Love Letters (Boy Edition)

Tomorrow ends Ryan's first week of school. Each day I've been painstakingly packing his lunches and praying he's eating. Eating is a chore in this house and, unfortunately, I am somewhat limited in what I can send unless I want to drive his teachers completely BSC.



His daily reports have been coming back great and most of his lunch is being eaten. Hallelujah.



On top of the whole, "will he or won't he eat this" nonsense, I have been writing little notes for him each day. Just so he remembers that I'm still here and so that he knows that I am missing him every second of every day. I am not an artist in the least, and after a few days I have exhausted my repertoire of doodles for his lunch box notes. That is to say, I drew a flower, a heart, a sun and a stick figure. And I'm spent.



So tonight I created little love letters to tuck into his lunch box instead. This is much easier than being creative at 11:30 p.m. And the notes are quite cute. I thought some other mommies might be able to benefit from my insanity. Feel free to download a set of love letters and use them with your kiddos. I printed them on cardstock, but you can print them on normal printer paper. Cut along the lines, write a little note, tuck it into your little guy's lunch box and ta-da! Awesomeness.



Enjoy :)

Preschool Presents and Free Download

The twins have a lot of the same friends in their class this year, so I didn't want to give out candy cane play dough again (thought it was a huge hit). Instead this year, I made gingerbread play dough.

Mix all of the ingredients together in a medium size sauce pan and cook over medium to low heat until it starts to congeal and get doughy. It cooks pretty quickly. I doubled the batch and ended up with enough play dough for 20 quarter cup containers. I also added clear glitter to the pot for some extra holiday sparkle. Clearly, that's optional.

The little plastic containers were from Dollar Tree and came ten to a pack (for $1, super steal). The ribbons were just scrap ribbons that I had from previous years. The labels I made and personalized for the R's, but if anyone is interested (and still has time!) in doing this project for their preschool friends I created a universal label, the labels fit on Avery 22807 sheets and the 2" size fits perfectly on the dollar store containers. If you can't find the Avery labels -- I couldn't either -- full sticker sheets and a 2" circle punch (which I found at Staples and Michael's, respectively) work just fine.

 { download here }

I hope everyone is staying warm and almost done shopping. Nothing is worse than the holiday rush. Oh, and if you live somewhere warm don't rub it in in the comments!

Big Brother and Big Sister T-Shirts

In celebration of Lola's big gender reveal anniversary, I'm sharing the templates for and instructions for making the twins' DIY big brother and big sister t-shirts. A huge thank you and shout out to Grace over at Finley and Oliver for the original inspiration and guidance, last year, when I took this project on.

What you'll need: 

• A pre-washed, blank t-shirt, one piece, or tank (Walmart is a great source for $3 t-shirts that don't have pockets)


• Felt or fabric piece for the applique (I got mine at Michaels)


• Embroidery floss and needle (also at Michaels)


• Scissors (the small ones with a pointy tip work best) 


• Heat n' Bond fusible webbing (also at Michaels)


• Template for the applique (download big brother and/or big sister templates here, you may need to adjust the size of your template as these were made for 24M sized shirts)

I didn't photograph all of my steps when I made these shirts originally, so I apologize in advance for the detailed description sans photos. If you run into issues or have questions, feel free to email me or leave them in the comments and I'll try to talk you through it!



Instructions:



First take the template and place it under a sheet of your fusible webbing. Trace the "big brother" or "big sister" on to the webbing. You'll want to make any thin lines a little thicker so they will be easier to cut and stitch later on. I left the templates printing in reverse, this is how you want to trace them so that when you flip them over and adhere them to your garment they read correctly!



Then iron your webbing onto your felt or fabric. Set your iron to the wool setting and make sure your steam is turned OFF. Iron the design onto your felt or fabric, holding the iron against the heat n' bond and felt for about three seconds. Do not over iron.



Carefully cut the appliques out. This applique is a bit detailed, which is why having small, pointy tipped scissors is helpful. And why tracing the thin connecting lines a bit thicker is also helpful.

