Grandma's Trash Finding New Home

Last week has been crazy. The boy celebrated his birthday with his friends from preschool and he asked for a princes-princesses party. Well, what a mom's job if not fulfilling his wishes? So mom, dad, grandmas, friends - all helped to make the dream come true, and I'm happy to hereby announce that the boy went to bed tired and happy that night. I will post about it at length later, but for now just one picture to show you what we had there:

Meanwhile I managed to finally finish a project that stood half finished for a long long time. My grandma's garage is a garage of surprises. Everytime I go there, I leave with something super nice. So on one of my visits, I found this miserable table, that has seen better days long long ago.

I bet you can see the potential, though. So I sanded (for hours!) and sealed and filled holes and cracks and painted it, and then decided I didn't like the color, so I sanded again and painted again, and bought a new handle for the drawer (that used to have this strange hook instead of a proper handle) and applied varnish and glued a red polka dot fabric in the drawer, and then finally the big moment has come - I placed the sewing machine on the table, and I'm proud to officially say that I have a sewing table!!! Here's the after:

With the drawer open:

And the drawer:

Those That Broke and Those That Haven't (Yet)

During the last year I've been taking ceramic classes and I just love it! The best part is to arrive to class after I already forgot what I made last week, just to find out that another bowl is ready. Unfortunately, there's also a down side to ceramic - it breaks.
Now, just to help you understand the situation, a short explanation: In our house live under one roof: one real man, one clumsy woman (calling myself 'a woman'... Now that's funny!), 2 kiddos under 5 years old and 2 cats that enter the house even when they're not invited. This combination sometimes causes my precious ceramic items to break, and somehow it's almost always those bowls it took me hours to make, not the simple, 10-minutes bowls.
So here are a few of my ceramic items. Some are still with us, some are not (some broke before I even managed to take pictures of them, like one of my favorite bowls, that I worked on for 10 hours or so).

This is the first bowl I've ever made. Surprisingly, it's still sitting proudly on our countertop.

 A "snails" bowl that took me hours to make. It has tragically perished when the cat (the dumber of the two) jumped on the countertop in a very un-cattish manner, causing it to meet the floor in a speed and an angle that smashed it to pieces.

A Chinese style bowl (still with us, thanks for asking)

Flowers for the garden. They actually stood in the garden for a while. At some point they just dissapeared one after the other and yesterday, when we weeded our garden, we found two of them hiding underneath the piles of weeds.

And my favorite, a tea pot. One is still sitting on a shelf in our kitchen and one has found a good home at my sister in law's.

The Laughing Man

During the ceramic & pottery class I'm taking, I usually just make bowls, cups, plates and such. But once in a while, I just feel like I need to make something different. To be really creative and sculpt. The result of my last attempt is my laughing man. His skin color came out a bit on the pinkish side, but anyhow I fell in love with him. He's not too big, but cute and at the same time there's also something bothering in him, I think.

Purim

Purim is my favorite Jewish holiday. The idea is quite similar to Halloween - it involves costumes and candies as well - although the story is different (most Jewish holidays celebrate how someone tried to kill us and how we, again, managed to survive somehow).

My girl, as expected, wanted to be a ladybug. She has this obsession for ladybugs, and I knew she'll go for that before we even mentioned the holiday. The boy had problems deciding. He changed his mind every 5 minutes or so. He wanted to be a lion, then Mickey Mouse, then a knight and somehow ended up with a cat.

So for my little ladybug I made a red tutu skirt (I used this great tutorial by Sachiko from Tea Rose Home, then I sewed black circles on it. That was the easy part. For the wings I used metal coat hangers. I made 2 circles out of 2 coat hangers, then covered the sharp edges with masking tape. Then I sewed red fabric with black circles onto them and finished with black bias tape. That was looooooong and exhausting... Then I made the antennae - I covered a simple metal headband with black felt and added black pipe cleaners with a small red felt ball. That's it, ready.

The cat was easier to make. I bought a fur like fabric ( I know, it looks more like a leopard than a cat, but I guess other moms were quicker than me, so that was the best I could find) and sewed pieces on the tummy, back, elbows and pants. I made the tail out of pipe cleaners wrapped with the fur fabric and ears from felt and fur, sewed to a headband. I used a glue gun to glue the fur onto old shoes and also made gloves with fur sewn onto them, but since this year we had a summery Purim (usually it's cold and rainy this time of the year), he wore them mostly for the pictures...

And both together...

Upgrading Kitchen Towels Tutorial

Cute kitchen towels can be a great gift, like these ones, for example, that I gave my grandma for Passover. Since they're so easy to make (around 10 minutes), I managed to make them and take pictures, so I can show you how to easily upgrade towels.

You're going to need:
A kitchen towel
2 pieces of fabric, same width as the towel. As for length - I used 10 cm (around 4")
2 pieces of lace, same width as the towel
Threads
pins
Sewing machine (you can sew it by hand as well, but it'll take more time to make)

Fold 1 cm of all edges of one piece of fabric towards the wrong side and iron. Do the same with the other piece of fabric.

Place the first piece of fabric on one side of the towel, where you want it to be, and pin it on the bottom and both sides. Now turn over and place the second piece of fabric on the other side of the towel, exactly behind the first piece and pin it too (if you place the towel flat on the floor with the first side you did touching the floor, you'll be able to feel the edge and pin the second piece exactly where it should be). Place the lace on top and pin. Do the same on the other side.

Sew along the circumference. It's best to use white thread for the top part (the lace) and a thread the same color of the piece of fabric for the rest.

That's it, you're done. It was simple, wasn't it? The only tricky part is to lay both pieces of fabric in the same place on both sides of the towel. Here's the second towel I made:

And both together

And right before they moved to their new home