Front Door Wreath

I usually have a holiday/season appropriate wreath on my front door but whenever May rolls around, my door ends up sad and empty, usually until September.  This year I was determined to do something about it.  My Easter wreath was falling apart and so I decided to go ahead and strip all the decor away and I was left with this...

... a nice bare grapevine wreath.  A perfect base for my new front door wreath, even if it is a little lopsided.  I wanted something simple and cute that matches my other living room decor.  I've pinned all kinds of wreaths that use fabric flowers and so that is the direction I decided to go.

For my living room decor I'm using my family scrabble tile board as my color inspiration and I just happened to have a scrap of polka dot fabric that was the same colors so I built a fabric color palette off of that scrap.

Now, obviously, I'm not using all these fabrics, but this gave me a good color base to go off of.   I decided to make frayed flowers, as they are my favorite type of fabric flower.  I started with one very large red flower, then I added a smaller orange flower, and an even smaller green flower.  At this point I decided it looked good just the way it was but I still hadn't used the blue color.  So I cut a strip of it and used it to hang the wreath from.  And there you have it...

... a cute simple door wreath.  This project cost me nothing (because I used supplies I already had around the house) and was done in under an hour.  But the best part?  My front door is no longer boring!

March Cottage of the Month

So, it's been a while but I finally finished my March Cottage cross stitch from Country Cottage Needleworks. 

I stitched it on 14 ct Natural Aida cloth and used DMC colors:  3347, 3348, 433, 3823, 3822, 3031, and White.  I messed up on a few of the leaves but didn't want to take the time to fix them.  I left out one of the floating clovers because I thought it would be too much.  The white hardly shows up at all on the aida cloth so I outlined the fences so you could actually see them!  I'm really happy with my color changes particularly making the flowers yellow instead of pink/orange. 

Next up I'll be stitching up June.

I'll be using 14 ct Natural Aida Cloth.  I also changed up the colors on this one and I'll be using DMC floss: 581, 3822, 347, 3031, 422, 420, 433, and White (which I have to buy some more of, so it isn't pictured.)  I got way behind and I want to display these in their months so I'm going to skip ahead.  I'll just have to make the time to catch up on April & May later.

Simple Book Bags

Now that the kids are out of school for the summer, I need to make sure to find stuff to keep the busy.  One such idea, is to go to the library every week.  Our local library is even doing a special summer reading program with a different event every Monday.  Also, the library is a good way to keep them reading through the summer, which is super important!  So in the spirit of going to the library I decided to make my kids some simple unlined totes for them to use to carry their library books in.

I had a lot of fun with the monogram appliques I put on the bags.  Instead of using another fabric for the letter, I cut away the circle fabric to show the fabric underneath.  I'm happy with the effect although, it would probably be even more effective using a smaller pattern or solid fabric. 

Unfortunately, I took way to long making said library totes that we didn't actually make it to the library today, oops!  However, we will be ready for next week!