Next, peel away the paper that is still on your letters exposing your fusible webbing. Place your appliques where you want them on the t-shirt with the fusible webbing/glossy side down. Iron the applique to the garment by applying light pressure over the felt for about 10 seconds, again using the wool setting with no steam. Be super careful not to over iron, especially if you are using felt. I used felt from Michael's when I made the kids' shirts and I melted the felt and had to start over again. The shirts were salvageable, but the process was annoying.

Now that your letters are attached to your garment, you're ready to start the applique process. For this process you will stitch by hand using a straight stitch, which is a really simple stitch to master. If you aren't sure how to straight stitch a quick youtube search will solve that problem for you. Cut about 3-4 feet of your embroidery thread. Each skein of thread has six strands, separate two of the strands from the piece you've cut and thread them through your needle.



I used contrasting threads to make the applique pop, but if you're nervous about sewing or just starting out, using coordinating threads will be more forgiving. Once you have finished stitching all of the appliques, you're done. Voila!



Be sure to wash your garments inside out, to help the felt wash and wear better.

Preschool Gifts

The last of my holiday-DIY this year came in the form of the kids' gifts for their friends at preschool. My friend Kim made candy cane play dough for her daughters' day care friends and I was so thankful for the inspiration when I had to come up with inexpensive (not annoying) gifts for nine littles. 

Thankfully the only thing I had to buy were jelly jars ($9 for a pack of 16), because I am running out of time to get everything done before Christmas and schlepping my little angels in and out of craft stores is my personal idea of hell. The card stock was leftover from a three years ago when I made my own holiday cards, the glitter in the play dough was leftover from the twins' first birthday invites and the jingle bells were leftover from gift wrapping two years ago. The reindeer clipart is a free font from dafont.com called Xmas Cartoon. 

To avoid going out and buying fabric for the jar tops, I just traced the circular jelly jar lids onto the holiday card stock and then cut the circles out. The secondary jar lid held the circles in place and hid the string that holds the gift tags/jingle bells (which are connected to a zot placed on top of the metal lid). The whole set up took me 45 minutes spread over two nights after the kids went to bed.  

I used the same play dough recipe that I posted previously (here) and just added glitter and peppermint essential oil -- which I bought at the Green Grocer -- to the pot while the goo cooked and transformed into dough. 

Their friends and their friends' mommies loved it, which is awesome. Especially because this is one of those projects that looks like it takes a lot of time and effort, but really is so quick and easy.  

The Twelve Beers of Christmas

I come from a very large Italian family. You know the kind that I'm talking about -- a room full of thirty people and they're all aunts, uncles and first cousins. Loud, opinionated and everyone has a mustache (kidding...kind of). We usually head down down to New Jersey for Christmas Eve with my family and then drive home to spend Christmas Day with Joe's parents. What this means is that annually I'm scrambling to come up with A LOT of presents that don't break the bank for A LOT of people.



There's nothing I hate more than wasting money on junk someone doesn't want and/or need in the name of gift-giving. I have two uncles and two cousins who are of age and I got it in my head that I'd give them beer. Who doesn't love beer? I remember seeing a 12-pack called The Twelve Beers of Christmas last year, but of course I couldn't find it on my one afternoon of child-free Christmas shopping, which was all the time I was giving this beer to magic itself into existence.



I did find a 12-pack of Saranac called The Twelve Beers of Winter though. Which leads me to believe that this was the beer formerly known as The Twelve Beers of Christmas and one of two things happened -- Saranac decided to broaden their market reach beyond Christians at Christmas and changed the name OR some atheist filed a complaint that claimed drinking Christmas beer infringed on their freedom or some shit like that. Either way, there is no such thing as The Twelve Beers of Christmas.



Not to be thwarted, I remembered a blog post that my friend Heather wrote last year (which is amazing, because most days I can't even remember if I showered or not) and her creativity totally bailed my ass gift out. Ladies and gentlemen...I present to you a six pack o' reindeer.

