Jo and I love Earth-friendly craft projects (just check out our collection of “green” posts) and we are always excited to see new project ideas that involve recycling, upcycling, or reusing. So we were tickled pick when we were reading Lady Willow’s Treehouse and saw a fun idea for turning old pens and other items into neat, recycled handles for crochet hooks of all sizes.

Having done a little bit of crochet myself, I know how frustrating it can be to hold the tinier hooks comfortably in your hand while you work. I can only imagine how difficult it must be for those with arthritis or whose fingers aren’t as nimble in colder weather. What those tiny hooks need is a big fat handle!

Lady Willow will show you how to raid your desk drawer to find lots of great potential handles. From the cheapest of stick pens to the finest wooden writing instruments, anything is fair game, as long as it’s the right size and comfortable in your hand. She even makes a handle out of an old Sharpie! So be sure to check out Lady Willow’s instructions (and her downloadable PDF file) and get ready to have some fun.

If you would like to submit a project for consideration as a Feature, just send us an e-mail at features@chicaandjo.com. Everyone who is featured will receive a banner image to display on his or her site, to tell the world that he or she was featured on ChicaAndJo.com!

Last week, I did a book review on the the book The Complete Book of Wedding Crafts and I mentioned that the ideas within the book could easily be adapted to other occasions besides weddings.  One project in particular caught my eye as a great inspiration for a baby announcement.  The author used the popular idea of magnetic poetry to create a wedding announcement.  What a great idea for a baby announcement, too! With my little girl on the way, I though I would go ahead and design a template ahead of time for me to use, based on the instructions included in the book.  Now that my baby is here, I can just swap out all of the pertinent information and the picture and print away for my birth announcements.

After laying out my design, I printed two versions on a printable magnet sheet to show you all a black and white example as well as a color example.

Once they are printed, all that’s left to do is cut out the whole cards and pop them into an envelope to mail to friends and family.  Then they can have a picture of your newborn on their refrigerators for a while.  They can either decide to cut out all the individual pieces (like I did on the left in the picture below) or leave it whole (like on the right).

July 4th is just a few days away, and I’m anxious to celebrate our nation’s birthday with a fun, long weekend. My party planning is wrapping up, and I think I’ve got all the bases covered. Cute decorations? Check! A fun game for the kids? Check! The last thing left to figure out was some fun stars-and-stripes dessert. I knew I wanted to serve cupcakes, and I had a new idea for how to decorate them… I’ve invented what I like to call “cupcake collars”! I did a practice run over the weekend and I was amazed at how a couple of simple decorating techniques resulted in such spectacular cupcakes.

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Hello friends! Your regularly-scheduled post from Jo today has been interrupted because Jo went into labor last night and gave birth to a beautiful baby girl! Everyone is doing great, and happy to have the newest member of the family in their arms. You’ll be hearing from her again soon, but meanwhile… Congratulations Jo!

P.S. If you’ve got a baby on the way or know someone who does, you might want to check out our baby projects and ideas!

Chica and I have both been married for quite some time but we continually get requests for DIY wedding ideas from friends, family and our readers.  We try to keep up with the latest wedding trends and come up with our own unique wedding ideas.  To this end, I am constantly on the lookout for new inspiration, so I was quite pleased to when I picked up a copy of The Complete Book of Wedding Crafts (Quarry Books).  It’s filled with DIY ideas ranging from invitations to favors.  It even has a section showing you how to do calligraphy.

What really made me like this book is that the ideas are in no way limited to weddings.  In fact, in an upcoming post, I will show you how one of this book’s projects inspired my baby announcements.  Yep, I went from wedding book idea to baby announcement!

Another great example of the easily-adaptable projects is this fantastic picture frame made from polymer clay. This picture frame idea would be great for a new baby, vacation, new home or anniversary present.  It all depends on your color choices as well as what you choose to make the impressions in the clay.  The book gives you step-by-step instructions for creating your own as it does for all of the projects.

If you would like to submit a project for consideration as a Feature, just send us an e-mail at features@chicaandjo.com. Everyone who is featured will receive a banner image to display on his or her site, to tell the world that he or she was featured on ChicaAndJo.com!

I’ve got my new Fourth of July felt pennants to decorate with next weekend, so the next thing to focus on is entertainment. I wanted a new game for the kids at my party to play, and since their parents are all fans of the popular game cornhole, I wanted to make something similar with bean bags for the kids. Jo and I brainstormed last week and came up with easiest way to make bean bags ever… using the pockets of old jeans! Then I made some scored targets to toss them at, and now I have a game I can’t wait to show all my young friends (and maybe the older ones too!)

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