My big belly (28 weeks) and some griping

I have a few things I've been meaning to craft, but I just haven't gotten around to it. I thrifted a white dress shirt for 50c, and I want to make another dress shirt onesie with it; maybe I'll get to that today. I've been very busy finishing up some scrapbooking (I thought I was all caught up, but I keep thinking of pages I want to make...), and making this giant beast of a swingset for my son.



We got a good deal on it, so I couldn't pass it up. I went to the store to buy tea and bread, and came home $670 poorer. My husband said he's going to stop sending me to the store. I ended up getting about a hundred dollars in groceries, diapers, etc., the swing set (which was on clearance for $479 and was originally 8 or 900 dollars), and a patio table with six chairs and a umbrella on clearance for $250. I already had a coupon for 5% off my entire purchase, and then I decided to go ahead and apply for their credit card (this is only my second credit card, so it's okay!) to get the additional 10% off.

Since the stuff was on clearance, if we didn't get it now, we would have to wait until next year! As we're getting a patio poured in a couple weeks, I didn't want to wait a whole other year to get a nice patio table set. I'd been looking on craigslist, but I wanted something more contemporary looking, and I just wasn't finding what I wanted. Sometimes you just have to buy things new!

Oh, I can't forget that our CENTRAL AIR WENT OUT. Grr. We had to spend two nights at the in-laws because it was about 90 degrees in the house. It was pretty miserable, especially since I'm pregnant. It cost us... brace yourselves... $1600 to get it fixed. Of course it had to be the compressor, the most expensive, important part, that went out. And of course this had to happen just a couple days after I spent almost $700 at Meijer... and just weeks before we're scheduled to spend $3100 getting our patio poured...

Anyway, enough griping out of me! Here's a cute pregnancy photography idea that I've seen all over pinterest. I loved it so much that I made my husband photograph my tummy. And when we were done, my two year old must have thought that it looked like we were having a blast, because then he exclaimed "Do me! Do me!" I love two year olds, don't you? :)

Puzzle Pockets- Genius!

Cluck, cluck, Sew came up with the best idea ever when it comes to toddler puzzles, to corral all those stray puzzle pieces that end up all over the house.

Puzzle pockets!

She used fleece; I used felt because I have tons of it on hand. She used velcro, and I opted to use snaps and buttons (once again, because I'm running low on velcro, but have dozens of snaps and millions of buttons). Because of the snaps, the button is actually not functional. I just sewed it on to hide the ugly snap.

The way she did it also uses less fabric than the way I did it. She's smarter than me... I should have reread the post before I started! I ended up sewing a large envelope, and then hotgluing it to the back of the puzzle. Either way, it works!

Kiddie Table

At our old house, we used this little side table in the sunroom. It used to belong to my ex-boyfriend's mom, but she gave it to me years ago. After a crisp coat of white paint, it fit into my decor perfectly!

At the new house, there is no sunroom, and so this little table has been in the crawl space for the past year. I got the idea the other day to get it down and use it for a kiddie table!



I already had these three adorable Mexican chairs too. Can you believe I actually thrifted them on three separate occasions?! At the old house, I had them hanging up in the den on a peg rack. Here at the new house, they've been sitting in the basement.

I'm so glad I brought them upstairs. My son l.o.v.e.s. them! They've made quite a nice little nook in the family room :)

Kitchen Table Transformation

This table was the one we had in our kitchen growing up. My mom gave it to me in college when they upgraded. Unforunately, my rabbit chewed on the legs, and so I still have some repairing and painting to do.

The first thing I did to spruce this up and add some color to the room was add a fitted tablecloth. Very cheery!



For Mother's Day, the hubs and my son made me a hand print. He calls it his "hand cake" because they made it in a pie tin :)



I started with two matching kitchen chairs, found one for free sitting near a dumpster, and then bought one at a thrift store for two or three bucks. They don't exactly match, but they're close. Armed with four cans of spray paint and some primer, I coated them all with this funky blue paint. (My husband says it looks like chairs from a Mexican restaurant. I'm not sure if that was a compliment or not. I don't think so!)

I found four seat cushions on clearance at Meijer for $6 each, and that completes the sitting area! I'm not so sure about the competing patterns, however since the tablecloth won't last all that long (it's already tearing!), I figured it didn't really matter. I already have a new clearance tablecloth waiting in the wings... Meijer has really cute teal with large white polka dot tablecloths, and I snatched one up :)

Vintage Cart Before and After

I've been meaning to fix up these old, rusty, ugly vintage carts. I finally got around to it :)

Before (I forgot to take a photo of the red one before my husband disassembled it):



And after! (Ok, the other one isn't done yet because it's too dang hot to spray paint...)

Keep Calm and Ride On (And Other Nursery Printables!)

{When I printed mine out, they had white backgrounds... I didn't figure out until later how to make the background colored! Oh well!}

Until the newborn babe is born and I can take tons of pictures of my fat little baby and plaster them all over the house, I have a lot of picture frames that need filled. With the help of Microsoft clipart, some cool fonts, Microsoft Word, and Paint (the computer program), I created some free nursery art that I thought I'd share with y'all. I couldn't figure out how to add a pdf file in blogger, so I uploaded them into google docs. Just click on the photos below, and it will take you to the big version.

This is the part where I tell you that these free printables are for your personal use only, so please don't sell them (unless of course you want to give me half the proceeds)! Thanks!

This one is my fav:



By the way, these are centered in the pdf file...
I cropped them and made jpgs out of them for the links.

$10 Photo Ledges. Heck yeah!

