Felt Tree Garland

This adorable garland has been tempting me for a couple of years in the Land of Nod catalog. However, being the cheap cheapo that I am, I refused to drop $30 on some felt tree garland.

Thus began a valuable lesson in crafting. Sometimes, it's worth the money to just buy the darn thing.

I had a ton of felt left over from my Christmas stocking project last year. I'm not so good on the estimating, and since I was making them from my own imagination, I bought "a little extra" just to be sure. I could now wallpaper our family room with felt, but that's beside the point.

I figured the felt wasn't really a cost, because if I didn't use it for this, I was just wasting it anyway. However, I probably spent $15 on sequins and other decorating doodles for the trees. Then there was the expense of the ribbon and glue.

Not to mention, the expense of the time involved. It was time consuming. Just ask Lovely, my stepdaughter. She spent about an hour gluing the trees onto the sequin strands.

So, meh. Felt tree garland. It's cute, but I would just buy it from Land of Nod.

About

I have been known to make fun of crafters. It wasn't until I started surfing through Etsy and made some new friends who considered themselves "crafty," that I began to understand that gaudy sweaters and piles of scrapbooks weren't the end of the road for crafting.

There are artists out there.

While I don't aspire to become an artist, I would like to learn how to use my new serger, and how to sew in a straight line. My craft aspirations center around my sewing machine and learning to make things for my family and friends. Things that they won't pack into the back of a drawer five minutes after receiving them.

I began sewing in October 2007. Perhaps I shouldn't admit that, since I don't feel like I have gotten much better since then. I've made a handful of baby clothes, a couple of purses, a half dozen rag quilts, Halloween costumes, and my proudest accomplishment, our family's Christmas stockings.

When I think back on all of the projects I have tackled, I wish that I had been chronicling what worked, what didn't work, what I would like to try again, and most of all, I wish that I had been taking more pictures.

This space, then, is not a "how-to" craft blog. It is simply a blog to document my projects. My failures and my successes. It is a place to collect ideas and hopefully connect with other amateur sewers. I dare not call myself a seamstress.

I am simply someone who sews.