Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy heart day, friends!  I hope your day has been full of hugs and kisses and roses and chocolates and balloons and cards and anything else that Hallmark encourages us to buy this time of year!  I, for one, got some brand new socks from my Valentine!  I love me some soft new socks and I love even more that Doc was paying attention last week when I offhand said I needed some new ones.  Yay for practical gifts!  (Not that I would have turned down chocolate.  I love that too.)

I mostly wanted to pop in today to show you the Valentine I whipped up late Saturday night.  Since we got Lollipop on Valentine's weekend last year, it only made sense that she was the star of our Valentine card this year.  And yes, this is a picture of a picture.  I could've uploaded the original .jpeg file, but then you wouldn't have gotten the full effect with the lollipop!  (It's supposed to look like its in her mouth, by the way.)

 

Sticking the sucker through made the card (picture) a little wavy, but I still think it turned out pretty cute for a last minute idea.  And my coworkers seemd to enjoy them so I call it a success.  Yay!

That's it.  Hugs and kisses and all that other Valentine-y stuff!

A Canvas Makeover

In my last post, I said that I had a few paintings for the beach house in the works, and now I've got one to share. Here it is!  What do you think?  Isn't it great?

Juuuuuust kidding.  That painting will not be hanging on a wall in the beach house.  At least, not looking like that.

This masterpiece came from Target.  Let's zoom in so you can see why I bought it.

Less than 8 bucks...holla!  You can't buy a plain canvas that size for anywhere near that low of a price, so you know me, I decided I could just paint over it.  I loaded that clearance rack gem into the MINI and brought it home with me.

I've been hanging on to this for a couple months now.  Of course I bought it without knowing exactly what I'd do with it, but I knew the perfect idea would come.  And it finally did.  After Beth finished all her paintings, it hit me that we still didn't have anything at all for the walls in the downstairs bedroom.  That's where the yellow dresser will go.

So with a general idea in my head, I got to work.  Keep in mind that I am by no means an artist.  I was totally wingin' it.  First, I knew I wanted to add some texture to it.  I'm sure modeling paste or something would've been ideal to use, but you can't find modeling paste in our woodshop so I was outta luck.  I improvised with something you can buy from a hardware store...if it ends up holding up, maybe I'll share my secret!  I figure if it doesn't hold up, I'm only out $7.56.

I started slapping my medium on using a putty knife.  Again, probably not what real artists use, but it worked.  Then, I used the wrong end of a paintbrush to draw in my general design.  Then I had to waaaaaaaaaait.  I am so not patient when it comes to things having to dry!  But I absolutely had to give this stuff 24 hours, so I left it alone for the night.

Doc saw it while it was drying and said, "Oh cool, bubbles in the grass."  That's when I thought oh crap, this may be harder than I thought.  They weren't supposed to be bubbles...I was going for whimsical flowers!

The next day I was able to start painting.  I didn't have good paint, so it was craft paint for me.  I was planning to start with the sky, so I filled my plate with several shades of blue, some white and cream, and even some grey.  I tried really hard to tap into my inner artist and not be too much of a perfectionist with how things looked.  I told myself it was ok for things to look a little messy and not perfectly blended.

For the grass, I used several different shades of green with a little brown and black mixed in.  It started out looking very camo-ish, but I think I eventually got it looking a little better.

The main color in this bedroom is yellow, so I chose a couple shades of it for the flowers and started filling in my circles.

I'm pretty sure this is when my dad came in and commented on the "weeds in front of the ocean."  Awesome.  Clearly, I still had more work to do.

I knew when I was painting the yellow that I'd have to come back and add in some more green over the flowers so they didn't all look like they were on top of the grass.  My mom became an expert painting dryer.  We broke out the hair dryer since I was too impatient to wait for things to dry!

I also didn't like how flat the flowers looked, so I went back and added some outlines to some of them.  I think it made a big difference.  (Before is on the left, after is on the right.)

  

Here are some more shots of the finished flowers.

And finally, the whole painting, hanging a little caddy-whampus on a plywood wall.

So, do you think it's an upgrade or downgrade from its original $8 look?  I can't wait to see it with the fabric we're using in that room.  Not too much longer!

