More in the kitchen – label it

Oh labels, how I love thee! I’ve been collecting lots of label shapes from the Silhouette store and when I realized that the place I get my vinyl had a chalkboard version I knew I had to try it.

The spice labels I did a few weeks ago were awesome, but not everything stays in the same container like spices. So these labels were destined for my very small pantry.

I wrote on the labels (which are very sticky and will stay on at least through hand washing) with bistro chalk markers. I love these things! No dusty mess, and much much easier to write with. They do take a little bit of time to dry though, and as I am not the patient sort, some of the labels are smudged. No worries, a damp cloth takes the writing off completely (I’ve found this to be less true on an actually chalkboard with these markers, FYI).

I’m super happy with this, and hope it prevents things like three bags of raisins being opened at once (because it was hard to see where the raisins were!). At Goodwill the other day I scored a pack of dry erase vinyl sheets. I haven’t played with them yet, but I’m thinking if you preferred a white label look those might work too. Originally I used white board markers on the tops of these containers, it didn’t end well. I’ll let you know how these hold up!

Dreaming of Spring

The this moment photo from last week was taken at 2500 ISO with all the lights on in the room and the windows open… and it was only 1pm! It’s been quite gloomy here (with a few very welcome sunny days thrown in). Not surprisingly I’m being drawn to my spring time photos to scrap.

This simple one highlights just how quickly things change once the  sun does come back out.

I had really specific ideas of how I wanted the 13 to look, but none of my fonts were fitting the bill. I ended up taking the 1 from one front and the 3 from another. I love that I can do that with my die cutting machine! Seriously I am still so loving my Silhouette, I can’t believe I’ve had it over a year and it still feels like the best new fun toy.

Not the best photo of this layout (lack of sun, sigh.), but you get the idea. I love how Ali does her journalling around the edge of her layouts often and thought I’d try it here. Tuesday has still been asking if we  can go to the market, though it’s been closed for a month.
I really don’t mind our winters, for some reason though I am missing the light this year. Good thing we have lots of Christmas lights outside that come on at four!

Heart cards

I was going to do one of those catch up posts, but am still too busy! I think it’ll be easier to tackle little projects I’ve been working. Basically Tuesday was sick, then the in-laws were here, and Thanksgiving and shopping, and trying to finish an advent, and well now all the sudden it’s almost December! So here is a project I just worked on. I talked a dear friend of mine into letting me host a baby shower for her. She didn’t think it was important as it was her third baby, but since her second “baby” is eight she does need cute baby things so eventually I talked her into it 🙂 Sarah came over to help me put these together and I just love how they turned out.

They were inspired by Susan’s card from the Studio Calico kit this month.

I found the wording for the back here and then just printed it two up on an 8.5×11 sheet, cut it and rounded the corners. Glued down it covered all the stitching from the front.

I wanted to show you how I cut out the hearts. I’m not sure where I got the original heart image, it just happened to be the shape I liked best. If you have shapes you repeatedly use (hearts, stars, circles, etc.), I wanted to share this tip. I have a couple of set sizes of hearts that I like, this is the one I use most commonly (1 3/8″ wide x 1 1/8″ tall). I have taken to saving just about every layout before/after I cut so that if something mis-fires or I want to use it again I have it. So I made up a file with just hearts (here I fit 72 on a 8.5 x 12 piece of paper). When ever I have extra space on a piece of paper I’m cutting I usually fill it with hearts or stars (I have boxes for these cut outs in my scrap area). When I pull a heart from this saved file (or a row, or how ever many I have room for) I know they will all be the same size. It’s great for repetition. I hope that was pretty clear. Basically I use this file as a set size, like I would a paper punch.

Since I do have so many hearts cut out I made the guest of honor matching thank you notes. My aunt did this for my cousin’s baby shower and I thought it was so sweet. Then I got to thinking…

Holiday thank you notes!

Thank you notes on kraft cards! The only thing really stopping me from breaking out stars, snowflakes and circles, along with other sentiments right now are these darn advent projects! Yikes! And for the strings on the thank you notes I’ll probably just leave them. I do have one pretty picky relative whose card I’ll probably tie in the back, but I think most people won’t mind. So get out your punch or die cutting machine and go nuts with Susan’s great idea. I just love it!
And if anyone has any great ideas on how to make the “big” sister (age eight) feel super special at the shower, let me know. Or fun games that could involve her, etc.

Lesson Plan—Faces

I touched on our schedule here, and part of that includes a “school time”. I named it this mostly for Tuesday, as we are an always learning kind of family (I like to think). We have been starting with a story, sitting on pillows, and then really she can do what ever activities she likes. I have set out many Montessori type activities (I’m not trained or anything, I just like a lot of those activities). I also have projects we can work on if she chooses. I like the idea that for this set amount of time (about an hour and a half three mornings a week) I am totally focused on Tuesday, so often I’m trying to “get stuff done”. One activity I came up with a while ago and had already all planned out was a face activity. Tuesday loves for us to draw circles so she can fill in the faces so that’s where my jumping off point was.

