The Epic Story of The Table

Last fall when we were getting ready to move Rush into his new bedroom, we bought a little kid table and chairs from Ikea that I thought was wood with a light stain, but in fact was raw wood. That was not great news for me, as I had recently discovered that contrary to my own ideas about myself, I’m actually terrible at painting. For some reason I decided I could paint it anyway, probably because I consider it too humid to work with stains. And I’m delusional.

So I started painting the table and it was indeed a disaster. One of many problems was not having a clear plan, so I ended up with a brown chair, a purple chair, a yellow chair…it was seriously ugly and at some point I had the sense to put down the paintbrush and ban myself from ever trying to paint furniture anything more complicated than a single color. I mentioned the episode to my sister Casey, who loves to paint furniture, and she immediately said she wanted to paint it and would pick it up next time she visited.

Next time she visited, she told me she was pregnant. My first thought was “New life, how wonderful!” My second thought was that I would never see that table painted. I didn’t want to be a downer and let her know that she would likely be too tired and nauseous to even get out of bed, so I let her take it. She brought it back, not painted, the next time I saw her.

The table and chairs sat in our garage, quickly becoming an expensive waste of money, until my mom, painter extraordinaire, came to the rescue and took it home with her. A month later she brought back a masterpiece more fabulous than I could have imagined:

It’s so amazing that I can’t believe I’m supposed to let children eat on it or use crayons around it. I can’t imagine how long it took to finish, but it really looks awesome. I could never, ever, in a million years have done anything like it.

So Mom, thank you, thank you, thank you. I asked her if she would start selling any painted furniture, which she did occasionally when we were growing up, and it sounded like her rates had really increased. I think she said anything this labor intensive would typically run about $5,000. It’s a good thing I have connections.

Handmade Gifts Wrap Up

I’m doing one more post about handmade gifts, because they consumed so much of our energy over the past few months, yet we couldn’t really talk about it. So. Here we go.

For my sister I made the market tote from Amy Butler’s Sew-It Kit. Lesson learned: if you take the time to actually follow directions and buy home decor fabric and the fabric says “dry clean only” even though it’s 100% cotton, if you wash it, most of the heavy starch will wash right out of the fabric. It still turned out fine, but geeze fabric makers. Who dry cleans cotton?

And because Casey is the easiest person to shop for/make things for, she also got a little travel card game set. (On second thought, I might be making all these things for my idea of Casey or the college version of her. She’s a minimalist now might be throwing all this stuff away or donating it to Goodwill as soon as she gets it. I need to snoop around next time I’m at her house.)

There was the collection of make-up bags using the Flossie Teacakes tutorial that went to some of my sister-in-laws and my mother-in-law and grandmother-in-law. For once I did a really good job of buying just enough fabric, which is kind of disappointing because I was looking forward to having more scraps left over.

Rush drew his Aunt Kelley’s name in the Williams family handmade gift exchange, so he made this cute apple stamp lunch bag/produce bag/tote. He loves painting.

I made a crayon roll for Rush and adapted the pattern for colored pencils for our neighbor’s children. Rush is currently more interested in the metal lunchbox where he stores his crayons because he can stand on it and reach things on the bookshelf. He’s also into using markers from my marker box. Maybe for now I’ll just tuck away the crayon roll for travelling. There are sharks on the fabric, so maybe it will be a good rainy-day-at-the-beach toy.

Maybe my favorite gift was the pillow I made for my brother featuring a silhouette of his dog Mel. It was risky, because what single, 25-year-old male has “quilted pillow made by pregnant older sister” on his Christmas list? I think he liked it though, or at least he’s polite. I was inspired by a quilt that Kellaura’s mom made with her dogs on it.

For my dad, I designed a set of postcards with a map to their beach house on one side. If he and my mom invite friends for the weekend, they can give them the card with directions and any other notes they need to add. I did have a slight breakdown when I sat down with my box of black and white postcards still warm from Kinkos, excuse me, FedEx Office, and jars of paint and realized it was going to take forever to paint each individual card…who in the world thinks it’s a good idea to hand paint postcards? It’s not like color copies are restrictively expensive these days. I think because I generally enjoy making cards it never crossed my mind that it might be a time consuming gift. I finally just buckled down and painted them, but still consider it kind of an insane thing to do.

We didn’t get pictures of everything, specifically anything that had to be mailed or sent early, like the beaded cross for my sister-in-law, or anything that was wrapped as soon as it was finished, like the purse I made for my mom. Hopefully these gifts are being enjoyed somewhere.

I hope we didn’t run out of all our good handmade gift ideas. We should probably get an early start for next Christmas. We’ll have two children this year, so I guess I should get started around April or May. Trent should start now.

Cookies for Friend

My BFF Kate's baby is due very, very soon, so I'm anxiously awaiting the phone call about her new arrival. Her daughters were both born in Los Angeles and my irrational fear of California earthquakes kept me from ever visiting, so I've never actually seen one of her children as a little baby. I'm really looking forward to meeting the newest member of their family. They're adding a boy to their current line-up of two little girls, which I know from experience is a winning combination.


Because Kate is always working on something special and handmade for someone, I wanted to make something special for her girls and new baby. For the girls, I adapted my Raggedy Ann pattern to make little witch dolls, which was a really fun project (excluding the hair, which I always forget is super tedious). It's hard to tell from the picture, but their skin is green. There was pressure to finish them and get them in the mail in early October so they didn't seem like they were made on some sort of craft clearance if they didn't receive them until Thanksgiving. It was probably a good idea because it got the gifts in the mail pre-baby.

For the new baby I made the snuggle wrap blanket from Amy Butler's Little Stitches for Little Ones, so lovingly modeled by Pluto. On most blogs when people show off their crafts, they set them up in good lighting in a nice area. Looking at the picture I took, I probably should have at least made my bed first.

I loved that blanket so much that I made one for our baby too.

Speaking of our new baby, he or she is a kicker. Trent and I sat down to watch last night's Mad Men episode and the baby was bouncing around for the entire hour. Between Rush's love of the outdoors and this baby's apparent energy level, I think we'll be spending a lot of time outside running around over the next few years.

Pig/Wolf

Way back in April I said I wasn't going to buy any craft supplies for a month in honor of Earth Day and to try to focus on using my stash. The result:

It's Pig/Wolf, two stuffed animals in one. I made it from a pattern (yes, I used a pattern!) by Lizette Greco, who designs her creations based on drawings made by her children. She also has another creation that I love called the See-Through Predator which is a wolf with a mesh belly with a zipper, so you can make little pigs and people to save or let the wolf digest as you see fit. Making the pig/wolf took a long time to finish because it has a zillion pieces, so I think I'm done with stuffed animals for awhile.

I did cheat once on my April vow by buying one piece of white felt from Michaels. I had everything else for the project, adapting the pattern to use what I had, even cutting up a too small shirt for the green and white fabric. I tried to substitute something else for the white felt, but I just couldn't make it work. Making the pig/wolf was fun for me, but Rush is not in the least bit interested in the finished project.