Stuffed Animal Hammock

We have a toy hammock!

It's nice to free up some space in our bedroom by going vertical with stuffed animal storage. I loosely followed the cute Stuffed Animal Net Tutorial from Christie at Lemon Squeezy. But I'm always looking for resourceful ways to save money on crafty projects, so I used some alternative materials. I bought a mesh bag from Dollar Tree and took it apart for the netting. And I used 2 1/2 packages of webbing from my rainbow luggage strap stash.

The bag was really easy to take apart. The stitching on the seam and the stitching on the drawstring casing just pulled right out. Then I cut it into a triangle and serged all the edges to add a little strength.

These luggage straps are one of my favorite 99 cent items. Whenever I see them at a dollar store I stock up. I've used them for sandbags, bag straps and now for the binding on a toy hammock. I just folded it in half and sandwiched the mesh inside- no pinning required! Good thing I still have a couple packages of this stuff left for future projects!

Up next on the list of nesting to-do's: a robot lamp!

Finally sewing for the baby!

I've been seriously nesting! I'm 34 weeks and starting to realize that we're going to have a baby soon! We've had the kitchen/dining room/entry area and living room repainted. And we bought a new kitchen table and new living room furniture. Michael even approved an area rug! The house looks SO much better! Since we're staying in our little condo, we'll have the baby in our room with us. The plan is to have him sleep in the bassinet attachment of a pack n play and store his clothes in bins on the two lower shelves of his changing table. So I bought two of the Fabler Groda frog prince wall pockets from Ikea and hacked one of them into a diaper stacker. I looked all over different blogs for diaper stacker tutorials and I found some cute ones. But this one from Shannon over at Sew Beautiful was my very favorite. (And it's not just because she has such an awesome name!) I love that she made it gender neutral and the pockets on the front are a really cool detail. It also has the biggest capacity for diaper storage of any of the other diaper stacker tutorials I came across.

I harvested as much of the green stripes and dots as I could from the original wall pockets. Even though the wall pockets are over 4 feet tall, they really aren't made of much fabric. So I supplemented with the white cotton center from one of our old bed skirts. Now that we have a platform bed, our bed skirts have no purpose. But, we definitely have a use for a diaper stacker. So, all the diaper changing accessories and baby utensils will go in wall pockets and diapers will go in the matching stacker. Next, I need to figure out a net hammock for all his stuffed toys! He already has tons and after the baby shower tomorrow, I'm sure he'll have even more.

I've already done two loads of baby laundry and all those bins in his changing table are full of clothes, bibs and blankies! What a lucky boy he is already!

Christmastime Houses

Lindsey and I made Gingerbread houses!  It was her first time ever to decorate a Gingerbread house and I think she did a fabulous job!  We had a great time decorating the houses while Cornbread and Michael Bacon watched some really bad silly movies.  We all ate way too much candy, and had delicious pizza from Filippi's Pizza Grotto.

I used the Elfin cottage pattern from my 1982 Wilton Celebrate!: Christmas book.  I had a batch of gingerbread in the freezer that was left from last year's house.  And I made one batch of the Grandma's gingerbread from my Wilton book.  They both baked up pretty well.  But cutting out the pieces and baking a gingerbread house from scratch is really hard work.  I miss my cast iron gingerbread mold!  Maybe next year...

I've also been busy making more cardboard glitter houses.  The little green two story house is a pattern that Howard from littleglitterhouses.com shared on the cardboard Christmas forums.  I was going to wait until next year to make it, but then he surprised me with an adorable Santa figure.  I thought I should make the little guy a new house and I did the whole thing yesterday.

Howard suggested repainting the Santa and giving him a clear coat.  I did repaint him and add some glitter to his base, but I'm still deciding if I want to clear coat him.  I only have gloss clear coat right now, and Michael says he likes him flat.  Maybe I'll try to find some flat clear coat, but for now Santa has a new home.  Thanks, Howard!

I also made another one of the Urban Debris mini Putz houses for my Grandma's Christmas present.  The vintage-looking tall tree, Santa and silver gift boxes all came from WalMart.  I just hot-glued the little scene on the top of a Christmas tin and I plan to fill it with candy and sweets for her. 

We're having a boy!

