Laundry Day

I had 2 baskets of laundry to fold yesterday. That’s it. Sometimes the simplest chores are the hardest to accomplish around here!
The girls have always LOVED playing in laundry baskets and ask to get them out and for me to push them around the house in them. Want a serious work out? put two kids (about 55 lbs total) in a laundry basket and push them around a 3200 sq ft house for 30 min! Carpet gives lots of traction so its even harder on the butt and thighs lol. Anyways, I have several pictures on my phone of them playing in the baskets but nothing a photographer can love.
Yesterday was just one of those days when I really could care less if the laundry got folded and put away right away. Hormones are surging with Jackson due any day and I felt really nauseous and weak. So, I have to pick my battles. With toddlers “help” folding clothes, it doesn’t really happen that efficiently anyways. I decided to just sit back and let them fold the clothes while I got the camera out. Having kids is great practice! Here are the pictures. They turned out so much cuter than I predicted!

I had seen people on Pinterest hang pictures in their laundry room so I thought this would be a great fast project! I knew I didn’t want to do just plain ‘ole picture frames so I wondered around Hobby Lobby and came up with this.

Found some wood plaques, painted them green (if you know me, green is pretty much my go-to color (besides white). Its my favorite and I love how lively and pretty it is! ) and added picture hangers to the back. I wanted to incorporate clothes pins since they were going in the laundry room, so I used them to hold the pictures. Got my favorite 8 printed at Walgreens and that’s it! I really wanted to have a plaque that said something like “Laundry Day” on it but it didn’t work out at this moment so I may have to add that later.
Hope you like it! I sure do!!

Semi-Homemade Crayons

This was a Pinterest inspired project but it is not exactly a new concept.
I tell my sister all of the time that she needs to be the one with a blog since she does stuff like this all of the time, but she isnt really into the whole “blogging” thing. In fact, she doesn’t even read mine or friends unless I ask her to lol.
She was here last week and we decided to clean out my crayon box of all of the old broken crayons and melt them to make new ones. She had these silicone molds that were in shapes of vehicles (cars, boats, airplanes) so we thought it would be the best thing to use.
It’s really pretty self explanatory, but we simply took all of the crayon bits and pieces and filled the mold.

Put them in the oven on 350 degrees (I bumped it up to 400 after it was taking a while)

Once the were completely melted and all of the chunks looked like they were gone, we pulled them out and let them cool

Voila! new crayons that the kids LOVED! A quick, easy, “kid tested, mother approved” kind of craft that didn’t cost anything, cleaned something up, and made the kids very happy. Win-win for sure!
My sister remembers doing this as a kid using egg shells. I don’t remember this, but she said our dad would hollow out an egg (like making confetti eggs) and fill them with the melted crayons and then when it cooled, peel the shell off. Like I said, not a new concept, just a different way to do it. Oldy but goody craft, guess you could say.

New Hobby

I have been wanting to learn how to knit for about 2 years now. As most of you know, I already have several hobbies but every single one of them limit me to being in my craft room or sitting in front of my sewing machine, or painting something in the garage. I really wanted to find something that I could do while watching TV at night or able to bring with me on trips. I can not sit still long enough to watch a single movie; I feel like it is a waste of time when I could be doing something productive. My husband hates this about me since he wants to watch movies all of the time and it used to drive my college room mate crazy since she was a big movie buff too. Sorry guys!  I think I have found a cure, though!
When a friend mentioned that she enjoyed knitting I had to stop her mid sentence and was like, “wait, what?! you knit?!” I bought several “teach yourself to knit” books and some starter kits but could never figure it out myself. I am such a visual learner that I needed to watch someone do it and walk me through it. She was excited to teach me so we spent a whole Sunday together knitting and learning. I fell in love! It’s only been a week now but I know that this is going to be a long term relationship lol.
I have made several little “swatches” of different styles of stitches that I have learned. (now that she showed me the basics, I can understand a bit better what the books are talking about) Avery loves my sample swatches and seems to run off with them for her doll house. Here’s 2 that I made, though.

If you are a knitter you are probably laughing at how excited I am about such simple beginner things, but I am so proud of myself!

I even watched a YouTube video on how to make a Center Pull ball of yarn.

It seems that yard is a really fun toy for toddlers. You would think I had 2 cats running around here the way they get excited when I pull out the balls of yarn lol.

Right now I am making just a hand towel so that I can learn how to incorporate different colors and practice several stitches. Kind of a “hodge podge” project but I have to start somewhere.

*Sorry for the poor iPhone pics but I was too lazy to get up and get my camera while working on these.
My first real project will be a head band for the girls. Avery was sitting with me while looking at patterns online and she really liked this one and insisted she NEEDED a pink headband. Why not? lol I told her I needed some more practice but I would make it for her very soon.

