Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Summer Activities

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This summer was exceptionally busy. Because there was so much that we did, & made, I just simply didn't have time to update my blogs. I say blogs because I have for the last little while maintained (not very well), 2 separate blogs. The first, www.azgardengirl.wordpress.com & the second, www.cutecoolcrafts.blogspot.com, are now going to be consolidated into this one blog. I think that will work a lot better for me.

The whole first part of June was taken up with girls camp. Some of the things we did were little individual backpacks for the girls, with their name embroidered onto felt and fabric glued onto the backpack. Those worked really great. We used the pattern found on this link: http://reannalilydesigns.com/2009/10/fat-quarter-drawstring-backpack/. At first I wasn't sure it would work well for a hike, with a water bottle and snacks, etc. in it. I myself put 2 regular sized water bottles in it, as well as snacks and a few other things, and it worked very well. This was one thing I would definately do again. It really didn't take that much time with 2 people sewing to get them put together, and it was a lot cheaper than buying them, if you used some discount or sale fabric. For the straps, the directions on the pattern say to use ribbon, but we went to our local store and bought some cotton clothes line at 100 ft. for about 3 dollars. It worked well. There weren't any problems with the clothes line digging in to our shoulders or anything. The one thing we did adjust was to add some inches if a girl was a little bit larger, to make it more comfortable. But, that was the only change. Below is a picture of my backpack. We made them for the leaders as well, which was nice to keep all our stuff together. You can see mine has flowers pinned onto it. Those flowers are made using wired ribbon, and by pulling the wire out of one side of the ribbon, you can wind the ribbon on the side with the wire, getting this flower effect. It really is super simple and turns out amazing.
We also made the girls little journals that we gave to them. These were a lot of effort, but they were pretty neat. As you can see, they had a front cover and a back cover that went with our theme. The inside was divided into sections: Journal, Notes, Pictures, & Certification. That way, the girls could print off their pictures and put them into the journal as well. We did give them some time to write a note to each other, but that didn't happen as often as we wanted, because we were just too busy.


We also made a flag, and since our ward's name was
"The Royal House of the Believers," the girls came up with things they would like on their flag that showed what they believed in. And then, we had a committee that worked on it. I think they did a great job. When they unveiled our flag, everyone gasped! It was awesome. We also had an entrance into our camp. Our entrance was definately NOT the most elaborate of all of them, but it worked just fine.
We took the sign at the left, & put it atop 2 pillars. It looked great.
To make this sign, so it wouldn't rip (which was a good thing, because this year it was sooo windy), we just took some inexpensive white fabric and transfered the letters on and painted it with black paint. I think it only cost a couple of dollars to make. It is hard to see, but it says, "House of the Believers". We also hung it up in our camp during the week.
One other thing we did, was paint a background onto a sheet that we could hang up inside of our eating area. This also was pretty cheap, just the cost of a sheet from a thrift store. As it happens, I had a sheet already, that we used.
I bought a Yudu screenprinting machine. It can be viewed at this link: http://www.whatdoyudu.com/. At first, I found it a little difficult to use, having never screenprinted before. However, after doing 40 of these shirts, my friend and I got the hang of it. Since then, I have also tried some other types of inks. I really like opaque ink from Speedball. I purchased them from http://www.dharmatrading.com/ and they were great. I didn't really like the regular inks from Speedball as much, but it might be that I have gotten used to a thicker ink and the regular Speedball ones are pretty thin.

One more thing we did, which was I really liked, and actually was a lot of work was make matching pj bottoms for everyone. It may sound like it could be expensive, but we found some sheets at a good price so it worked out to be about $1.5o for each pair. This is what my pair looked like, which was the only one with little ruffles on the bottom.



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