Clean Up

In order to organize and streamline, I'm moving all of my craft posts from the good ol' family blog over here.  I'll leave them on the family blog as well, but just want to have all crafty related stuff in one place! So don't mind us there may be lots of repeat posts over the next little while, but my be a nice refresher! :)

"The Happy Chair"

With 2 two year-olds, the "Happy Chair" (i.e. time out chair) is a popular place at our house.  I needed to have something help me smile since we visit it often throughout the day! 

So I took a plain and boring wood stool from AC Moore...

 

and gave it some smile potential with some spray paint, fun papers, and my trusty new Cricut machine.  :)

I love the end result!  It really does brighten a not so enjoyable time!

 

Spring Wreath

Wow! Ever since I saw this wreath from Dana at Made and this one from All Things Thrifty, I've been obsessed with wanting a wreath.  Well I so excited when we moved to our place and the dirt mound yard was covered with acorns, I had my little Halster help me gather them and set off gluing my gathered acorns for hours.  

Either my hot glue gun sucks, or I suck at hot gluing because there were pesky strings EVERYWHERE! I thought spray painting it pink might help hide the strings, nope I was wrong.  It looked like pepto-bismol.  It was awful!

Seriously.  I'm not exaggerating.

  

So I gave up and threw it in the trash where it belonged.

Now I'm glad I did, because here's what I came up with.  I'm not overly excited about the fabric choice for the flower trio, but I wanted to use what I had- so it works. And it still brings a smile to my face. :) And best part, it was completed during naps with plenty of time to spare... yea for having time to eat! Enjoy.

Cupcake Dessert Platter

What do you get when you combine a plain and boring $1.00 candlestick from Goodwill, 2 I-have-to-have-them-right now-they're-super-cute plates from TJMaxx, and a little clear Gorilla Glue?!

You get an adorable cupcake, dessert, and anything else you want it to be platter. 

Add these incredibly easy last minute Easter treats and it's too cute too handle! :) Love it all!

For the Bird's Nest Clusters I found the idea here at Sew Much Ado with the link to the recipe here found on The Trendy Treehouse. Thanks gals!

Spring Color Inspiration

I'm ankle deep in the middle of finally potty training Hallie, so we're hanging low at home for the next few days, some post-Easter plastic egg fun broke out this am and all I could think about was how I wanted some fabric with these colors or to make something with these colors! 

Aren't they gorgeous!?

Even after Captain Destructor got hold of the snake they're still gorgeous!  

(i.e. Hallie who was given this nickname during nursery at church because she would go around destroying what everyone else was playing with... she's a feisty one that's for sure!)

A work in progress...

5544 Inches+ later I've finally got all of my delicious blue and brown fabrics sewn together.  Why did I ever think it was a good idea to take on a quilt?! Yea me, the girl who has a hard time finishing a scrapbooking page?! Yea, I'm still trying to figure that one out... although it may have something to do with the delicious blue and brown fabric that called screamed my name the day after Thanksgiving for a terribly hard-to-resist price!

Next step involves one of my least favorite activities, with my super ugly, in desperate need of being recovered ironing board.  Followed by some more cutting, as if cutting 144 strips wasn't enough, there's more cutting, and even more sewing.  All I have to say is that the final project better be spectacular or I will have wasted a large portion of my life! :)

Check out my inspiration here and her blog here.  She's an amazingly talented gal!

Photo Storage Tutorial

If you're anything like me, you have a ton of pictures on your computer...

Well our poor little computer couldn't handle the 1000's of pictures we had on it, so I needed to get them off but wasn't quite sure how to store them. So I thought and thought and thought some more, which took me back to my Rec Therapy days at Tamarack. The school teacher there used this method for storing pictures of the kids. It's simple, but brilliant and cheap...

1st step: Weed through your pictures, deleting any you don't want or need

2nd step: Burn a cd of the photos, sometimes I did 1 month per cd, sometimes more

3rd step: Using your photo program of choice open the cd. I used both Google Picaso (free program... thanks Alisa!) and Adobe Photoshop (not so free, but a great Christmas present... thanks mom!) Photoshop was the best, the thumbnails were smaller and used less paper, Picaso thumbnails were much bigger, needing more paper. Most programs have a choice when printing to print thumbnails or a 'contact sheet.' Select this option and print away! 

4th step: Grab a 3 ring binder and some page protectors, slide your contact sheets into the page protectors, along with your cd and you've got a terrific simple, but brilliant storage method for your photos!