Holiday preparations

Today I spend all day in the kitchen,and girls decorated the tree and windows.
I'm so tired of cooking and baking and making cookies for holidays.I have no time for anything else creative.
Well cooking is kinda creative but it is also boring sometimes (like now).
I made 7 different kind of cookies(not all of them today),I had to make lot of cookies because girls are going on New Year party with their friends and everybody have to bring something-so they are bringing cookies.

I definitely will not going to cook for few days after this because I made SARMA-our national meal,and I made A LOT of it (I can feed small village somewhere in Africa with all the food I made).

Marko (my DH) will bring roast pork from his job (he's a butcher),and I'm going to make a delicious side dish with mushrooms,eggs and hard cheese.There will be also a salad that we call Russian salad-with cooked vegetables chicken,eggs and mayo,and also sour cabbage salad.

Also have to make a birthday cake for Tamara (on January 2nd).
My B-day is just after hers on January 3rd,but no cake I hope that there will be enough cookies.
Yes we are having company for New Year party.
My sister Maja,her boyfriend,his sister and nice,my husband's brother with his wife and my sister's friend,with me and Marko it is 9 persons.
Hope that it will be fun.
P.S. Maja is preparing more food to bring for dinner.
If I survive all this food -will write in next few days.
Happy New Year to everybody.

Merry Christmas to all

I'm not celebrating this Christmas,but to all of you who do I wish very Merry Christmas and happy New Year.

My house and the neighborhood

This first picture was taken from my bedroom window,it's first snow this season.


Someone once asked me how my neighborhood looks like,and I promised to send the pictures.
Here it is-my house and neighborhoods across the street in the valley (my house is on the hill).

Of course there is lot of regular looking houses near me.

Altered suitcase

I have finished this old suitcase,you know I posted pictures how it looked before.

Well after all things that I did to HIM,here is how it looks now.

more art

So I said that I will upload few more "art pieces",and here they are.
I will cut them out and collage them on journal pages or made them into cards or paper dolls or...or...
I'm still learning...

Mama made me a new dress

Well all young ladies need a dress so I made one for Milica.I saw something like this on some website about dog's clothes.
I also made her a collar and the leash,but she still refuses to wear it.
So I was doing something...
Now I want to make her a jacket because it is cold in here.

Art journal

I was surfing the net in last few days and find lot
of interesting websites and albums with beautiful
journal pages.


I had to try doing this and here are my results.
I have also find few You tube movies with different instructions for making journals (links are added in “you tube favorites” on the bottom right).
I can’t buy moleskine in here so I decided to make one but this is still in progress so I will upload the pictures when it is done.
In the meantime I’m drawing in regular journal.

Our new baby - Milica

Here is our new baby.
Her name is Milica,and she is our new toy.
She likes to cuddle and sleep.
I have to be careful when I walk because she is always somewhere around me.
Can you beleive that she sleeps like this?
















Here she sleeps on Ivana's slippers.















First night she was sleeping in the box.














Look how smol she is.

I'm back

OK I haven’t posted for a while but I have a reason for this.
Well first I was sick than after 3 weeks doctors find out what is the matter with me and I started taking pills.Now I’m OK-well almost.
Second thing is that we have a new family member –baby kooker spaniel girl who goes all around the house doing you know what and I’m going after her cleaning you know what. She still can’t make it on the newspaper (she did it somewhere in this area).

joke

Hangover
Jack wakes up with a huge hangover after attending his company's Christmas Party. Jack is not normally a drinker, but the drinks didn't taste like alcohol at all. He didn't even remember how he got home from the party. He wondered if he did something wrong.
Jack had to force himself to open his eyes, and the first thing he sees is a couple of aspirins next to a glass of water on the side table.
And, next to them, a single red rose! Jack sits up and sees his clothing in front of him, all clean and pressed. He looks around the room and sees that it is in perfect order, spotlessly clean. So is the rest of the house.

He takes the aspirins, cringes when he sees a huge black eye staring back at him in the bathroom mirror. Then he notices a note hanging on the corner of the mirror written in red with little hearts on it and a kiss mark from his wife in lipstick: 'Honey, breakfast is on the stove, I left early to get groceries to make you your favorite dinner tonight. I love you, darling! Love, Jillian'
> He stumbles to the kitchen and sure enough, there is hot breakfast, steaming hot coffee and the morning newspaper. His son is also at the table eating.
Jack asks, 'Son, what happened last night?'
'Well, you came home after 3 A.M., drunk. You fell over the coffee table and broke it, and then got ill in the hallway, and got that black eye when you ran into the door.'

