A message from my son

Lined up

I enjoy organizing, but I hate cleaning. Anyone else know what I mean? Organizing is fun because it’s creating a pattern, almost like art. You can line things up by size or color or frequency of use. You can create cute little boxes or baskets to put odds and ends in so they’re not just an eye sore. Fun times. Cleaning, on the other hand, is not like art. It’s like work. Pain in the butt work. Dishes, laundry, toys: piles and piles of stuff that multiply and never end. I’ve found that I can happily clean while I organize but I can’t organize while I clean. This is because the cleaning will never get done. Meaning, if my goal is to organize, a good deal of cleaning will obviously happen in the process. But if my goal is to get everything clean, stopping to look something over and decide whether or not to keep it and where it should go and then moving other things around to better locations to accommodate my new system: doesn’t work.

Just ask my mom.

I used to drive her nuts when I was supposed to be cleaning my room and I would spend a solid 5 minutes starting at each individual item I had picked up, reminiscing about where and when I got it, etc., before moving it all of 6 inches to the left. She also used to hate taking me shopping for clothes. I always had a definite picture in my head of what I wanted to get and we never could find a store that could read my mind.

But I digress.

My awesome SIL spent the past few days organizing most of the closets in her house. She posted pictures of the before and after this morning and suddenly I remembered how much I like organizing. So after half a morning in our master bedroom closet, here is a before and after of my own.

Before

      

My heck-a-cute kids

After

A couple weeks ago I did some work on my side (the garbage bag in the first picture has a bunch of my clothes in it to donate.) So today I did Kevin’s side, which included sorting through all the baby clothes I’d thrown in there as the boys grew out of them. See how pretty?

All color sequenced  

Told you I love a good pattern. Of course, most of these shirts had been in that pile on the floor for a while. But wrinkled is the new ironed right?

I don’t think you can see very well in these pictures but I have only white hangers for my side and only blue hangers for Kevin’s side. I did that last year and I think it really helps make things look nicer when there aren’t 15 different types and colors of hangers floating around the closet. Only problem is, if I ever need to jimmy the lock on my car; no wire coat hangers to be found. Ah, well, c’est la vie.

Project Tweek

What do you think?
Button?

Or no button?

Ah, decisions, decisions…

Digi Frame Makeover

(Thanks again to Michele for the inspiration for this project!)

Sweet Silhouette Print & Cut Action!

Measure frame!

Design covering in Silhouette Studio

Select “show registration marks”

Print on white card stock 

Select “detect registration marks”

Cut

(Hole toward bottom is for access to buttons)

Add some vinyl lettering (also cut with Silhouette; obviously!) and attach new covering to frame (I used regular old scotch tape but if it falls off I might go back and use something sturdier.)

Bam! Done!

Love it

Why didn’t IIII think of that??

Two Christmases ago, Kevin very thoughtfully gifted me with a nice black digital photo frame. I was quite excited and thanked him profusely. I then proceeded to never use the thing once. At one point we even demoted it to use as a night light for Alexander. We’ve since bought a whole four pack of night lights and the frame has gone back to its completely dormant state.

Enter IShareCrafts!

I was looking around HowDoesShe at all their neat new Valentines Day ideas and they happened to share a few links that looked interesting. First I clicked ISharePrintables and bookmarked it right away. Then I went to IShareCrafts and before I was there 2 seconds I noticed craft #1122 by The Scrap Shoppe.

Makeover your digital photo frame! What a great idea!

Now I’m definitely not going to do mine the same exact way Michele did hers (wouldn’t go with my décor) but just the idea is all I needed. All I gotta do now is go through my craft supplies and try to find something I already have that will do the trick. So sweetie, thank you again for my Christmas gift. I think I will be getting some good use out of it now. Love you!

You've got (real) mail.

I love ordering stuff online! It's so nice to have true one-stop shopping. And I must admit, I can be a bit of an "Amazon Super Saver Shipping" junky. You know, when you only have one thing to buy but you buy 3 other things too just to get your total up to $25? :-) Good times.

Anyway, just kind of rambling because I'm in a good mood today. My expressions vinyl order came over the weekend and I'm excited to get my "I get to come home to you." quote put up. I actually probably won't do it today because there are a couple of people I want to show how it works so I'll have to wait til they can come over. But getting stuff in the mail is just so fun.

What's your favorite thing to get in the mail?

Cooking tip

You know how, when you’re cracking eggs into a bowl, every now and then a tiny little piece of the shell breaks off and lands in the bowl? Grrr, right? Because then you try to get it out, either with your finger or some other nearby utensil and no matter how quick you are, the thing is bobbing and weaving and you just can’t get a hold of it! Well, here to the rescue is a little trick I learned in Home Ec. in about 7th grade.

Use one of the big pieces of the shell as a scoop!

It still takes a little finesse, but (probably for the same reason the little piece of shell runs away from you when you chase it) the big piece of shell slices right through your lovely collection of egg whites and lets you pick that sucker right out of there.

So there you have it, from the “I don’t know how to cook” queen herself, a cooking tip. Enjoy.

Read the Scriptures!

Thanks to my sister-in-law Katie for sharing this awesome scripture study help on her blog! The site www.readthescriptures.com offers preplanned or personalized scripture reading schedules. You pick one or many and they will email you your selection(s). I love this idea because I'm currently working in Primary (with the little kids) at church and since that means I don't get to go to Sunday School myself, I chose to have the preset weekly lesson scriptures sent to me so I can keep up with the grownup class. I've been wanting to get back in the habit of daily reading and this seems like the perfect thing to give me a little push. The site also has a bunch of other extra features like highlighting and stuff I haven't tried yet but it looks like they thought of everything. It also lets you form teams to be kind of a study group for discussions and stuff. Oh, and did I mention this service is totally free? Yay for free! So now I'm going to post this and go read my first day's selection. Let the spiritual nourishment begin!

Photos of Photos

The other night after I hung the Alexander and Jacob wall pictures, I decided I would hang all the other pictures I’d framed but never hung. Kevin was going to the store so I asked him to get me some more nails…


That’s a box of 300 right there. Don’t think I’ll be running out again any time soon.

Photoshop + CorelDraw = Yippie!

I tried to use my Silhouette this morning to cut out a nice big tree to put on the wall in Alexander’s room. Apparently I still have a few things to learn, however, because I set the cutting thickness too high and the vinyl ended up all twisted around.
So this afternoon, to cheer myself up, I threw together this little scrapbook-y photo.

(little test of the "colored pencil" photoshop filter)

Printed it out as a 5x7 and now I’m going to frame it and put it somewhere. Then I’m going to hug my baby because he’s being so good even though I’m sure he feels icky (had to get shots yesterday.)