Festive, right? Brown pipe cleaners, googly eyes, pompoms, a hot glue gun and a half hour later and ta-da. The beer and the crafts were around $50 (for four six packs), so not bad at all. Hopefully they love them. It's definitely better than a lifetime subscription to the jelly of the month club.

Homemade Play Dough

The kids have a sitter that comes twice a week while I run around to vendor meetings and such for the new house. I try to leave them activities to do each time their sitter comes, both so she can keep them occupied and so they have some fun while mama's away.



This week I made them up a bunch of play dough and had Joe swing by Wally World on his way home from work to pick up a cookie cutter set for the monkeys. He scored this 101-piece set for ten bucks. I'm so proud of him.

I sorted out all of the pieces so I can break them out at different times of the year (letters, numbers, Valentine's Day, Christmas, Halloween, etc.) and left a bag of the random shapes and animals out for the kids this week.



I surfed Pinterest for a few recipes and went along with the most common cooktop method. The dough came out great and I'm hoping the kids get a kick out of playing with it. I'm also hoping that it's nice outside so they can keep their mess contained to the spaces I can clean with a hose. Repeat after me: "fun does not have to equal mess". (At least that's what I keep telling myself.)

Play Dough Recipe

• 1 cup flour 


• 1 cup water 


• 1/4 cup salt 


• 2 tsp. cream of tartar 


• 1 Tbsp. vegetable oil 


• food coloring 

Dump all the ingredients into a pot and whisk them together.

Cook over a medium heat, stirring constantly until the mixture begins to form a ball. Do not panic when it seems to start forming lumps, this is what happens right before it turns into a ball.

I kept the food coloring out of the pot so I only had to make one batch to get multiple colors. Once the dough was formed, I threw it in my KitchenAid stand mixer with the dough horn and some food coloring to "knead" the dough and mix in the color. But I didn't have enough dough to actually make the KitchenAid do any kneading, so I ended up working in the dye with my hands which are a little pink and green after the fact. Sweet. Note to self: next time cook in two different pots and add dye in while dough is still in liquid form.

Once it forms a ball, let it cool and knead it with your hands until it's soft. Then store it in a sealed container or ziploc bag. Supposedly the dough will last for up to six months. I'll be happy if it lasts for six weeks.

Making an Upholstered Headboard

We completed our headboard over the weekend. It came out pretty well for our first run at such a project. We both agree we'd definitely do it again and that it will be much easier the second time around with some of the lessons we learned, which I'll share here. Definitely beats spending several hundred (or more) on a store bought piece!



Supplies we used:

• 1" plywood (bought at Home Depot and cut to - 79" x 45" - for free there) $37


• 2 bags of 1" foam (purchased at Walmart) $29


• 110" x 110" heavy ply quilters batting (purchased at Walmart) $12


• fabric (3 yards for our King, purchased at JoAnnes) $14


• D-rings (purchased at Home Depot) $3


• heavy duty picture wire (purchased at Home Depot) $4


• heavy duty picture hooks 


• spray adhesive


• saw (if you are going to cut out a design) 


• staple gun 


• electric sander (although you can use a regular sanding block)

Total Cost: $99*



* note we already owned the power tools, spray adhesive and picture hooks



Things we could have done to bring the cost down further:

• We used a really high quality plywood, there were much cheaper 1" pieces, but I wanted something that was quality and had little warping and some bulk to it. It was much harder to hang because it was so heavy! The 1/2" plywood high quality plywood was $8 cheaper. So even going with a thinner plywood would have saved us some cash. Going with cheaper plywood altogether would have also saved money!


• You can order foam offline and get it much cheaper, but time was not a luxury we had, so I went with what was available, it was cheaper at Walmart than JoAnnes. Husband and I both agreed that we could have easily done 1/2" plywood with 1/2" foam. OR we could have just done the 1" plywood with two bags of the quilters batting and no foam (we were able to fold the batting from one bag in half and get two layers out of it, so two bags = 4 layers). Skipping the foam altogether and adding more batting would have saved us about $15

So right there with the plywood and foam you could drop the price by another $25 if you needed to!



