Sarah's Cordless Heating Pads

CORDLESS HEATING PAD
As legend has it, in an old rural Missouri farm house, the cold nights were made warmer with a Corn Sack. During the day, a large pan of shelled corn was warmed under the kitchen wood burning stove. Before be, mom would distribute the corn into sacks, one for each family member. That hot Cornsack warmed the bed feet or anything for quite a while. Every morning, before breakfast, the corn was returned to the pan under the stove to warm for the next evening's use.
My friend Sarah makes these corn sacks and sells them at fairs and it keeps the users warm.  I know that a lot of her friends have used them at home football games during the cold months to keep themselves warm. 

Painting

While not the traditional paper, paint and pretty picture, its the roller, one color and a wall painting.  I am getting ready to paint my apartment and right now I am looking at a wall covered in little white spots from previous holes.  I love painting and doing little home repairs so I guess what better to blog about right now than what I am going to do with my apartment!  Since I am in an apartment, I had to get permission from my landlord to paint and then  get permission for the color.  I got really lucky in the fact that my landlord likes dark colors so I was able to paint a color other than white or ivory.  I think the color is a light brown and is going to look spectacular!
When painting, it is important to get some blue tape and tape whatever you don't want painted.  The last people to paint my apartment didn't care at all what happened and there is paint all over my baseboards.  It looks quite terrible and I spent a whole day using paint thinner to get it off. Its not perfect, but it looks so much better. Tape everything, especially if you aren't sure about it. You can never use too much tape unless you don't put it where it needs to go. Usually it goes around windows, doors, along the ceiling, and baseboards.  The rest of painting is simple, don't get too much paint on your brush because then it will drip, and always use a primer to cover the previous paint. The primer isn't needed if you're using a 2-in-1 primer and color.  Happy Painting!

Knitting

My first experience with knitting was a complete disaster.  My two sisters took to it like bees to honey. Me, I was all thumbs.  I kept dropping stitches and I was the only person they ever knew to get three rows into a project, snag on something and rip every stitch out.  That was a long time ago and since then, I have just stuck to quilting.  I do wish I could learn how to knit and make a scarf or some mittens, but its just not my thing. 

Knitting is actually quite easy to learn and after ten minutes of instruction, most people could learn to knit a simple scarf.  The general items you would need are knitting needles (the long stick looking things), and some yarn.  For scarfs, I love the feel of the yarn you would use for babies because it is so incredibly soft and very warm.  For people that learn it and are successful, more power to you! As for me and my fingers, I'll stick to something like embroidery or quilting. :)

Wood burning

The art of wood burning is a very delicate process.  Just one mess up and the entire project qualifies for a life long trip to the wood stove. :)  I personally have never done this, but I know that it takes a lot of patience to create something like the horse above.  I have family out in Kansas and in the town where they live, there is a restaurant that has each of the ranch logo's burnt into their own piece of wood.  It's quite neat to see all the different farm names on one wall.  Shops like Hobby Lobby and Michaels sell wood burning kits and anyone that has the patience to do it has my respect.

Stained glass, minus the glass

A couple years ago, I was at a camp and we did work with the stained glass paint.  It looks beautiful and is a simple gift idea for anyone.  I made one for a gift exchange in my sorority and used my schools logo as the central idea.  Using liquid lead and various paints and toothpicks, I was able to create a beautiful piece of art that was relatively cheap. 

Any picture can be turned into a stained glass piece by placing it under a piece of glass or plastic and tracing the outlines with liquid lead.  You must let the lead completely dry before filling it in with colors otherwise the lead will get in the area you want to fill with color.  After the lead is dry, color can be added.  a little goes a long way and can be spread with different paint brushes to create different effects. A toothpick can also be used to blend more than one color together.  The finished effect will look very professional and can be hung in a window to create a beautiful stained glass piece.

Wedding

I am the Maid of Honor in my friends upcoming wedding and all her talk of weddings got me to thinking about do it yourself weddings.  I am going to be married in around 2 years ish so I have a lot of time to think about such things.  The things I like most are the table centerpieces and favors.  My friend has a really good idea for favors where instead of buying Hershey's kisses with the premaid stickers on the bottom, using the dots you get for garage sales and writing or printing on them what you wanted them to say.  I also saw rolls of mints that had ribbons tied around them with the bride and grooms name on them. 

Centerpieces are really easy to do. Candles in a vase with pebbles around them is very classy.  I have seen many people that use flower petals with floating tealights.  Basically you fill a vase up with petals and water then put a tealight on top to float.  It looks very nice.

Sorority Letters Shirts

So we've all been around a college campus and seen all the girls in their shirts with the different letters on them depending on what sorority they're in.  Well, I make my own.  I charge $5 for a t-shirt and $10 for a sweatshirt simply because the sweatshirts are harder to work with.  Working with shirts is somewhat difficult, but like any craft, it just takes a little time. 

The first step in making these letters shirts is to get some wonder-under. This is the stuff that makes the letters stick to the shirt.  Take the wonder under and iron it to your fabric, then trace out your letters Backwards!  cut them out and peel the backing off the fabric so you can iron it to your shirt.  Iron it to your shirt or pants or bag and sew around it using a satin stitch (the zigzaggy one). This completes your very first (or maybe second or third) shirt!

It also doesn't have to be a letters shirt, you can make any applique shirt or bag or pants using the same method.  Me, I prefer to make letters shirts for people, but I've also made frogs and footballs using the same method as described above.  Happy sewing!