Birthday Skirt

This year, Maddie not only requested a birthday shirt, but a skirt as well. At least one of us has confidence in my abilities. I had decided that I was going to make a circle skirt with the cutest cupcake fabric that I've had for years and I can't remember why I even bought it in the first place. I remember there being at least a yard of it. So I pulled it out yesterday and there is barely a 1/4 yard there. Boo! So the cirlce skirt was out. My next thoughts went to a pleated skirt but I had no pattern. Then comes the math......

I measured Maddie's waist and I needed 8 strips 3 1/2 inches wide (cut 4 inches wide for seam allowance)

 and 17 inches long. Yes, my soon-to-be 5 year old is very tall. I cut 8 strips from each if the colors. There was barely enough of the cupcake left. I serged the strips together into one giant circle. LOVE my new serger. I then ironed it completely flat.

 Next, I folded the pink strips so that the cupcake strips touched. I sewed 4 inches down each side of the cupcake strips. *not pictured* I added a 4 inch zipper at the back per Maddie's request. I wanted to keep it simple and add elastic, but Maddie already had a plan in mind.

I cut a strip a strip of the pink fabric to fit around the inside of the skirt and 6 inches long. Sewed the right sides trogether and ironed it to the inside. I then zigzagged stitched the top boarder of the skirt. I serged the bottom edge and I think that I might leave it that way. I kind of like it. We'll see what Maddie says in the morning. My little stylist in training. :)

BIG 5 Birthday Shirt

My Maddie turns 5 exactly 2 weeks from today and the birthday plans are in full swing. Trying to get everything together is fun and chalanging at the same time. A fun thing I do for my girls each year is make them a personalized birthday shirt. The theme usually centers around the theme of the party of whatever they are interested in at the time. My Maddie is obsessed with dogs and has been for a couple of years now so that was this years inspiration even though she requested a Hello Kitty party. Somehow it works....right?

My Maddie modeling by the new black wall :)

 I started by finding a picture of a dog. We went with Cloe from Beverly Hills Chihuahua (her favorite movie) and I drew it onto the shirt. I didn't have a plan for the left side at this point but I figured the dog would look silly centered.

I knew I wanted to incorporate something with her hand print to play off of the 5 theme. I took the cutout of her hand and traced it 5 times in a circle. (see the punny theme here? Yes, I'm that dorky)

I painted the dog with fabric paint and a little brush. The thinner you paint the longer it lasts without cracking. These girls wear these shirts all year long. It has blue eyes just like my girl. :-)  I decided that a '5' would look cute on the left so the dog would be looking down at something. I just freehanded it. It and the yellow around it are glow in the dark paint.

I painted the handprints like they were overlapping in the circle. I tried to choose fun bright colors with her favorite color, purple, on the top. I also added her name accross the top in silver. It's in a picture at the bottom.

Maddie modeling the front

And here's the back. You can see her name accross the top on this picture.

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How I Organize - Art Supplies

We have a closet in our kitchen. In our old place it used to be our pantry, but out house has a built-in pantry so this was not being used. The kitchen is the only room in the house that is not carpeted (minus the bathrooms of course) so it is where we do most of our art/play-doh. The pantry was being used to house a lot more than just art supplies and started to become one of those places in your house that you open the door, shove something in and slam the door shut before everything comes tumbling out. 

Art Pantry Before

The cookbooks on the top shelf were relocated to the bookshelf that is in the bottom right corner of this picture. And I got rid of everything that wasn't art related and either tossed it or re-housed it elsewhere.

Art Pantry After

 This project was done with supplies that I already had on had. The magazine holders were made by a tutorial I used from A Bowl Full of Lemon's Blog. I used contact paper to cover my boxed instead of wrapping paper and I think it actually works better.

Up on Top

On top is where I house my laminator, postal scale and label maker (The label maker is MIA in this pic because it was in use).

1st Shelf

The first shelf is for "Mommy's Stuff". It includes my magazine and project ideas as well as permamant makers and supplies that I just don't feel like sharing. :) Yes, I have my own box of crayons. I love coloring with my girls but don't like searching for hte colors I want or trying to use broken/unsharpened crayons. I know I'm not the only mom in the world with grown-up only crayons. Am I? The black labels are chalk board contact paper that I cut using a XXXL paper punch and liquid chalk pens.

