Jot Journal - That Cool Project I Promised

I really like the idea of keeping a journal.

In fact, I like it so much that I have 3 pretty ones.

They're all blank.

It's the blankness that scares me. The fresh, crisp pages seem to call out for profound revelations. Sadly, my days are short on profoundness. And what if I had to scratch out a mistake?!

So here's my new Jot Journal. I'm jotting a few words a day, on non-scary index cards. I modified THIS IDEA on Pinterest so I could use a great old calendar for the dividers.

I decoupaged some pretty paper onto a wooden crate from Michaels. The whole project only took about an hour and cost under $6. The best part is that I'm actually using it.

Wouldn't this make a thoughtful gift for a busy mom?

Nicer Than Me

It occurred to me that my husband is. Nicer than me, that is. In brief: I asked him to make a display thingie for the craft show. My vision was that he would get a sheet of pegboard, cut it in half longways (to make 2 pieces each 2' x 8'), run skinny boards around each section to sturdy them up, hinge them together and WA-LA, a display thingie that I could paint and hang stuff on at the craft show.

So he did that. He did EXACTLY that for me. He even had to add extra boards to sandwich the pegboard to make it more stable. When I finally went into the garage to see it...IT WAS HUMONGOUS. It was so big it scared me. It was SO big it would touch the ceiling in a normal room. (The garage ceiling is higher, but turns out regular ceilings are 8' tall.) I took one look at it and said, "OMG, that is a MONSTROSITY. It's WAY too big and it's unusable like that. Can you cut it down????"

This is when I knew for a fact he is nicer than me. Know what he said? "Sure, that's no problem." SURE, THAT'S NO PROBLEM. Now, if the situation were reversed, would I have been so nice or would I maybe at least have said something sarcastic? Yep, sarcasm.

The only other thing he said was, "At what point did you realize that 8' is really tall?" LOL

Thanks for stopping by. Hope to have some pics for you soon!

My Ribbon Rack!!

I am SO excited and happy with how it turned out!! I'm a big fan of the antique-y, sort of primitive look when it comes to things like this. My husband and I used materials he already had (except for the oak dowels) and luckily, he had a piece of luaun-type beadboard for the backer. I wanted 4 dowels so that my ribbon collection would have plenty of room to grow.

First of all, this is my current storage method. I have stick pens pushed down through the spools, but you can see it's still pretty unmanageable. I keep jabbing and scratching myself with pins that are securing neighboring ribbon ends as I reach in there to get what I want.

AND, you can see that the collection has outgrown its container. The whole thing is just beyond aggravating.

Without further ado...TA-DA!!!!!!!!!

I was SO excited to get a pic posted so that I can go and obsessively organize my ribbons over and over again, first by color...no wait, by style...ooooh, how about by width AND color AND that I actually just slapped 2 spools up there to give you the idea.

Like it?? Leave me a comment!
Thanks for stopping by! Off to organize my ribbons!!!!!!

What I Did This Weekend

First, I promised a friend that I'd post the pics of the little Christmas light hair clips that just about drove me NUTS...if I'd let the glue dry before trying to embroider over it, that would have helped.

I made some things this weekend that I don't have pictures of, but I CAN show you the two sets of bibs and burpies my friend Ann asked me to make. After making this first set, I've decided that baby blue has got to be the hardest color to match. There are just so many tiny variations in the amount of green in the blue- which is why the burpie is monogrammed in brown. I just couldn't find an embroidery thread that wasn't either too green or too blue.

And then here is the other set. I just LOVE the monkeys (but if you've read this blog for a while, you knew that already.)

You will probably be seeing a lot more baby blue, and a LOT more cute jungle animals. Check out the Silly Safari bedding that Rachel has picked out for our grandson-to-be, little January. (Not his name...his due date.) I just LOVE that bedding!!

Oh, and one more thing...my husband and I made a ribbon storage rack!! This is possibly not as exciting to you as it is to me. If you saw the state of my ribbon collection right now, you'd understand. As soon as the rack is painted and dry, I'll load up the ribbons and snap a pic for you.

That's it for tonight. Thanks for stopping by to visit!

Paper Bag Floors

Today I have one of our more bizarre home improvements to show you. A while back, the vinyl flooring in our foyer/kitchen was really starting to look worn. We also had some parquet flooring in the dining room that I just hated and some carpeting in the living room that I was not overly fond of, either.

Since it was really not in the budget to replace most of the flooring in the downstairs of the house, I began to search around for some sort of quick fix that might last for a year or two. I suddenly remembered reading an article in a magazine years before about a paper bag floor! Of course, I no longer had the magazine, but with the wonders of the Internet, I researched the method(s) like THIS and THIS, and came up with a plan.

First, we tore up the old parquet and the carpeting.

There was adhesive and various other lumpy stuff left on the floor, so we laid a layer of luaun (really thin plywood underlayment) to smooth things out.

We sealed the luaun by painting over it with whatever leftover paint we had.

Now here is where I should have taken more pictures. I did the paper bag part while my husband was at work and it was WAY TOO MESSY to be snapping pictures! I used rolls of brown paper from Lowe's (the kind they roll out to protect your carpet if you have construction going on in your house.) It was a little bit back-breaking, but the hardest part was keeping the cats off it until the polyurethane dried!

So here are some pics of the finished flooring:

Turned out okay, right? I have to say it has held up fairly well, considering it's PAPER! It's been several years now and it still looks pretty good. It did shrink up around one of the floor vent areas, but it's behind the kitchen table and is not obvious. Not bad for a temporary fix!

For the Birds!

Well, I was hoping to have something creative to show you, but nothing I worked on today is finished. We did go to the DMV and then cut and notched a piece of carpeting to fit the back floor of the truck in order to protect the carpet if the dog's feet get dirty at the park. And although all of that took up a good chunk of the day, it certainly wasn't exciting enough to photograph.

So I searched around in my picture folders and came up with this project that I thought I'd share. It's a bird bath I made a while back from clay pots and saucers!

It was simple to make and is probably pretty self-explanatory. The bottom pot measures 14" in diameter across the opening. The next one up is 12" and the top one is 10". The saucer on the top is 16", I think, but you could use a 14" saucer. The 12" saucer was too small and looked kind of dinky. Yes, I was lifting them down off the shelf at the garden center and stacking them up. It was a little bit exhausting.

Once I lugged everything from the store to the truck and from the truck to the backyard, assembly was really easy. I dry-fitted the pots and made a pencil line on the bottom two so that I would know how much of those two I would need to paint. (You can paint the entire outside of those pots, but they're each going to be hidden by the pot above, so why bother?)

Then I took the pots back apart and painted everything including the saucer. Everything took a couple of coats to cover because I used I didn't use any primer, just regular yellow exterior enamel. To finish it off, I dotted on some red enamel with a pencil eraser and did that line of red around the edge of the saucer. That's it! When it was dry, I stacked the pots and then used epoxy to glue the saucer on top. The pots are not glued together and it's actually a good idea to take it apart and store it inside during the winter. I haven't done that, and our pots have cracked a little.

I did a some research before deciding on a location for the birdbath. It's important to place the birdbath where the birds have a little shelter, such as under a tree or near shrubbery. Otherwise, they won't use it because they will be too exposed while they are splashing around and will be easy pickings for bigger birds of prey!

So that's it, except I will leave you with a stock picture I found online to show you who else likes our birdbath. One night we turned on the back light to see this guy's relative

looking like he was trying to do a chin-up on the saucer as he struggled up to get a drink!