Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Oh, chet!

About the time Dr. Light and I got engaged, DIY ideas blossomed in my head. I wanted to learn everything, DO everything. And I will still get about 90% of it done. However, one item that I wanted to DIM (do it myself) was our cake toppers.

We all know that Etsy can provide some of the most amazing toppers ANYWHERE. For example:

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So. Adorable.

However, my desire to make our own cake toppers took form in the idea of little crocheted figures of our favorite animals. For Dr. Light, a squirrel. For me, a cow or a poodle.

Pictures like this were my inspiration:

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They were so dainty and fun, and as a sew-a-holic, I love anything made from fabric or yarn.

So, I decided to teach myself to crochet. I bought some books. I had my mom work with me because I kept doing my loops the wrong way. I bought some big, thick yarn so I could see what I was doing and practice practice practice.

Do you know what I'm going to admit? I still don't know how to crochet. It's 8 months to the wedding, and I've realized that crochet is a skill that I'm not going to have time to pick up and perfect before the cake toppers need to be done. I never practiced, and my crochet books are sitting by the bed, oh-so-lonely.

This weekend, my pal Beverly and I hit up JoAnn Fabrics while we were waiting to get massages (oooh, heavenly!), and we sat down to look at patterns. I was flipping through a Simplicity book when I came across these:



I'm not sure why I didn't think of this before. I sew. That's my strength. The sewing machine and I could rule the world if we tried hard enough. So why aren't I SEWING the cake toppers?

My favorite pattern is the top one with the cow, pig, and horse. It would be really easy to turn one of the designs into a squirrel for Dr. Light, and if the stuffed animals are too big, I can take the pattern to a copy machine and re-size it. These, I can do. As soon as Simplicity has another pattern sale (or I get antsy and buckle down to buy it normal price), I'm picking up all the tools to sew us some adorable cake toppers.

Has anyone else had to re-evaluate a skill you wanted to learn for the wedding? Have you had to identify a strength you have and change a project to match it to get a task completed?

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