Book Review: Every Day's a Holiday

Heidi Kenney of My Paper Crane brings this little set of book reviews to a close with Every Day's a Holiday: Year-round Crafting with Kids.  As you can probably guess, it's organized chronologically following the holidays month by month. There are a ton of projects from crazy hats to stenciled totes. These crafts are targeted to kids of all ages -- some you'll need to help out with and some they'll be able to do on your own. There's definitely a good variety and a full dose of her uber-cute signature plush style.

All the templates are in the back and easy to photocopy as you need them. There aren't a lot of  illustrations to the steps but there are plenty of photographs of the crafts at different angles so if something's difficult, you'll be able to figure it out. And while the crafts are all attached to a holiday (and some really bizarre ones at that), you can do most of them at any time.

Overall, this is a great book for you to pick up if you have kids. You should have picked it up last week before you got buried in all that snow. Then you would have actually had some cool stuff to do instead of watch at that TV.

Happy Birthday to me

While we were out of town, my long-awaited birthday gift arrived from Spoonflower. I told Mr. Lemon that I wanted fabric for my birthday so I picked it out and ordered it. It's much easier that way. These are from Heather Ross' new collection for Spoonflower called Macaroni Love Story. I decided to go with the organic cotton sateen. I have some of her cotton voile, some of the linen, and some regular quilting weight cotton, and of course this, so why not keep mixing it up? The sateen is very soft but feels hearty.

I love this design. When I go to pick out fabrics for a project, however, they are rarely like this. So I went with a test swatch of the two colorways that I was having trouble deciding between. I like having just a little bit -- enough for a pocket or some trim. As you can see for the aqua, I adjusted the scale from 300 to 375 dpi. It's not very noticeable but I just wanted to experiment. It made the people a little bit smaller.

These three are my little impulse buys. The Snow White is by Heidi Kenney of My Paper Crane, the yellow school buses are, of course, by Anda, and the awesome gnomes are by Paper Sparrow. I only remembered after I ordered the Snow White that I changed up the colors for the cross-stitch I am working on; it's not going to match. I'll have to figure something else out.

Thank you awesome computer for saving this entire post when Blogger didn't. Oh, and soon Andrea from Paper Sparrow will be doing an interview. Yay!