I’m not quite sure how I managed to neglect posting the past few days. All I know is I was up late every night working on that big project, and it just didn’t happen. But I do have some photos of the projects and the craftermath.
So, you probably remember the cookies I baked:
This is just part of a fun project I volunteered for. I found out that a couple who are both in the Army, and both stationed at the same base in Afghanistan, are planning an October wedding. They wanted to have a bridal shower while they are still downrange, so a group I know got together to send them a “Bridal Shower In A Box”. Well, it will likely be several boxes, based on all the stuff I saw today!
So, I offered to bake some cookies to send, and to put together 30 party favors. The cookies came out fine in the end (as you can see above), but they killed my mixer in the process. Literally “in the process”. I was about halfway through mixing a double batch of cookie dough, when the mixer simply stopped. And it never started up again.
Luckily, my sister has a KitchenAid mixer. And was home. And offered to help me fix it. And actually knows what she’s doing in the kitchen.
Long story short, she and her mixer saved the day (and the cookie dough), and I was able to return to my house to actually bake the cookies. She even helped me color the cookie dough with the food coloring while she still had the mixer out.
So, after I got the cookies made, I started in on the favor bags. I grabbed some pretty fabrics out of my quilting stash, and figured out that I could get 3 decent-sized drawstring pouches out of each fat-quarter of fabric. Even though I could have made more from each piece of fabric, the larger size allowed me to more easily use my sewing machine to sew the casings for the strings. I used embroidery floss for the drawstrings, and threaded beads onto the strings. Here’s how a few of them turned out:
The bags took a lot longer than I expected! It didn’t take very long to sew the bags up, but threading and beading the drawstrings took quite a bit longer. I was up very late 3 nights in a row working on these. They will be filled with little plastic bags of candies (to keep the candies from rolling out of the bags in transit, and from getting dusty after they arrive at their destination). I also made some tags with the bride and groom’s names, that can be cut apart and attached to the bags.
Finally, the last part turned out the best, I thought. One of my co-workers bought a couple of teddy bears dressed in green camo, tan t-shirts and dog tags. I brought them home, bought a couple of items to add to their outfits, and came up with this:
It’s really difficult to find nice gifts for a military couple with no time to order. So, I customized these bears. The groom bear is wearing a top hat, a boutonnière to match the bride’s bouquet, and is “holding” a silver ring. The bride is wearing a tiara and veil, and holding a lovely little bouquet of mixed flowers. Here they are from the back:
As you can see, they are sitting among the “craftermath” of my marathon crafting sessions. Which still hasn’t been put away. Oh, why yes, we are expecting company this weekend! How did you know?
So, while I wasn’t posting here, it’s because I was so busy making stuff, I didn’t take the time to write about it. Which is kind of cool, I think.
Now I think I need to go do something about all that stuff in my dining room.
