She's Crafty

Its been a busy week on the craft front.  My first project was to make Mothers Day gifts for my mom and mother-in-law.  I found a really nice tutorial on The How-To Gal.

Wood Blocks from Hobby Lobby

Brown Spray Paint from Home Depot

Hinges from Home Depot

Mod Podge (on hand)

Helpful Hint: I'd recommend using a Laser Printer or have the pictures printed at an office supply store.  We printed ours on our Epson and the ink tends to run/smear.  But I liked it w/ some faint streaks (and so did the moms).  And by some miracle, I was able to get all 3 cats in one picture.  They may not all be looking, but they're all there!

The Alabama Wildlife Center held its first Wild Baby Shower this weekend and it was a huge success! We had lots of visitors who gave lots of wonderful things to help us through baby season.

I found some cute Owl candy molds at Bake It Pretty and made some milk and white chocolate lollypops to sell.  I used my owl vases w/ floral foam to arrange them.

We created a bean bag toss game and I made the bean bags for 4 different foods that certain birds would eat.  I scavenged the scrap bins at Hancock Fabrics and found some for really cheap and freehanded most of the food items.  Then used fabric markers to draw on more details.

Fish

Waxworms (I just randomly pleated the fabric to make ridges).

Mice.  For the mice I used this tutorial from craftster.org.  I used ribbon for the tail and fabric markers for the details.

   

Sunflower Seeds.  I used part of the mouse tutorial and cut out 4 pieces and sewed them together.  I painted some nonspecific detailing.

Here are the boards a wonderful volunteer painted! They are just amazing!

Red-tailed Hawk = Mice

Northern Cardinal = Sunflower Seeds

Eastern Bluebird = Waxworms

Great-blue Heron = Fish

The kids really enjoyed it and I'm sure we'll be using this for many events to come!

You can see more pictures from the event on AWC's Facebook page.

So very busy a bit of Owly Tuesday

First, I wanted to say a little something about the Gulf Coast Oil Spill.  The Center is currently on standby to send some of the staff (including me) to the Coast when needed.  Its just a horrible ecological and economic disaster.  There won't be any healthy fish for the local business and tourism is going to suffer greatly.  There won't be any healthy food for the animals to eat and therefore their young will starve.
Its going to take a while for the true effects to present, but I can guarantee its not going to be good at all.
People are so eager to help right now, but most of the help is going to be needed further down the road and I hope their enthusiasm will sustain throughout the devestation.

Now on to a few brighter things.  We've been busy on the yard the past few weeks and I've been dying to test out my green thumb.  So I've planted a few things.

This is one of 2 hanging baskets on the front porch.  Plectranthus (the green leafy stuff), Begonias (pink, white and red flowers) and Ajuga "Mahogany" (purple flowers). 

I've planted a few Oakleaf Hydrangeas from some cuttings my coworker gave me.  We'll see how they do, if they don't make it, thats ok.  They wer free!  But I really hope they do b/c I love Oakleafs.

Our wedding tree (Red Maple) we planted June 2008 is doing really well! We thought it wasn't going to make it because of all the highwinds and sitting in the pot for 2+ months.

Here it is at the wedding.  It was soooooo windy when we bought it and drove it to the reception area.  It looked sad.

But its lush and grean and has grown a lot in 2 years.

I'll be working hard on sewing a 3 each of fish, worm, mouse and sunflower seed for this weekends Wild Baby Shower!  And a few other things are also up my sleeve.  So, till next Tuesday...have a great week!