Vintage Wedding Kits

Things have been busy here with the little one.  We took a bit of a hiatus on everything while TC finished up his Masters.  In the meantime though, I’ve been busy working on a variety of projects that I’ll try to post in the coming weeks.

One of my newest projects are wedding stationary kits that I’ll be selling through my etsy shop at: http://www.etsy.com/shop/questionabledomestik

Each kit will be personalized and delivered as a pdf, though I will offer a printing option.  It’s been so much fun working on these.  Stay tuned for more to come!

Coat Rack Bookends

I’m sure you’ve seen the IKEA spice rack book holders on pinterest that are so popular that it’s becoming impossible to find them in stock at an IKEA store:

Original Source

Originally, I was hoping to do something similar, but we couldn’t find them in stock at our local IKEA.  While I love the bookends I made a while back for the nursery, they aren’t durable enough to withstand the wear a soon to be walking kid will impart.  Instead, I came up with the idea of putting pegs in the shelf at intervals to hold up the books, but keep the spines visible.  Since I didn’t want to drill directly into the shelves (the particleboard and melamine combo can be a pain to drill cleanly), we decided to go with the coat rack look.

The wood was scrap from home depot (less than $1), and the pegs were $0.69 for 2.  If you’re super resourceful, you could probably pick one up at a garage sale for less.

Book of Faces

We live far from our families, but wanted to make sure that our daughter had a sense of who her family is.  Since babies are really attracted to faces, I thought putting together a book of headshots is a simple way for her to get to know her extended family.  We go through the book whenever we’re sitting down to read, and you do get a sense that she’s gradually getting more familiar with the faces.

artscow.com prints on board book style cardboard, which is great for babies and ships quickly.  I waited for a sale and this book cost me 7.99 to print, and you can’t beat that.

We’re on ETSY!

Check out the new etsy.com store:
http://www.etsy.com/shop/questionabledomestik

Month Old Signs

We’ve been taking monthly pictures of our kidlet to track her growth since everything changes so fast in these first months (that and we’re proud parents, so we really don’t need an excuse to crack out the camera and taunt the kid with stuffed animals). 

In today’s edition of ‘now you can too’, I’ve uploaded the monthly circles in 4 separate colours so you too can annoy your friends with monthly pictures…I mean, track your child’s growth.  I used a lollypop stick, but a popsicle stick, old chopstick or any other child-safe pokey bit will do.  I glued (good ole’ Elmer’s) it to a piece of cardstock that I cut to the same size as the rounds, like so:

Each month I peel off the previous month’s, and attach the new month with a glue stick, and voila!

Download Blue Circles

Download Pink Circles

Download Mod Orange

Download Mod Purple

Rocket Ship

A friend of mine is doing her son’s room in a rocket ship theme.  I haven’t broken out the paints since my art school days (mainly because I’m still reliving the obnoxious condescension from my art critiques), but I had some canvases hanging around and thought ‘what the heck’?  I think they turned out okay, no?

Baby Shadow Boxes

 

I wanted to give the parents some sort of footprint/handprint memento for Christmas, but I found that a lot of those kits you can buy at Michael’s are only for kids aged 6 months and up.   Someone recommended using Crayola’s Model Magic, which is what we ended up using. 

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure I recommend it as a mould making product.  TC and I had to wrestle the kid (who at the time was squirming like a wet cat) and still couldn’t manage to get a nice handprint.  The footprint required a lot of force, and the process ended up warping the edges (I really wanted clean edges).  

In the end though, I think the shadow boxes turned out okay.

(photos were printed at London Drugs directly on to foam core for easy mounting)

Christmas Cards 2011

I wanted to do something simple and easy this year because I was running short on time.  Normally I start making christmas cards in January (not because I’m a keener, but because we’ve been selling them to raise funds for TC’s Ride to Conquer Cancer).

These cards look labour intensive, but they’re really not.

All you have to do is rip canvas to your desired size (I had a stack of 4.5x6 cardstock that I had kicking around, so that was the size I went with).  Stamp canvas with a holiday stamp of your choosing.  Layer on top of cardstock, run it through the sewing machine, and voila!  The hard part for me was running the darn thing through a sewing machine.  It turns out that not sewing since grade 8 home-ec makes me a terrible seamstress.  The card looks great from here.  Just don’t flip it over.

We included a family letter in ours (yes, we’re THOSE people), and a picture of the kid that I took in front of the tree once we had it up (I needed an excuse to buy a pair of ruffled diaper covers)

Here’s my invitation writing station all set up:

And, if you’d like to make these your cards next year, I’ve put up a pdf of the wrap around labels:

Download PDF