Merry Christmas, Kitties!

Gah!  Where did the day go?!  It's 7:00pm and I'm just getting around to posting.  Are you feeling the Christmas scramble, too?  I bet you are!  Thank you sooo much for popping by today, especially with life being so busy for all of us right now.  I truly appreciate it!  And now on to today's project...

 
Who says the feline friends in your life don't deserve a little Christmas lovin' too?  As a cat-lover and kitty mama to two (plus kitten fosters on occasion) I wanted to whip up a little something for my furbabies, and to give as gifts to fellow cat-parents.

These catnip stuffed kitten toys were really fun to make - and are a good way to use up scraps of felt that you have in your stash.

Felt Cat Toys

Supplies:
Felt scraps
Sewing machine and thread (or you could hand sew these if you wanted to...)
Jingle bells
Catnip
Polyfil stuffing

 

How to:

Create a template (I chose a fish!) from cardboard and cut out.  Pin to felt and cut TWO of your shapes per cat toy... you can stack two sheets of felt together to speed up this process and cut out two at a time.

Sew around the outline of the shape, leaving a small seam that can be trimmed later.  Leave one end of the toy open for stuffing.

Fill half full with stuffing, add a couple of generous pinches of catnip and two jingle bells.  Top off with more stuffing until firmly packed.

Sew the opening closed, and trim off loose ends.

Trim around the shape as needed / desired... and you're done!

 

And the final step?  Let your kitty ENJOY!!!

PS... please forgive the TERRIBLE lighting in these photos!  Things are so busy around here that crafting is taking place waaaay later in the day - and there's just no hope of good light in the craft studio after dark!  

Christmas Tree? FAIL!

So I have this idea in my head that I'd like to make Christmas ornaments for friends and family as gifts this year. Yes, yes, I understand it's only July - but with all kinds of "Christmas in July" things floating around the blogosphere - I started giving it some serious thought.

Since I've been feeling rather felt-y lately I had this great picture in my head of a felted Christmas tree ornament embellished with sequins and ribbon. So off I went, and here's what I ended up with...



Hm... not so satisfied. Not at ALL! It was sooooo tricky to hand sew - hard to stuff (so many little nooks and crannies!) and I couldn't get the sequins glued on without glue gun stringy messy residue getting on my felt to save my life. Grrr!

So it's a GOOD thing it's only July, right? Time to go back to the drawing board. The ornament is actually really quite similar to some that I remember my Mum making for a craft show when I was a kid. I can't for the life of me remember if she hand sewed them or machine sewed them? I'm thinking that machine sewing them would be WAY easier and neater. That is, once I actually learn to machine sew... : )

And in other crafty fails - Heather and I attempted our second batch of Bakerella's cupcake pops yesterday. We made the first batch for Lily's Cupcake Party back in May - and while they weren't perfect by any means - they weren't bad for a first attempt. Well... the second batch sucked. Plain and simple. Pretty much everything that could went wrong did! But we will not let the cupcake pops get the better of us - you'll hear about them again I promise!

Happy Friday, Crafters!

Lily's Cupcake Party!

HAPPY FIRST BIRTHDAY LILY!

Lily's first birthday party was so much fun! Everything went really well - and despite crazy thunderstorms the night before and much rain that morning - even the weather was cooperating by the afternoon! Check it out! ** WARNING ** This post contains LOTS of photos!

The cupcake spread! We used recipes and some decoration ideas by Saucy at Saucy's Sprinkles. The little wrapped lollipops in the back are Cupcake Pops from Bakerella's blog.

Lily enjoyed her cupcake - even if she didn't know what to make of it at first!

The banner! I enlarged some embroidery templates from Lollychops and cut the cupcakes out of felt. I used a glue gun to attached the two halves of the cupcake together (if I had had more time I would have sewn them...) and then sewed each cupcake to a long pink ribbon with floss and a cute heart shaped button. The letters are peel and stick chipboard letters that I spray painted. I finished it off with some small bows of cupcake ribbon between the cupcakes.

The goody bags!

Lily's Aunt Heidi crocheted her this little bunny rabbit. Absolutely adorable!

And just for fun... a few shots of Lily with her new bubble machine in action. Beautiful! Her tee shirt is an Etsy find by the way that her mom ordered...

I hope you are all having a wonderful weekend!

Cupcake Party Progress - Three Days To Go!

I hope you're not getting sick of cupcakes... : )

For those of you who are new, or just haven't been paying close attention (ha!) I'm working on all things cupcake for my niece Lily's first birthday party on Saturday!

In case you've missed a post or two... get caught up! (click on each photo for the full post) and if you've been following along, go ahead and scroll down for some new stuff!

CUPCAKES!

Since baking this many cakes and decorating them all would be VERY hard to do all in one day, we baked last weekend, are freezing the cupcakes and decorating them the morning of the party. I was a little nervous about freezing them, but we did a lot of research on best practices and it seems it's all in how you defrost, so I think we'll be just fine!


INVITATIONS!

Heather (Lily's mom) showed me some invites she liked, and I used them as inspiration and gave them my own twist.


I also embellished the envelopes just for fun!


GOODY BAGS!

For the siblings and older girls who are attending the party to take home with them!


PENCIL TOPPERS!

To go inside the aforementioned gift bags! Now all I need is some cute cupcake PENCILS. Anyone seen any lately?


GIFT TAGS! TABLE CONFETTI!

Courtesy of the fabulous Lolly at lollychops.com who is having a CUPCAKE WEEK! I printed Lolly's FREE template (I told you she was fabulous! I mean, not JUST because of the free printables - there's so much more - but you know what I'm saying! Yeah Lolly!) for gift tags - unfortunately I didn't have a scallop punch, so do you know what crazy Aunt Joanne did? Oh yeah, you know it, I cut twelve of them out by hand! Talk about scissor skills - I must have absolutely aced that day in kindergarten...


I'm saving these for Lily's gifts (note to self - don't forget to wrap gifts!)


And then I added one to each of the girls' goody bags. Such a nice touch!




Another of Lolly's templates was for 1-inch punches - I have one of those! Lolly did some sweet things with shrinky dinks, which I'm dying to try, but didn't have on hand, so I just printed to cardstock to create some colorful table confetti!


FUN! Head over to Lolly's to grab some of her printables and check out Cupcake Week. It's been a blast so far!

And here's a little sneak peak of the project I *hope* to post tonight... I'm so excited about it! I've used some Lolly goodness once again...



Can you guess what it's going to be?? Can you?!


The birthday banner of course! Look out for it later tonight! And lastly (this is a long post!) a big special HOWDY, HI, HELLO! to any of you who have popped over from Lolly's today (thanks for the shout out, Lolly!) please leave a comment and say hello, and do stop back by again!