Amy Sedaris book giveaway
As I was milling around my favourite local bookstore the other day, a sea of yellow bookcovers alerted me that I was about to run into a book display. I picked up one of the little beacons and started flipping through it.
I knew immediately that you should have this book.
;)
It’s the most wonderful time of the year according to Frank Sinatra, but most of us could use a few belly laughs to keep the Santa-ball rolling. Even if you’re not planning on making your dad a dryer-lint-stuffed tie-snake, reading about it will have you giggling.
I appreciate this tongue-in-cheek approach to crafting for the humor she’s infusing into what’s usually a super-serious (or unduly cheerful), art supply store-, power tool-ridden genre. The quest to make holiday gifts can leave us grouchy, confused and uninspired; yet not having much money doesn’t always leave us with a ton of other options. Kudos to Amy for making us laugh about all of it.
My Christmas gift to you, dear readers, is this. Three lucky winners will receive a copy of Amy’s newest book, Simple Times: Crafts for poor people.
Enter by leaving a comment below describing a crafting scenario gone right, wrong or improvised into something unanticipated.
Don’t forget to include your email address in the little box or I can’t contact you to tell you that you’ve won.
Comments close at midnight on December 22, 2010. Random.org will select three winners based on the number associated with your comment. Only residents of the U.S. or Canada are eligible to win, and one entry per household please.
Thank you for following my adventures all year long. Happy Holidays!
Kate
Congrats to Meg, Sarah and Vanessa! Happy crafting to us all!
Reader Comments (56)
Lets see, there's the time I was making Coconut Custard pies for Thanksgiving and I spilled the custard putting the pies into the oven. I didn't worry too much about it at the time. but after the pies were cooked, I cranked up the heat to cook a pizza and heard "poof". I thought, why did my oven go poof? and turned to look and the entire oven was on fire. Who knew custard was flammable?!? There's also the time I was making a quilt for my nieces graduation and I realized I needed a 4x6 piece of fabric to finish the mariners compas...but it was fabric I had bought years ago. I ended up going to my quilt guild of 100 people, holding up a piece of the fabric and asking if anyone had it. One person had the same brand in a lighter color, so I took it, made a really strong tea dye and dyed the heck out of it until it matched the rest. It worked. The quilt came out beautiful!
I am crafty...love being creative.. .the kids will benefit as much as I will with new hobbies to do at home with little money! Hope to see you soon!
These comments are great! That said, there have been many a craft project gone awry on my watch. Here's one that went well. A pair of maternity pants that I made that utilized the top of a huge pair of underpants. They were awesome! I went around showing off my underwear pants to anyone who'd listen.
How about the time I made a fleece "tie blanket" and gave it to my cousin (for her baby) before realizing that I had left pins in it???
:) Everly
Oh how I love to craft, sew, and create, but there is always something to go wrong, especially with the little one's running around and trying to "help". The latest being the Christmas blanket I was sewing, using a fleece backing, that managed to shift, roll and stretch so that as i reached my last stitches I realized I was going to have to break out the seam ripper and make some major changes. I had big plans for that blanket....but after all that, I was fine with just closing up the hem and being done!
I have always had this vision of myself in complete domestic bliss. When my kids were born I made their baby food with all organic foods. I breast fed for months and months. That's where the bliss stops. I had envisioned myself sitting tirelessly at the sewing machine happily making their organic clothing too cool for school while creating masterpieces in the kitchen. All wrapped in a house completely clean with rooms each having a bit of all of our personalities.......Reality??? My house is trashed, I can't keep up, most of the time is dinner thrown together....My sewing machine hasn't been used in months. The last craft I did with my girls cheering squad.....I ended up with 7 girls cute little penguin bracelet super glued to my hands along with the entire bottle of super glue..................need I say more?????
At my age, I have literally decades of Christmas crafting stories, both good and horrendously wrong. My favorites lean to the good ones, but the wrong ones are the stuff of legend with my grown-up kids. Like the time we couldn't get the Gingerbread House walls we were building to stick with Royal Frosting, so we cheated with hot glue - effective, but not edible. Or the orange pomanders that were supposed to be fragrantly stuck with whole cloves all over, that turned brown and moldy in the matter of just a few days time. Or while hemming new Christmas stockings for all 6 kids late on Christmas Eve, I very sleepily sewed the last one to my lap (the clothes I was wearing). Or, my total favorite, after putting together several layered jars of cookie mixings for gifts with the older kids and setting them into a box on the floor, we discovered the youngest sitting under the kitchen table, gleefully taking them one by one and emptying them into a heap of flour, sugar, and m&m's on the floor. Ahh, those sweet Christmas memories!!!
I hosted a Christmas Craft ornament playgroup today and it went fabulous! Kids ranging from 2 to 8 and each one of them had a great time making dough, baking, painting, and stringing them for the tree.
food tends to top my list of homemade gifts... something i feel a general kinship to as i love to eat and am close to my edible crafts. this year... done right, with 5 minutes to spare were vanilla simple syrups. equal parts sugar and water boiled, poured into ikea glass bottles, a vanilla bean plopped in and voila...amber beauty for the near and dear!
love your blog...
Cutting out a simple apron pattern on my lap only to discover I had cut a nice large whole in the skirt I was wearing! LOL So embarrassing but so very glad that I was at home.
