Weekly Goals

I know it's not Monday but give me a break. It's the end of the semester and I had a ton of homework to do! At least next week is Finals and I'm done with this semester! Woot!

Weekly Goals List

1.   Paint Peanut’s dresser

2.  Start my Mother’s Day gift

3.  Make Chore list for the kids

Earth Day!!!

Have I mentioned how much I love my children? Well I do! They are the most fabulous and caring kids I've ever known. Today was Earth Day and in celebration I had planned a few craft activities and a trash walk around our city park. Unfortunately, due to my Ballerina having an upset stomach, we only got to do one craft activity and the trash walk was cancelled.

The activity that we did get to do was making bookmarks out of paint swatches. My daughter did most of the work at my verbal instruction. We took blue and green swatches and cut a hole out of one of the colors, put the other color behind it  and taped them together. This was a representation of our planet. Then we hole-punched the top and added a blue & green ribbon. Cupcake was so excited about this that she made one for everyone in her class and took them to school this morning! Peanut & Bulldozer could care less about the craft.

Well tonight, due to miss Ballerina the rest of our plans were cancelled. But did that stop my kids from celebrating Earth Day in their own way? Nope. They went and created this:

It's the Recycle City!!! I know this because they posted signs.

This is the most elaborate and amazing city that I've ever seen and it's mostly made out of discarded items that they found.

The Police Station

The Bank

Walmart





Dollar Tree (Mommy loves this place)

Grocery Store

Hospital

City Hall & Lowes

A Residential House

My little creators with their Mall.

How stinkin' cute was Recycle City! I love them!!

Carole

Getting ready for Earth Day!!!

Earth Day is tomorrow so my house has been busy doing recyclable crafts. I have to admit that as a student teacher, I'm asking my own kids to do them before thinking about adding them to my future curriculum. (Is that smart or bizarre? I can't decide.) Anyways, moving onto the crafts...

Since I'm planning on having my own classroom one day and currently I have an infant with tons of empty formula cans, I decided to recycle those cans to hopefully put them to use in my future classroom.

This was my first time using Mod Podge. My dad is a pretty crafty person and assured me that I would be fine but it was not easy to get the wrinkles out. If anyone has any suggestions for this, I would love to hear them.
Even with the occasional wrinkle, I did a pretty good job and even got carried away with the whole project.

I think they look cool.

Also in celebration of Earth day, my kids got involved by making coffee filter Earths. The kids got around the table and I gave each of them a paper plate and a coffee filter. I put a pile of washable markers in the middle. Since we were making the Earth, I gave them blues, greens, and a few yellows.

They had a blast. Bulldozer (my 2 year old) was acting as if it was his birthday or something. He giggled the entire time while occasionally missing his coffee filter completely and coloring his hands. After they colored as much as they wanted, I took their paper plate and sprayed it with water. About 4 sprays worked well.

After I sprayed, we watched the colors spread slowly across the coffee filter. Then I set them out to dry.

I let them dry completely. It took most of the evening. We just left them alone until after dinner so it was about 3 hours total. After they dried, we glued them to black construction paper and wrote their names on the bottom of the page.

I made Ballerina's for her since she's only 3 months old. LOL! I have to say that I think Peanut's Earth turned out the best. It was full of vibrant colors and in fact, all he did was color very thick in the center before getting tired of coloring but the water spread the colors beautifully.

I have about 3 more Earth day activities planned and we have 2 days to complete them so I"ll be adding more.

**In other news, I still have yet to complete any of my weekly goals but I don't have any classes on Friday so maybe I'll at least get one or two completed then. We'll see!**

Carole

Goals for this Week!

On one of the many blogs that I stalk, the blogger occasionally blogs about her goals list. I have just recently began to think that this may be a very good idea. It may just keep me on task a little better. So I decided to try it today since it's Monday.

Weekly Goals

1.   Go to Home Depot to check on dresser drawer wood.

2.  Come up with a snazzy idea for my classroom treasure chest.

3.  Decorate for Spring (a little late...I know)

Meringue Madness!!

