Dresser score!

If you've been reading here for a while, you have probably seen the dresser that I worked on for the girls' room. It was a $35 Craigslist find. A nice, solidly built dresser from the 1960's, all wood. I simply had to patch a hole in the side, sand it, prime it, paint it and poly it - including removing the drawer pulls and spray painting them. For just a minute, ignore the clothes peeking out of the drawers and enjoy the transformation:



And now, feast your eyes on what I was able to buy yesterday for $5 each at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore...



Built in 1975, these dressers are just as solidly made though they will require a few more repairs. They don't need nearly as much work as some other pieces I have seen, and I think the time invested in them will be well worth it. While mostly structurally sound, they will need more extensive repairs than the one I got for my girls'. They both need to have several drawer rails replaced or repaired, and a bottom leg support on the longer/shorter dresser will need to be replaced completely (but it should be as simple as removing half a dozen screws, getting a piece of wood cut to fit, and then drilling some holes in it for the dowels to fit in). A little bit of wood putty to fill in a few areas, followed by sanding, painting, and polying and I think these dressers will have at least another 40 years of use in them! I bought them for my cousin's family and we are all excited to see how they turn out.



One of the features that I really love about these dressers is the fact that some of the drawers have built in dividers! How handy would these be for keeping things organized?



The staff at the ReStore told me that these had been hanging around the store for a while and they were planning on destroying them, but thought they would give them one last chance. I really believe it was one of those "God things" that I just happened to finally stop in to check out the store because I had been thinking about going there since the store opened a year ago, yet had never actually made it in... though it's only about 4 miles from my house. And it was just last week that I found out my cousin needed two dressers, and here were these matching pieces!

Now I'm just waiting to be led to the "perfect" dresser for my boys' bedroom. Something about the same size as the one I got for my girls room, but with more masculine detailing - maybe some dental moulding! Something that will look wonderful painted a nice brick red....

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I finished crocheting the preemie gown last night, and then wove in the ends and added the ribbon today. I think it came out very sweet and elegant looking. I am now officially out of baby yarn, so I will have to buy more before completing any more of these charity projects.



I have been trying out the free samples of soap nuts that I won back in December. I'm not sure if they are actually cleaning the clothes, but I can detect a bit of a smell from them is permeating the clothes. I'll write moer about them after I use them for a week or so. It kind of feels weird to be using such a natural soap product in the wash, and then throwing everything in the dryer with a chemical laden dryer sheet.

Nigel is home! That last enema worked and he pooped out some sort of rubbery squishy material that we are thinking came from one of the kids' toys, as well as the barium th evet had used for the contrast Xrays. I think it might have been one of those stretchy spiders, as I have caught him chewing the legs off of those. One day I thought one of the cats had some sort of horrid worm infestation when I went to clean the litter box and suddenly saw long bright pink tube-shaped things sticking out of the poop. He's breathing normally, eating again, and isn't acting like it hurts to jump on/off the furniture.

Hubby and I are very thankful that between the two of us, we have been scheduled for 14 mystery shops next week with GFK. That will help catch up from the blow that vet bill dealt us. Thank you for your prayers for our kitty. The vet said that he prayed before he went to bed last night that Nigel would pass whatever it was that was causing him so much pain and discomfort, since he didn't want to go have to go in and do surgery on him today. He has had several cats come in over the last month that have swallowed foreign objects and needed surgery... including one that had swallowed over 30 inches of ribbon. As you can tell by my crafting and projects posts, I have a lot of that kind of stuff laying around the house... ribbon, yarn, thread, etc. This is a big wake-up call that I need to try to stay harder on keeping the house picked up, lest little Mr. Eat-Everything-In-Sight gets a hankering to gnaw on some other forbidden item!

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Sierra got her stitches out today! She is healing very well from her tumor removal, and is back to being her darling playful self. While we were at the vet, I checked in on Nigel. He is breathing easier and appears to be more energetic, but still isn't eating much and hasn't had a bowel movement. The vet said that he wanted to do another enema, and it looks as though he is spending another night.