Source

I’ve made a new board on Pinterest for knitting projects and ideas. I hope I get good enough for them!!

Looks like I am going to have to add another category to the top of this blog page, too!

Wish me luck in my adventures in Knitting!! :)
 

Fabric Wrapped Photo Albums

I am tired of looking at these ugly photo albums sitting on my shelf! I hated them so much I really just wanted to toss them out but I couldn’t get myself to do that with all my childhood pictures in them! I had a kind of “light bulb” moment the other day and decided that they needed to be wrapped in fabric. GENIUS ! Why have I not thought of this before?! Here’s the before/after:

So, Here’s how I did it.
I first went through and decided if there was anything I could get rid of. It’s amazing how organized you can get just by purging!! I threw out my old scrapbooks from High School and college. I know, I might be crazy. I put a lot of time and energy into those, but they were falling apart and getting junky and I have digital copies of those photos so it wasn’t too hard to part with them. Plus, there were lots of pages of me with ex boyfriends so who wants to look at those?! lol I also threw out a lot of prints from elementary/junior high/high school that I just didn’t care to keep.
I was able to narrow it down it the 4 binders I had and kept the 3 scrapbooks of stuff  from my childhood. Luckily, I had gone through those and condensed that stuff several years ago. I found a binder laying around the house that I put some other photo prints into and replaced the fabric wrapped one that I had. Remember when this was popular?

I vividly remember making this in Girls Scouts in elementary school. yikes! Needless to say I threw it out and replaced it with another binder.

All in all I ended up with 5 binders full of childhood prints from my birth to my wedding.

I went to Hobby Lobby and got some thick canvas material. I originally wanted Linen but it wasn’t thick enough to cover the patterns of the old binders.

I cut strips of the fabric just about an inch wider that the width and length of the binder

I then coated the outside with spray adhesive, flipped it over and laid it on the fabric

I did the binding first. I cut a tab out of the fabric and glued it down first using rubber cement.

P.S. Clothes pins work great for this and I feel like a genius for thinking of this! lol

I then went around to each edge and glued the fabric down with the spray adhesive, clipping it until it dried. The spray is nice because it dries really fast  but you have to be ready to glue and try not to make a mistake! I messed up on one binder and was able to pull it off so there is some give to it, but if you have the super permanent kind, it is not as forgiving!!

There you have it. Pretty, clean line and simplified binders that don’t look like ancient photo albums.
The best part is that this project only cost me about $10 for the fabric! (would have been cheaper but the lady at hobby lobby fought with me over the fabric being on sale. I know it was 30% off but sometimes a few bucks just isnt worth the argument)

19 hilarious signs you're definitely a parent

Jeff emailed me this link and I was definitely in need of some comic relief!

http://now.msn.com/funny-parenting-photos

If you're a parent I hope you enjoy!

Homemade Play Dough

My sister is the leader on this little project but I thought I would take pictures and feature it on here.
She has been staying with us for a while now with their transition to move back to Houston, so we have had a house full of toddlers. We decided today that it would be fun to make our own play dough. I ran out of the store bought stuff since they let it sit out a few days ago and it all dried up. That stuff was never that great anyways, since it dries out fast and crumbles all over the place.
She found this recipe a while back and tested it out and really liked it, so that is what we used.
1 cup flour
1/2 cup salt
2 Tablespoons Cream of Tartar
1 Tablespoon oil
1 cup water
food coloring

Mix the first 5 ingredients in a sauce pan and whisk together.

Add food color of your choice and enough to make it as dark as you want.

Cook over medium low heat stirring continuously with a metal spoon until it just starts to come together into a dough ball.

Immediately take it out of the pot and onto a plate. At this point the dough should still be pretty sticky but still able to be picked up into a ball. knead the dough until it forms a smooth ball with the consistency of normal play dough.

Put it into a tupperware with the lid on to cool. I actually put the dough into a tupperware and left the lid off, thinking that the condensation would be bad and needed to cool without the lid, but Emily said that if you leave the lid off it will dry your dough out. You want to keep all of the moisture with in the container!
After it cools, it’s time to play! We made pink and blue (2 batches) but you can obviously do as much as you want and as many colors as you want. I am out of cream of tartar so once I can get some more, I will be making lots of other colors!

The best parts of this play dough is that it doesn’t dry out fast, doesn’t crumble, and the colors do not rub off on their hands!
PS. I love that my breakfast table is perfect for things like this! I don’t have to be paranoid the whole time about them scratching it up and making messes (to a certain extent, of course). I look forward to the day it can be refinished to be beautiful again, but for now, it gets lots of toddler “love” :)