Confused, he asked his son, 'So, why is everything in such perfect order and so clean? I have a rose, and breakfast is on the table waiting for me??'
> His son replies, 'Oh THAT! ... Mum dragged you to the bedroom, and when she tried to take your pants off, you screamed, 'Leave me alone, I'm married!!'
Broken Coffee Table $239.99
Hot Breakfast $4.20
Two Aspirins $.38
Saying the right thing, at the right time . . . PRICELESS

My Etsy Shop

Finally I find a way to make my online shop.
My old friend Lydia, from Germany, was here for about two weeks, and made me Pay pall account and helped me to make Etsy account.
I have uploaded my patterns in PDF files for now, but will not stay only on this.
As soon as I figure out about shipping taxes I will add few more things.
For me this is great for the start, just to see someone buying something…
A link to my new shop is:http://tamaraiivana.etsy.com/
You are very welcome to visit.

Recycled jeans

I like to recycle everything that is possible.
Not that I’m cheapstick but I’m sorry to throw away something that can be used in another way.
For my dolls I recycle old clothes, and it works fine.
Sometimes I recycle clothes into bags or book covers, wallets etc.
Recently I find old jeans (overalls) that were damaged with wall paint, so decide to do something with them.
On some website (can’t remember the name) I saw that group of ladies made bags of old jeans with lot of embroidery on them. I liked this project, and will try to do something like this. For the start I cut off top part, and will recycle this part into embroidered bag, but not just now. First to decide what kind of embroidery stitches to put on it, but I have already made shopping bag from legs.
It’s large and comfy. Great when I go shopping by bicycle.I have added a raggy flower, so it looks cute.

Bobbin Embroidery

Not so long ago, on one of my groups, somebody mentioned that you could insert unusual thread in the bobbin and make interesting drawings on fabric.
It sounded interesting to me and I tried it. Find some golden and metallic thread, and started playing with it.
The result is not that bad –don’t you think so?

Gallery

All my dolls from the gallery are at home. The owner decided to close the gallery and to do something else in there. OK, now my house is full of dolls and felted jewelry.
People in here are not that interested in crafts and doll making, so I haven’t made much profit of selling.

The clown is Alley Oops- pattern by Suzette Rugolo, from a magazine. And here are few felted rings and necklace.
My big giant doll is sitting in the corner of a dining room now, my kids made her few phyrsings- peer sings- or however you spell that, on her eyebrow, under and above the lips, and in the nose.Angel hair is pattern by Magic Threads.

Three-dimensional embroidery

You know that I had a class at Dollstreet few months ago, well I earned some money than and decided to buy few books. It really was hard for me to decide what to buy because I’m interested in so many things and have limited amount of money. I have made a wish list but it was so long that I needed 10 times more than what I had. Well I started to cut down and finally managed to fit my wish list into my money supply.
One of the books was “Three Dimensional Embroidery” by Janet Edmonds.
I was amazed with cover picture, and find few inside pages on the web with also great pictures. My expectations was to find detailed instructions for all beautiful things inside,. …Well I was not totally disappointed, but it was not near what I expected.
There is few words about every picture, and general explanation but nothing to point you how to make something specific from the book.
I have to improvise and guess what I need to do. Well, never mind, here is what I made.
I wanted to make fabric for the bag –to look like texture from the cover picture from the book (It is vessel on the picture in the book).

Findings from the flea market

One of my flea market findings is this old leather make up suitcase It was, as you can see, old and broken but I thought that it could be repaired and altered, so I ripped off all old fabric and started making new interfacing.

It takes me lot of time because everything has to be glued (and glue has to dry overnight), but eventually it will be done.
Here is how it looks at the moment.
I’m planning to make a collage on the outside of it but haven’t decided if it’s going to be paper or fabric collage.
However you’ll see it finished in few days (I hope so).

Flea market

The other day I was at the flea market looking for something.

I never know what this something is exactly but I always find something interesting.

Usually I buy interesting fabric clothes that I can use for dolls, but sometimes I find other interesting things like old books, photos, toys that needs to be rescued, jewelry, charms, beads etc.

I took few pictures cause I thought that would be interesting for you to see how our flea market looks like.
As you can see there is lot of junk but you can always find few pieces of real “treasure”.

This time I bought some synthetic fur (for bears) and one cream mohair kind of coat (also for bears), one blonde wig ,and huge pile of blank post card size papers (maybe I will try to make some PC’s).