Since one of the only ways to get my mom up and out of bed for the day is to take her somewhere, I told her I would take her to the thrift store if she got up, ate breakfast, and took her pills. I was hoping to find more skirts for me, but came up empty. Of course, I did find two below-the-knee length adorable denim skirts for Cecilia and Abigail. They've been twirling around in them and talking about how girly they feel wearing them! $2.60 well spent.

I started this little preemie gown yesterday. I'm at 9.5" long and it is supposed to be 12" long, and then I need to do the little edging and trim around the chest and neck. I hope to finish it tomorrow.

Last night:


And tonight:


Once you get the hang of the skirt pattern, it is an easy project to pick up and take around with you to work on in those "little moments"... the waiting room at the vets, while giving the girls their spelling tests, or waiting for things to come out of the oven... Like the yummy cornbread I am about to go enjoy with my leftover pork and beans!

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Two cute quotes from the kids...

:::While driving in the car the other day...:::
Sabrina: "My foot fell asleep."
Abigail: "Great, now it's going to be up all night!"

:::While driving in the car today...:::
Niko: I know why it's called McDonald's. Because they MAKE food. Get it? MAKEDonald's!
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I tried my hand at shopping at Walgreens today. I don't feel like I did that great. I thought I had planned out in my head pretty well, but I guess the register didn't agree with my game plan. I ended up getting two boxes of Huggies wipes ($3.29 each), and two bottles of Garnier hair stuff (spray and mouse, on sale for $2.99). I used one $5.00 off Huggies coupon (internet printable), and two $2.00 off Garnier coupons (from the EasySaver catalog), and paid $4.60 for everything. I guess it's not that bad of a deal, seeing as how I saved over $11, but not as good as I had hoped to do. I will save the boxes of wipes for when we go camping... they're great for cleaning off the kids between trips to the showers or pool.
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Okay, here is the project that I did yesterday. It is nothing too fancy or "cute", but it saved me a lot of money. My girls share a bunk bed. We've had it for about 7 years now, and the bunkie boards that came with it were just plain worn out. The tops of the bunkie boards were covered with this kind of papery fabric, and from years of them crawling over the edge of it to get in bed it was all worn away and tearing. Since the mattress gets shoved against the wall, it exposes about 2 inches of the bunkie board, and all kinds of dirt, sand, dust, little pieces of toys, stray crumbs from the food they're not allowed to eat in their room, etc. kept getting trapped in that area. I would try to vacuum it out every time I vacuumed their room, but then they start poking at and ripping the cardboard too.
I looked into replacing the bunkie boards, and they range from $36-40 each at the discount furniture places in the area. There was no way I could swallow that chunk of change for something like that, so I turned to the trusty old thrift stores. $4.95 paid for enough heavy canvas fabric to completely reupholster both of the bunkie boards. I taped up the worst tears in the papery fabric, though I had debated with myself about taking it off completely. I decided to leave it place after cleaning them as thoroughly as possible and cutting off the stained areas, hoping that the paper and cardboard would provide some additional structural support.

I just laid the bunkie boards down on the fabric, and then with my Dad's help, we used his old manual upholstery stapler to tack the material around the edges... sort of like a huge seat cushion. We started with the centers of the 4 sides, then folded in the corners "present style", and then went along the rest of the ends.

They look 10,000% times better now, and the canvas material will be a lot sturdier than the previous covering. Now I won't be cringing every time I make their beds!

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I had to take Nigel to the vet today. He's been having labored breathing since Saturday; you can watch his sides suck in and out. He just hasn't been himself all weekend long, not wanting to play, ignoring his food. The vet at first thought that maybe he ate something he shouldn't have, like a piece of ribbon, but so far the xrays haven't shown any blockages, persay... though he did say it took longer for the barium to exit than it should have. He doesn't have a fever, so it's not an infection. The vet kept him overnight, so hopefully I will find out more tomorrow.

After going to the vet, I had to take my mom to pay her phone bill. While we waited in line, Niko got to play a video game.


I completed another preemie hat. This brings me up to #5!
I made Bev's Summer Hat with the flower toppers from here!


