Mini Forest Tree Quilt

It's been a loooooong time since I've been on here! But I wanted to hop on and share a quilt that I made that I've been getting lots of questions about on Instagram. That's where you can find me these days (@naturallymeg) but it would be easier to explain the details of this quilt over here.

I love how my Holiday Patchwork Forest quilt turned out! I really wanted it to look like pine trees in a snowy forest, so that is why all the trees are green and the white background. I used this tutorial for the tree blocks from Diary of a Quilter.

I cut my trees down to 3.5" x 5" so they ended up being pretty small blocks. I tried to make the trees as uniform as I could, but that was tricky since it is kind of a free style pattern. And yes, I wasted half of the fabric. The way that the pattern works you would end up with white trees and a green background too, but I just wanted the green trees. The thrifty girl in me died a little by throwing the other block pieces out, but I think it was worth it to get all green trees with a white background.

I picked about 12 different fabrics to make the trees. I think it was key to have a couple solid greens in there too, so there is a solid dark green and a solid lighter green that I had on every row. The rest of the fabrics were mostly dots and stripes that I had stashed away from other projects. For the white I used kona white solid fabric.

I ended up with 107 tree blocks and 75 blank white squares that I randomly placed so that it had a more foresty look. 182 blocks total with 14 blocks across and 13 rows going down. This still ended up being smaller than I wanted for a lap quilt  (48x58 was the finished size with just the trees) so I added a 6 1/2" white border on all sides of it. It ended up being the perfect size to cuddle on the couch with my kids during the winter, just like I envisioned!

I machine quilted it with a matchstick quilting pattern. I just sewed in the ditch straight down and then measured 1 1/2" over which was down the center of the trees starting in the middle of the quilt and going to the end. Once that was done I went back and sewed another line in the middle of those two seams to finish it off. Then I flipped the quilt and did the other side. I hope this makes sense. If not then check out this great tutorial on straight line quilting by Suzy Quilts.

I picked a super soft minky fabric for the back and a striped binding. I'm so happy with how it turned out!

Knit mermaid tail...

My dear friend had a baby girl this summer. She lives by the beach is sort of a mermaid herself ;). So it was only fitting that this new baby have a mermaid tail too. I used this pattern and really loved how it turned out.

This is by far one of the largest items that I've knitted before. Hopefully I get the chance to make another one like this someday, it was really fun.

And here is the sweet little mermaid herself, modeling her new tail!

Triangle quilt...

I finished the triangle quilt for our living room a few months ago and am finally getting around to documenting it here. We snapped some family pictures this fall so I brought the quilt along with us to take a few pictures outside.

My goal was to keep it simple and use the colors that I want in my living room in the quilt. I went for brown, teal, green, and white. Honestly... I love it, but it's a bit busy for me. I think I used too many different patterned fabrics and not enough solid colors. Oh well, it's a quilt! I'm sure it will be one of many around here someday. I used a mossy green flannel on the back so that it would be nice and soft. It's been getting a lot of use around here already.

Woodland mobile...

*** So I've lost my camera. I have no clue where it is. I know that it made it here from the move because I took Baby G's 11 month pictures with it here, but now it is gone and I wish I could figure out where I put it! But I really wanted to share the latest project that I've finished, so please excuse the phone pictures that I have. 

Baby G finally has his own room! I've been having fun making plans to decorate his new space. I want to do a woodland animal theme and started on a mobile for it back in the beginning of the year. I put it away for a while but pulled it out again when we moved to finish it up and get it hanging above his bed.

I used wool felt and pretty much fell in love with it. That stuff is so dreamy to sew with! I just worked on one animal at a time until I had enough to hang it up.

I found an old branch in the yard here and tied all the animals to it with some fishing string. 

 I think this colorful fish is my favorite...

I used four eye hooks screwed into the ceiling to suspend the branches. This little moose guy wasn't pictured above, he was the last one I did before hanging it up.

I'm super happy with how it turned out! I think that Gray likes it too. These pictures just don't do it justice... darn it! I'm happy to have something up in his room for him now.

Handmade gifts - bread boards...

I love making handmade gifts for Christmas when I can. I decided that this year I wanted to make something that I've been lusting over for quite some time, and that is bread boards! I think they are so beautiful! I would love a stack of worn bread boards sitting on my kitchen counter someday. Here are some pictures I looked at to give me some bread board inspiration:

 

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There are a ton more on my kitchen pinterest board if you want more bread board eye candy.

I have to say that I have learned that even though I have a father in law with lots of wood working tools and a very willing husband, I really do get in over my head with these wood projects sometimes. This was one of those times! My husband did most of the work. Turns out I get a little scared of using the band saw and it's hard to work in the garage with a newborn that can't be out there. I'm so grateful that my husband was a good sport and did most of the cutting for me and that I was able to do the sanding and the oiling on my own ;).