2nd Shelf

 The second shelf is all of my girls' art supples for painting and coloring. It's just our of my 2 year olds reach, which is exactly where it needs to be. Their workbooks are also on this shelf.

3rd Shelf

 The third shelf houses all our current kids puzzles. I can already tell that this will be growing quickly. My almost 5 year old LOVES puzzles. All the color wonder markers and paint are also here. They are easily accessible for both my girls and basically harmless.

4th Shelf

The very bottom houses all the Play-Doh and accessories that go with it. This is an activity that we all join in as a family and emjoy. Tons of fun and the girls love playing with Momy and Daddy. :)

After

There's the after again (minus labels. see the label maker is still up top in this pic). Hope the girls let it stay like this for a little while because I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

~~~BOWS~~~

I'm a HUGE fan of bows. In my book, the bigger the bow the better. The awesome thing is that my girls have the same ideas about bows. I used to go to Target or Walmart and grab whatever bows were on the shelf, but they were so small and seemed to lack so much imagination.

I started googling around and this is the best site for bow tutorials. The best part is they include pictures or videos and they are all completely free. I used the tutorials to get the hang of it, then I let my imagination take over.

Swarm of ladybugs a made for a friend at church

Up close

Hello Kitty boutique bow.

Valentin's Bow

For pigtails. I LOVE pigtails.

My youngest requested a car bow. Easy way to make 'boy' things girly.

How I Organize - Under the Kitchen Sink

I've been trying to organize my house one small space at a time to make it a more manageable goal. Here's how I stared...under the kitchen sink.

Here is my 'before' picture. Yeah, it's pretty bad.

 Steps to organizing...
1. Empty your space
2. Wipe it down
3. Get rid or things you don't need/use

Here's my nice, organized 'after'. I used 2 dish pans from Target. One for Daily
Cleaners and one for Scrubbers. There are 2 black baskets in the back. One for bug sprays and one for sponges and light bulbs. The labels are Chalk Board contact paper. I recently discovered it and I'm in love.

Master Bedroom.....so far

The Master bedroom is finally coming together. I put the bed together on Wednesday. That was a beast.



 Maddie wanted to help so I put her to work sorting the hardware.






My little helper




Here's the bed all set up. Poco just had to be in the picture. Surely I'm not the only one with a pet who always seems to end up in the shot. (Ignore the tools in the corner. I was installing the curtain rod)

I love the bedding. I found it at Kohl's and got a great deal when I combined a sale with a 30% of coupon. :) I LOVE Kohl's. 


Here's our master bedroom so far. It's still got a lot of work to go, but It's finally starting to feel like a room and not just a place to sleep.

Hello Kitty Invitations

Finished Maddie's birthday invitations tonight. I LOVE my cricut. So glad she picked Hello Kitty for her theme. There is so much that you can do with Hello Kitty. :)

I Love Color

Maddie wanted the bows to be purple......her favorite color :-)

Door Knob Wall Shield

Sometimes you have a need for something, but all the options seem so ugly. All the doors in our house open right into a wall. In the girls' areas I have super cute painted wood cutouts that look adorable. That just didn't seem like it was going to work in my Master Bedroom. I ordered a wall shield, but they are all just so ugly so I decided to improve it.

Ugly Ugly wall shield

Supplied needed to beautify. The contact paper is left over from the nightstand drawers

All covered up

The awesome dent my girls have already made on my freshly painted wall

Definitely better than an ugly ivory blob on the wall. :)

Nightstand

Slowly but surely our Master Bedroom is coming together. The bed and nightstand came in the mail today from Overstock.com. I came home to 4 massive boxes on my porch. The largest was 70lbs. It was super fun trying to get it into the garage. I decided to start with the nightstand. Mostly because the 3 seperate boxes that the bed came in seemed really intimidating.

Why does furniture come in so many pieces?

The finished product. In place and ready for the bed.

I added black and white contact paper to the drawer bottoms before I put it together. It keeps with the black and white theme of the room and looks si much better than the laminate bottom it comes with.

The beauty of a black wall

We have been in our "new house" for about a year and a half now. Our 'master bedroom' has changed locations a couple of times from the true master bedroom to the finished basement to try and have a bigger space. I finally decided once and for all that I wanted to put my master bedroom back in it's rightful place. The problem is that all the furniture that we have is a mattress. No dresser, no night stand, nothing......

