I'm Dreaming Of A...

...DIY Christmas! I discovered Pinterest a few weeks ago, and I have been having WAY too much fun with it! I've decided I want all my presents to be DIY this year, because it's usually so much cheaper and also a lot of fun :)

Before I start, I have a couple apologies:

1. I know this is primarily a quilting blog, but I really don't want to start an entire new blog for all the other crafts I do. At least, not right now. If you'd rather I only posted quilty stuff on here, then let me know :)
2. I am not a creative person. Although I quilt, most patterns and designs I use are either really easy, or I purchased them from someone else. Same goes for all the crafts I'm going to post, I found them all on Pinterest. So apologies for all the external links, but I'm going to give credit where credit is due and link back to the site that I got each recipe. I will also put the very general recipes here in case you don't want to click a bunch of links.
3. The crafts I'm going to post are finished, but they don't look it. I haven't spruced up any of their containers yet, so I wanted to apologize for the lack of...professionalism?...that they infer.

Off we go!

On Friday, my hubby squished his hand really bad between a hand pallet jack and one of his two trailers (he's trucking with doubles right now, which lets him stay in this general area rather than trucking cross country). He had to get 16 (17?) stitches, and now he has to stay home for 2 weeks to let it heal before he can go back to work. One of the wonderful managers of the store he delivered to took him all the way to the hospital to get it fixed up, and then refused to leave until he was done! She had to wait AT LEAST 3 hours while Chris was seeing the doctor, and even though he asked her to leave and told her he'd be fine getting a cab, she still stayed (Chris and I both think this is partially because it allowed her to play/talk on her phone rather than work, but that's between you and me ;P she was still a lot more helpful than most would be in that situation). I'm forever grateful to her, and to show it, I'm going to use her as my guinea pig test driver for all the DIYs I'd like to make this year! So far, I've made her vanilla body butter, peppermint sugar scrub, and lavender bath bombs. I also tried to make shower bombs, but the first recipe didn't work out so well, so I'm going to make those later (probably today). Additionally, I might make her bath salts and bubble bath, but I'm not sure yet. I'm also planning on making her an actual quilt-related thing (like a pot holder or mug rug), seeing as that's more of my forte than bath products =P

The vanilla body butter was literally just whipped coconut oil and vanilla extract. I put the coconut oil in the Mix Master for a few minutes, and it felt quite lovely. Very airy! Which is good, because my main problem with coconut oil is that it solidifies when it gets too cold, which makes it a pain for scrubs and rubs and such. Here's the very plain jar I have so far:

Very simple recipe found here

Next is the peppermint sugar scrub. As expected, it didn't turn out as well as the original did, but hey, it was my first try! I mixed 2 cups of plain white sugar with about 1/2 cup of coconut oil and a couple drops of peppermint essential oil (which I surprisingly found at Fred Meyer's!), then used red food coloring for half of it to make it look like a candy cane:

Recipe here

Next is the lavender bath bombs, which I actually made a while ago for myself and ended up loving :) This one has a few more ingredients, so I'm actually going to put them in list form:

1. 1 cup baking soda
2. 1/2 cup Citric Acid
3. 1/2 cup corn starch
4. 1/2 cup Epsom salts
5. 3/4 tsp water
6. quite a few drops of lavender essential oil
7. 2 1/2 tsp coconut oil
8. food coloring (I used red and blue separately rather than purple, and the bombs don't really look the way I want them to, but when they dissolve in the bath they kind of have this multi-color purple effect which is cool)

 I mixed the dry ingredients together, then added the wet ones, then stirred it really well with a whisk. Then I packed the mixture into super adorable silicone heart molds, let each bomb sit overnight in the molds, and this is what I got:

Recipe here

And I also made myself (and my sister) some pumpkin spice sugar scrub, which smells like Halloween! Here's the ingredients:

1. 2 cups brown sugar (I used dark because I needed to get rid of it, but I think light would work too)
2. 1/2 cup white sugar
3. 1 tsp cinnamon
4. 1 tsp pumpkin pie spice
5. 1/2 tsp nutmeg
6. over 1/3 cup coconut oil

 I just mixed all ingredients together till I got the right consistency, and put it in a few different jars. Here's where I put the leftovers:

Recipe here

Ok, that's enough of that. Now on to QUILTING!! As promised in my last post, I took pics of my very first all-Minky quilt! This is for a baby girl who isn't due until the end of October (near my birthday!). However, she's threatening to come early, so I wanted to make sure this was ready for her:

Woohoo!

sew much fun!

This owl isn't on their site yet, but their main shop can be found here

I wanted to prove to myself that I could sew with all Minky! It's not all bad, you just have to pay attention and not stretch the fabric as you go. I also used a super easy pattern, which helped as well. The main quilt is my own design (just stripes and a square), owl is from McKay Manor Musers. I also made a super cute little owl stuffy using their Happy Scrappy Whoo pattern to go along with it:

I don't think the beak is necessarily supposed to be open like this, but I thought it was cute so I left it that way :)

That's all I've got for now! It was a very busy weekend, and I'm so glad I actually had time to work on stuff. Next project to work on: the Mario quilt provided by Cora's Quilts! More pics to come :)

Am I the only one planning an all-DIY Christmas? Let me know what you're working on! I love using other people's inspiration for my own stuff (hence all the bath products from Pinterest, haha)