makes the most gorgeous pillows! The latest phase of my room-redecoration....
The black and white polka dot is Daydreams by Deb Strain for Moda. I found the gold moire at Hobby Lobby for 40% off! And the pale pink, pale yellow, and gold damask were all vintage flea market finds.... I made the pale pink pillows and the pale yellow pillow out of tablecloths-- the remnant for the bolster was only 50 cents!
This is the best makeover yet, no?
Finally! Here's our 'rag rug'. We saw it first at a friend's house and just loved it. All you'll need is a piece of fabric measuring the size of the place you want the rug to go and little 2" squares. We weren't particular about the square size....(translated, we eyeballed the squares and didn't measure them all)
Our bright squares piled on our work table. 
And then sewing the squares on....
After you cut your 2" squares, fold them in half, (corner to corner). Then, sew straight through the middle, (over-lapping the ends of each square) securing squares to the base fabric. Continue sewing squares in a long row down the entire length of the fabric base. When you're ready to start another row, hold the previous row back with one hand while you're stitching the next row. Your rows of stitching will be about 3/4" apart. We started the whole process with a row of squares in approximately the center of the base. Once you've made it from the center to one side of the base, you'll head the other direction. One of the nice things about this rug is that the sewing lines don't have to be perfect. Once the fabric "fluffs" up, you'll never see the stitching lines. If you want the rug to look even fuller and fluffier, sew the rows closer together. This is one rug that is made without any "perfect" way, and yet it is as cute as can be!
tada! Here's the back and front of our new rug!
Well, well, look what we have here! We girls have been wanting a rug for our room for some time but never found the perfect thing until.....we saw a picture of a braided rug in an old decorating book.
Here are the strips (about 1 1/2"wide...the wider the cut strip, the fatter the braid) that we cut from all of our scrap fabric..notice all the bright colors!
The strips were sewn together (length-wise) and are now in the midst of being braided... I love this part! Since we're braiding our strips, we made three separate, VERY long runs...then we braided them together.
(someone had to get a picture of our cute pincushion.... find more like this on our Etsy shop! )
Once you have all the strips braided and have one long braid, you start wrapping your braid around itself and sewing it together in whatever size and shape that you want. We didn't want a huge rug and since this was our first attempt at braided rug making, we started our center about 6"in length. You need to keep your rug laying down when you're working on it, or it will have a tendency to curl up (we found this out the hard way... thanks to Nanny for helping us with that little problem) into a bowl shape. We also found that a curved needle and clear quilting thread (easily available at some place like JoAnn Fabrics) work great for this job. Once you've used up almost all of the braid that you have made, but your rug isn't big enough, stop with some fabric hanging free, and sew on more fabric scraps, braid, and then start your hand sewing again. Continue until the rug is just the size that you're wanting.
The finished product! This was a lot of fun for us girls and we're sure that you'll enjoy doing it as much as we did.
We'll try to post about our other rug that we made real soon.... so stay tuned!
As you can probably tell, we're not much for decorating things in the "ordinary" way. Oh no. Sometimes our ideas turn out perfectly. Others we have to work on a little. But we always like to think that that's the beauty of it... keep working, rearranging, etc. until you find something you like. And like our sewing room adventure "Is it practical?" Here I think we found something practical and something that's cute too.
Two rooms in our home have pretty wall borders that we made up. What sets this apart from other borders are a couple things: 1) no wallpaper involved 2) it's only on one wall. Sounds different, don't you think?
This room needed something prettier and more delicate so we used vintage rose postcards and sheer red ribbon. The postcards are held on the back with sticky tack (found at Hobby Lobby and other craft stores). 99% of the time sticky tack comes off fairly easily and shouldn't damage the postcards at all.
This room, on the other hand, is eclectic 70's brights, so it needed something more fun. We chose to use special letters, drawings, and notes from sweet little girls. In this room we tacked them up with white thumb tacks and used yellow grosgrain ribbon behind them.
Why this is such a extra neat idea (in my humble opinion!) is that it can be done very inexpensively and be made to fit almost any room in your house! Try this in a new babies room; I'm sure you could make it really cute with some kind of sweet baby memorabilia.
The possibilities are really endless! Your choice...now you decide!
We are SO sorry.... we've not posted about our progress for so many days! Nanny, Mom, and us girls have been extremely busy working on the Roman Shades. Lord willing we'll be able to finish them all today, because Nanny has to go home tomorrow. We're all really going to miss her!
Our Roman Shades have turned out very well so far. We used plain sheeting to make them with and Mini Blinds without the slats. Lord willing you'll get to see pictures of the finished product later on today, but for now, here's some pictures working on them. We had a total of 10 to do!
Took some cutting, measuring, and ripping!
Not to mention pressing and sewing!
Then yesterday afternoon, we decided to drive over to a town about 20 miles from us to do a little looking around. We felt like we could take a small break anyway! We visited a couple flea markets and throughly enjoyed ourselves. We brought along a digital camera so we could snap a few pictures to show you all.
Aunt Amy, your sister bought these for you!
We know, we know... we're were supposed to post daily. We're sorry... the days just come and go so quickly! Here's a little blurb of what we did yesterday and today.
