{ making me smile... }

These unbelievably charming handmade dolls from etsy seller, and philanthropist, Dolls and Daydreams.

Holy cuteness!  I am truly smitten!  You can buy the PDF patterns for these lovelies right over here.  Sarah, founder of Dolls and Daydreams, makes and donates hundreds of these beautiful treasures to orphaned children all over the world.  She is definitely an inspiration. To read more about her worthy work, or even participate in a doll drive, head over here  for more info.

h a p p y   m o n d a y !

{ spread some sunshine }

All the sunshine spreading I've managed to do lately has been of the digital variety.  See, I've been quite the busy bee helping fabulous mamas who are interested in planning parties like this one. 

 Ever since Pottery Barn Kids debuted their catalog featuring their Very Hungry Caterpillar party, I have been inundated with requests and questions about Grant's little party.

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I've made a bunch of these for several lovely mamas and their cute kiddos.

Oh, and a bazillion of  these too.

You know what's awesome?  Every single mommy that has contacted me has been genuinely wonderful and sincerely appreciative (even on the occasions when I take waaay too long to deliver their files).  I feel truly blessed to have been able to contribute in a small way to the birthday celebrations of so many special little gals and guys.    

 I feel like the party fairy or something! ;)  

Have you been spreading some sunshine of your own?  I'd love to hear what you've been doing or are planning on doing.  To be honest, I've been a bit uninspired lately.

{ i spy a diy - with bovagoods! }

Today I am absolutely delighted to bring you a guest post, courtesy of my ridiculously creative and talented friend, Elisabeth.  Take a peek at her tutorial for some easy-peasy and totally darling, fabric flowers. If you're anything like me, you'll be itchin' to grab your glue gun and fabric scraps like, lickety-split!
 Take it away, E!

Hello, Polkadots and Puppies People!

I am thrilled to be guest posting here today on one of my all-time favorite blogs.  This is such a happy place, isn't it?

Rachel and I go way back to college where we often spent the night in the studio draping, sketching, sewing, and pattern making. Now we are both bloggers and still stay up all night pinning, reading, posting, and creating. Ok, well, we probably don't pull as many all-nighters as we used to but we still share the love of all things creative, crafty and colorful.

My blog is called Bovagoods. I love to share with my readers my DIY projects, before and after projects, Pinterest love, thrifting finds and any other "goods" I am inspired by.

Rachel has asked me to share my fabric flower goods with you today, and I couldn't be more excited to do it!

If you have fabric scraps, felt, buttons, a hot glue gun and some hair clips or headbands then you are already prepared to make the project I am here to share with you today.

The tutorial that inspired me to make these can be found here.

Here's what you need:

Fabric Scraps 

Clips, Pins or Headbands

Felt

Buttons (or other items for the center of the flower)

Hot Glue Gun

Cut out a bunch of fabric circles:

The bigger the circle, the bigger the flower. 

If you cut out 5 inch circles, you will end up with a 5 inch flower. 

(Note: 5 inch flowers are really big.)

Mine are made with two different size layers. You could do one layer, or three layers.

It takes six circles per layer.

The circles don't have to be exact.

I looked around the house and used bowls, cups, etc. for patterns.

Stack up the six layers of fabric, hold the card stock pattern on top and cut.

Cut some felt into a 2 inch circle. (You will need 1 felt circle per flower.)

Take a fabric circle, and fold in half:

Then, fold that like this:

Then, flip that over and fold over the other half.

Then, you have something that looks like this:

It sort of looks like a double cone thingy.

Take your glue gun and put a bit of glue between the layers of fabric at the bottom near the points to keep them closed/folded. Don't use too much glue and don't smoosh it out all flat or you'll have flat flowers.

You will have a bunch of these:

Now start gluing them to your 2 inch felt circle.

Glue the smaller petals on top.

It will look like this on the bottom:

Then glue the button to the center and when that dries, glue on your clip, pin, headband, etc. to the back.

I made my girls some flowers out of white linen to wear for Easter.

Dresses: Clearance rack at GAP Kids

Pink sandals: Wal-mart

White sandals: Target-fall clearance

Hand painted basket/purse: vintage family piece

This one started out as a huge 5 inch flower. it was way too big. (Maybe on a headband it would work) I had to trim it down a bit. It ended up being about 4.5 inches.

This one is the 4 inch size.

I needed to add some color to my dress for Easter so i pinned a couple of flowers to my waistband.

Dress: Land's End Canvas (clearance last year)

Shrug/sweater thing: tj maxx

Silver necklace: lisa leonard

Blue beaded necklace: vintage

Earrings: Target

Sunglasses: Coach (found at Tj Maxx)

Flowers: Made by me!

The flowers on my dress are 3 inch and 3.5 inch with safety pins glued to the back. I also played around with pinning the blue one to the side of my necklace. It was really cute. So many ways to use these.

Pin them to your belt, necklace, purse, top, hair, jacket, bathing suit, beach bag, throw pillow.....

So easy. So good. Thanks for having me Rachel!

xoxo,

Elisabeth

{ blowing kisses }

I figure it's about time to start thinking about Valentine's Day, don't you?  And who doesn't enjoy celebrating a day dedicated to all things sweetness and LOVE?!?  Boy, there sure are a lot of fantastically creative DIY ideas out there these days!  It certainly is a nice change from the lame, character-laden paper Valentines I remember giving and getting as a child.  Jack had big ideas about giving "bubbles AND candy" to his friends, and so we came up with these little goodies to give out to our little group of friends, as well as his preschool class.

 The boys helped me assemble the little treat bags full of bubbles and Hershey kisses, and only insisted on sampling one chocolate each.
  I thought that was more than fair ;)

We bought our itsy-bitsy, red bubbles from Party City and the cello bags from Michael's.

And I thought, just in case you want to make some of these for your little friends too, I'd go ahead and share the printable toppers I made.
You can download them here.
 (make sure to click 'Download Original' for the highest quality)
Can you tell I received Photoshop as a Christmas gift?!!  Excited!!!

What kind of Valentine goodies are you planning on giving this year?  

{ i spy a diy - shoe sugar }

Shoe clips are making a crafty comeback like nobody's business.  Have you noticed?  I feel like I'm seeing them everywhere lately!  That really had me wanting to make some shoe sugar of my own.  I had a few spare minutes to make these last week, and they could not have been easier!  Now I have two pretty options for dressing up my $5 clearance Target suede flats.

 Um, yes please. ;)

My apologies about that terrible cell phone pic of those Jolee's boutique flowers. I picked those up at Michael's for 99 cents.  They were screaming to be adorning some cute ballet flats, in my opinion.  I picked up my shoe clip hardware from here.  The sparkley clip-ons you see in #2 were fashioned from some cheapo Forever 21 earrings that I'd had for a while. I had to use epoxy for those guys because hot glue just wasn't going to cut it when trying to adhere metal-to-metal.  

Need some more shoe clip DIY inspiration?  There are so many lovely ideas out there!

(click on the image to go to the source)

Not a 'clip', but a darling shoe refashion, nonetheless

h a p p y    w e e k e n d !

{ pillow talk }

Have you been to Target in the last few weeks?  They are really hitting it out of the park in the home decor aisle right now!  I want pretty much every pillow they have.

one,  two,  three,   four,  five,  six,  seven,  eight

And it's not just Target's pillows that have me all aflutter.  Look at all the other goodies they've got!

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And I know this has been floating around Pinterest and blogs a lot, but I couldn't resist posting this as well.  It really makes me giggle.

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Target - one of my absolute favorite places!  Do you feel the same way?