Of course it’s always special when you get to use mama’s pens (my zigs whose smaller end has run out of juice get put in her supply cupboard). Tuesday always draws 2 eyes, a nose, a mouth, and a forehead (of course).

I had a couple of bodies drawn for her to decorate.

Then I gave her a bunch of circles that I had precut out of scraps (with this). I gave her a mini Boden catalog and showed her that she could replace the faces in it with her own. She did a few, but then was more excited about using the glue stick so I just went with it. A pretty good project, she seemed to have fun with it, and it lasted about 25 minutes. Now to show you it’s not all roses…

The activity was to scoop with a ladle into the jar, which she did and then went crazy feeling and experiencing the foam ball things (found in the floral section of an arts and crafts store). I’m totally down with her doing what ever she wants (as long as it’s not dangerous), but we do have to rule to put something away before you do the next thing. The next thing after this was lunch. Let’s just say we ate pretty late. And there were tears.
Tuesday is 34 months.

Nature Exchange

Tuesday and I have been having fun collecting for the nature exchange we are participating in.

This little bundle of wonderful nature bits is going to Russia. I printed out a picture like this and labeled where we found everything (again with in two block of our house). I figured it would be nice to compare to when it arrives and is dried out a little. From top left: pine cone from a couple blocks away, holly berries and leaf, moss, bits that fall from trees whenever it’s windy, maple leaf, little thing that drops from our neighbors tree, more moss (it’s wet here!), rosemary (from our herb garden), lavender (from our front yard), little flowers I managed to still find blooming in the yard, leaves, leaves from a blueberry bush and rocks from the Oregon coast, random berries and leaves.
Like I said we’re sending our package to Russia. I have an atlas that I found at an estate sale that is in Russian (I hope!). So I wrapped it up like this:

That is Russian right? I love these mail exchanges and hopefully I can find some more for Tuesday in the future, I’m very excited for her to get our egg carton. Did anyone else participate?

Crafting for me

Scrapbooking is totally crafting for me. I don’t know who is going to want my scrapbooks down the road, but I know I love looking at them, a lot. I love all the memories, all of the details and the fun products. Just the chance to get crafty is so fun.

From the tiny bit of snow we had last year. Love this photo so I printed it big.

The Tuesday on this layout is a negative from the pillowcase on craft weekend. I didn’t iron it perfectly onto the paper so it’s a little messy, but I still love it.

I took a lomo print, cut it up and arranged it to make the strip of photos on the top. The prints have individual photos in a weird order (counter clockwise I think).

A rare double pager, but I just couldn’t weed the photos down to less than this. I think I took fifty photos of her eating applesauce (two years ago!) and printed at least a dozen!
I love doing layouts like this so much, but I’m onto something new too. I got my supplies for doing Project Life next year and dove right into them. I decided to go back and scrapbook 2011 month by month using the separated page protecters. I’ll share soon, I just have to say, I love it for all the random photos and so does Bj. He is glad to see them out of the three-up photo albums I store my printed photos in that are not scrapped (Library of Memories style). I’m not sure if I’ll go back any further than that, and I think in 2012 I’ll do weekly or bi-weekly pages, but either way I’m glad to be recording my memories, as always.

Tuesday Time

We basically live on Tuesday time around here. Especially in the evenings. I’ve attempted to get on a schedule with her before, and I’ve heard how much kids secretly love that and blah, blah, blah. But it has never worked for us. The closest thing to a schedule has been the last almost two years in her nap being somewhere between lunch and dinner. The biggest wrench in the whole thing is her night time sleep. I mean it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if you rock your kid for hours at night, and it’s 11:30 before they get to sleep, you’re going to have to stay up pretty late if you had anything to get done. Along that line, here’s what I worked on until 2:30 AM yesterday!

I’m really, really hoping this visual schedule works for us. If it doesn’t at least I’ll know I tried EVERYTHING!

I made the cards from old Kolo pages I cut apart and vinyl letters cut from my Silhouette SD (note: for this transfer tape is a must, so you don’t have to move letters one by one). I made them the same size as the cards that came with the chart (I used this one). First I went through my stash of photos already printed  to find activity pictures, and cut them 2″ high. For the activities that were missing I finally figured out how to print custom sizes on my little 4 x 6 printer, so I printed two to a page. Side note: I have a Picture Mate from Christmas 2005 that still totally rocks my socks. I can’t recommend that little Epson enough! If you’ve done Week in the Life with Ali, than you probably have most of things you do day to day in picture form! A lot of my photos are from that week.

Tuesday loves this thing. A little too much, I think I’m going to laminate all the cards before she wrecks them. My original idea was just to use this in our newly implemented “school” time. Since routine in general is hard for us and concepts of before, after, in an hour, later, etc. are too I thought this would help with our day over all. I’m going to try it out for a while and see how it goes. I do wonder what will happen if something doesn’t go as planned, I’ll probably just slip the cards out. And it would be fun to leave a gap and give her three card options to choose from. Or later on leave a few out and let her decide which comes first, etc. I’m pretty excited about it. I’ll let you know how it goes!
Oh and I should mention that the nap didn’t happen today, which knocked out writing notes and scrapbooking (and made her CA-RAZY by four).