I also worked on another project that I will share with you tomorrow... here's a teaser though: I saved about $70 by DIYing!

Pay it Forward Project #2

This was the second of my three Pay It Forward projects that I completed. I decided to make a framed silhouette set for my friend Chandra, featuring the profiles of her four awesome kids. Because I wanted it to be a complete surprise, I had to go hunting through her blog for photos that showed each of the kids' profiles clearly.

Using Microsoft Word, I cropped and resized each of the pictures so that they were proportionate to each other and printed them out. I cut out the profiles from the printed pictures and laid them right side down on the wrong side of black cardstock, and traced around them with a pen. I used scissors to cut them out.

Because the frame was 18" long, I couldn't use scrapbooking paper for the background, so I picked out this pretty fat-quarter of fabric in one of her favorite colors. I taped the fabric in place around the cardboard, and then mounted the silhouettes with scrapbooking adhesive tabs.

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Inspired by Kimba's blog, A Soft Place to Land, I decided to head to the Dollar Tree to find myself a little something to spray paint. I found this chubby little bird with an awful paint job... the picture doesn't do his garishness justice. The yellow and orange were nearly neon.



I love him so much more now, all in a pretty coat of glossy white.


After the Dollar Tree, I went through the Goodwill and found myself a new skirt. I've really been wanting to wear more skirts lately (dresses are pretty much a lost cause with my shape), and so I was excited to find one that I liked. It's a pretty floral skirt with green, blue, purple and white... and it was the half-off color tag so it only cost me $2.50!

When I got home, my mom asked me to take her out to a thrift store too. We waited until the girls got home and had their snack, and then we headed out. We ended up going to two thrift stores, but the only thing I bought was this little bunny for 45c. He's getting a coat of glossy white spray paint too!


It is pretty fun to go poking around the thrift stores, trying to look beyond the ugly to see what can be made pretty with just some spray paint. And all of this fun only cost me $4.00 + paint that I already had!

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We had a semi-busy Saturday. Sabrina and Abigail had to be at another local elementary school this morning at 8 a.m. for the "Great GATE Escape". It's a once-a-year event for all of the 3rd-6th graders that are in the Gifted and Talented Program. They had a great time and were so very excited when we picked them up at noon.

They both got to do a class on Geology cupcakes and learned about the different layers of the Earth, and then they had separate classes for the second session. Abigail's session was on Origami Math. She made a whole bunch of different origami sculptures... a piano, a swan, a house, a rabbit, and a box. Sabrina's second session was in Technology, and she learned how to do a PowerPoint presentation. They're both looking forward to the GATE summer program now, where as before Abigail was thinking of skipping it because she wasn't sure if she would like it.

Here's a random picture of my hubby smushing my sweet Henry baby. Henry is such a docil cat, and will just lay limp in your arms while you do stuff like this. Nigel... not so much.


Cecilia finally lost that snaggle-tooth. She bit into an animal cracker at snack time and it really started bleeding. I promised her a McDonald's ice cream sundae if she would just let me pop it out. She finally agreed, the tooth came right out with barely a tug, and we both enjoyed a hot fudge sundae.

Is it too early to start singing "All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth"?

I started, and completed, my preemie hat for March. This one is from Bev's Bumpy Hat for preemies (and newborns). Sorry my picture came out so yellow... I'll try to take a better picture when it is light out tomorrow. I really liked this pattern, it was a very quick work-up and I love the little bumps!

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My English class started this morning. I don't have much to say about it yet, since the hour and a half we were there was pretty much just filled with attendance and wait lists and adds. I do have an assignment due next week... I have to write at least a one page autobiography introducing myself to the class. We are also supposed to read two short stories from the text book. It's been a very long time since I took a writing class, so I hope that I do well in it.

When I got home from school, I did not get to collapse on the couch as I had planned. One of the limbs on my Dad's lemon tree had broke under the weight of hundreds of lemons, so we had to spend about two hours cutting off branches and removing as many ripe lemons as we could so that more branches didn't break. The branch that broke was about six inches in diameter to give you an idea of how heavy the branch had to have been! We filled two wheelbarrows to overflowing with lemons, boxed them up, and set them on the curb. They were all gone within an hour.

