Fabulous Finds Friday: This Week's Cool Finds

So many great tutorials and projects! So little time!

• I found this great (and FREE!) little pattern for a newborn's knit hat connected to my favorite place to find organic fabrics online - Stitch Simple (they have a great Tuesday sale - free fat quarters - for their newsletter subscribers). They recently ran an experiment to see if pre-washed organic knits were easy to work with, asking five sewing bloggers to test the fabric and offer their findings and patterns online. Tie Dye Diva took up the challenge and posted her pattern for making this newborn top knot hat.


• All you need is a camera, some lollipops, and a cooperative little one to make these great little Valentine cards. Jen Parker over at The Smile Report posted a great tutorial for creating these memorable cards.


• I haven't fully committed to the scrapbooking craze yet. Okay, so I have baskets and bins of decorative brads, beads, and buttons. And I've bought two albums, one for each of my sons, but I haven't actually created a page yet. Instead, I use all my supplies to make gift tags and cards. Recently, I stumbled across a number of great digital scrapbooking sites that offer a ton of free doownloads for personal use. Check out Shabby Princess, Digital Freebies, and O Scraps Freebies for lots of great ideas and free downloads.


• Here's a great project for a nursery or toddler's room found on the Design Mom blog. Create very cute (and easy) framed alphabet art using a stencil plate. Actually, walking through the stencil aisle of your local crafts store yields a million variations on this idea. You could easily use a scroll or botanical stencil to create beautiful art for any room in your house.


• I love this quick and easy Valentine's banner by DIY Dish because it can so easily be adapted to other holidays and celebrations. A great idea! I never thought to distress the edges of a cut-out using dark ink. I guess I haven't been doing enough scrapbooking!


• And this great little craft to do with the kids can also be easily adapted. Found on Alphamom (I LOVE Alphamom's blog), these homemade Valentine patches are so easy and cute to make with little ones.


• Heidi Vetter over at Sew, Craft, Create has a very cool tutorial and free printables for creating your own fabric using an inkjet printer. By using your printer, freezer paper, an iron, and fabric, you can design a limitless number of cool embellished project. Heidi includes a very cute Valentine printable for this tutorial.


• I was scouring the JoAnn Fabric website this week to read reviews on personal screen printers. One of the reviewers mentioned Fibra Artysta over on Etsy as a great place to get personalized Thermofax screens without having to hunt down a Thermofax machine. I love this idea! And you have to read her shop announcement. A very well written piece on why she does what she does. Now I just have to decide on what images I'm going to send her first!