Iron Craft #17: Royal Wedding

This week the Iron Craft challenge had me stumped for a bit but eventually I came up with the idea of doing a monogram. I dunno what I'm gonna do with the monogram but I think it fits in with the wedding theme well because a lot of people get monogrammed items as wedding and anniversary gifts. I also stuck with my theme of trying new things for IC challenges by trying out a new embroidery stitch for this project. The B is done in stem stitch, I decided to leave it that way and not fill it in because I like the look of the outline. The new stitch I learned was a padded satin stitch which I used to do the leaves, flowers and berries. Satin stitch was easy but time consuming. All of the things I used satin stitch for took twice as long as the stem stitches. I have a ton of ideas for what to use my monogram for from leaving it in a hoop as art to making it the front of a throw pillow and more. I'll post when I eventually decided what it's going to be.

Forgot to mention that the monogram pattern came from needlenthread.com.

Iron Craft #16 Taxman: Citrus Change Purse

This week the Iron Craft challenge was to make something inspired by money. I'm pretty sure there are a ton of change purses being submitted so far but I decided to go with one anyway. I decided to go with a change purse because thus far Iron Craft has pushed me to do things I have never done before and before this week I had never sewn in a zipper. 

I found this pretty little rainbow crocheted change purse tutorial at SparklePetal and decided that I wanted to make something similar. I liked the rainbow but I don't have scraps in rainbow colors and I didn't want to buy seven separate skeins of yarn. I didn't mind buying one skein of yarn and using scraps I did have on hand so I came up with this lime slice idea. I made mine with six single crochets in a magic ring and then increased evenly for sixteen rows. I embroidered the lime wedges and seeds with white yarn I had on hand. Then I followed the tutorial at SparklePetal to make the liner and attatch it. I gave it to The Mom because I don't really need a change purse and she liked it.

I learned that using a plain ole foot on my machine to sew in a zipper is not a good idea so I'll be buying a zipper foot as soon as I find one. It wasn't hard to do but I did it sloppily because I was using the standard foot my machine came with. I don't know why zippers are so intimidating now that I actually did it.

Iron Craft Challenge #15: Peepcakes

This week the challenge at Iron Craft was to make something using peeps. Now I dunno about any of the other crafters but there are several reasons why making a craft out of peeps was not gonna happen in my house. The number one reason was The Man, he is a marshmallow fiend, his favorite snack is those giant roasting marshmallows, there was no way I could keep peeps in the house and him not eat them. The second reason is ants, there is just no way I was going to let a sugar covered marshmallow just sit around my house to attract bugs. After all that you might think I was saying I didn't make anything for Iron Craft this week and you'd be wrong, I baked something for Iron Craft this week. I decapitated twelve bunny peeps and put their bodies inside cupcakes as they were baking then topped them with the heads. I was going for a snowball sort of cake but the marshmallow sort of evaporated and left a candy coating on top of the cake which was pretty cool too. We ate them all so they couldn't have been bad.

Peanut Butter Muffins

Last night I was craving something sweet but we were out of just about everything to make goodies except for the fixings for peanut butter cookies. Well, I wavered on making them because it takes a good long while to make them and it was too hot to have the oven on for that long. My solution was to try making peanut butter muffins instead. I figured that a dozen muffins would take about a quarter of the time to make as two and a half dozen cookies. I'm going to try to play with this recipe a little more and make a PB&J muffin later on. For now the plain peanut butter muffins are as follows:


1 1/4 cups of AP flour
1 tsp of baking soda 
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup of milk
1 cup of peanut butter (chunky or smooth)
1/2 cup granulated sugar
5 tbsp melted butter
1 egg beaten


Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and grease or line 12 muffin cups. Sift the first 4 ingredients together  and set them aside. Mix together rest of the ingredients thoroughly and then combine the dry into the wet. Mix them well but not too much. Evenly fill the muffin cups about a third of the way full and bake for 20 to 25 minutes until a toothpick inserted into the middle muffin comes out clean. Remove from the pan immediately.

Iron Craft Challenge # 14 - Wish You Were Here Postcards

This week the Iron Craft challenge theme was postcards. At first I was rather stumped because paper is not my usual medium but I tried a few things. The first ones I did were altered book pages and they are too embarrassing to show pictures of. Then I got some scrapbook paper and tried some things with it. Those are slightly less embarrassing, enough so that I can show pictures. The first is an owl and the second is a masquerade mask of an owl.

I didn't like either of them, they looked too much like cutting and pasting that a kid would do. I realized that, aside from origami, I just wasn't experienced enough with paper crafts to pull that off. I thought about just not submitting anything this week but then I had an epiphany of sorts. I realized that there wasn't anything in the post on Iron Craft that said I had to make my postcard out of paper. I went through my stash looking for something suitable for a postcard and I came across my bag of felt. From there I created a scene that one might find on a post card and I liked it. There was a problem though, it was unfinished and the raw side was showing, so I made a post card backing and sewed the two pieces together to cover up the raw edges. I really liked the way it turned out so I made another one. I have yet another one in the works but it won't be finished in enough time to submit it to Iron Craft.