Organizing

Last weekend, I noticed a moving sale up the road from us, but I was trying to be good and not stop for fear of the temptation that I knew would be there - besides, I only had a dollar and a load of frozen food in the back of the van + it was over 90 degrees outside. Nuff said.

So, you can probably imagine my surprise when Alan gets home and asks if I've been to the sale up the road. I say No & he's shocked, so I pleaded my case - I mean, I was trying to be good with my spending! He decided he was going, so Brooke & I tagged along. Sure enough, as soon as we pull in I see a mirror and a birdcage I HAD to have! In the end, I'm the only one that came home with anything & he left empty handed & $5 less in his wallet. I also discovered a unique looking plastic mail organizer and thought it looked cool enough the way it was, but I knew it would blend in too much where I wanted it to go.





Here it is in the condition that I bought it. It's molded plastic that's designed to look like carved wood. Unique looking, right? At least I thought it was. I saw that it had even more potential though. Sorry about the 2nd photo, I didn't check to see if it turned out clear and it "clearly" was not, but you get the idea.
























Here is what it looks like now with a bit of creamy white paint & then a coat of gel stain that I rubbed off before it was dry. Gives it that vintage look, don't ya think? It looks very nice up against the section of brickwork & the dark kitchen counter I have. I just kinda wish it had some tiny drawers to keep stamps & the small plastic letter openers in, but it's much better than how it was before, which was nothing more than a pile of envelopes & other junk!

I'm still plugging away on the girly graduation mini album. I've had some delays because I've had to come up with ideas to fix what I screwed up. I don't think I can ever do a project that I haven't screwed up something. My goal was to have it done this weekend, but not sure on that. At least it's a surprise, so I don't have a set deadline to get it done, but I have lots of other projects that I need to start working on, so I need to get this one done and out of the way.

So, very early this morning, I hear it raining ... hard. By the time I get up, the yard that always floods when it rains really hard is flooded. I later look out at the pool to see it's overflow device dumping water like crazy & the cute little dolphin chlorinator is floating right at the top of the pool railing! Then, Alan goes & checks to see how much rain we got just this morning it the rain gauge measured 3 1/2 INCHES!! I noticed that my Hibiscus finally bloomed today, but you can't see the flowers because the plants were all beaten to the ground. :^( I hope they snap back when the sun comes out later today & this weekend.

Well, I gotta go get the hubby's paycheck & take it to the bank, so I'm off for a bit of running.

God Bless and Have a Great Day!!

One craft show item I'm willing to share

This is my version of a picture I purchased at a flea market many years ago. I sold that picture at one of my craft shows that year. I'll tell ya, first of all, I wish I would have taken a picture of it so I could recall what it looked like exactly & secondly, I wish I would have made a dozen of them that year because I could have sold each one.

Sorry that I didn't take a Before shot of this. The base of the picture is actually an old, faded to blue cardboard picture of a farm field scene that I found at a flea market. Initially, I had other intentions for this old picture, but then I remembered that I had bought everything to make the snowman picture way back when & this picture was the perfect size to make it!! It's made all from felt & I cut everything & stitched the snowman by hand. How cute are those rusty snowflakes? Everything was going "close enough to perfect", until it came time to put the felt on the board. Being totally oblivious of where my fingers were during the gluing process, I managed to get a good sized glob of glue on one of my fingers & of course, managed to get it on the front just below the top right large snowflake. If I would have just thought it through before trying to take a pair of scissors to cut the glue off, I could have just dissolved the permanent fabric glue with some nail polish remover. Now I have this small defect on the picture. I tried to camouflage it by rubbing the felt in other different spots, but it just makes them look like grease spots, which there is not. LOL! The splotch is not really the only defect, but the other one isn't that bad, but when I was ironing the nose on, the iron smeared a little of the orange paint onto his face. I did take a little bleach and water to help remove that, but there's still a tinge of orange left. I guess I'm selling this one at a discounted price because even though it's handmade with imperfection, these are not the imperfections that I can live with.




Now I'll be changing gears from being crafty to outdoorsy by sharing some of my flowers/gardens that are blooming right now. I've thrown in a cute little critter pic at the end to hopefully brighten your day and bring a little smile to your face, in spite of the squelching heat.


I love African Daisies and this is one of my favorite colors. I planted the seeds in my garden a couple of years ago & they have just reseeded themselves every year since. I haven't seen any of the orange ones yet, but there is a gold one that is blooming now too. Not so much my favorite. Goldish yellow flowers are not really my favorite, but they do brighten up where ever they are.

