{DIY} Wash Cloth Puppies

Last summer my brother brought home some favours from a small wedding in which the bride's labradoodle was the ring bearer. The favours were puppies made from wash cloths, which my mom wanted to replicate to give as favours for her retirement dinner earlier this month.

These would be great for baby showers - they're cute and useful! If you don't want it in the way, just take it apart and use it as a dish rag or whatever!


They're so cute but when you look at them for too long, it's like when you keep looking at a word and it starts to look wrong - after staring at the puppies for a while, they stop looking like puppies!


Here are the steps to make a litter of your own:


1. Take a wash cloth and start rolling one edge until you get to the middle. Roll it tightly since it will loosen a bit as you go along!

(Optional) My mom used pins to mark where the middle was. When I was making them, I just eyeballed the middle.

2. Use 3 pins to secure the rolls when you get to the middle, but be careful as my mom said that in later steps she kept poking herself.

3. Roll the otherside towards the middle. I didn't use pins and kept flattening the first roll down while I rolled the other side and then just tightened both rolls before the next step.

4. When the wash cloth is rolled up on both sides, pick it up and fold one third of it over so that the rolls are on the outside. Then fold the last third on top of that.

For  more emphasis on the nose and a smaller dog, fold the inside layer so that it's a little longer than one third of the length of the wash cloth, and then fold the top layer so that about 1/2" of the inside edge is folded over as well. Here you can see the inside layer is flat so even with the elastic, the head is pretty flat. Two photos down you can see that we folded the inside edge a bit to give the head some pouf.

5. Secure a rubber band at about less than half of its length from the edge that's folded over, but wrap the last bit of elastic across the bend. (See the next photo)

Here you can see that the rubber band was wrapped horizontally and then vertically, which is supposed to simulate the nose/eye area... Our wash cloths were a little too thick but you can see it in the brown dog at the end of this post.

6. (I would actually recommend doing this step last since the pom poms might fall out while putting the ears in or tying the ribbon). Spread the gap between the rolls a bit to squeeze a pom pom in. We used 1/2" pom poms, I think.

7. From the sheets of felt, cut ears with long ends that will stay between the towel well.

8. Using a chopstick or some other thin stick, push the end of the ear in between the back two folds and repeat on the other side. Fix ears to your desired length and position!

9. Tie a ribbon over the elastic and you're done!

The brown one is the one from the wedding. I thought the elastic sticking out above the ribbon was supposed to be its collar, but my mom and aunt said it's probably the tongue, so that's another optional thing you can do if your elastic is long enough (ours weren't).

10. Admire your pound of puppies!

There are sites where you can purchase these puppies ready-made for about $3 each, but each of ours cost about $1. I think I'm calculating it incorrectly, but it's roughly $0.75 per puppy! We made at least 60 puppies and had just enough ribbon for those.
  • Wash Cloths: 24/pack for about $15.00 at Costco
  • Pom Poms: 100 for $2.09 ($3.49 with 40% off at Michael's)
  • Ribbon: 2 rolls for $2.00 (the pink one was on sale for $1.00 while the blue was supposed to be on sale for $2.00 but the Michael's cashier just scanned the pink one twice)
  • Felt: 4 sheets at $0.49 each
  • Rubber Bands: a lot for $1.00 at Dollarama

Here's my little guy (only temporarily). We put a puppy at every place setting since the name cards kept rotating, but we gave ours to the coworkers at our table who have more than one kid so that there'd be no fighting!

Cute, no? I'm a little tired of them though. We're actually still making some for those who couldn't make it to the dinner.

{Deals & Steals} Seriously, I Love Indigo

Last week before some window shopping, I was killing time browsing the Indigo sales racks (of course) since they're having their Winter Clearance Sale and came upon some items that I couldn't leave without! Not without some hemming and hawing though (neither items are shown online).

This moose paperweight by Zuny is the same style as some of the bookends I was fawning over in this post! They did have moose and deer bookends, but since I just bought bookends I thought this little guy would be a cute decorative piece on it's own. And at 75% off ($5.63), I couldn't not buy him! I love moose! Mooses?

And in this post, I pretty much said I wouldn't buy any more tea towels for now, but that quickly turned into a lie!

