Man, you just can't go anywhere without hearing about this darn elf these days. All we hear about is who among our friends is doing an elf, what they're doing with him, what mischeif the elf is getting into, what presents he brought.. Etc, etc, etc, blah, blah, blickety blah.

Oh wait. That isn't my gig at all. Sorry friends, I am a self-proclaimed Elf on the Shelf lover. Our Elf is named Twinkle, and this is how we met him.

First, Mimi read to Katie a story about the Elf on the Shelf, and how he came to be. In the story, Katie learned that her Elf will watch over her all day, then fly back and report to Santa every night whether she was a good girl or not. She also learned that she must never touch him.

Katie is a very studious little girl, so she took her time reading all about the Elf. When she went to bed that night, she asked if an Elf could come stay with her for a little while. I told her it was up to Santa, but maybe it would happen since she's pretty much been a good girl all year long.

Sure enough, we all woke up to a very special North Pole 2012 breakfast, brought by Twinkle himself! He brought letters for both the kids, as well as a pair of Christmas jammies for both. Christmas jammies are a pretty big deal around here, so it was awesome that Twinkle got them early!

So once Twinkle got everything arranged, and gave me the dish on what he wanted the kids to have for breakfast, he took to his little perch and prepared to watch.

Well, I did it again! And this time, I didn't just make a wreath.. No, my friends.. I, Emily Frederick, used a sewing machine for the second time in my life.

To be honest, I did make two more wreaths, and here they are!

And since you are obviously impressed with their shabby chic-style cuteness, please visit my Etsy shop and Like, Pin, Tweet away! 

http://www.etsy.com/shop/EmilyGotCrafty

But to me, it is much more impressive that I made an honest to goodness dress that my baby girl can actually wear! And since I was overzealous with the "ruffle", she will be able to wear it for years, haha! 

I thought making the dress was rather easy, but it was time-consuming for a few reasons. First of all, I couldn't find a single tutorial that did exactly what I wanted to do. What I wanted was a basic pillowcase dress with both a liner and a second layer of fabric on the bottom. I wound up using probably 10 different patterns, and piecing the instructions together on my own to make what I wanted. 

Also, I'm really thankful to my awesome sister in law for letting me use her sewing machine right now. I wasn't sure if I wanted to go ahead and invest in one yet, so she's letting me do a trial run. Well, she's never had the chance to use her's, and it turns out that it was stuck in reverse! I sewed that entire dress backwards! Now I feel like I can tackle any sewing machine and pattern, though :)

So here's the result of my hard work. I hope you think it's as cute as I do! And the little girl wearing it ain't too shabby, either!

It's very rare that I have a moment where I feel like being crafty. In fact, it's so rare, that the last crafty thing I did was KB's birthday tutu back in August. So yeah.. It happens a few times a year.  Well, I got the crafty bug earlier this week, partly because I realized I was running out of space to display our Christmas cards. I looked around on Pinterest and Google for some display ideas, and didn't find anything that I loved. So I made something of my own! I'm not at all saying that this has never been done before. In fact, I'm sure that I got this idea from somewhere, just not in my searching the other day. So anyway, here's my board!

Materials: 1 18x24 wrapped canvas, 1 yard of my ridiculously shiny fabric, batting and some craft ribbon.

First, I took 1 18x24 inch wrapped canvas, and covered it with batting to give the board some volume. I didn't want it to be all flat, ya know?  I measured out the batting at 22x28 inches, and hot-glued it on.

Then I measured out my fabric. I realized that the 22x28 I used for the batting was a little bit too much and cut some off, so that's also the measurement I used for the fabric.

So I hot glued them on, too. I cut the corners diagonally into the board so that the fabric would wrap around them better, by the way. I figure that's common sense, but who knows..

Last came the ribbon. I wanted 3 vertical lines to hang my cards on, so I cut 3 strips of ribbon. I don't know how long they were, to be honest. I just wrapped it around to the back of the board and snipped when there was enough to wrap around both sides.  I measured the board, and for 3 strips of ribbon to be on it, they would need to be 5 inches apart, from the closest side of the ribbon, not from the middle.