It IS easy being green

Happy Memorial Day weekend!

I was having such a fun time yesterday cleaning my apartment that I completely forgot to post.  This girl knows how to have fun!  But honestly, my weekends have been pretty over-planned lately so the cleaning has totally escaped me.  Now that it's done, I feel so much better in my space and can enjoy my long weekend a bit.

Yesterday's challenge: It's not easy being green.  Work only with green-colored materials today.  Try working on a green surface for a real challenge.

Well, I don't really have many green surfaces, but I was super excited about this challenge.  I've mentioned before how I enjoy making things out of felt, and I decided to make a small boutonniere using green felt, embroidery floss, a pipe cleaner, and a button.  It was so much fun and I'm really happy with the result:

I've been seeing and reading about a lot of people who are using handcrafted flowers for weddings, and I completely love that idea.  Handmade flowers aren't tacky like fake flowers can be, and I think they'd be great favors for guests to take home - and excellent way to save a little cash when planning a wedding and add a personal (not to mention sustainable) touch.

Off to go to a baseball game!  I haven't been to a game in years and am really excited.  Go, Tigers!!!

Day 5

Challenge:  What do you collect?  Work with a collection of objects you have in your home (or borrow a friend's if you like).

For this challenge, I had to think for a moment: do I have any collections?  I collected key chains as a kid, but those days are long gone.  Whenever I travel, I like to buy a piece of unique jewelry as a souvenir, but I've never been terribly inspired to make work related to fashion or glamour, it's just not my thing.  So I started looking around the apartment, looking through things and discovering that I do have a collection, but I just didn't know it:

SCRAPS.

I have little pieces of paper, snippets of inspiration, a box of buttons, bags of pieces of embroidery floss, leftover batting, funny cut-out bits of felt, scant feet of yarn skeins wound into small balls, dollops of paint left in the bottoms of paint containers, and so on.  For this challenge, I decided to get out some of the scrap felt pieces, embroidery floss. and batting to make a stuffed patchwork heart.  I've made stuffed snowmen ornaments and small felt bird toys as gifts or for craft fairs before, so the concept was familiar to me.

First, I dragged some cardboard out of my recycling bin and cut out a heart template.  Still, I didn't follow the template exactly.  That adds character, right?  I actually love a little imperfection in most things:

My plan was to create another patchy heart for the back, but I decided on a solid color backing instead.  After attaching the back and stuffing the heart with batting, it became an adorable tiny pillow and/or toy:

I'm not sure, but I think that Lola approves:

Now, what to do with this crafty creation?  Mother's day gift that rivals something I probably made for my mom about 15 years ago?  Stuff a little catnip in there and let the kitties have at it?  Give to a nephew of mine who would probably either throw it, squeeze it until the seams break, or try to eat it?  Tell boyfriend that I made it just for him???  Oh, the choices.

In any case, my sister/roommate does have one collection - shot glasses.  Here's one that I bought for her from a trip last month to Arizona:

I considered using her collection for this challenge, but the scraps idea took a hold of me before any creative shot glass idea came to me.