Christmas #1 : in the Sierras

Friday Links ~ Holiday Edition

Brooklyn Tweed's Wool People 4 has arrived. I'm in love with the Lumen pattern and am thinking that it will be my winter-break knit.

Found a cute and easy little star pattern. I'm thinking some star garland would be a perfect addition to next year's Christmas decorations... and for welcoming our little boy in April!

Finally, something to leave you smiling as you head into the holidays :: dogs carrying presents

Cash, our poor pooch, may not have the merriest of holidays, but we're wishing you a Merry Christmas*

Elving Away

There's been a flurry of crafting activity or "elving activity", as I like to call it, around these parts. Here's a tease, with full details to follow in a couple of weeks {once we've made it past the Russian Christmas festivities}.

And finally, our elves have settled in for a break/nap::

Vacation T-shirts!

This little project was put into motion by C. Two days before our flight to Brazil, he mentioned that he wanted to get us matching vacation t-shirts but ran out of time. I took his dissapointment as a last minute crafting challenge and got to work.

While it's the fun kind of dorky to have matching shirts, we wanted a design that looked good enough for people to wear the shirts again. C's requests were that the shirt said "Schu Family Vacation 2012", and that it had something to do with our travel from the US to Brazil.

Given the time constraint, we couldn't get the shirts printed by a 3rd party. I thought about using the printable iron-on t-shirt paper, but was hesitant for a few reasons : 1. I never like the homemade look of the iron-on material on the shirt, but was willing to give it a try in order to speed things along, only to realize 2. we only had access to laser printers but the stores were only selling inkjet paper (you have to order the paper for laser printers online). So - our final solution was to come up with a design that could be drawn relatively easily and quickly using fabric markers.

After grabbing images from google and using these characters of my parents that were on kitchen mugs, this is what we came up with (minus the latitude and longitude lines) :

I used our projector to put the image on the shirts, taping the shirts to the wall (with painter's tape) and tracing the enlarged image. It took about 30 minutes per shirt, giving me plenty of time to catch up on the BBC's Sherlock.




The whole image was traced with black fabric markers. Pro last-minute-crafter-tip : Since I was working on these shirts the night before our flight when the stores were closed, I bought more than enough shirts and markers in case of mistakes and in case I ran through the markers faster than expected. Luckily I had plenty of each and was able to return the extras when we got home.

To make the shirts more fun, and in an effort to plan for our long flights, we bought a pack of colored fabric markers so that people could color in their shirts if they wanted. I ended up liking the black and white image so much that I kept mine plain.

Unfortunately, the shirts were the least-documented aspect of our whole trip (must have been because we were having so much fun!). This was the only close-up I could find :





It turns out that making the shirts was easier than getting a group shot of everyone wearing them! It began with six of us and - a hat?

And it looks like we had to interrupt the photo session for a discussion of the turf?... notice the photographer's hand taking an active role in the discussion.

We're almost there, just missing Sarah ::

There she is! Looking super excited about the group shot (notice the color she added to her shirt) ::

And there you have it ~ one more squinty eyed group shot. 

Brazil Snapshot {Days 7 and 8}

~ The Beach ~ 

Other than one crafty post tomorrow, our Brazil adventure comes to an end on the coast. 

Brazil Snapshot {Day 6}

~ Avare and Sunset on the Lake ~