St. Patrick's Day Wreath

I just love making holiday wreaths to hang at work! I'm starting to get quite the collection of them!

Supplies needed for this wreath:

• 12" wreath form
• pot of gold, gold coins, shamrocks, etc. for decoration
• ribbon--preferably St.  Patrick's Day theamed
• Tulle or netting (I used heavy scrubbie mesh/tulle) in the following colors: 

              red--------4 strips
              orange----4 strips
              yellow----4 strips
              green------about 35 strips
              blue-------4 strips
              purple----4 strips
Strips should be 1.5" by about 28"

To apply the tulle strips, fold the strip in half. Place folded strip under wreath form with fold on the inside of the wreath. Pull the loose ends of strip over the wreath and through the fold's loop. Pull tight. Continue applying strips, overlapping some, until wreath is full.

*Note: if your mesh/tulle has large holes, you will be able to see the color of the wreath form underneath. Also, it should be a stiff mesh/tulle so that the ends stick out well.

Trim the edge of the mesh/tulle to desired length. Add embellishments with a hot glue gun. Wrap a ribbon around the top and you're done!

Yes, my dog is my child

On December 18th, exactly one week before Christmas, my day was a normal day. I got up, went to work, and drove home. Everything changed when I arrived at my house. I live on a highway, right on the highway, in the mountains of Idaho. We have animals. When I approached the house and saw a car on the other side of the highway with its hazards on, I wasn't worried. I thought they had just had car problems. Then I see a man in the middle of the road waving his arms above his head to get my attention. Now I'm starting to worry.

I pull into the driveway and see my nephew running up the walkway from the house. I roll down my car window and all I hear is "Tali got hit by a car." Thankfully I didn't go into panic mode. This isn't to say that I calmly walked into the house. No, I ran into the house, not even taking the time to grab my purse out of the car, I'm just saying that I was able to keep my wits about me.

As my nephew and I are running to the house he tells me that it looks like her leg is broken. I'm worried deeply about her but am relieved that she isn't dead. I get in the house and run to her. After examining her leg it looks like it's dislocated. I could also see a laceration on her back leg and cuts around one of her eyes. I'm worried about internal bleeding. The man who hit her came to the door and talked to my nephew while I examined Tali. He said that she went under his car (a small SUV).

We live an hour away from town, and there was no getting her to a vet that night. I put her in her crate so she wouldn't be able to move and didn't let her eat dinner.

I took her down to the vet first thing in the morning. I had to drop her off so I could get to work. I anxiously waited for the vet to call me. They confirmed that she dislocated her elbow on her right leg, had a laceration on her right knee, and thankfully no internal bleeding. Unfortunately they were unable to re-locate her elbow and referred me to the emergency vet in our area (which is twice as expensive as a normal vet).

She had to have surgery and cost me $2,100.00, but at least she's still with me. I was a little shocked when I went to pick her up and saw this bright pink bandage holding her splint on.

They had to put 5 staples in her knee to help close the laceration.

She had three different medications she was taking, one of which had to be dissolved in water and shot into her mouth in a syringe. She hated that one and fought with us as we would try to open her mouth. We also had to keep her bandages dry. Dry?! We live in the mountains, it's winter, and they want me to keep her bandages dry!? Let me tell you, it was a challenge that involved a lot of Glad press and seal.

She now has staples and bandages out/off and thinks she can run and jump. She is supposed to have restricted movement for another week, three weeks in total. She also has multiple physical therapy exercises she gets to do for a total of six weeks.

I hope she's learned a lesson about running into the road, but I highly doubt it.

Santa Wreath

I'm sure I saw this on Pinterest, but I apparently didn't pin it because I can find it on any of my boards! Good thing I remembered how to make it!

To make this Santa wreath you will need red and white feather boas (I had to use 3 6ft white boas and 2 6 ft red boas; go figure), wooden letters, black and gold/yellow felt, and a hot flue gun. Oh, and a wreath form.

 Start by wrapping the wreath form with the boas, half white and half red. I cut the black felt into 2 inch strips. It took three strips to make it all the way around the wreath. Hot glue the ends of the strips so that it fits snugly around the wreath. For the buckle, cut the yellow felt into a 2 1/2 inch square, a 2 inch black square, and a 1/2x1 1/2 inch rectangle of yellow. Hot glue pieces together and glue to belt.

Paint your wooden letters; I choose silver. I hot glued these on. You may find it necessary to secure them with thread that is the same color as your letters. Hang it with some ribbon and you're done!

Riddles In The Dark

So, as mentioned in my last post, we had a scavenger hunt at our Middle Earth party based on the Riddles in the Dark. I noticed as I was preparing the images for this post that two of the riddles got run together and I only carved one stamp. Oops!

Here is the riddle sheet they were given. Once they figured out the riddle, they could then look for where the stamp might be. For instance: "wind" was behind a fan in the kitchen and "teeth" were in the bathroom. Two of the stamps required the guest to give the answer to Carma in order to get a clue to find the stamp. This brought our love of letterboxing into the mix.

Here is the sheet again with the answers filled in and the stamps inked on the page.

We were having a problem trying to figure out where to put the fish. Out of nowhere, as fun ideas usually come, I thought: "We should put a bowl of candy fish out for the guests with a sign that says Smeagol's Food and put the stamp behind it!" Needless to say, once people found the stamp, the bowl of candy disappeared fast.

