Great Printable Invitation Site

My sons birthday party is also sneaking up on me. Because it's in July it requires a little advanced planning to get invitations out to the kids at school before the end of the year. After struggling to come up with a theme for his water slide party I settled on a beach theme. I have printed invitations up from some free online printables sites, but this year I happened upon the most awesome site for printing invitations. It's called Invitationland, and you simply MUST go there and check it out!!!! They have a free sampling of invitations to choose from, and you can save your file as a pfd once your done so you can print more a later date without having to worry about typing it all in again. I am so very pleased with this site I decided to use it again a few days later to make up invitations to a neighbourhood potluck. They have a uber cute little bird and bird house up in a tree that is so cute. The coolest thing, besides their image quality and design (two thumbs up for those), is the fact that the colours used are customizable by you immediately as you are creating the invite. If you decide to purchase the annual subscription to their service, you then get access to the full range of designs, and the ability to make thank you notes and gift tags as well. The price tag is quite reasonable I thought at only $10 for the year. As I mentioned, I have now used it twice as the free samples seemed to fit with my invitation needs. Very pleased with the product so far. For the invitations pictured above, I mounted the cut images (which were sized 4 to an 81/2X11 page) onto some red card stock to thicken them up a bit. For the neighbourhood potluck, I am leaving them on plain paper and printing them up 2 per sheet to leave in the neighbourhood mail boxes.

As a bonus, I believe they also had some printable shower games, which would be super duper handy if your wanting to plan a shower.

Another Teachers Gift....

End of the school year today! Wow that went fast. It seems that the end of the year always seems to just creep up on me, even when I think I'm so prepared. As is usual for me, everything got done just in time. This year, my sons grade one teacher is retiring and today was her very last day of work. She is getting set to move away, so we needed to think of something small and hopefully useful for her to take on her move. Since my favourite craft at the moment is covering those little tape measures, I went on and made one for her.......until 1:00am last night! I think she does like to be crafty now and again, and she will hopefully have the time for it now. I hope she likes it! Also in the package, from my son, I included a packet of Forget Me Not flowers. Although, for better or worse, I really don't think that is going to be a problem. I threw in an Ann Taintor luggage tag (she had not yet decided whether to use her powers for good or evil) and a little chocolate and some coloured tissue and we were done like dinner.

Felting is so Popular Now

Another felt covered tape measure finished and on it's way to it's new home. This is my new favourite fabric craft (I think). It's fairly quick, darned cute and very functional....at least I think so. Felt work is quite popular now, or so it seems to me, and there are many cute projects ideas out there. It's an ideal fabric to hand sew with, since it will not fray. This also makes it suitable for seaming with blanket stitch. Felt is easily available in acrylic, wool and wool blends. The wool and wool blends are more difficult to find but much nicer to work with and will wear better over time; while the acrylics are super easy to find, inexpensive and available in a wide variety of colours. There is also the option for you hard core crafters to make your own wool felt from wool roving.

You can also make your own felt material by washing 100% wool knits or wovens in hot soapy water. Once it has been washed and 'shrunk' enough it will be a felt fabric. For example there are many projects made by recycling old wool sweaters into felt fabric and them cutting the felt to make new projects. There is a free pattern available online for the teacup version of the Betz White cupcake pincushion which is adorable, and if you can follow the pattern, it is easily translatable into the super cute cupcake pattern or you can purchase the book mentioned on the Betz White site. There are numerous uber cute project ideas if you are looking for felted sweater project ideas on the Betz White Blog, that are well worth your time to check out. I highly recommend it! The few things I have made out of red felt such as the little duck, little red monster, red felt brooch and the red felt pincushion have been made out of a felted red wool blanket. Because it originated as a woven item, the felt produced is stiffer than if it had been made from a knitted wool sweater.

Another felt crafting option is knitting items with wool yarn and then felting them in the wash until the felt fabric is formed and the item is the appropriate size. You must keep in mind that when something is knit and felted that the item will become quite a bit smaller and thicker as a result of the felting process. There are many good books with great patterns on this subject. And many free patterns available online as well. Also of course the same kind of results can be had with crocheting with wool as well.