Aren't these blue Bachelor Buttons gorgeous?!!! I direct sowed them from seed and they're just now starting to come into bloom. They sure are pretty, but not enough of them are blooming to give me the impact I'm looking for right now. They're not too picky, considering we have such barren dry sand for "soil" here. They do get really weepy looking in the heat of the mid-day sun, but they do OK in spite of it.

Even though this photo isn't of the peach daylilies and Hosta in full bloom, it's a little past that, but I still love the look, even though the dry, humid weather has taken it's toll on the daylilies, the flowers are still going.

Check out this pretty butterfly that was feeding from my Bee Balm patch today. You can't tell it in the photo, but it was HUGE!! Sorry about the picture quality....by the time I ran back to the house & ran back out to the flowers, it was such a temperature change with high humidity that my camera lens was trying to fog over. I actually think it makes for a cool looking photo.

This is my patch of Bee Balm this year that grows along the back & side of one of the garden sheds. I need to get the seeds moved closer to the side of the shed instead letting them take over more of the backside. DH is complaining that he has nowhere to hide is scrap metal junk without trashing my flowers. OK, nuf said.

One of the things about living where we live is there is a ton of different creatures to be found everyday. Some years we are literally over run with frogs and toads. You'd walk through the yard and there'd be a literal wave of frogs hopping ahead of you!! Oddly, with all the rain we had this spring, this year wasn't really one of them but we still have tons of them. Check out this cute little tree frog shading himself from the late afternoon sun in one of my daylilies. You will find them tucked into the flowers all the time! Isn't he so cute tucked in there? ;^)

 

I know, I don't post for a week at a time & then this week it's twice & I've gone into pic overload! tee hee!


God Bless and have a great day!


I am linked up to A Little Knick Knack Blog's Everything but the Kitchen Sink link party.

I do have some things to share today

I have been busy working on several craft projects that are mainly for my craft show later in the fall. I would love to show all these things off, but I run into the problem of people who must be locals here that copy my stuff (exactly like mine, thank you very much) & put them in their own booths at the same show. I realize that the internet is vast ocean of ideas for the taking & I am no different of being lured in for inspiration, hook, line & sinker! I do copy other ideas I've seen online, but I do at least try to put my own twist on those ideas. But there are some ideas that I have completely come up with all on my own & I believe them to be pretty good ideas. The last thing I need is competition for sales on my own idea! Been there. Done that. It sucks. Once, I posted something I created out of vinyl on the old Cricut message board & it had a lot of positive remarks. I showed up at my first craft show after that & there is a booth with the same exact thing I made! I'm sure you can imagine me keeping my jaw from hitting the floor as I'm walking by this booth with MY project! So, note to self & others that do craft shows with their own original ideas.....don't post them online unless you want them copied, even in your own po-dunk town craft show. I can't stop the copiers that walk through the shows just to steal ideas, which includes other vendors as well as the shoppers. I do pretty good in sales for such small venues, but I don't like fighting for sales of my own idea. The bright spot of the one situation was that I sold my project and the other person didn't.


OK, enough of my complaining about craft show idea robbers. I have a simple little project that I made as a gift for someone that I thought was a friend, but who turned out to just be the social snob I originally thought she was. She was very nice to me for the week that we worked together on Teacher Appreciation projects & we even exchanged some personal family history with each other that we had in common. She seemed so grateful for my help that she offered to take me out to breakfast the next week. I told her she didn't need to that, that I enjoyed doing the projects & having someone else to talk craft talk with that liked it as much as I did. She still insisted she would take me to breakfast. So, I thought I would make a little something to say thank you for her gesture. I still have it because that was May & now it's 2+ months later & not a peep from her. She only lives a block away from me, so I'm not sure why the snob job from her, but I guess she'll be totally on her own next year with all 65 projects! It's not a huge deal of a gift, I just put her initial on it in case she wanted to use it for something else - but then again probably not.

Then I took a Dollar Tree mirror and transformed it from this....

....to this. Lots of Cricut cuts and I've said it before and I'll say it again, I don't know how I could craft again without that machine...or at least a cutting machine of some sort.




I have another project that I want to post, but maybe I'll save that for tomorrow's post. Not a big deal, but I still think it's neat.


So that's all for today


God Bless and have a great day ~ keep cool!!

Breathing again....whew!

