most of you away from wanting to show up unannounced, but I do have one darn cute kiddo, so ya just never know!

I just took pictures from every month of Kalia's life so far, starting with month 0 and ending with month 11.  I resized them down to 1.05" High by 1.57" wide.  I messed around with the sizing of the images until I got 6 across that would fit in a standard 4 1/8" x 9 1/2" envelope, which I already had a ton of on hand.  I fit two of these on one sheet of thick cardstock 8 1/2" x 11" paper.

For anyone interested in creating the same sort of invite, my margins were : left and right : 0.5", top : 0.38", and bottom 0.13".

I've got so many  decoration ideas floating around in my head.  I have no idea how many I'll actually manage to get done, but I'll be sure to share what I do with you guys!

So what do you guys think of her invites?  Do you guys DIY invites or order them out?  I'm not gonna lie, figuring out the pictures and sizes took a bit more time than I thought it would, but it just cost me postage and ink to send out.  With this down to one income ordeal, every penny counts!

Hope everyone had a great weekend.  Happy Monday!

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Wanna Be Sewer

Do you ever come up with an idea in your head that you know is a bad one, but you just can't let go of it?  Yeah, happens to me all of the time.  I dream about my projects...literally, I'll wake up and jot down a sketch of some project or another that I want to do.  I'm weird, I know.

Let me start this post by saying I can't sew.  I can't bake, I can't sew, and Chris taught me how to iron.  I sound like a great catch, huh?  At least I have this blog to show that I can do a lot of things.  Well, it at least shows that I'm stubborn and ambitious enough to try almost anything.

And really, even though I can't do those things, it doesn't stop me from trying.  I just fail...again, and again, and again.  And then I try again thinking that maybe I've gotten better.  Which I haven't...

Anyways, there's a project-ish in here.  My newest niece, and the first on Chris's side, was coming over for the weekend.  She's 6 1/2 months younger than Kalia, so we thought it'd be cute to take pictures of them with matching outfits on.

Did I mention that I officially have a toddler now?  Kalia started walking about 3 weeks ago.  So taking pictures of a 4 month old and an active toddler who either wants to point out to her cousin where her eyes and ears are (by stabbing them or pulling them off) or play patty cake on the top of her head with her probably challenging enough.  But the night before they were scheduled to arrive, I decided I wanted to make them matching dresses.

I can't sew.

Oh, and I refuse to follow patterns when I do attempt to sew.  They use big words that I don't know what means, and I'm too impatient and give up by the time I've gotten to step 3, so I just don't use them.  Which is probably a huge reason why I can't sew (see my failed pillow attempts here - and yes, Kalia's pillows still look like that.  I don't think I'd do much better the next go round, so they're staying that way!).

But I have fabric that I really like and I wanted to make the girls cute dresses.

So I tried.  I took one of Kalia's dresses and added some length because they're always too short on her, and then made a smaller size.  I sewed the neck together once and the skirt part of the dress together once.  I don't have a seam ripper either, so I just started over again.

After a few hours, I came up with these dresses :

Cute, right?  I was so so so proud of these.  Because I can't sew...and I did, and I thought they looked sort of awesome, even though I didn't line them to finish them.  Meaning there is no hem or anything like that all the way around.  I mean, why do that if I had no idea if they were even going to work?!

Unfortunately I had to take them off of the hangers and put them on the girls.  Kalia's cousins dress fit Kalia, which means I obviously made them huge.  But I can't sew and there's no way I was attempting some sort of zipper or buttons or any of those other fancy things, so I just made them a little bit big.  I probably made an 18 month old size and a 4T size.  For an almost 11 month old and a 4 1/2 month old.  I'm a genius.  We took some bobby pins and pinned up the straps and that pretty much fixed the problem.  'Cept Kalia wouldn't stay still, so her bobby pins kept coming out.

Daddy attempting to put back in Kalia's bobby pins.

And then we waited until the girls were nice and tired and hungry and stuck them outside in the heat and told them to smile.

At least Kalia's cousin listened.  This was actually round two of pictures, but round one with the dresses.  Kalia tried to beat up her cousin a little too much on round one, so we had the Daddy's stand in for this go round.

Afterwards, I attempted to get some shots of Kalia with her dress on.  She doesn't really sit still for very long, so it was sort of impossible.

front

back with the straps pinned

Kalia : "peace on out Mommy and Daddy, this sitting still for photos stuff is for the birds!"

Oh well, if nothing else I tried.  They looked like they'd be successful on the hangers, right??

The funny part about it is that I already have an idea for something else to make.  With my non-sewing skills.  What is wrong with me??

I think it's because if you tell me I can't do something, I'll try to prove you wrong.  So apparently I'm trying to prove myself wrong.  I'm failing.  Does that mean I'm wrong or I'm right when I say I can't sew?

Hope you guys are having a wonderful day!

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Trunk Redo

Hope all of you Mom's out there had a wonderful Mother's Day yesterday!  It was my first with Kalia, which of course made a special day even more special.  Kalia helped her Daddy and her furry brother cook and clean for me yesterday and gave me a nice break!

We took a nice bike ride down to our Y and played on their play ground too.  Kalia makes it okay for me to be a little kid at those places and not look like a complete weirdo anymore!

It was a great and special day.  Motherhood is the most amazing adventure, and I wouldn't change anything for the world.  Okay, enough mushiness, onto the project part of the post!

My parents gave me this old beat up trunk when I was pregnant with Kalia :

Apparently they thought that I had a ton of free time on my hands between growing a baby and literally building Kalia's nursery, so they thought they'd give me something to do.  Actually, my Dad made a comment about knowing I had zero free time to work on it, but he thought I'd like it anyways.  He was right.  But it needed a lot of work!

First up, we took off that gross top.  I'm pretty sure that thing has been on there for at least 20 years, and with us kids, it had seen much better days!

Then because the laminate top layer was chipping, we attempted to peel  / scrape it off with a paint scrapper.

We did as best we could with that, and eventually just sanded it down until it was smooth.  The problem with what was left was that it was glued on, so we left ding marks on it where we tried to get it off.  I decided we weren't stripping the whole thing at that point, and just went the sanding method.  Whatever came off easily, we scraped off, and if it was stuck, it just got sanded down.

When we were done, we were left with this :

I wood filled and did a white stain on one side to test it out.  I knew this was a bit brighter than we really wanted, so I went back and added a colored stain on top of the white stain.  I believe this is called pickeling, but I'm not positive.

We still had to do something about that top too.  We took batting, folded it over itself to give it more cushion, and stapled it onto the top.

And then went around and stapled the fabric on, folding the corners like you would a present.

After it was all said and done, here's the trunk in its new home, our bedroom.

A few detail shots :

And one last one of my cutie showing her approval while talking on the phone to her Daddy.  She's too young for a cell phone, I know!!

So what do you guys think?  Are you a fan of the pickeling effect, or would something a little bit cleaner have suited your style better?   For me, I thought I needed to add to the character of the piece by updating it, but not trying to make it look too new.  I'll show how this ties in with our Master Bedroom before too long!

Happy Monday!

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I'm linking to the parties in my sidebar!