Craft Nights

Those who follow my blog regularly must have noticed that I’ve been ignoring it big time. I’ve been very busy with work and other stuff so haven’t been too motivated to write but slowly I’m getting the time to sort through my pictures and start posting about what I’ve been up to. 

Back in April I threw a baby shower for a very special couple. Traditionally baby shower is a girls-only party but why should the expectant dad be excluded?!? So I decided on a coed baby shower and you’d be surprised to find out how much fun the men bring to such a party. We had a ball playing silly shower games with the guys!!!

All the decorations for the shower were done in Pink and Mint. I’m so in love with these colors this summer. I started out by making a custom bunting banner for the couple. I designed the buntings myself using basic tools in Microsoft Publisher. Each triangle was a light pink color with subtle gray color polka dots and the letters in black. I printed them out on regular paper and cut out the triangles. Then I took mint color card stock cut them into slightly bigger triangles and taped it to the back of each letter so you can see the mint color on the edges. I think such small details add a special touch. Then I sewed a ribbon joining all the buntings together to create the banner.

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I used the same pink with gray polka dots template to create all the games for the shower. One of the games was a little questionnaire that the dad-to-be filled out and the mom-to-be had to guess the answers. I made the questionnaire in the form of a book so the parents could later save it as a keepsake from the shower.

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To involve all the guests, I print the same questions on a sheet of paper and handed those out to all the guests so they could answer along with the mom-to-be. 

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No shower is complete without a scrambled words game. Again I used the same template and personalized it with the name/date of the shower on top of the page.

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I also made a little banner in matching colors as a cake topper. I cut out the little triangles from Pink and Mint colored paper and threaded a ribbon through it and tied it to mini wood skewers. I used silver alphabet stickers for the letters. 

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For the party favors, I picked up some cupcakes from a local bakery and personalized them with the cupcake toppers. The cupcake toppers were also designed in Microsoft Publisher and I printed them on regular paper and cut them out into circles. Then I glued together two, right-sides facing out and stuck a toothpick in the middle.

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Finally, my prep would not be complete without a handmade card! A short and sweet baby quote decorated with some matching ribbons and we are all done!

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He who works with his hands is a laborer.

He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsmen.

He who works with his hands, his head, and his heart is an artist.

- St. Francis of Assisi

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I came across this quote in the book “Weekend Knitting” by Melanie Falick. My sister gifted me this book on my birthday last year. I am not the fastest knitter in the world and I tend to get bored with long projects so I’m always on the look out for quick knits. This book is perfect for me. It has 50 unique projects and ideas; some of which you can finish in a matter of few hours. I’ve knitted quite a few projects from this book but my favorite one has to be the fingerless mitts. I just finished my third pair this week for a very special friend. Fingerless mitts are perfect for keeping your hands warm but letting your fingers free. They are very suitable for the mild winters in sunny LA and are quite a fashionable accessary for a fall/winter outfit. The pattern from the book is very different from other patterns I’ve seen. These mitts are knitted sideways in garter stitch. Short rows are used to make the hand portion wider than the wrist and the thumb opening is worked like a buttonhole. My favorite part is there are NO SEAMS!!! The first and last rows are knitted together using a three-needle bind-off method. This makes finishing very easy! I will highly recommend this book to anyone who is a beginner/intermediate knitter and is looking for quick projects. 

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We have a natural inclination towards drawing every minute detail of the features when we start drawing a face. For example if I ask you to draw a face you will probably start with the eyeballs, the shape of the eyes and maybe even some pretty eyelashes, then move on to the nose, then lips and so on. When I started learning about drawing portraits the hardest thing to learn was to resist the temptation of drawing a hard line to define the eyes, nose, and lips. The key to drawing realistic portraits is to first lay down the correct tones of the face. If you squint and look at a picture of a face, you will notice that the eyes appear the darkest, front of the nose and forehead are the lightest and the rest is a mix of tones in between. By squinting you can see the general tone of an area and ignore the details such as eye lashes. You keep building on these tones and keep relating them to each other in terms of size, shape, and distance until you have a drawing that starts to look like the picture. Here are some photos of how I started some of my portrait drawings:

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