Saturday was the day I held my son's Graduation Open House. He actually graduated back on Memorial weekend in May, but I needed much more time to prepare for a party & his step-mom was working on one and wasn't even including me in on it. I was just going to get an invitation to MY own son's party! That was just so they could say that I didn't help with any part of the party & they did it all by themselves. You have no idea what kind expletives I want spew out here, but I'll refrain, since this is a happy post. ;-) So, I just decided I would have a party for him at my own home as well. :D

Here is a shot of my son on his graduation day. He needed a hair cut, but that didn't end up happening. It's the best picture I could get of him. It was also very humid & stormy that day with a tornado warning immediately following the ceremony, so everyone was confined to the hallway & not allowed to leave or go outside. My goodness, it was muggy.













This is the display board I made for the party. (remember, click on the image to see it larger)










I used my Cricut and the markers in the Cricut to print the poem on a 12x24 piece of red card stock. For the border design I used a thin strip of black card stock & then did another strip of red card stock decorated with a border punch design over a wider strip of black card stock. Even though I just did this last week, I can't exactly recall which cartridge I used. It may have been Calligraphy on one of the specialty fonts. It looks a whole lot nicer than my hand writing!

It was so hard at times to read this darn poem while I was working on it. It just hits home and right to heart of a parent. I found this poem way back when my son was only 4 years old and I first got a computer & the internet was in it's own youth. This poem was one thing that I managed to save all these years and not lose, even from one computer to another. That's really something for me! You should be able to view a larger image of this photo by clicking directly on the image.

I'm still kind of dragging yet today & recuperating a little, but so happy I did it & even happier that it turned out fabulous! An added bonus is that my house is pretty darn clean & tidy!! It's still needs more stuff done with it, but this is how I feel it should look everyday.

Oh yeah, I also need to give a big hug & HUGE Thank You to my step-mom for coming over on Friday & helping me get the food prepared. I thought I would have been able to get all that done and everything else I had to do, but I would have been sadly mistaken with a meltdown surely before the end of the day.

And so I'll end this here and remember....
God Bless & have a great day!

Another outdoor project complete.

We have been feverishly working away at trying to get things squared away for my son's high school graduation party this coming Saturday. Things are not complete & perfect around here & I'm sure they never will be. That's just how we are. human.

Anyway, we did manage to get half of one of those little projects done over this holiday weekend. Notice, I said HALF done. Yes, it is a rare occasion that any DIY project ever really gets 100% complete at my home. There are some, but they are few. They get mostly done, at least to the point that it can sort of look like it's complete to the naked eye, but upon closer examination you will notice that there is no baseboard trim or the trim piece between hardwood floor and carpet. Things happen that just prevent us from being able to finish what we start sometimes. It's either a lack of funds or a scheduling conflict that brings the project at hand to a screeching halt.

Well enough about that. Man, do I babble on or what? So we had purchased 4 candle lanterns maybe 2 years ago on clearance for $11 each. We thought that was still expensive (yes, we are cheap..e'hem "frugal") but compared to the $30/ea. we thought it was a good deal, especially considering what we really wanted to do with them! I was just thinking out loud about how cool they would look as lanterns on our deck if they were lights instead of candles. Of course, my hubby is very handy in all sorts of things. He said he could probably make that happen,s o we got them & they've been patiently sitting around for their debut. Two of them get their grand appearance to the world this weekend. The other two are going to have to wait for the other stairway some other time. I'm sure it won't be this year.....(picture rolling eyes here). The lanterns were originally a grayish green painted patina that I painted a satin black.

This is how they look with the lights off. We haven't put the cushions on the patio furniture yet because we don't want it getting wet before the party.




This is how they look with the lights on. Since I just took the pictures this morning so you don't get the full ambiance of them in the dark.




This is a view with one of the lanterns on, but you can see the rope lights on under the railing too.


We mostly have the yard work done, except for what will need to be mowed & weed eated right before the party. YAY!! Isn't it funny what it takes to light a fire under your butt to get things done that have only been put off for years??? This is part of why I have parties, so we can get stuff done that needed to get done a long time ago. LOL!!

I have also been working on finishing up recovering the cushions to my glider rocker that I've had since I was pregnant with my son. So far, it's coming along OK, but I'm intimidate by putting the old zipper in the new cover. The cushion is shaped funny & it's throwing me off. I guess I just need to do it!

I also need to most likely finish that other mini album I'm making because I invited the grandmother of the girl I made it for so that she can take it back with her. I'm not sure why I do some of the things I do to create more stress in my life, but that what I do!

So, with that, I will say adios. Possibly for the week. I really shouldn't even be on here today, but I think I'm having internet withdrawal. *snicker!*

God Bless & have a great day!

P.S. I've decided to link up to my first link up party with this Outdoors-In project at Funky Junk Interiors Blog.