I'm still here! I just took some time off for a very hellish intensive week of scrapbooking. I hadn't done a page since my son was born in Feb 2009. I am now caught up! I completed three scrapbooks in just over a week! Hip hip hooray! And yes, two of the three scrapbooks were thrifted for about $2 each, as well as three packs of extra pages. Each pack had five sheets (or ten pages) and was 69c. Woot, woot!



Anyway, can I just say that Ana White is seriously my hero? I found some instructions on her website, showing how to make your own photo ledges, and I was all over it.

Okay, my husband was all over it.

I sat in the driveway, eating popsicles, and talking to my neighbor while our boys played together.

The best part about these ten dollar photo ledges is that they actually cost me less than ten bucks! All the wood I bought was $20, plus the cost of paint and stain (which I already had lying around), plus a couple dollars for new screws. That's about $23, but when you divide that by three, that's only $7.66 for each eight foot section!

We bought enough to make three 8-ft ledges. That's six 1x4x8s and three 1x2x8s. We had the man from Lowes cut the 8 ft sections in half, so that we could make six 4 foot ledges instead after we decided that 8 feet sections were just too long.

After the hubs made them and I painted/stained them, we decided to do 2 ledges in three different rooms rather than 3 ledges in two rooms. (All this math is confusing, isn't it?)

I used some frames from storage in the basement, which received the royal spray paint treatment, and then I went hog wild at thrift stores and garage sales, buying up frames for 50c to a dollar. I bought 27 frames for a total of $15.50. (I use about 6-8 frames per shelf, and remember I had six shelves to fill up!)



So for under $40, I have decorated three walls in my home :) Not too shabby!

Two ledges are up in the family room (the "lodge")...




two are in the master bedroom...


and two are in the nursery.





{Keep Calm and Ride On}

In the nursery, I made a bunch of little printables to put in the frames. I'm trying to share them with you... stay tuned! My computer program is not cooperating!

Dresser Redo

Remember this dresser? The green wasn't really working for me.



Now it looks like this! Much better :)



I'm really digging the two toned look right now.
So much so that I also painted this little side table the same way.



Both the dresser and side table were second hand finds. I think the side table was $5 or $10 but I forget for sure. I've had it since college.

The dresser I won years ago at an auction (why do they call it "winning" when you have to pay for it?). It was ten bucks but was in sorry shape. The previous owner had painted it black.

I painted it light blue. Then I painted it white. Then I painted it light green.

I can't make up my mind.
I change my mind a lot.
I'm indecisive, okay?

I added some cute thrifted baby block knobs to it and used it in my first son's nursery. Now I've given it some clear crystal knobs I had laying around, and I'm going to use it as my bedside table :)

More tees please

I think I need to go to thrifting rehab. I swear I just can't stay away. I was perusing the newspaper the other day, and I saw a couple ads for local thrift stores and their 50% off sales. I wrote it all on the calendar, so that I wouldn't miss it!

I hit up the men's tee aisle, as well as the kid's clothes. This particular store doesn't have a wide selection of knick-knacks or homegoods; it's mostly clothes. I was able to find a package of four fitted sheet straps to keep the sheets from coming off the mattress all the time. I hate that, don't you? They were 50c :) That was the only non-clothing item that I bought.

Here are the men's t-shirts that I scored the other day. They were 50c unless noted.

Another St. Patty's tee.

I bought one last time I went thrifting too,

but I'll eventually need one in every size, right?

I'm thinking Father's Day for this one!

Do kids even know what GI Joe is anymore?

As a band director, I couldn't pass this one up, even though it was twice what I like to pay for kid clothes. It was $1. *Gasp* Breaking the bank, right?

I do hope that Joel chooses to play something other than percussion though!

This one is a Columbus Clippers tee.

Every little boy needs a special Clippers tee to wear to the games!

And here's the little twerp wearing his Clippers tee to his very first Clippers game.


Not sure what he's doing with his hand ....

Dress Shirt Onesie. Genius!

So have you seen this tutorial yet over at Sew, Mama, Sew!?

Yeah, it's pretty awesome.

What makes it even more awesome is that this men's shirt was originally thrifted so that I could cover a cork board in my son's room. I figured I had enough extra fabric left to make a onesie out of it also, especially since I had not used the button plackets for the cork board project. So this onesie cost me no additional money :)

Because I never fully follow a pattern and end up winging it at some point, mine is a little bit different. First of all, I didn't want to mess with putting the button hole foot on my machine, so I opted to hand sew on snaps at the bottom of the onesie.





I sewed matching buttons on the other side of the snaps to make it look like it buttons, but they're really not functional. Fooled ya :)

Secondly, I didn't want to mess with elastic, so I just used some extra t-shirt scraps to sew a bias binding (even though it wasn't really cut on the bias), and then just finished off the bottom with that.

Lastly, I think I screwed up the collar somehow because it just didn't seem to reach around as far to the front as I think it should, and so a clip-on tie wouldn't work with it like I had planned. Instead, I made Prudent Baby's super easy and super awesome bow tie :) I opted to make my tie smaller than hers because mine is for a super large 3-6 month old. (Ok, it's supposed to be 3-6 months, but when I hold it up to his other onesies, it's really more like 9-12. Not sure why it came out so big!)

The dimensions I used for the main part of the bow tie were 9" x 2.5" whereas hers were 12.5" x 3.5". I actually used her dimensions first, and it turned out pretty ginormous. Cool for my toddler, but too big for an infant.



I didn't photograph it, however here's how it's attached to the onesie. I made a tube of the same fabric as the bow tie, pressed it flat to make a strap, and slipped it through the "knot" on the backside. On the left side of the onesie, under the collar, I stitched the strap directly to the onesie. On the right side, I used my handy dandy snaps again. I sewed the snap onto the onesie, under the collar, so it's hidden out of sight. No one will ever know that the strap doesn't go all the way around the neck!


Love it!