Photogoraphy Skillz

13yrold saw a flickr photostream of a stormtrooper lego person. I cannot recall which one. There are loads (http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=lego+stormtrooper+love&m=text) but it inspired him to take some photos. Love them!!

Signs, Signs, Everywhere Signs

He sure gets mad when she teases. See his frown?

Orange you glad?

I like to hang laundry on the line and today it struck me just how many orange t shirts we have.

Hook Em!

Case Closed

Easy craft and the 13yrold whipped out a handfull in no time flat.

I have some stiff felt on hand. Folded it in half and roughly cut the shape, sharpie dots on the inside, Big Bite to punch the holes,  use large giant needle and yarn to stitch on the outside. Easy cheesey. Had to play with the size but also good for eyeglass case, cell phone case etc – gift for the grandparents!!

Sign of the Times

I like how he drew her hair perfectly.

Warning: Replacing a water heater causes decluttering / reorganization

 

The water heater was here before we were and we have been in this house for 18 years. It was a real workhorse until recently. Then the water was only warm . .  and only for about 20 minutes at a time. We started having to calculate showers, dishwashing, laundry, etc. So after much discussion and debating and fretting by me, Pete with the help of our neighbor changed out the water heater.

Awhile back we had our garage enclosed creating a laundry room / large walk in pantry and, beyond that, a very large storage room guestroom. Something you might not know about me is I am one of those crazy couponers – I stockpile something when I find an awesome deal. So the thought of something happening in the Water Heater Changeout causing water to gush and flood because I am paranoid about my precious foodstores gave me heart palpitations!

So I emptied half of my pantry. I boxed and bagged all the food and moved the shelves and everything into the spareroom. Let’s see the before:

 

So here are the messy before pictures. There were wire racks full of empty glass canning jars mounted on the walls at either end, the cart taking up a good chunk of space and even though I work hard to keep the metro shelves tidy (I use tiles as “floors” and lots of shelfy dividers and baskets and bins), it just comes off looking kinda overstuffed.

Soooo, you can probably tell I hit a couple of deals – the oatmeal was ridiculously cheap after coupons and the chips after the buy one / get one sale and the coupons were crazy cheap!

To the right is the foodstuffs and the water heater. To the left is the laundry center and the non food stuff – serving pieces, cloth napkins and placemats, kitty litter box, drawers with spin art machines (I have 3 – shuddup!), electronics kits (we have 5 – shuddup!) and other stuff.Yes, I have 3 feather dusters- my nice Flylady one (that no one but me is allowed to use!) and 2 others for the kids to use.

 

I emptied the food side and he replaced the water heater (awesomely, by the way! Nice to have hot water again!!) and the we put the shelving back and reloaded them- purging and rearranging. But then the laundry side felt unkempt. Can you see where this is going? I purged and rearranged that side little by little until the pantry feels so much better. I am happy to walk in there now.

Here are the after photos:

 

Getting rid of the wire wall racks and the cart freed up space for the vacuums. Purged and rearranged. There are actually *EMPTY* baskets! See!?!

 

To the other side- also got rid of the wire wall shelving and the plastic drawers, shifting the catbox over (and yes, that is a wicker placemat being used as a litter catcher). I labeled the baskets that I hadn’t labeled before and got rid of a lot of serving pieces we really were using once ever year or two. How the heck did I end up with so much paper product (have wayyyy too much paper plates and plasticware)

I labeled each of the baskets and went through them (ugH!). Cleaning the pantry snowballed into cleaning out the hall craft closet (post coming soon) and the house looked quite a mess for awhile. It is slowly looking better.

I am disappointed that my wall racks and shelfy organization bits have not sold on craigslist. Next project is to clear the flat surfaces – the island (there are 2 baskets of stuff awaiting “repair”), the diningroom bookcase (kid projects tend to fester there), the top of the scrapbooking cart (a microwave cart that hold all my paper gear – I moved it next to the table so I could clean it out and sort and purge but now the top is full of clutter).

Semi FAIL!

Sooo, I got this shrinky dink printer plastic. And the thought I had was keychains or luggage tags. I already had some cell phone lanyards on hand (and now no ones phone has the little spot to attach them to anymore so I am looking for alternate uses for them! I got mine cheapy cheap off ebay).

I resized and printed the photos- took a little trail and error. You gotta use photoshop or something and reeeeeeally lighten them up.

 

Then I trimmed (using my scrapbook trimmer) and punched holes (used my cropadile) And shrank them in the toaster oven.

 

But the holes closed up too much so I gave them another punch with the cropadile.

I tried threading them on keyrings and broke a couple so I switched to small binder rings and just stacked them on, then clipped it to the cell phone lanyard and added these little keychain clippie thingies.

  

I had read about coating them and tried it- I used a clear spray paint I had on had. See the two photos below – at an angle you can really see the clear coat. It seemed like an unnecessary step with extra dry time.

 

I gave them away and they were well received. I clipped mine to my keys. Aaaaand then they started breaking. CRAFT FAIL! When I checked back in with the gift recipients they reported the same thing and no one was using them for anything now. Argh! 

I still think this has potential. Maybe earrings or a pendant – something with less handling that keychains. Also I am not talented enough but I do think a black pen carefully ran around the edges would class it up a but. Oh yeah, forgot to mention, I also had wanted the kidlets to write their names on the back but somehow forgot about that in the frenzy of the crafting. I make super tiny shrinky dinks (using a circle punch and #6 recyclable plastic because it comes out thicker) and have them write their names and date on them and I attach them to xmas ornaments (my hope is years and years from now it will help separate the collection so everyone can take “their” ornaments when they move out on their own).

Easy cheesy homemade gift idea! Post It holder!!

  

This is one of those crafts that is sooooo easy and doesn’t need a lot of directions.

Pick up a few of those clear acrylic angled frames. Cut scrapbook paper to fit.

Stick the post it pads to the outside of the frame (I used glue dots to do so) and stick small photos on the paper. Insert paper (play with photo placement if you are as spatially challenged as I am) and there you have a gift to brighten someone’s work cube!

This one was last father’s day I think.

Pay It Forward

Do you volunteer?

Is there a cause you feel passionate about?

I am a cat person. There have been times where I cared for a lot of cats at once (let’s just say for about a decade I had over 20 at one time and leave it at that). I have always had an indoor scaredy cat – basically an indoor feral cat who hides and rarely comes out and barely tolerates me (and that is only because I can open the catfood tupperware container!) for as long as I have lived on my own. I know this kind of cat needs a safe environment and would not make it outside of my house. My current scaredy cat is an 18 pound black and yellow tortie who waddles away as fast as she can whenever she spots a human and she hides under the sofa all day.

Once a month my wonderful husband uses a day of his hard earned vacation to stay home and watch the kiddos so I can volunteer. I help out a group who does free spay neuter clinics for feral cats. Every two weeks they fix about 20 – 25 cats.

Feral cats might not be cuddly, they might hate you, but, you know what, that’s fine. We still trap them and fix them and tip their ears so everyone knows they have been fixed. While they are knocked out they get shots and medical attention. I work in recovery. So I keep an eye on them and monitor their waking up, give them fluids (yep, I poke them with a needle) and (what I think is a cool perk!) get to pet a wild animal as it sleeps.

We have saved cat lives.

Follow your passion. Volunteer even in a small way. And it will renew your spirit and make you happy.

 

Signs

A sign (translation: no naked little sisters) I found that the 13 yr old had made.

The vehemence of the NO part of the sign cracks me up.

What would you buy with 100 bucks??

Well, the 7yr old would get a bunch of electronics apparently. I just wonder what the other kids in class wrote.