I made a gorgeous Christmas Advent calender with 25 cute little decorative tins. They were all nestled in a beautiful antique frame I had painted silver. Stenciled "Christmas countdown" in distressed paint...the works! My kids were super excited to pick a tin each day and reveal a little treat. I decided to secure the tins onto the backboard with magnets so we could easily take a tin off each day. Apparently my magnets were not strong enough, and to top it off they did not stick to the backboard well, so they would randomly fall off....sometimes one at a time, sometimes all at once, which the wonderful "glass break" feature of our alarm system did not find too funny. At least every few nights for about a week they would all fall off in the middle of the night and set the alarm off, wake everyone up and scare us all to death. A good crafter can always salvage a mess....decided to change the magnets out with velcro dots this year....so far no alarms from falling December days! Advent calender is still a hit this year!!! Would loooooove this book!
In an effort to cheaply decorate the walls of our apt i tried to make pop art posters of me and my roommate. Photoshop is so hard! I made my own version of yves kleins monochrome instead, with only relatively more success.
LOVE Amy Sedaris!
deciding to make sew a ''easy'' diaper bag, resulting in peices of fabric everywhere..sewn material backwards..sewed my shirt in with the material..oo lets just say that patterns are not easily read by me, especially the ''sew easy'' ones! lol!
Last year I tried to make hand print frames with my 3-month-old. That was a comical experience that took several sessions and produced pink hand prints all over my living room. We finally managed to get an acceptable one on the decorative paper that I had bought for the occasion.
I have a lot of half finished projects...those probably count as 'crafts gone wrong...help!
I had the preschool kids glue pompoms (ornaments) to foam Christmas trees. That's about as ambitious as I got this year.
I decided to re-learn how to crochet and make beanies for my children. It took me about 4-6 hours for each one. Finished my son's and he loved it, was almost done with my daughter's and needed to take a break to make dinner for the evening and left it sitting there with my hook in it as I got busy with other household chores for the evening. In the morning when I went to wake my daughter up for school the entire beanie was unraveled and tied up around one of her dolls.
I asked her why she did it and she started crying, here it is 3 weeks later and I still haven't restarted making that beanie. But I did do a scarf for her while she wasn't home :))
fallen fruit cakes not even fit for pooch or trash, pumpkins muffins looked gorgeous but tasted horrible without the sugar!, super excited about a bargain from last year but followed the directions a little too closely and cross-stitched "Baby's First Christmas 2009" on a gift for THIS year!.......not sure I'll admit to many others :o)
How can I compete with these? I just unabashedly want a chance at winning the book! Thanks for sharing all of these wonderful stories that make me feel much more human and not a "bad mommy"!
So happy to have just found your blog and be on time to enter the contest!
My crafting almost-gone-wrong stories have mostly revolved around stressful last minute knitting.....there was the year I knit my mum a lovely stripey cardi in expensive yarn and thought I'd be fine with the last minute sewing on of the zipper....well I can't sew and I was an inexperienced knitter at the time too so it didn't twig that I should hand sew the zipper in place.....that sucked.....thankfully I have a very patient husband who was not willing to let me admit defeat...he took it all out and we replaced it with a sewed in piece of velcro....not quite what I was aiming for but mum loved it nonetheless!
I am a crafter, as was my grandmother before me! I believe that Mama Jackie could have offered up many of her creations for Amy's new book. My grandmother was the queen of plastic canvas, bad ceramics, and L'egg easter eggs covered in fabric scraps and rik-rak. Mama Jackie was so tacky! And it is in my genes! HELP!
i'm not a crafty person by any stretch of the imagination... nearly everything I try goes wrong, usually because i've either forgotten an essential ingredient, or couldn't find exactly what I needed and tried substituting something in its place.
Mine is a flop/win all in one... I was trying to help my daughter's BETA club hold a party and the theme was beach/Hawaiian... I had the brilliant idea that making a fake waterfall would be awesome... the concept was good but this was my first foray in using spray foam insulation for crafts... LOL! OMG! What a mess... I used hardware cloth/chicken wire for the frame and spray foamed for a "rock" effect... Painted, etc. I used a sheet of blue metallic mylar strips for the water... The end result was stunning after I painted and added artificial plants and flowers, however, the lessons I learned: DO NOT use spray foam insulation indoors for large craft projects... (the thing stuck to my living room floor) - DO NOT forget to anticipate how large the end product will be and how you will move it... It took a borrowed truck and 4 adults to move it... LOL! I still picture that thing and wish the person that begged to borrow it for an event afterward would have returned it! It would have looked cool on my back porch and was weather proof... Oh well, another lesson learned... :D
(thanks for the opportunity to win this book - I really want it!)
I don't have any great stories, only to say that I'm not a fantastic crafter. I try and try, and my crafts are mediocre at best. I spend all this time and $ and end up with something that looks like a 2nd grader made it. Maybe I should take the hint and stop crafting...
Or maybe I should mention that I bought all the stuff to make a wedding scrapbook and never did (and have since decided I never will). Now what do I do with all that junk?
Let's just say that I made the mistake of thinking those little foam stickers would be a fun and "easy" way to involve my 3 year old son in crafting. He is always "helping" me any time I have something I am working on. My first purchase of these darling little things was over a year ago. We've actually had our flooring replaced and I still find them every now and then like little mystery surprises all over the house. Sufficeth to say, I am over the little foam stickers and will do nearly anything I can to avoid direct contact with them.