For Valentine's Day...and Mother's Day: Mom Heart Tattoo Applique

 I must admit, Valentine's day is a hard holiday for outfitting boys.  You don't want to dress them in ruffles, lace, and huge amounts of pink. However, I think that I came up with a fun and appropriate approach to the holiday.

How about a Mom Heart Tattoo Applique.  Because these two little guys are so rough and tough....alright, not so much, but they sure are lovable. When Clark and I started our photo shoot I asked him to act tough, all I got were smiles and kisses (maybe he was remembering our Christmas shirt shoot).  

Right now I'm really enjoying the fact that I am the girl that is in the center of their lives, I dread the day that Clark runs off chasing girls, and forgets all about his dear old mom. I'm marking my territory.  I'm reminding them now, while their young, that mine is a heart that they don't want to break.

If you are interested in this particular applique template and tutorial, I have a pdf file available for purchase.  The file includes three different sized templates.   I've also written up a photo tutorial to explain the process that I used to create my appliques.  The pdf template will be emailed to the buyer, and you can be printed at home. 

Check out the guns! 

While I'd love to share all of my projects with you for free, I feel like I need to make my time more profitable.  We're hoping to get my husband  into grad school later this year, and we're trying to save our pretty little pennies.  Don't worry though,  I have several more projects and tutorials that I'm working on.  Hopefully I'll have them to you early next week.

 A whole lotta love here.

 Thanks so much for reading!

Modest Maven Purses for Mother's Day

For Mother's Day this year I made our mothers these great pleated purses. I followed this free pattern from Modest Maven. She has a wonderful tutorial with pictures to accompany written instructions. This would be a great beginning sewing project, and it would make a great gift for any occasion. I added a few personal touches to the purses including: flower corsages that are removable, key hooks, and card/coin purses.

The bags were fairly inexpensive to make. I used mostly found materials. I had some left over fabric from a table cloth that I had turned into curtains. I used it as the shell for the solid brown purse and as the yolk fabric for the houndstooth purse. I also lined the dark chocolate purse with the fabric from a pair of ripped pajama pants. The houndstooth fabric I had purchased for 25cents at a remnant sale at a local home fabrics store. The thicker fabric worked great. It really holds its shape well. I did invest in magnetic snap closures for the purse, a snap for the coin purse, and the key chain. It was a very easy and inexpensive project. Easy and inexpensive is just how I like it.