It’s been a while since we did a Friends and Family Friday post. This post is particularly special to us as we’d like to feature the one woman who has inspired us the most in the world of crafting: our mom. She is crazy talented and does so many amazing things with her skills. She can quilt, sew, create, make costumes, bake, cook, shovel snow (especially this week!) and so much more!

Today, we’re going to feature a few projects she is working on. The first is a flower basket, made completely of fabric:

I cannot tell you how impressed I am with this project. She created a pattern for it as well that’s available on her blog. Here’s another picture with the flowers out:

Another one of her fun projects is an Alphabet Soup can. I’m still waiting for one for my son but since he calls every letter “R” we’re in no hurry.

The can is made around a cardboard cylinder base but the rest is all fabric. It must have taken a lot of patience to get this far!

The last project I want to tell you about is something I had not known much about until my mom started designing them. They are called pantographs… I think. They are patterns for quilting machines. She has done some amazing quilts including my son’s Christmas quilt with a pattern she designed and then used herself.

Here is an example of one called “Jan’s Tatting”:

You can see the unique design on the fabric that binds the top and bottom with the batting in between. She has a super cool quilting machine that makes the work much easier!

Tracy and I hope you enjoyed this little introduction to our Mom and how amazing she is. You can check out her blog here and please go visit it and leave her some comments. She would love it!

Today, We’d like to introduce you to our other sister, Nichole. We hope she’ll continue to do some posts her as a spoolsister, but we know the twin boys due any day now might keep her a little busy!

Here’s Nichole on decorating her boys’ room:

When decorating the twin’s nursery, we knew we wanted to hang letters spelling their names on the wall.  We quickly grew frustrated that all the letters were plain white with very girly ribbons.  This just would not go with the room’s sports theme!  So we decided to make some of our own….

We found a great website, www.3dwoodcraft.com, where you can purchase unpainted custom cut wooden letters and select the font and size. We chose 10 inch “Flubber”.

Once these arrived, I painted them all with off-white paint.  After this base coat dried, using blue painter’s tape, I outlined pinstripes on each of the letters.  We chose blue and red for the pinstripes and I used a stencil brush for the colored paint.  My husband, Dave, then varnished each letter to get a nice shine.

After the varnish dried, we used a glue gun to attach ribbons to each letter and around a stained dowel. We hung the dowel on silver hooks above each crib.

Voila!

Tracy and I are so proud to introduce a new weekly segment on spoolsisters:

Every Friday, we’ll be having guest posts from our VERY talented family and friends. You’ll get to meet our other sister, Nichole, our amazing Mom, Karen, as well as aunts, cousins, neighbors, friends, and pets! Ok, maybe not the last one…

We hope this gives you even more creative inspiration in areas that Tracy and I aren’t experts in, such as tatting, painting, costume making, and more!

Come back soon for the first Friends & Family post!