Iron Craft Challenge 9: Notions

This challenge, to use materials from the notions section of the craft store, immediately led me to ribbons and buttons.  And with Mother's Day coming up, I decided to make some pretty cards for the special ladies in our lives.

I got some of my inspiration from here and here. I also included a list inside of some of the things I love about my mom, and my husband did the same for his mom.  I got that idea here, and I think it's such a sweet one.

A little ribbon and buttons from my craft stash, some glue, and voila! Mother's Day cards! 

Iron Craft Challenge 5: Green

This week's Iron Craft challenge was "green" (whether you picked the color green or something eco-friendly was up to you).  I chose to use some of my craft stash items to go for the eco-friendly option.

This is another one of those "why didn't I just do this a long time ago?" projects.  I have been working on getting rid of some of my craft supplies and odds and ends that I have been saving, and this was a project that I had all of the components for, but I just hadn't done it yet.

It took me all of two minutes: Dump old coffee beans into old pasta sauce jars.  Add old votive candles.  Realize that these old things have been sitting upstairs in the craft stash for 2 years.  Light candles and smell the lovely mixture of warm coffee beans and Christmas cookie candles.

Iron Craft Challenge 3: Hearts And Flowers

One of my favorite things to do while watching tv is plastic canvas stitch.  (Is anyone else like that, where you can't just sit there and watch?)  I found a picture of these for sale on etsy via pinterest, and thought "I could make those!" so I did.

We have no magnets on the bottom of our fridge because my kids have destroyed them all, so I'm hoping that since these are a little bit sturdier than cheap-o magnets we get in the mail for random things, that the kids won't ruin them.  And, since they're seasonal, they won't be up there super long, although I do have plans to make some Thomas the Tank Engine magnets in the near future.

Jonah thinks the magnets are pretty neat.  He also thinks his new vest and tie are pretty neat (we have awesome friends who gave us a bag full of hand-me-downs).  I think he may have inherited my lack of fashion sense...

Iron Craft Challenge 2: Orange

One of my favorite colors is orange, so I was excited to see that as the challenge theme this week.  I also still wanted to attempt some circle punch art, to try out my new punches that I got for Christmas.  So I grabbed a stack of orange magazine pages and got to punching.

Last year for one of the Iron Craft challenges, I made my note card journal.  I like it and have been keeping up with it, but it has been bugging me for awhile that it was still in the ugly baby wipes container.

I peeled off the label, and mod podged on some of my circles.  The label left some sticky-ness, so I just put a few coats over the whole thing to get rid of that.  It's not perfect (especially some of the corners), but it's a lot better than it was!

In fact, it kind of reminds me of my first car...I had a blue Chevy Corsica in college, which my dad knew wouldn't be re-sold, so he let me paint a line of orange polka dots on it (I wanted to do the whole thing in polka dots, but we compromised).  Ah, the memories!

Iron Craft Challenge 1: Cotton

I thought about putting "participate in Iron Craft 2013" on my goals list, but with 2 blog challenges and several other projects already on there, I wasn't sure if that was realistic.  Still, I do want to try to do these challenges.  I was not that great at it last year, although I do enjoy looking at all of the other crafters' projects.

The theme for this first challenge was cotton.  Sometime last year, I bought a few rolls of cotton yarn to make some dishcloths.  I made two each of two colors, but for some reason I never finished this color.  Time to fix that!

I am no expert knitter, so these are simple 40x60 and 30x44 stitched cloths on #7 needles.  I like the size of the bigger one better, but the skein of yarn only had enough to just make these, with about six inches of yarn to spare.  These homemade rags do the job, and the ridges from the knitting actually make these better scrubbers than my store-bought dish rags.  Yay homemade!