This set of three, solid tea towels was 50% ($7.25) and I probably shouldn't have bought them, but based on the model suite, I think the colours will go nicely with the finishes/colours I'm going to pick! I'm getting way ahead of myself though - they haven't even broke ground yet!


I really do have a bad habit of buying things I like but don't need, just because they're on sale. It's especially hard to restrain myself from all their lovely Lifestyle products!

P.S. Pay no attention to the bad baseboard paint job in that corner! We freehanded the painting quickly since we wanted to get the new hardwood floors in ASAP.

{Blog Life} Liebster Blog Award

Big thanks to both Beatrice at The Crafty Bee and Michelle at SweetSuite10 who awarded the Liebster Blog Award to me!

Apparently Liebster is German for "dearest", meaning beloved or favourite. The Liebster Blog Award is awarded by bloggers to other blogs with fewer than 200 followers to help expose them to a larger audience.

A few conditions for accepting the award are:
  1. Post the award on your blog.
  2. Show your thanks to the blogger who gave you the award by linking back to them.
  3. List five up-and-coming blogs (with fewer than 200 followers) to award the Liebster to and inform your top five by leaving a comment on their blog.
  4. Share five random facts about yourself.
A lot of the blogs I read are the more established blogs, but recently I've been finding newer blogs that I really like as well and deserve more love. (Apologies if I've passed this on to you and you have more than 200 followers! Sometimes I can't tell and guestimate.) So in no particular order:
(Going through my mess of bookmarked blogs has made me realize that I really need to bunker down and organize my subscriptions and blog rolls... Especially because I think my computer will go at any moment and I hardly ever back up by bookmarks.)

And the five random facts about me:

I love theatre. Mostly musicals and the ballet as some plays are too obscure for me or go over my head so for those I prefer comedies. I even make special trips to New York City (24 trips since 2006 and counting... If I could move there, I would), DC, and Los Angeles to see shows (luckily my brother has friends in every city to stay with). 2011 was my biggest year for theatre with 89 shows (some were repeat shows because I love them so much, or different casts, etc., etc.!). I'm a bit of a theatre/pop culture geek so I actually have two Twitter accounts - one for blog related stuff and one for personal/entertainment related stuff.

Past grade 4, no one has ever heard me sing. Not that I know of anyway. I belt out along with the radio to my heart's content in the car and when I'm home alone, but as soon as I sense someone nearby, I stop! And I have no idea why! Maybe I'm just paranoid that I am waaaay off key like those delusional contestants on Idol? Even humming makes me nervous when playing Cranium lol.

My favourite show is Friday Night Lights. I'm pretty sure I cried during every episode of the first and second seasons, and probably half of the third. And definitely during the last episode of the fourth season. I can't even bring myself to watch the fifth (and last) season because it will break my heart when it's over!

I was an extra on Degrassi: The Next Generation in the seventh season for the prom and graduation episode. There was a teeny 2 second shot of me during the prom episode and I looked MISERABLE, even though Natasha Bedingfield was performing! It was fun to see how filming is done, but it was such a long day and I was tired. I could never be an extra for a long production. I never showed up in the graduation scenes they aired, but I'm in the background of some of the production photos.
I actually can't even think of any of his songs right now. I think I'm too old anyway.
Source (These used to be on the Degrassi site but now that it's moved to Much Music, the official site is weird and useless for older seasons.) 

I love traveling. I want to visit every continent and so far I'm 4 for 7. I still have lots of ground to cover in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa (I want to go on a safari!), but I still have yet to visit South America, Australia, and Antarctica (if only I could afford the $10 000 cruises that go there!). One day...

{At Home} Progress, Or Lack Thereof...

So progress has stalled on the powder room and the upstairs bathrooms. We bought a new faucet for the powder room but still need to buy new light fixtures! Also, I started to clean out my closets but that has come to a complete halt since I was keeping everything that still fits, it's just that I forgot I owned half of it, so I need to reassess before continuing. And I still need to figure out what to fill the frames with.

Basically, fail all around.

I was going to post some photos of a little Valentine's related craft I did a few years ago, but I still haven't taken photos of it even though I've been meaning to for the past 3 months...