I finished a second preemie hat for this month. It was a super simple one that I just worked on for a minute or two here and there while waiting for programs to load and such. It's just rows of BLO double crochet, with a pompom on top.


Here are the three hats that I have made so far this year:


Why is it that little boys always have such gorgeous lashes??


He makes mine look so puny:


Our plans for the weekend include buying textbooks, going on a 16-mile ride, making homemade pizza, and bribing the teenager to mow the lawn.

Pay it Forward Project #1

Now that it has been received, I can share what I made for my first Pay It Forward project. I made a bow holder for A Frugal Friend.

It all started with this little frame:


I took the glass out of the frame, and spraypainted it with many, many coats of a glossy white spray paint.



I taped off most of the glass, except for a strip across the bottom, and added scrapbooking letters.

I gooped on lots of etching cream, and then rinsed it all off and dried it.



For the inside of the frame, I layered two colors of blue cardstock, some pretty striped vellum, and a picture of her daughter. (Face edited out for privacy.) I topped the corner of the frame with a hand-tied blue bow hotglued in place.



I finished it off with two 24-inch long strips of grosgrain ribbon to provide a whopping four feet of bow-hanging storage!

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I started a "wool-eater" blanket today, and am really enjoying the pattern. I wanted to use up some leftover acrylic (that's oh, about 15+ years old now), so that is the purple and the variegated yarns. I picked up some "soft raspberry" Red Heart to add a 3rd color to the blanket. Abigail has already claimed ownership of it because of the purples in it.

I can totally see this in a lot of pretty colorways and would like to make more. I'd also like to try it in some really soft baby yarn, or at least some Simply Soft as this scratchier Wintuk and Red Heart yarn really does a number on my hands!

Recycled Crayon Hearts

The kids wanted to give something to the two toddlers next door, and I didn't want to go anywhere because it was raining. I saw this tutorial on Craftster and realized I had the same foil molds in the cabinet, and there are always broken crayons lurking around!
I taped the little tags on to the backs of each plastic-wrapped heart (ziploc baggies with the zipper part cut off). Their mom LOVED them (the little ones were sleeping off a nasty cold).

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I did do a lot of errand running today, but I'm not going to focus on that right now. I am not going to tell you that I went to DD's Discounts, Joann's, WalMart, Walgreens, and the dry cleaners. I am going to tell you that I found some adorable fabric in the clearance section at Joann's, and made this sweet little skirt for Cecilia. Perfect for Valentine's Day!






That is $1.75 worth of fabric, a bit of thread, and about 50c worth of no-fold elastic!

Oh, and here's one of the sandwiches that I made for the girls this morning. I "painted" one slice of bread with food coloring and milk, and toasted it. Then I used a small heart-shaped canape plunger to press out hearts, flipped the sandwich over, and inserted the heart into the plain toasted side. I also included a sweet little printed vintage valentine in each of their lunches (and one in hubby's lunch too!).



Sorry about the dark inside pictures... it's raining like crazy!!

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February's preemie hat. So sweet, so tiny.

The pattern is from YouCanMakeThis.

Goals, revisisted.

January is almost over, so it's time to take another look at my 2009 goals list. I have a few more projects that I want to add!

