Cars not tutus!?!

My great friend /cousin-in-law has two little girls just like me. The oldest is turning 2 this Saturday so I thought I’d make her a tutu and a matching one for her doll… I chopped C’s curtains, for just such an occassion (I was meaning to hem them anyway).

But then her mom told me that she’s really into cars so I found this adorable Tutorial on how to make a Cozy Car Caddy from Homemade by Jill (by the way everything on that blog is adorable).
So here is the final project.

I didn’t realize that Match box cars were $1 each so I only bought 3, but it gives her room to grow. Here is what it looks like open. I followed Jill’s directions exactly except that I embroidered the numbers on since I didn’t have any fabric paint or freezer paper (is wax paper the same thing as freezer paper?). I used a pair of my husband’s jeans that had a hole in them and they were just big enough. A woman’s pair of jeans probably wouldn’t work.

I had to buy black felt for $0.29 but I had all the other felt and material. Total cost – $3.29.

Her second gift was a puzzle block set. I found alphabet blocks at Micahel’s for $1 for 15 blocks. They were almost 4 x 6 inches so I printed out 4 pictures of M and her sister L and family at Walgreens for $0.40. Then I used a paper cutter to cut the picture into 15 squares 1 and 3/16ths of an inch squared. It was annoying that the measurement was so weird, but it was easy after the first couple of boxes. I wfound a tutorial that was similar at Making the World a Cuter.  Here are some pictures. It turned out cute, I wished I starter earlier because at midnight I decided to be done and only do two pictures instead of four. The blocks have letters on two sides and just drawn on pictures on the other sides. The picure sides are smooth so it’s easy to glue onto them.
I took pictures of the two sides with the puzzle put together and then I glued that onto a box about that size.  I think the parents will play with it as much as the little girls. The final cost was $1.20 (since I only used two of the pictures).

The last present is by far my favorite and was free to make (if you have writeable CDs laying around). I had my girls pick out 10 books from their collection that they would like to give to their cousin. It’s great because C is too young to think about keping the best books for herself that she picked out some cool books to give away (keep in mind that our house is overflowing with books and we really need to downsize). Then I had my tech guy (the hubby) show me how to record onto our computer, it was so simple. We actually have a program on our computer called sound recorder and DH told me that most computers do if they have an internal microphone our if the come with an external microphone. Next the girls sat on my lap and we had storytime. Everytime we came to the end of a page all three of us would say “beep” so that M would know to turn the page. We tried to be very animated, and there are a couple of times the girls forgot that we were recording and they’d ask a question about the book. I left those parts in, because I thought it was cute. Afterwards we sang Happy Birthday and burned the DVD. I made a little CD cover with all the book titles and I made little labels for each book with the title Cousins’ Storytime and the book number.

All together I spent $4.69 (not including what I had on hand or printing on my printer) and we gave a $5 donation to Beyond Borders to help with everything going on in Haiti.

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