Happy Halloween!

We thought we would give you a little tour of past Halloween Costumes. Nicole dreams up some great ones each year and manages to get her husband involved too! I'm still laughing over him dressing as Norman Bate's mother.
Nicole is awesome at sewing these and at times ropes our mother (excellent seamstress) into helping. She "assisted" with the sleeping beauty outfit. Isn't it beautiful!?

This puppy costume is too cute! Nicole even made a personalized collar! I think she had strands of black fur all over her house for weeks! That black fur is so messy to work with!


This is my first attempt at sewing a costume. My son was obsessed with the Lego Knight series. I can't seem to remember the name of this particular knight.
Nicole put a lot of hours into this beauty. Her hubby even has the face down! What a hunk of burning love!
This one is particularly interesting.....hmmmmmm? Yes..she's a PREGNANT belly dancer!
Norman Bate's mother....I love it!!! So clever! Nicole's husband did not want his identity to be known?!

This is some type of Jedi? Is it Obi-Wan, Luke...don't know? The cape was the best, but I do wish I had a picture of all the costume work underneath. It was a big job, but worth it. I had used my serger for the very first time. It's sooooooo much easier!

This one takes the cake. The fabric was absolutely gorgeous on this one. Mom helped quite a bit on this too! The wig and make-up are great......and no she's not a Geisha, people kept asking that. According to her daughter.... "I'm a China Girl!"

Have you ever tried a Router!?

WE are by NO means trained in carpentry...we are SELF-taught! Nicole is pretty good with wood though. In the past few years she has slowly collected wood tools at pawn shops and hardware stores that have come in handy. She's had the router for a couple of years now and is just beginning to learn of the possibilities of what it can do! Today we routered the edge of a new project! Daaa dum dummmmmm.... That was meant for dramatic effect... Yes, I think this might be a hare-brained project but at least the top of it will look good, thanks to the router! Look at what it can do!

Does that look good or what! We ran into a little problem when the bit came loose but after tightening it up it was all fixable! So cool! I have to see if this turns out before I explain or post pictures of what we're up to....Stay Tuned!:)

I was blog searching the other day and found this cute sight where she was hand sewing cute pockets onto an advent calendar. It's another version of the Pottery Barn advent calendar, they sure make some cute ones! This tree was our attempt at copying last year's Pottery Barn Christmas Advent calendar.

Don't look too closely, with limited time and endless dreams we thought, hey why not? The gal from A Feathered Nest made her pockets so beautiful, and her hand stitching was perfect! I wish we had the patience and time to conquer that. Instead we used our favorite on hand adhesive "Tacky Glue". I love that stuff, can't get enough of it! Maybe this blog should be called "1001 Ways to use Tacky Glue"? Just a thought.... For our lack of master stitchery skills we made up with glitter glue! I don't think there's anything finer than a dab of glitter glue...who doesn't need a bit of sparkle in their lives? At least this time we learned our lesson on how tedious it is to manually cut out each little bit so we went down to our local craft store and used the die-cut machine to cut numbers, letters, and snowflakes. The rest Nicole hand-cut and created...or COPIED. From far away it looks pretty good if I do say so myself! Most of all, our kids LOVE LOVE LOVE them! And that's all that matters right? Now if I can just keep their little hands out of the pockets!:)And the best part, we made the whole thing for less than $10...beat that PB!