Baby I Got Your Money

Our kids are at a tough age when it comes to buying them gifts.  They're too old for toys, but they still want something cool to open.  We begged them to make wishlists for Christmas and their birthdays, but every time they did, money seemed to be the reoccurring item.  So Doc and I decided that money was what we'd give them...for their birthdays, at least.  Their mom is taking them on a Disney cruise the first week of their Christmas break.  It's in lieu of birthday parties and is their gift from her.  Even though Anna's birthday isn't until after they're back from the cruise, we decided to go ahead and give them both their money before they left so they'd have it to use as spending money. But we couldn't just give them cash in an envelope.  Where's the fun in that?  I racked my brain with how we could get creative with this ho-hum gift.  Scavenger hunt?  All change and make them roll it?  Earlier this year, a friend from work told me about how he and his wife folded a bunch of one dollar bills to make a lei for their son's graduation.  That sounded cool, but I couldn't figure out how to make the lei work for December birthdays.  (Guess I could've tied it in to the Caribbean cruise.  Hindsight...gets ya every time.)

I had already told Doc that we needed to figure out a way to creatively fold the money when I spotted this idea on Pinterest.

(found here)

Yessss!  This was a great idea!  We could creatively fold the money like I wanted to, and now we had a cute way to box it all up to be wrapped.  Winning!

I sent Doc to Target to pick up two cheap-o candy boxes.  Russell Stover was the winner.

The first step in this little project was to eat all the candy figure out how much of each bill we needed.  Our candy boxes didn't come with the little individual paper wrappers, but instead had little dividers to make different sized compartments.  We could work with that.  We went back and forth on how much money to give the kids, but eventually decided on $10 for each year of life.  That meant $110 for Anna and $120 for Wyatt.  I let Doc figure out how to evenly divide the totals into different sized bills...a task right up his alley!

A couple trips to the bank later and we had all the cash.  We struck out on half dollar coins, but did manage to snag enough whole dollar coins to use.  Each of them got one fifty dollar bill and one twenty.  I can't remember the amounts after that, except that Wyatt got one more ten dollar bill than Anna since he's a year older.

We spent a whole night folding money!  Doc gets most of the credit because he started while I was wrapping Christmas presents.  He got creative with his folding...here is Wyatt's box around the time I joined in to help.  You can see a couple that center on an E for our last name, and one that has a 12 for Wyatt's age.

I, of course, had to pull up some tutorials online so that I could fold the money into fun shapes.  My first dollar bill became a heart for Anna.

I also made her a ring.

For Wyatt, I made a Star of David.

And, the one that I was most proud of (and the one that took the most time and the most re-doing)...a shirt and tie!  Yes, that's only one bill and there was no cutting, taping, or gluing involved.  Bam!

Doc stepped it up a little on his folding, too.  He made this one for Anna that shows her birthday - 12/25.

I was pretty impressed with this one he made for her - it shows her name AND if you look behind the n's, you can see an 11 - her age this year.

And finally, this last one that he made for Wyatt totally cracks me up.  He gave Andrew Jackson some Bieber hair.

I forgot to take pictures of the boxes when they were finished.  (Obviously we rearranged Wyatt's from that initial picture after we had folded more bills.)  The kids loved opening them and seeing all the money.  Actually, first Anna saw the box of chocolates and said she sure hoped there weren't too many with nuts.  I'm pretty sure she was glad to see the money instead of just a bunch of chocolates!  I guess Forrest Gump was right about those boxes of chocolate...you never know what you're gonna get.

Pumpkin Treats

I'm back with yet another fall project.  This one was more than just fun and easy...it was tasty too! Saturday morning, I whipped up a batch of pumpkin rice krispie treats.  I've seen different versions of these all over the web, so I'm not sure where the idea originated (rice krispie website, maybe?).  I first saw them here.  I'm sure there are tons of different ways to do them, but here's my method (and I bet it's the easiest!).

I had generic crispy rice cereal on hand, so it's what I used.  I think they were called Krispy Rice, or something like that.  I also used a whole bag of jumbo marshmallows.  I like my rice krispie treats to be extra ooey, gooey, and marshmallow-y, so I went all in. :)  Here are my supplies.  Not pictured is the butter.