A few months back I ordered a bedding set of Kohls.com that I absolutely love. It's mostly white with red, black and grey leaf pattern all over it. Those are the wall color choices I pondered for our Master. When we bought the house it has a light blue wallpaper on 2 wall (directly on the drywall. Who does that?!?!?!) and butterfly boarder all around. Definitely not what I pictured for my Master. After months of thought and hours of google searches, I decided that I desperately wanted a black wall. One whole wall in the Master bedroom is a sliding glass door so I knew we had the lighting in the small Master we have to pull it off.

Here is the beginning of what I hope is a truely beautiful room.

After countess hours of scraping and sanding and scraping and sanding I was able to get the room primed and taped off. If the wall looks discolored aroud the tape it's becasue I went around the area with a bright white paint becore I taped to make it easier to pull of the tape and have the wall ready to go. I'd love to say I had the measurements of the boarder, but as I was trying to figure out the best way to beasure I looked down and saw the Winnie the Pooh book that one of my girls had left on the floor. I held it up to the wall and it was the perfect measurement for the boarder I imagined so I held it up next to the tape the whole way around the room to 'measure' my boarder. Hey! Whatever works right?!? (I did check the lines with a level and they were straight, I promise)

I used 2 coats of Black paint. It's Glidden Satin paint in OSU Black (Originally bought for an accent color for our Ohio State - not yet finished - basement) We had a gallon of it laying around because they accidentally mixed my a gallon instead of a quart and they gave me the extra at no charge. Thanks Home Depot. :)
Finished painting last night and pulled the tape off after work today. I wanted to see it in the daylight and make sure there weren't any spots I missed. The tape didn't come off as clean as I would have liked so I'll probably go back around with the white.

The image above was taken from my walk in closet. This one is from the door of my Master Bedroom. See I told you it was a pretty small room. Don't mind my messy computer hutch. I was to lazy to empty it so I could move it out of the room. That will come later.

Seeing how well the wall came out makes me want to do the same thing on the other walls. I was originally going to just leave them white, but I really like how this looks. Any suggestions? The furniture (bed and nightstand) should be coming any day now so I'll have to make up my mind soon.

Mod Podge little girls shoes

So I got was looking all around at Blogs and started to realize that almost everyone uses Mod Podge. I'd never heard of it before, but I knew I had to have some. I went to Amazon and ordered some. It arrived in the mail 2 days ago and ever since then I've been trying to figure out where in the world I would start my Mod Podge adventure.

This morning while my girls were getting their shoes on I realized what bad shape their shoes were in. They both love to crawl around pretending to be animals so they scuff the fronts of their shoes like crazy. I spent the rest of the day figuring out what to put on them to make them look better, especially since they both still fit into their Mary Jane style shoes really well. I decided then that I would start my Mod Podge adventure with their shoes. They were both inexpensive to start with and couldn't really get any worse.



I started with my supplies. Mod Podge, Sharpies, Fabric and scuffed up shoes. I gave each of my girls a wipe and asked them to clean the outside of their shoes. (Wipes are for everything )




The first thing that I did was color the scuffs in with permanent marker. If you look at the original picture you can see that this is my usual quick fix. I just wanted to make sure that the difference in color wouldn't show through the fabric.




My almost 5 yr old loves animal prints and chose a black and dark purple leopard print for her shoes. (At least it matches. :) ) I cut it to fit the top of her shoe then covered the toe in Mod Podge and stuck the fabric on. It had to be large enough to cover all the scuffs but small enough to not cover the flower on them. I applied a coat of Mod Podge on top of the fabric, waited about 20 minutes for it to dry and applied a second coat. The fabric kept wrinkling at first because the from of the shoes aren't very stiff so I stuffed the toe with newspaper to help them hold their shape while they dried.



I did Dora and Diego on pink mary jane style shoes for my youngest. They are still drying in this picture.




Here they are a couple hours later. I LOVE how they turned out.

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An Oldie but a Goodie