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Family Fun for the 4th of July

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family picnic and board games for the 4th

I’m excited to share today’s post with you for a few reasons:

1. I conquered a huge fear and used my sewing machine to make something huge.

You have no idea what a feat this was for me! My first large sewing project, especially for you!

2. It’s a project that’s near and dear to my heart.

It covers all the things I love about the 4th of July – it encourages you to spend quality  time with your family, outdoors!, to play with your children, and enjoy the best parts of the holiday (food, fun & fireworks)

3. It’s a group project with some of my favorite bloggers and I can’t wait for you to see what patriotic crafts they came up with.

Big thanks to Coupons.com for sponsoring this 4th of July inspired blogger project 

Coupons.com offers a wide selection of digital coupons for both companies and brands. They are the largest provider of digital coupons on the web! Including coupons for Home Depot, as well as Jo-Ann coupon codes.

The mission:

15 DIY and creative bloggers were given a $50 e-card to either Jo-Ann’s or Home Depot and asked to use it to create a DIY 4th of July project.

Here’s how I spent my $50:
Red, White and Blue picnic and DIY star chess set

A red, white, and blue patchwork picnic blanket, and a DIY star chess set.

This picnic blanket cost $50.33 to make.

That’s a bit expensive for a picnic blanket, but I know this is something we will cherish for a long time to come, so it made it worth it to me. If you could find a cheaper fabric the cost would be much lower. I found the fabric 5 minutes before JoAnn’s closed on the one chance i had to get to a store during this challenge. I should get bonus points for having to figure it all out in 5 minutes time :)

I took all they had left, 4 3/4 yards on sale 50% off for $9.99 ($47.45). In the end I had a bit of extra fabric left over, but not much.

I am in love with this fabric, the fact that it was pre-patched and so red, white, and blue already made this the perfect medium for a newbie to sewing like myself. I’m not lying when I say I bought 60 yards of stitch witch, double sided duck tape and fabric adhesive thinking I could glue this bad boy together … but in the end, I bit the bullet pulled out that old sewing machine that has been taunting me for years and got to sewing!

It felt amazing to conquer a huge fear like this … I am literally scared just to cut into a piece of fabric. This was the hardest step by far

cutting the fabric

I used a straw picnic blanket we had on hand as my template and cut the fabric to cover the same area. Next, I pinned the back side of the fabric together, taking great care to make sure all the stripes matched up …

raw edges together

Then, I googled how to thread a bobbin

I was ready to stop there ..

but the blanket needed to be lined. I was almost over budget as is, so I ran down to my local WalMart and picked up a white twin flat sheet for $2.88, just the right amount of fabric.

lining up the backing _ pre ironing

I layed it out across the back of the blanket, trimmed off the excess and used it as a new template for finishing the sides of the blanket. Sorry for the pre iron shot …

That’s really all there was to it. I sewed the sheet to each side of the picnic blanket and then folded the edges down to meet the sheet on all sides. No binding, just pinning and sewing. It’s my first project .. and it’s going to be lying on the ground anyway!

Needless to say all of this took me an incredibly long time … while I was overcoming my big fear of sewing I had three rambunctious kiddos running around in the house. I knew I needed to keep them busy and I had a few dollars of change leftover from my $50 budget.

I used it to buy the wooden stars, not knowing at the time what we would use them for, just that I told the kids to point out to me all of the star stuff they could find and they really wanted these cheap wooden stars. I thought, what could it hurt?

While I was pinning and sewing, I had the kids busy on the other end of the table doing this

painting stars

My kids all love chess, I knew as soon as we got them home and they broke out there new “toy” stars what we could do with them! We lined up two different sizes of stars on the chess board and painted one side red & silver, the other blue & dark blue.

When they dried we added some fun colorful star stickers we had to designate the pieces on the board.

DIY star chess set

The kids are in love with their new DIY star chess set and I am too. We can hardly wait to take it with us to the 4th of July celebration while we wait to watch the fireworks!

red, white and blue patchwork blanket and homemade chess set

a Rafflecopter giveaway


Now head over and see what fabulous the other ladies have created for you, I can hardly wait to see all of the projects myself!



The post Family Fun for the 4th of July appeared first on Kids Stuff World.


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