Pocket Letters

I first stumbled over Pocket Letters on Pinterest and thought: "Great! Like I need another hobby!" But the more I looked into it the more interested I became! So it is basically a creative way of pen-paling. You use one of those baseball card page protectors and make each pocket pretty with patterned paper, bits and pieces. Somewhere you tuck a letter to your friend and you can use a mail tag to ask more questions about them.

I jumped on the bandwagon, of course! Right now I have 2 Pocket Letter pals and that is ok for now. It is a delight to recieve some happy, fun mail once in a while and I find it super relaxing to make them. It is creative play without any "rules" of memory keeping, keeping up etc. And, which is a great plus, it is an awesome way to use up bits and pieces left over from other projects!

I have recieved two so far and send out three. It´s exciting! 

I have prepared some cards for my next few and made a biger painting on paper, cut it apart and will use that as my background cards. See, fun and a creative outlet! 

wood&stool inspired!

i totally forgot that i hadn´t shared this with you :)

are you familiar with  wood&stool?

well, it is a dutch based little company that does (among other things) very cool wooden stools and those cool wood christmas trees, did you see them?

ok, so they had me there really! but then i saw these scrap wooden signs and i just fell in love!

link

and even though i think you should totally buy some from the company! i thought maybe i could whip some up myself!

we had all sorts of scrap wood laying around and some pieces were painted in different colors others were left bare. then i used my alpha stamps to stamp my messages.

the signs are now put in little nooks in my home for our viewing pleasure :)

i´ll have to take some pictures of that too!

oh, and you know what is their newest product? yup, granny square garlands

sigh...

sick day is art day...right?

my daughter came down with a fever yesterday and today she is in full bloom cold. we are having a sick day and i think that sick days should be all about pampering and spoiling, because that is what you want while you are sick, right?! she is doing ok, and as a fun thing we went outside for a few minutes to decorate our strip of the street. here are a few of our creations :)





family portrait




what are you up to today?

project random

I busted out my sewing machine for yet another project! Yay me!
My daughters birthday is coming up this weekend and i wanted to make her a "soulemama" inspired gratitude wrap. Her best friend is moving away and they have decided to be penpals, which i think is a very good idea. So i made her a place to keep her stationary.



I chose a jean fabric and a yellow cotton one. I sewed the two fabrics together, which is where i made my first mistake :) Since i wanted the wrap to acctually hold stuff the pockets would have been super to have been sewed on before i sewed everything together :)



Anyway, since i had already messed up, i just went with the flow. I went on and added some padding.



I acctually wanted to make some fabric pockets, but since the above, i resorted to plastic. I found some scrap page protectors, one larger which now holds the acctual papers and envelopes and one smaller to hold stickers and stamps. The smaller one i sewed right in the middle to create 2 pockets. Then i just handstitched them both so the inside of the wrap.



As the wrap came together, i added a felt butterfly on the inside and a felt flower to the front as decoration.



To tie the wrap together, i simply tied a knot with a felted ribbon. Voila!
Haha, i guess it turned out ok, but i think i will make some more as pratice, because i think this would make a wonderful Christmas gift!

The second project i made this weekend, was highly inspired by something i had seen on flickr somewhere.



As i am a stone collector it was a pure joy for me to pick some smooth stones at the lake this week. I took them home and painted the first step; black. I use ordinary craft paint for this so it doesn´t take all that long for the paint to dry. Then i painted the "center" of the stones in different colors and after that i used a q-tip to make the dots. The finishing touch was to add positive words to the stones; love, hug, yes!, lovely etc. Now, i think i will just use them as a decoration like below, on a glass plate or maybe give one or two as a gift for someone that needs some encouragement.



I like the colors and the messages!

What did you make this weekend?

stone project

So, even in my blogger profile i have listed that i am a stone collector. i have picked and collected stones since forever. i have stones from everywhere i have ever been. hungary, serbia, turkey, germany, france etc. i even have pices of the berlin wall. stones has a special meaning in my life without me noticing it really. it has just happened over the years. at my home we have a huge old glass jar filled with my collection. from time to time i pick every single one of them out of the jar and feel them. they are soft and edgy, some are both. this fascination of stones has rubbed of on my daughter. now we both have heavy pockets after a walk on the beach :) i like the stones just as they are, but one day i decided to make something fun with them. i went to the beach and picked some stones more for their shapes than that they stood out to me. when i came home i painted them a few in a green shade and some in a blue shade. i let them dry over night and then just finished them of the next day.






by that evening they were all dry and ready to be "flowerpot monsters" :) i painted white eyes and added a black pupill.

this is them resting before i tested them out in the flower pots :)





they are just a fun thing to add for a flower gift to the hostess or a fun adding to the kids windowshelf. i am going to sell them during my daughters and my garage sale next week!








they make me happy :)