I melted less than a half a stick of butter on the stove, and added the bag of marshmallows to the pot.  Once they were mostly melted, I added some Wilton orange food coloring.  Red and yellow would work fine too.

It turned my mixture a nice shade of orange.  In hindsight, I could've probably gone a little oranger.

I don't know exactly how much of the crispy rice cereal I added - maybe 5 cups?  I just kept added until I was ok with the consistency.

Anna was my helper for the assembly process.  She unwrapped the tootsie rolls while I rolled the pumpkin balls.  The marshmallow mix was still pretty warm.

As I rolled the pumpkins, I used my finger to make a small indention for her to stick the tootsie roll.

I had a small can of frosting already, so I added some green food coloring to it to make a few leaves.  I didn't really try hard so they don't look exactly like leaves, but I think the extra color still helps.

My finished plate of pumpkins.  The best part was definitely eating them up!

Fall-ified

I don't really consider myself to be a seasonal decorator.  I mean, I decorate for Christmas of course, but that's pretty much a given.  The only other time I really decorate for a season or holiday is if/when we're having a party of some sort.  That said, yesterday I brought home some pumpkins and added a touch of fall to our house. My mom helped host a couples' shower Saturday night and she was in charge of the table decorations.  Somehow that meant that I was also responsible for the table decorations.  Huh.  We procrastinated until the very last minute but finally settled on a pumpkin theme late Friday night.  That's how I ended up with decorations for our house - they're leftovers from the party.

Here's our newly fall-ified (fallized? falled?) dining table.

This is pretty much exactly how we decorated the tables for the party, minus a few votive candles.  The tables were outside and we had three of them to do (plus a food table inside) so we needed something that wouldn't get too expensive.  We bought our pumpkins from Home Depot for about $4 each.  The mini gourds came for the grocery store.  They were 3 for $1.

Like my dining table, each table at the party had three main pumpkins - one white one, one large orange one, and one funny shaped orange one that we laid on its side.  I didn't get a picture from that angle but this one kinda looks like two pumpkins stacked on top of each other with just one stem.  For the white pumpkins, I pulled out my Silhouette machine and and cut out a fancy G (the initial of the soon-to-be-married couple) out of black vinyl and just stuck them on.  While I had my machine out, I went ahead and cut out an E for me and an S for my mom so we could use them at our houses afterwards.

The big orange pumpkins all got carved.  My mom left me to do this part by myself and I thought my arm was going to fall off!  I had six pumpkins to empty and as I got my work area set up, I realized I've never really emptied a pumpkin by myself.  I had no idea what I was doing, but I guess I figured it out ok.  Getting all the guts out is hard work!  Then, once they were all finally empty (and I had broken a good sweat), I grabbed the drill and got to carving polka-dotting.  The drill bit went through the pumpkin really easily, so it wasn't hard to do at all.  My problem was that I was using a re-chargeable drill that had a heavy battery on it, and it seriously got heavy after a while!

It looks ok during the day, but it really looks cute at night when its lit up.  I tried to take a picture of it, but I couldn't really capture its cuteness.

I know my burlap needs a little fluffing.  It's not arranged very well yet, but I didn't feel like fixing it for the pictures.  I'm lazy like that.

I put another polka-dotted pumpkin on our kitchen table.  Much plainer, but it works I guess.

I did crank out one tiny craft project too.  After cutting out all the monograms for the pumpkins, I had a small strip of vinyl scrap leftover that I didn't want to just throw away.  So I cut out "give thanks."  I grabbed a scrap piece of wood and painted it brown then yellow and sanded it down.  The letters were easy to stick on and I just added a piece of wire we already had to hang my new little sign.  I didn't have the raffia bow on it at first, but I think it gives it a little something extra.  Total cost?  Zilch.

My new little sign is hanging on the china cabinet for now, but that could change.

The last fall decoration that I put out is my set of wooden pumpkins that I made last year.  I still love them.

I also have a bowl of candy corn sitting out on the coffee table but I didn't think I should take a picture of that.  I'd hate for someone to come over and expect to see it because it won't be around much longer...