Trogdoooooor! (A little baby dragon quilt)!

Greetings from Missouri, where I am right now for family Christmas shindigs!
The super exciting thing I want to talk about has absolutely nothing to do with Christmas, however. My sister Miriam's having a baby! In February! Her baby shower was yesterday, so to get ready for it I got to crafting as soon as I got home from school last week (I survived finals- can you even believe it?!)

When my sister Sophie had her baby Felix my mom and I made a quilt for him and that was my first semi-major batik project. It was all adorable and sailory, so I batiked an anchor center piece. This time around I made the quilt by myself and dyed all of the fabric on the front, and I'm really pleased with it! Miriam and Danny decided to go with a dragon theme for their nursery, which I think is awesome.

The batik pieces are all left overs from other projects in my etsy shop and the kind of mottle-y pieces were dyed using the method described in this tutorial. It's really nice because it's a fun way to dye fabric without having to go outside, which I certainly appreciate given all the snow. The back is some fun cotton I found at Hancock Fabrics and the center piece is a dragon my dad helped me design (hence the Celtic knot work stuff).

Now that I'm home for all of January, I have all sorts of crafty ideas to keep myself busy, so stay tuned!

Oh, and here's TROOOOOGDOOOOOOOOOOOOR, in case the title got you all excited. 

Leaf Me Alone!

Okay, don't. Even though you'll probably want to after that bad pun...

So, this week I've been using leaves from the great outdoors to help with some craft projects!

First, I picked some leaves from a bunch of different trees/plants/bushes/weeds in our garden:

Then, I traced around them onto some paper and added some veins:


Then, using my light box, I traced them onto a 100% cotton blouse with a washable marker. A couple days later I painted over those lines with some soy wax, and today I dyed it! Here's the result:

Just put it in my shop!

What do you all think? I wish that I had maybe used a darker green, because then there would be more contrast with the white and the leaves would show up better, but I'm pretty pleased.

I could have just left the stencils to use later, but I decided to color them in... basically just because there was a box of crayons sitting on the kitchen table:

Not sure what I'll do with those yet... but I think they'd make a cool print or poster or something!

The last thing I have for you is this... I was outside with my nephew, Geordie, and he found a cool leaf with a hole in it that he immediately put up to his face and peeked through. I took the leaf, traced around it, colored it in, and turned it into a mask! He wore it for most of the day and seemed to like it a lot. I'm sure a similar thing could be done with felt and fabric paint, which would be more durable.