But here is my first attempt at making my own bread boards...

Not too shabby! We did two different types of handles, and I loved them both!

We spent an afternoon at MacBeath Hardwood looking at all the different pretty wood they have there. I loved the walnut, but that stuff is so expensive! So we went with this pretty Ash wood.

The board on the left is after I rubbed the food grade safe conditioning oil on it. The other boards are the raw wood. I found some butcher block conditioner at Home Depot that I rubbed them down with once they were all sanded and ready. 

It was a fun project! But a lot more work than I anticipated and could really handle on my own ;). They aren't perfect, but made with lots of love.

Family picture ornaments...

 I like to have a family picture taken every year of my little family. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, most of the time we just have a friend snap a few pictures with my point and shoot camera. Just something, with all of us looking reasonably presentable, in the same picture... once a year. Not too bad right? We've been able to do it ever since Blue was 2 months old, and I love looking at how we have all changed a little over the years. I've been trying to find a way to display them around Christmas time since I haven't been the best at getting cute Christmas cards made every year. I thought it might be fun to make ornaments for our tree out of the pictures so that we can pull them out and look at them every year.

They were pretty simple to make! This is by no means a tutorial, but here are the supplies that I used:

 

I found some wooden rectangles at Hobby Lobby (4 in the pack for $1.49) and printed out wallet sized pictures (I had to get two of each... so now I have lots of extras!). I stained the wood because I love the whole darker wood look, and just mod podged the pictures onto the wooden tags. I then drilled a small hole in the top and laced some bakers twine to hang them from.

I wanted to use my wood burning tool to put the year of the photo on the back but it wasn't working so well. I ended up using a white paint pen and just writing the year on each one.

I have to say I LOVE how they turned out!!!

 

Here is our shot from this year. Can you believe this gorgeous "forest" is just two blocks away from our house? 

 

Easy project that didn't take very much time that I will treasure. I'm still working on getting my tree all decorated, but it makes me so happy to see these when I walk past the tree.

The coop and the ladies...

 We have the coolest old root cellar in the back yard that is original with the house. But up until this point it has just been cool to look at, not a usable space for us. I was always afraid to go in there because I was sure it was full of black widows or something.

Husband got the idea that it would be cool to turn it into a chicken coop. So he asked our awesome landlord if we could do it... and she said sure! I was thinking that he would wait until springtime when the new baby chicks come out. Nope. He got right to work cleaning out the root cellar. It took a few days, he said there was a squirrel nest in there with a dead squirrel in it (RIP little squirrel) and it was FULL of walnuts. Anywhere a squirrel could have possible stuck a nut there was a nut there. So he cleaned out all the old nuts and stuff that had been stored in there for 50+ years and built a roosting shelf for some chickens.

Then he looked on KSL to see if there was anyone who was trying to get rid of some hens. Sure enough, there was a lady who had five hens that were a year old that they were done taking care of. So he went and picked up the hens for super cheap and we now have five ladies residing in the root cellar...

 They are super tame and pretty birds. They are really great with Blue which is wonderful since he likes to pick them up and carry them around. Now that we've settled on some names for them, here are the ladies.

And for the inside of the coop. I think it's the coolest chicken coop ever! I love that we can use this space for something now. Trent has built a big feeder and turned our old cooler into a watering station so we could leave for a while and they would still be fed just fine.

We've put hay down on the shelves and wood chips on the ground so that when it comes time to clean the coop we can sweep everything up and replace it with new stuff... hopefully it stays less stinky that way. I think that it's pretty awesome!

First morning after we picked up the ladies the boys went out to check for eggs... none yet!

But we've since been getting 3-5 eggs every day and they are beautiful! And yummy! I'm glad my husband was willing to do all the work since I've decided my only job in life right now is to nurse a baby.

Livingroom progress...

 I have this belief... call it what you will... the laws of the universe, the secret, whatever.  But I believe that if you take a thought in your head and you say it out loud,  write it down, blog about it, it is no longer a thought or idea but it becomes real. It becomes a tangible thing that you can see, and it can grow and evolve from there. But if it's left as a thought in your head there it will stay.

Which is why I wrote a post about what I wanted to do in my living room to spruce things up. I also wrote a nice long to do list on all the things I hope to get done for this room. We've been here for a year and almost nothing has gotten accomplished in this room. But within the last week things have happened, moved along, and we are well on our way!