Getting Started:

• Decide on a shape for your headboard. A rectangle would have been the easiest choice, but my husband will tell you I never pick the easy choice! My inspiration was the Brennan Headboard from Pottery Barn

• When buying plywood at a home improvement store, you pay for the whole sheet no matter what size you cut it to. The piece we purchased was 4' x 8'. Before we brought it home, we had Home Depot cut it down to a smaller rectangle for us. Our mattress is 15" deep and 77" wide. I knew I wanted the headboard to be completely hidden by the mattress and stick out over the top of the mattress by 30" and I also knew I wanted it overset the mattress by an inch on either side. So we had them cut the plywood down to 45" x 79". 


• We saved the scrap wood just in case we decided to do legs, but determined later on that we didn't want to bother (and it looks fine without legs).


• Purchase your foam, batting and fabric (again, here is where you can spend and overspend).

Putting it all together:

• If you're going to cut a design into your rectangle you start by doing that. My husband made a mockup of the design on a piece of cardboard we had in our garage, then he used the cardboard to trace the shape onto our plywood. You can just draw on the plywood (obvs) but for me seeing it on the cardboard cut out first helped me decide if I liked the slope. What can I say? I'm both a pain in the ass and a visual person.


• We rolled out our foam on top of our wood and then used the spray adhesive to mount the foam to the plywood. Once the foam was mounted we cut the excess foam away from the design. I wasn't worried about jaggy edges because we were also going to use batting. We were able to get away with Frankenstein-ing pieces of foam together to fill the plywood since the batting was going over the top. As long as the foam was touching the batting would create a smooth line.


• Once the foam was mounted and cut to match the shape of the headboard, we laid out our batting and then placed the headboard (foam side down) on top of the batting. I trimmed any excess batting so that only about 5" stuck out on either side of the headboard. Then you just wrap the batting over the back of your headboard and staple the batting down. You want to make sure the batting is flat under your headboard and pulled taut when you are stapling, but don't pull too hard or it will stretch! We started by stapling at the top of the design and then once the batting was attached to the top we lifted up the headboard to make sure our lines were smooth and that the batting wasn't wrinkling before tacking down the sides. Then we checked it again before tacking down the bottom. 

{ headboard after tacking down the batting }

• My husband brought the headboard upstairs and placed it behind our mattress just to see how the everything was looking once before we attached the fabric. This gave us a good idea of where we wanted to attach the D rings for mounting. 

{ What our headboard height looks like with a euro pillow or with king pillows. }

*Note my puke bowl and Tums on the nightstand! Klassy. 

A full-term multiples pregnancy is no joke   

• While he did that I ironed the fabric. I ended up just getting fabric from JoAnnes because I didn't have time to wait for the P. Kaufmann fabric I really loved to come in the mail (I'm pretty much a ticking time bomb these days). The fabric I picked was a chenille that was normally $14.99 a yard but on sale for $4.50 a yard. I hated the chenille so I flipped it over and the reverse side was actually a really nice durable fabric that looks like a thick basketweave - almost a Belgian linen. Total score. And it pulls out a color in our area rug perfectly.

{ Pottery Barn Darby Rug }

• Then we laid out the fabric and placed the headboard foam/batting side down on top of it. Again I cut the fabric so that about 5" stuck out on either side of the headboard. Starting with the top we pulled the fabric taut and tacked it down. Once we got done with the top we lifted the headboard and checked our progress to see if the lines were smooth. After tacking down one of the sides we noticed that the top was bunching, so we simply removed the staples in that section, pulled the fabric smoother and retacked it down. Keep checking your work so you can make sure your fabric is laying smoothly and everything looks good, especially if you are working with a curved design!


• To tack the corners I stapled the fabric to the very edge and then folded the corner almost like I was wrapping a gift so we had a nice smooth edge and no weird bulkiness.

