Homemade Monday: Counting the days

Do you remember as a child, the looooooong wait until something special. You'd nag your mom about how many more days until it was supposed to happen? Yep, she'd get tired of it, then bust out the scissors and a stapler and make a countdown chain. As a kid, mom normally made mine out of construction paper in a color scheme appropriate for the event - Christmas, the team colors, etc.

Well, I'm pretty excited about the Scrapbooksteals.com Crop in October. Right. October. So very far away! I know. But I had a little free time between loads of vacation laundry and set to work using papers that while pretty in this picture I'd never use on a layout about my guys (Princess!).

I had the Scientist help me string it up using holes already in our bedroom. And then I attached this sign to it:

All of the paper in the chain is from MME Lost and Found (I bought one of those HUGE paper packs before discovering Scrapbooksteals). Most of the other pink papers are various other MME collections, I do think a Fancy Pants scrap slipped into the mix too. The alphas are an assortment of PiggyTales Twinkle Twinkle, BasicGrey Oliver and some Target $1 bin. I don't remember where the brads came from, but I do remember they were one of my first SS steals!

Homemade Monday: Wash/Dry

We have a sink at our kitchen window - even better it has one of those mini greenhouse windows! It would be an awesome view if it weren't of our apartment parking lot! Over the years I've dressed it up some, I started with baskets to hold wash cloths and kitchen towels since I didn't have enough drawers. Then I added some  plants in the greenhouse.

Now back when dishes were my chore (Scientist would do laundry) the wash clothes and towels stayed  in their respective baskets. All. The. Time. without fail. And it was super useful, so useful that we stopped using paper towels and in our thriftyness only use cloth.

These days not so much with the organization. Which means they fairly often get used for the "wrong" tasks if what you want is less accessible.

So I made these nifty little tags for the baskets: Wash and Dry. I'd had some plastic tags (ID badge tags from the office supplies area) left from labeling the toy storage containers and sized them to those.

 

At least if they don't help the "problem" they're still pretty cute.

For these tags: MME Lush 2 Orange, MME Lost and Found Union Station, Karen Foster alpha stickers, Colorbox Sour Apple (for inking edges and alphas) and Twine.

Homemade Monday: mirrored, again

Sometimes I get into a design rut. Same thing over and over and over. So I altered a mirror again - rut. Sort of, this was the original mirror project and Squirrel managed to break off some of the spoons so I regrouped and made the papered mirror for the Paper Variety's challenge a couple of weeks ago.

But I still wanted the spoons to hang in my dining area (next to a mammoth one a friend gave me that used paint sticks a la Pinterest) and I really wanted it to still have that starburst effect to complement the one from my friend.

Here's what I had done: Gorilla glued all the spoons to the back of the mirror. In normal, non-preschooler circumstances it would have worked. It was mirror side down and he went under and popped the spoons off of the mirror. Grrrrr

Having learned to never trust my creation when preschoolers are nearby the second time I traced the mirror on cardboard and cut it. Then I started hot gluing the spoons down, more immediately secured that way. When the spoons were two layers deep I squirted a whole bunch of Gorilla glue in the cavity created from the spoon ends as well as across them. Carefully placed the mirror and a heavy object on top of it all and left the house for a few hours.

When we got home the mirror had slid a little and I could see part of the cardboard. Not enough though to need to scrap the project or anything. Instead, I took some ribbons and a flower and gave it a more decorative feel. It had been feeling really empty to me anyway and I think it was a nice touch.

Now where did all those weird looking spoons come from? Well, the friend who gave me the starburst mirror had around the same time discovered Orange Leaf Frozen Yogurt. Our two families went together one evening, and while the yogurt is tasty and the restaurant is tons of fun I fell in love with the unique shape of the spoons. So I started making everyone give me their spoons when we went out. There's 38 there, that's a lot of sharing good times with friends and family.

The mirror I'd picked up for $2 at Goodwill.

The ribbon was leftover from a couple of other projects - some MME Lush 2 Orange and some Paper Studio.

The flowers are Imaginesce with a MME Lush 2 Orange brad.