Then I decided I would post photos of the sugar cookies I made last year for friends and co-workers, but apparently those photos are only on my external hard drive so instead, here's the photo that my friend Mandie took of the cookies she got. It was my first time (first time in recent history anyway) decorating with royal icing and it took me FOREVER.


Then I was going to start putting together my post for the Liebster Award that Beatrice from The Crafty Bee so kindly passed on to me... But that would mean I would have to have my crap together! Which I do not.

Hopefully I'll have it up this weekend/early next week?!?!?
I flew in late Sunday night thanks to the usual delays at LaGuardia Airport (I swear I have spent more time there these past 5 years than I have at Toronto's Pearson Airport my entire life) and I'm working 3 of the next 4 nights at my part-time gig so I took last night to just veg after a busy weekend.

In any case,
HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!

Remember to check out today's Google Doodle! It's a cute animation featuring Tony Bennett's "Cold, Cold Heart". I love when they have Doodles.

{Deals & Steals} Gordon Ramsay's Healthy Appetite

I really must stop buying cookbooks, but I just can't help myself!

I already I picked up 1080 Recipes by Simone & Inés Ortega for $20 a few weeks ago and design books-wise, I now have Jonathan Adler's Happy Chic Accessorizing thanks to the swag bags from the Canadian Design Bloggers Meetup (good thing I didn't buy it in November like I had planned to!).

So then I was at Value Village last week and ended up bringing Gordon Ramsay's Healthy Appetite home to add to my slow growing collection as well!


Healthy Appetite was listed for $9.99 so I debated for a while, especially because I know some of his books were on sale at Indigo a while ago, but in the end I caved and paid only $8.40 thanks to the 20% student discount that Value Village has on Wednesdays!


Oh, and the deciding factor? It was a signed copy and even had the ticket from the book signing stuck inbetween the pages.


Now I just need some time to go through my books and make dishes from them!

Anyways, have a good weekend everyone! I'm off tomorrow for another theatre weekend in New York. Hopefully I'll have time to squeeze in Anthropologie and West Elm! There's also a Home Goods near West Elm, I think, but I'm never in that area so I don't know if I'll have a chance to check it out.

{Inspiration} Interior Design Show 2012

Sigh. I was so on the ball with my BlogPodium and Canadian Design Bloggers Meetup posts and then I completely dropped it with my roundup of IDS12. Oh well. Better late than never, right?

After BlogPodiumEmily-Jane, Britt, and I wandered around the show and took in all the gorgeous booths. Below are some of my favourite shots from the day.

All is calm at the Interior Design Show at 8am.

Chandeliers and pendant lights were all around IDS. I love, love, LOVE globe pendant lamps!
Elte's Chandeliers . AM Studio's Fibre Glass Balls, White Cubes and Porcelain Drop Chandeliers

I was heaven with all the reclaimed wood products being showcased.
Urban Tree Salvage's Log Rounds . an oak wine barrel turned wall mounted bathroom vanity by Native Trail . North on Sixty's raw wood table (the branches on top of the glass can be moved) and stools . Simple but gorgeous tables from Anazao

The How Do You Live? Exhibit featured a cut-away, 2-story building demonstrating multi-dwelling living. Each space was designed and decorated by a different Toronto-based design firm.
Mason's "Our Home and Native Land" . Youssef Hasbani of L’Atelier's outdoor "apple" . Casey Design Group & DesignWorks Studio's "The Dream Archive" . A glimpse of Jill Greaves Design's space

UpCountry's Halo Globetrekker Bookcases and Globes . Love Metropolis Living 's industrial pieces.

The neutral colours in Piero Lissoni's Lounge were so calming. And I can't stop looking at those low marble coffee tables!

The Cherish Auction, in support of the ONEXONE non-profit children's foundation, invited 21 interior, fashion and graphic designers and architects to re-imagine the Magis Julian Children's Chair.
(First Column) Hariri Pontarini Architects . Bruce Mau Design . Union31 . HBC (The Bay) . Joe Mimran (Joe Fresh)
(Second Column) Yabu Pushelberg . Arthur Mendonca
(Third Column) Philip Sparks . Piero Lissoni . Debbie Travis . David + Glenn Dixon . Giannone Petricone

By the end of the day, my feet were beat but it was totally worth it!