Attaching the headboard to the wall. Honestly, this last step was harder than the rest of the project. We ended up using D rings, heavy duty picture wire and large heavy duty picture hooks. A few tips:

• mount your picture hooks to studs and don't be afraid to mount them much narrower than the width of your headboard.


• mount the D rings to your headboard at an angle so your picture wire has more give and make sure that your D rings are mounted in the same spot on your headboard (trust me when I say that if one of your D rings is higher/lower than the other your headboard will hang funny!)


• Attach your picture wire to the D rings and don't be afraid to leave some slack, this will help you get the picture wire onto the picture hooks more easily and allow you to adjust your headboard once it's mounted so that it's level and the overhang on either side of the headboard is good.


• Keep in mind that where you mount your D rings and how much slack you have on your picture wire will affect where your headboard sits on the wall. At one point we got the headboard mounted and level and then realized that the headboard was resting on two outlets and our cable jack. We had to take everything down and remount the D rings lower so that the headboard hung higher on the wall. Total pain in the ass. 

{ our finished product }

Note I didn't make our bed or style the shot. This is what the bed looked like after my husband put it back together and the comforter is pulled back because he was about to climb in bed. We started this project at 2 in the afternoon and finished around 12:30 a.m. This includes running around to all of the stores we needed to go to get supplies, a trip back to Walmart to return eggcrates that I thought I could use in place of foam to save money (the eggcrates varied in thickness and I got nervous and decided to just cough up the cash for foam), two trips to JoAnnes - one to cut swatches of fabric which I brought home to match to our room and one to go back and actually buy the fabric, and a quick stop off at a local sports bar for the hubby to catch some football and drink a beer over lunch. 

If we can do all of this in a day, I promise this project is doable. Good luck, and feel free to ask me any questions if you take a DIY headboard project on yourself!

Understanding Fabric Yardage

Husband and I recently upgraded to a king sized mattress. Why we waited so long, I have no idea. It is simply heaven! We used to think the queen was so nice because we could sleep near each other and be close. I guess that's what ten years will do to you...we are very happy on our opposite sides of the equator now!



Anywho, I was hoping to purchase an upholstered bed and headboard unit, but I can't find anything I love and we need a headboard. I keep losing my pillows behind the bed. So after reading several tutorials, I convinced the husband to make a headboard with me this weekend until we can find something we love (or maybe until we move into our forever house).



Here are the tutorials for anyone that might be interested in embarking on a similar project: Centsational Girl, Pink Wallpaper, Design*Sponge and Freckles Chick.



The goal is to make a headboard with this shape

and cover it with this fabric - Braemore/P. Kaufmann's Fioretto in Sandstone, which runs in a 54" width with a vertical repeat of 25.25"and a 9" horizontal repeat.

Before we cut any of the curves on our plywood, the wood will be 72" wide x 48" high. So in my head we would need 2 1/2 yards of fabric to create this headboard. Right? 

I'm tempted to build legs for the headboard too so that the headboard doesn't just hang there. So perhaps 3 yards would be better? 

I used an online yardage chart and it told me to buy 6 1/2 yards (insane). I'm thinking this is for people who create a full slipcover or something. But what do I care what the back looks like??

What do you think? Will 3 yards be enough? Thanks in advance! 

Backyard Before and After

Before

After

Last summer Joe and a friend of his replaced the stairs and this summer we used the extra brick to extend the left side of the patio making room for a cute little outdoor living room set that we got at Home Depot. We also built a BBQ slide-in so that the wind would FINALLY stop knocking our BBQ over.

I also pruned the hell out of our nishiki willow tree and planed a perennial garden around the base of it, which I think looks pretty shnazzy. Now that the flowers are all a-bloomin' I'll have to go out and take new pictures, but the weather has been to wet and gray this week for that.

 Joe calls the yard our backyard oasis now. I have to agree it's pretty nice to sit out there. I can't believe we are almost done with all of our house projects!