First, after three days of looking at fabric at the store for some throw pillows that would match my green/brown rug I decided that I didn't want this rug anymore. I love it, it's a great rug... but it is getting old, and it's stained, and I just wasn't loving how limited it made me in my decorating options. Basically, I couldn't do what I wanted to do and match the rug. So I told my husband what I really wanted was to get rid of it and get a jute rug... I was totally dreaming! But he said, "Sure, lets get a new rug! That's fine!" AHHHH!!! I was so excited!! I've been doing some extra typing work for his job and had some extra money that we could get the rug with... so that's what we did (we got it from IKEA). I can't believe that Trent agreed to let me get a jute rug. You see, he could care less about style and goes more for comfort. I was worried that he would hate it because of the texture.

Turns out the rough texture is like a good foot massage on these pregnant feet. It's perfect!

So with that I had a clean slate to do whatever I wanted with this room! Here is where the whole "laws of the universe" come in. I've been wanting to find a long dresser that I could re-paint and put in the living room to house all of the baby's stuff in. I had been searching Craigslist and KSL for something that would work for a  few weeks. Then one day last week I got an e-mail (from the lady in our ward that sends out the mass e-mails) that said FREE DRESSER. Huh? Someone in my ward was giving away a 9 drawer dresser for free! So I jumped on it, called up the man who had it, and now we have a nice long dresser that I can paint and fix up the way I want it!

It's not exactly the style that I was looking for... but it's free! And I think that once I get it all re-done it will look just fine.

I've been trying to decide if I should go teal or yellow. I love yellow. That's what I'm leaning towards now. But I just don't want there to be too much yellow going on in the room. So maybe teal? Not sure still...

Here are some yellows that I love...

 yellow 1, 2, 3

 

And some teal...

 



 

 

teal 1, 2

 

I think that I'm just going to have to pick one and hope that I like it. And if not, I can always re-do it. I like the teal, but I worry that I just like it because it's trendy now... and I'm not a very trendy person. So we'll see (... and now that I've re-read this post I'm loving the teal! Oh help! Maybe it's just the cute baby in the picture that is swaying me to teal).

 

I did however sew up some cute yellow pillows out of the old yellow curtains that were in our Las Vegas condo... they make me happy!

 



 

 

It feels good to be making some progress! My list is already getting checked off and things are getting accomplished... it feels good!

 



Wood + White Entertainment Center...

 We finally finished up the project that we've been working on for the past 3+ months. Our TV stand is done!!! We finished it on Monday and I'm still giddy about having it in the living room...

Really, it's better than I thought it would be. It's always scary (for me anyway) to build something yourself. We are amatures at this for sure, but it turned out so great!

I'm still a little shocked that Trent agreed that we could do the white frame with the different colored wood doors. We have very, very different tastes in style. He likes natural colored wood, and is one of those people who thinks it's a sin to paint over nice wood. When I first showed him a picture of what I really wanted (similar to this) he said no way! So when I brought it up again when we got serious about building something and he said, "Sure, why not" I was really surprised. I kept asking if he was sure he was okay with it... and he said he was. So we drew out our plans and made it happen.

We wanted it to be very simple. Two opened slots at the top for the DVD player and current VCR we have (hoping to swap that out for something to play games on at some point here). We also wanted closed cabinets with space to store toys/blankets/games and some hidden drawers for DVD's. 

We've been going out to his dad's about once a week for the past 3 months to work on it. It took longer than I thought it would, but part of what's nice about building things with Trent's dad is that we get to spend lots of good quality time with him.

Trent cut the wood for the cabinet doors and brought them home for me to stain. Can I just say how much I love staining wood? It's kind of an addiction for me. I love it! I love taking something that I sort of like and making it into something I love with just a little stain. I went with Jacobean for the dark, Early American for the lighter brown, and made a homemade stain of steel wool soaked in vinegar for the gray/barn wood color (what I did was put a steel wool pad in a glass bottle and covered it in white vinegar for 24 hours. Then I took out the pad, wrung it out a little, and rubbed the pad onto the wood). 

Let me just show you how cool the vinegar stain turned out. These two panels are both stained with that, but they are two totally different colors because of the type of wood that was used. The wood on the left is a soft pine and the wood on the right is a hard maple. The hardwood came out GRAY! And the soft wood a light/dark brown. It was an awesome science experiment! Pretty sure this is my new favorite stain.

Simple knobs (that can be tied together for future baby-proofing)...

Simple hinges... I really think it's the simplicity of it all that makes it so pretty to me.

Here is our inside storage area.

I still need to fill in those spaces, once the boy decides to quit playing hide and seek in them...

I'm just so happy with how it turned out. We really needed to have some good functional furniture in our livingroom. It's nice to have something that looks great and provides storage that we really need.

 I love working on projects like this with my husband. Building something out of nothing for our family to enjoy.