Right before Thanksgiving we had our anatomy scan. Of course the actual purpose is to check fingers and toes and make sure the little one is developing properly. But, what most parents look forward to, is the big gender reveal. Our sonogram tech was great. She told us right away that he was a boy. Neither one of us were surprised in the least. Michael swore he saw the goods at our last appointment, and he was confident that he knew he was a boy. I couldn't see the screen at the last ultrasound, but I just knew from the moment I thought I was pregnant that it was a boy. I have absolutely no reason for it, I just knew. 

 After the tech chased him around for what seemed like forever, she was able to get all his measurements and my Mom got to come in the room. She was so excited! This will be her first grandson. Everything looks good with the boy. He's extremely active and doesn't sit still for very long. And he's long too! His femurs measure about two weeks ahead. I knew there was a large Viking boy in there! Someone with long legs has been trying to kick through my belly button. 

 We decided way back when we started to talk about kids, that our boy will be named Korben. So he'll be Korben Dino Bacon. That was a very easy decision!

After we had a great dinner with my Mom, we went to Ikea and Michael got his baby boy some toys. He got him a giant shark and two dragons. We had to get each a kitty a baby dragon too.

Our Christmas Village Has Been Deforested

And this is the reason. 

 Our darling, adorable little kitten, RacerX has been wreaking havok on the village. He's been very curteous with the houses, but the trees and Santa were not so lucky.  Especially Santa.

This is how the village started out yesterday.  But it didn't last long.  It was soon demolished.

So I put all the trees away in a safe place. And this is how our village looks now.

I'm probably going to be putting the Christmas tree up sometime this week.  I fear for it's safety with these two little guys.

Santa's Got a New Gold Bag

Our Putz Christmas village needed a Santa and sleigh.  I searched all over eBay until I found one that I was happy with.

I chose this Santa because I liked the size for the scale of our village. He's a little big, but he's not too huge. I also liked that he was one of the only ones that had actual brown reindeer. They aren't pictured because they didn't need a new paint job like Santa did. White reindeer have their place, but I think Santa's reindeer should be brown. Santa had seen better days. His paint was badly cracked and peeling and he lost his reins. So I gave him a bath in pure acetone to strip off all the old paint. And I did the same thing with his sleigh.

Then I carefully wiped off whatever paint particles were left in all the crevices and gave Santa and his sleigh a new coat of paint. I'm not sure what the original paint was, but I used Tester's model paints on both Santa and the sleigh. Originally, Santa's toy bag was a very dark, chocolate brown.  But, the set of model paints I was using didn't come with brown and I lean more toward the gaudy, metallic side of Christmas decor.  Luckily the paint set did have a lovely shade of shimmery, metallic gold.  So I painted the toy bag gold.  I love it!

And here's Santa with his all his reindeer:

(this was before Rudolph's time)

I still haven't come up with how I'll replace the reins and I think I need to add some miniature holly and maybe a tiny Christmas tree to his sleigh.  But, for now, he looks much better!

The Bibble

Wow!  My last blog post was about PREY?!  We've had lots going on since then.  But the biggest development is the Bibble.  Yep, that's the very first picture of our first little monster taken at my first appointment back in August.  The EDD is April 10, 2012.  We're nearly half-way through already!

We're very excited and we can't wait to find out more about our little one next week at the anatomy scan.  We already know that the Bibble is growing right on track and is VERY active.  So active that after 4 hours of ultrasounds we were not able to complete the NT scan.  But I just got the results from the 2nd trimester blood tests and everything is just fine.

I've been feeling pretty good.  I've been very lucky that the biggest pregnancy symptom I've dealt with is fatigue.  I felt a little sick in the beginning, but nothing too bad.  Michael has been absolutely wonderful.  He keeps on top of the litter box and puts up with me with extreme patience.  He's been taking great care of me and the Bibble.  I couldn't ask for a better partner in crime!

In the meantime, we already started adding to our little family.  We adopted two little baby boys a few weeks ago.

Bridget, one of our anatomy instructors, found these adorable little guys in her yard when they were just barely two weeks old!  She raised them by hand; bottle feeding them and doing a little litter box training and now they are happy wild little men.  Bridget is really an amazing person.  Two weeks later she found the rest of the litter and she's fostering them until she can find the best homes possible.  The big boy on the green pillow is Blade.  He's all black and fluffy and he loves to eat and bite fingers.  The little guy that's sleeping is RacerX.  He's very dark grey with black stripes and a curl at the tip of his tail.  He's very independent and loves to play with Judo.  And our little Judo is doing very well with her new little brothers.  She plays gently with them and licks them all over when they come to snuggle with her!  They are all such happy kitties!