Pre-camp Crafting

We moved out of our house and into our camp last weekend while some major renovations are done to our kitchen, bathroom, laundry room and sunroom. And while my commute is now more than five times as long (OK, it’s only jumped from 6 minutes to 35 minutes), I do love coming home to this view:

(Not that we’re swimming quite yet. It’s still pretty cold. We’ve been using the wood stove at night. And we have all three of our cats with us in a one-room cabin, and one of them has already figured out how to climb up the ladder to Parker’s sleep loft to wake him up in the middle of the night. But I really can’t complain about having a beautiful cabin and eventually, a beautiful new kitchen at home!)

The move also means that I had to think about what craft projects I needed to accomplish before the move, since I left behind my sewing machine and nearly all other supplies. (I did bring my knitting, and I’m actually taking an online painting class this summer, so I’ll still be fairly creative!) That made for a hectic few weeks before the move, but the upshot is I finished a few things quite early!

For example, I knew I did not have time to make gifts for Parker’s teachers, but I did find a cute idea for wrapping up a gift card HERE. So I have two of these all ready to go. (Oops, now I see I forgot to make a little gift tag for the present, but I still have time to add that).

And I made a stenciled t-shirt for my best friend’s son, who is a big Harry Potter fan. I can’t remember where I originally saw this idea of taking the key words from each of the book titles, but I tweaked it a bit, almost accidentally. I used my Silhoutte machine to cut a stencil out of Con-Tact paper, and while I was trying to figure out what colors to paint each word, I realized that the recipient’s name _ Cade _ was right there among the letters!

I was a bit impatient, and for some reason my colored textile paint was much thinner than the white, so the colored letters did not come out as crisply as I would have liked.