I've felt a little lazy lately. I have to be honest, I haven't tried any new recipes in a long while. Lately, it seems that the thought of dirtying up my kitchen is depressing. Normally, I'm baking or cooking up something awesome but for the past few weeks, I haven't wanted to. At all.

However, even though I've been avoiding the kitchen like the plague, I did manage a pretty nice coconut creme pie. My husband is a huge fan of pies but I haven't been a fan of making them because the meringue thing scared me. Finally, I decided to take a stab at it. And....

                                                          It turned out wonderful!!!!



But this doesn't change the fact that I'm still terrified of making meringue. At least I feel more confident about it now! 

Carole

Discarded Treasures

I live in a town that has "bulk pick up" four times a year. This means that if you have any big items or excess boxes, ect. then you can put these things on the curb during these four particular times and the city will send people around to pick up those things. (We have city trash cans and can only fill those during the normal trash days.)

Well I am my daddy's girl and I have a habit of looking at one thing and seeing its potential in turning it into another thing and often, I drive around during the "bulk pick up" time and see if something useful is out there. This time, I hit the jackpot!! I found two items on the side of the road just ripe for the picking.

This is a wonderful four drawer dresser made of wood that was just abandoned. I'm loving it!! But, it needs obvious work...

But I think with a little time and effort, I can make it look terrific. This is my summer project and it's a work in progress. I'll post updated pictures as time goes on.

Now the other little treasured piece of discard that I found was......drum roll please.....

A sewing desk!!!!! I could not be more excited about this thing's potential!!! Again, it is a work in progress and I'll update as I go along!

Carole

A little lovey for little miss Ballerina

So I got bored today and made another little thing for Ballerina.

I used some leftover scraps of fabric that I had from Ballerina's bow board and decided to put it to use. My daughter decided she wanted to try her hand at sewing so I gave her some scraps to do one for herself.

She did pretty good but she has a heavy foot and got a little carried away on the stitching. But overall, not bad for a nine-year old. Unfortunately, Cupcake wouldn't let me take a picture of it. (I think she was nervous)
Here is the final product from me.

The main difference between this one and the last one is that I didn't include the rattle so this one is just a little stuffed lovey for her to snuggle.

Carole

First time sewing...

So I've been lacking in my blogging lately. I blame my five kids, my chaotic Spring Break, and my busy school schedule. It's not a great excuse, I agree but it's an excuse nontheless. With that out of the way...onto the crafting blog.

So I did manage to get a tiny bit crafty recently.  Ballerina is three month old now. And even though her interest in toys with noise has increased, her hand-eye coordination hasn't. So I figured that this was the perfect time to break out my new sewing machine and attempt to use it. I received it for my birthday in February but I've been too chicken to use it. 

I am a confessed lurker on several mommy-craft blogs. I love them....I'm addicted. Anyways, on one particular blog that I'm obsessed with (Samster Mommy @ blogspot) the supermom, Natasha made her infant daughter a homemade rattle using a t-shirt, ribbons, stuffing, and a plastic case with beads. It was genius. I think she called it a Sunshine Rattle and it is so super cute.

Well I decided that this would be the perfect thing for my little miss so I tried it. Only, I didn't have any yellow fabric and I had an excess of old black t-shirts and iron-on patches. I started by cutting two circles out of the t-shirt and ironed on my little patches for a splash of color against the black.

After that I placed and sewed on my ribbons. I figured the brighter the better. Now on Samster Mommy, she used a plastic rectangle case as the rattle in between her two circles, I didn't have one of these but I did have a ton of plastic eggs leftover from last Easter so I took one of those and put about 5 beads inside it and super-taped it. Then I sewed the two circles together with the patches facing each other so I could turn it inside out. (This is where I forgot to put the ribbons on the inside of the circle so it would eventually be on the outside when I turned it inside out and ended up needing to start over. Oops!)

It turned out pretty good considering I didn't know what I was doing. I did end up with my final side being a little wonky. I had stuffed it beautifully and was ready to sew the last little bit when Ballerina suddenly demanded my undivided attention, forcing me to speed things up and making a wonky side.

Ballerina didn't seem to mind though. The rattle ended up being a big success and she loves the thing. I think I may end up making many more from leftover scraps.

Carole