Yesterday was spent mainly in painting the boys' room a pretty pale brown color. To us it looks just like yummy chocolate milk. And it's very surprising how cozy it makes a room feel! Nanny and Apphia are the official "cutting-in-a-room" painters (for us non-painters the term means go around the edges, near the baseboards, and trim!), so yesterday for awhile they worked on that while Mom helped the boys go through all the "goodies" they have. 
Here Nanny's starting to cut in the room, while Abigail looks on.
Apphia's working on some more painting while Caleb and Abigail keep her company.
Then Nanny had this impressive idea to paint a blue stripe on the wall with the window, and paint a Bible verse above it. Earlier this morning, Nanny worked on that by herself. We chose a verse that we thought would be good for our wonderful young men... 2 Timothy 2:1 "Thou therefore, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus."
She did this all free hand! Unbelievable to me! Now the finished product...
This afternoon we also enjoyed going into town and visiting one of our favorite local flea markets, The Picket Fence (Nanny loves flea markets as much as we do!). Mom and Nanny had decided on some nice storage solutions for the floor of the closet so off we went to Lowe's to pick up some things. Lord willing you'll get to see them tomorrow! (By the way, we also had to stop at the fabric store for some things...)
While we were in town we also picked up some Domino's Pizza for our movie and pizza night tonight... we're taking the evening off work.
P.S. Paps, if you're reading this, we love and miss you TONS!! We wish you were here too!
Our little camp stool was in pretty poor shape when we picked it up for $6 at a local flea market. (If you've read our blog for long, you know how we love flea markets!) It looked something like this (except for the fact it had a tacky blue paint on the legs, and the cover was an unattractive striped material)... 
We girls saw that it "could" make an adorable addition to our room. So... we went for it, hoping for the best. Wiping down thoroughly, a can of white spray paint, and a new cover was needed. To make the cover, Abigail tore off the old one (by getting the staples out) and measured its length and width. Then she took some pretty, bright vintage fabric we'd gotten at another near-by flea market (14 yards on a bolt for $15! We saw that bargain a mile away!), cutting out the size she'd measured from the old piece, plus a little extra seam allowance. Abigail got some plain white sheeting and sewed the two fabrics right sides together, leaving a small opening for turning. After turning it right side out, she hand whipped the opening closed. The staple gun was used to attach it to the frame. Viola! What a cute addition to our room! 
You could easily do this project for yourselves. A little camp stool, fabric you like, a rag, a bottle of spray paint, and a little imagination. You never know... maybe soon you'll be sitting pretty on a cute camp stool yourself!
posted by Achaia
Earlier this week we came up with a startling realization... our sewing room needed some help! Desperately! When we first began using the room specifically for sewing, Mom, Apphia, and Achaia were the basic ones who sewed. Three of us and three sewing machines. We had only two folding tables. With Abigail and Abiah getting older, they too, wanted to have room to sew. Two more girls and three or four machines later, and here we are. Something HAD to be done! It was getting more and more difficult to find enough room to do our sewing. Enter help-- Dad brought in another folding table and offered to buy us an ironing board that hooks to the wall and folds down. We did the organizing. Of course, we all know (at least this is the way we do it!) you've got to make a mess in order to clean it up properly. We weren't kidding when we said it needed help, were we?
Here we are working, working, working, discussing what needs to go where, and letting it slowly take shape...
It's looking much better now! (You can also take a peek under the table at one of our new fabric lines we just recently got)...
Another thing came to us... when we first had this as a sewing room, we wanted everything to be so pretty and decorative. Exit pretty and decorative-- Enter practicality and utilitarian. Now we can actually sew and enjoy it!
At last, by the grace of God, my bed pillows are finally finished! It's taken me a long time, but I think the results are worth the effort. After picking out some of my favorite fabrics for the fronts of each pillow, I used a less expensive white material for the backs, which tied the pillows in very well with my white quilt.
Just wait 'til you see the results of the project that Dad and I are working on for the empty space above my bed!
posted by Apphia
Decorating for the Christmas season is always lots of fun. But coming up with ways to use all of those cast-off ornaments can be somewhat challenging. Here are some of our favorite ways to bring a "zapper" (as our dear great grandma would say!) to holiday decor.
1. Gather up those basic shiny ball ornaments into a neat display! This little shelf above the closet door was the perfect place for vintage milk glass dishes (we have such a weakness for dishes) overflowing with colorful ornaments. This is actually a permanent decoration, because after last Christmas we couldn't bear to part with it. Here we have used vintage ornaments thrifted from flea markets and garage sales (can you believe anyone would sell hot pink ornaments?) to coordinate with our decorating colors, but wouldn't a collection of mis-matched milk glass heaped with shiny red ornaments be a beautiful centerpiece for your dining room table this Christmas?
2. Find a miniature artificial Christmas tree to enliven a boring corner. This one was purchased at a reduced sale price a couple of years ago. Dressed up with some inexpensive organdy ribbon, a strand of beads, old shiny balls, and some new glitter ornaments, this little tree becomes a big statement. (And is also a favorite of Ethan, age 4, who considers this tree "his size"!)
3. Use some old ornaments strung onto organdy ribbon as a whimsical window valance. Along with some beads (another thrift), this is a really fun holiday decoration. You may even try a strand of leftover Christmas lights, too! (Please excuse those roller shades.... they're on the makeover list!) We like to hang our ornaments at varying heights for more impact.
We are a mother and four daughters. Working together is our specialty. And we make things.
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