A Tale of Two Crafts

I like to think of myself as a crafty person. I have a Martha Stewart living subscription and actually do some of the things in there from time to time. I am crafty enough that I am totally buying this shirt the next time I’m in the market for maternity clothes. My talents are by no means universal, though, as I have recently confirmed. I am pretty comfortable with paper crafts. I like doing things that involve designing things on the computer, printing them out, cutting, gluing, etc. I’ve made a lot of invitations in my day. I also like party decorating, which works out well with the invitation thing.

Sewing, however, is a totally different story. You may recall the pants I made for Dave and Peyton. They are not as good as they look in the picture, with uneven seams and loose threads all over the place. Also, they took forever. Last week I made another attempt at using the sewing machine. I thought it would be cute to make Peyton’s Halloween costume into a stuffed dragon. It didn’t work. It’s actually quite frightening, although Peyton thought it was funny. Yes, the legs are totally crooked. I was going to sew a piece of felt over the face hole, but it just didn’t seem worth the effort at that point.

I’ve never done much with wood or painting, but I wanted to make a height chart that wasn’t cardboard and didn’t have lots of colors and animals all over it. I also wanted one tall enough to measure Peyton to adult height. So I got a piece of wood, painted it black, then painted on some measurement markings and numbers. It’s a 6 foot piece of wood and it’s 8 inches off the ground so it should be sufficiently tall. I need to get a white pen to write on it with. I really like how it turned out!

Peyton is actually 32″ tall. We couldn’t get him to stand right up against the board and that combined with him looking up makes him look a little taller in the picture.