1. Sew something with a zipper. (Pillow tutorial.)
Update: Purchased Elvis fabric online, waiting for it to be delivered... going to make pillows for hubby's grandma.
2. Conquer buttonholes.
Update: Skimmed the section in my sewing machine manual on how to use the automatic buttonholer function. Didn't get any farther than that.
3. Figure out how to purl, and knit something.
Update: Haven't touch my knitting needles yet this year. Except to use them to poke out corners when sewing things.
4. Crochet a poncho for Abbi. (And matching hat.)
5. Crochet a pair of socks.
Update: Got a couple of promising pattern links from Elisabeth! Check out Crocheted socks and Crocheted Baby socks.
6. Athenian Scarf crochet-a-long. (Broomstick lace)
Update: Still need to pick a yarn for this, and also want to pick up a set of big knitting needles to use as a yarn holder - just leaving the loops alone is too scary for me! I prefer the security of having them anchored to something, which is how I learned this lace technique.
7. Crochet a preemie hat each month to donate. ( 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 )
Update: Have a pattern picked out for February's hat! It's from YouCanMakeThis.com, under their free patterns - the preemie windowpane hat.
8. Crochet a cabled hat.
9. Use WiiFit at least 5x each week for 30 minutes.
Update: I was doing really well with this for 3 weeks in a row, until my headaches started getting worse. I will start up again when I have them more under control, but as it is now when I am waking up with a headache even, I can barely drag myself through my day as is.
10. Log in to Wellness360 regularly and keep track of food and exercise.
Update: Again, I was doing pretty well this, but I have found that it's really hard to log your food when so much of it is homemade. It's a big pain in the butt to try to estimate calories in stuff when you can't just look at a package. It's a cool program though, as you earn money for logging in and updating your logs. If you'd like a referral, let me know!
11. Use the vintage apron pattern that I bought last year from eBay and make myself a kitschy adorable apron (see #2, conquer buttonholes).
12. Finish the little cowboy quilt that I started 4 years ago.
13. Crochet another Lacy Shells poncho, for Amelia.
14. Attempt an amirugumi. (Never again!)
15. Finish my "mystery" project.
16. Finish Cecilia's scarf to match her pompom hat.
17. Make a hexagon afghan with yarn scraps.
18. Finish the green granny square baby blanket that is lurking in my van.
19. Figure out what to make for my 3 "Pay It Forward" giveaways, and finish them.
20. Make my bed every day for a week!

I am really enjoying having a list like this. It's helped me keep on track with completing projects, and it's handy to have all the links available too!

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A toddler sized Lacy Shell's poncho for Sarah-Michelle's little Amelia. Made with Caron Simply Soft Eco in Lilac Bud, size I hook, with an added drawstring at the neck (so that it can be adjusted to not fall off her lil' shoulders). This was a very quick project! :)

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I finished my cable hat today! I am so proud of myself for completing this project, as I had some issues reading the pattern and almost quit on it several times. I'm very glad that I did finish it though, because I love it!

I used Caron Simply Soft Eco in Soft Taupe, an I hook, and only did 3 rows of the edging for the band (I felt like 5 would have been just too long). It's a very thick warm hat, and I haven't taken it off all day long!

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Here are the pictures of Niko's finished quilt! Pardon the wrinkles... he slept with it last night and I wasn't about to iron it again just for a couple of pictures!It's 41"x35".

Cheese Dooooooooooooooooooooooohme.

Dome, sweet dome.

I refurbished the cheese dome this morning. It was a lot easier than I was anticipating. The "tile" inside was like a piece of tin that was glued on with a layer of cork to the middle of the base. I used a small chisel to pry up the edges and pop it off. Goo-Gone and a rag took care of the remaining adhesive and cork bits, but it took about twenty minutes of elbow grease! Then I used some Old English scratch cover for dark woods, and gave it a good polishing. I had intended to paint the base black, but I really like it better in it's natural wood state for now!
All I have to do now is get some cute seasonal dillybobs and whatnots to display under the glass. A trip to the Walmarts may soon be in order!

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I'm almost done with this quilt that I started over four years ago! I had only made the quilt top, and had gotten frustrated with the squares not lining up perfectly. It sat folded on the bookcase or in my closet for years. Since one of my resolutions for this year is to finish my unfinished projects, I grabbed some bandana print fabric and some flannel from Walmart. Today I sewed on the strips of bandana fabric, and sewed the 3 layers together... the quilt top, some white flannel for the inner layer, and the cute cowboy flannel for the back. Now I just need to top-stitch it and then tie it together with some pretty embroidery floss. I don't think it's too shabby for my very first quilt!
I chose the plaid pieces because they reminded me of the shirts that my Dad always wore. The sole denim square is from a pair of his jeans. The white flannel blanket that I used for the batting was one of my blankies as a baby. There's a lot of special meaning to it for me. :)