I also carved an additional two stamps to put on salt dough and clay tags/ornaments. The salt dough was too porous to stamp an image on well but the clay tags were perfect. The images are of J.R.R. Tolkien's symbol and the White Tree of Gondor.

I hope you've all enjoyed what we did for our party! Hopefully I've given some ideas for anyone planning a party of their own!

A Middle Earth Party

Well, the party came and went and I'm still exhausted! I still have pretty much everything to put away from the party! It's always well worth it when everyone has a good time. I'm going to just get right down to what we did!

I had two wonderful co-hosts, Carma and Amy. Amy made some great signs for around the house (thank you Mom and Dad for letting us use your house!), and she also made made a wonderful backdrop for photos. I'm sad to say we didn't get around to taking photos in front of it, but it made for excellent decoration.

Amy also had a large map of Middle Earth printed up, which we did use for photos.

Photo by Becca Robins Photography

I'm sure dwarves wore bandanas, right?

Photo by Becca Robins Photography

I had made some dwarf beards for props. We also utilized the invisibility cloak from our Harry Potter party so that it could be an elven cloak. My nephew was kind enough to let us use his bow as well for photos.

The Crafts:

I prepared four crafts to be done. I had them make an arrow, which turned out to be the hardest craft to make. The guests definitely have a good idea of how hard it was to make arrows and they understand why they would retrieve as many as they could after hunting or a battle.

I found a tutorial for the arrows on Entropy House. The only thing I did differently was the tip. I had my amazing father cut the notches in the dowels for me. I had him cut a notch in the end for the tip about 1/2 in deep. Instead of using foam, I found some wooden hearts that we painted silver and then hot glued them into the one end.

The hardest part was getting the feathers glued on strait. I had prepared the feathers per the tutorial so all the guests had to do was glue them on then wrap the thread around, but the feathers were slightly curved. It ended up taking one person to hold the dowel and one person to glue the feather on. I somehow managed to do mine myself and my feathers ended up strait!

Another of the crafts was making leather stamped bracelets. I had a list of Tolkien quotes that they could choose from.

"Not all who wander are lost." -J.R.R. Tolkien

The third craft was to make magnets. I printed out maps of Middle Earth and had them place flat backed marbles over the names of places. They traced the marbles and cut out the areas they had selected. They used their finger to wipe E6000 (glue) onto the back of the marble and place the marble on the cut-out of the map. I had round, flat magnets there that they then wiped glue on and put the marble on that.

I could not get a clear picture of the magnets. I tried different angels and surfaces, but this is the best I could get. They're the four round ones in the center. 

The last craft was to make the mallorn leaf wrappers and lembas bread. This tutorial, along with the recipe for the bread, can also be found on Entropy House.

Making lembas bread

Games

We didn't want everything to be crafts, so we came up with a scavenger hunt based on the Riddles in the Dark. I will do a separate post next week on this called "Riddles in the Dark."

We also had a raffle for a $10.00 movie gift card and a replica of the One Ring.

Food

Our party went through the lunch hour, so we decided to have stew. Our reason behind this? Po-tah-toes! Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew! So, that's exactly what we did!

For dessert, we had cupcakes with these cute rings in them!


Everyone had fun and went away with a bag full of crafts. Carma and I will now be planning our next big party: Hunger Games. I warned her that someone would ask us to do a HG themed party, and sure enough, my sister asked!

Letterboxing Address Books

Back in April (this is how far behind I am on blogging my crafts!), I made address books for Carma and Joyce's birthday gifts. Of course I made one for myself as well. I couldn't just use a regular address book, or rather I didn't want to, because in letterboxing you use an alias known as your trailname. We do this for safety reasons because of the internet, and also because it's just fun to have an alias! My trailname, for those who don't know already, is Music Chick. So, back to the address books, because we usually don't know other letterboxer's real names, I wanted to make books that said "trailname" instead of "name".

The address area has room for the boxer's trailname, real name, address, phone, and an alternate e-mail (we have our own e-mail on Atlas Quest that you can contact other boxers with).

In the back are two extra areas. I use the first to list out the LTCs that I'm currently working on and what stage I'm in on them. The second I use for keeping track of when the due dates are for different trackers or groups that I'm in so that I can get things mailed out on time.

It's been really handy to have. Atlas Quest has an area to keep your contacts in, but I really enjoy having something tangible.

Below is a picture of the front. It's really hard to see because there are sparkles all over it, but it reads "Amanda's Letterbox Contacts".

I got roped in again

I told myself after the Harry Potter party that I wouldn't do something on that kind of a scale for a very long time. Guess I lied.

About a month ago, one of the youth at church asked Carma and I if we would do a Lord of the Rings party to gear up for The Hobbit (in theaters December 14th). My first thought was "no way!", but as you might have guessed from the post title, the party is on!

This is going to be a Middle Earth Workshop. We'll be making numerous crafts and hopefully playing some games. We also want to enjoy some tasty hobbit foods.

So here's my plea: Does anyone have any cool Middle Earth related crafts? Any good recipes? Games? All of the Middle Earth/Tolkien parties I've seen on the web have been geared towards children. That's all great, but I'm going to have a wide age range in attendance. I've already got a list of ideas, but don't want to miss out on a really great idea that's floating around out there.

I look forward to your suggestions!