Scentsy!

Scentsy!

There are 75 days until Christmas!

Do you know what makes a fantastic Christmas gift for just about any one? Scentsy. And lucky you, now through Friday the 14th, Susan is offering 30% off all orders. Added to THAT, if you're a new customer, she'll include a free Scentsy Scent Circle (which is great for hanging in your car) in a fragrance of your choice.

So what are you waiting for? Shop early and save!

My New Fall Wreath!

Ahhh my beautiful front door {sarcastic font} - it desperately needs repainting {and you can see from my paint chips that I've been considering a red - those have been up for over a year. I'm leaning more towards a nice apple green now...} So our front door always is in need of sprucing up until we decide what color to paint it and actually get it painted.

I made a grapevine wreath last year out of some of my neighbors vines that trailed over our side of the fence. As I was trimming them back, I thought I'd keep the vines and make a wreath. I'd never done so before and it was a bit of a learning process.

This year, we made another wreath. Actually, my husband did the same thing I did. He got bored of cutting back the vines and took a break to make a wreath. Gotta love a guy who will stop and be crafty all on his own! After looking at his and looking at mine, I realized they'd look so much better if they were combined to make one beefier wreath. We cut more vines, twisted them all together and stuffed it in the garage to dry out.

Yesterday I dragged it out of the garage and set to making it pretty. I raided my closet and pulled out two tee shirts that I never wear anymore - a brown and an orange one - and set to cutting them into different length strips to make rosettes. Then I raided my very tiny fabric stash and found some nice fall fabric {that you might recognize from my fall tree in a frame project previously} with acorns & pumpkins and made a few rosettes out of that as well.
I knew I wanted to be able to remove the decorations from season to season to re-use later, so they're actually attached with some left over floral wire I had laying around. They're not on there super sturdy, so I'll have to play with it more and see if I can't get them on just a bit tighter - they're a little loosey goosey right now.

Next I found some nice fall paper {which, again, you might recognize from my Thanksgiving banner from last year} and cut out some triangles with my Cricut. I hot glued them to a piece of twine and tied it on the branches.

Total cost? Free. My favorite amount.

xoxo, Sarah

I'm linking this project up to:

Tatertots & Jello's Weekend Wrapup

Be Different...Act Normal's Show and Tell Saturday

Scatter Girls: Fall Porch Linky Party

Happily Ever After

This is an oldie but a goodie. I made this frame after being inspired by Lisa at Moore Minutes (inspiration here). I took a plain dollar store pine frame and sprayed it with Oil Rubbed Bronze. After that dried, I went over it in plain white. I sanded the edges (perhaps a bit early, my sanding is some what smudgy, but I like the way it looks). I removed the glass and covered the back with scrapbook paper.

I had just purchased my Cricut and all I had was the George & Basic Shapes cartridge, but it was perfect for this craft. I cut a tag at 2 1/2" on some pale peach cardstock and then tea-stained it a deeper color. Once that was completely dry, I carefully taped the tag on a piece of printer paper and ran it through my printer (the font is Larger Mime, found free here).

Once that was finished, I measured out my brown ribbon and fiddled with the placing of the tag. As you can see, the tag itself isn't centered, but the tag + ribbon is. Then I dug through my button stash and found several cute little buttons that matched the colors in the scrapbook paper and added those to the corner of the tag to pull it all together.

The frame sits on a faux shuttered window in our master bedroom and when life starts to get really hard, I look at that frame and remind myself that it could be a lot worse.

xoxo, Sarah

Scrappin' Saturday

Here's a layout I made recently. I actually made eight copies of this layout; I'm attending a scrap-swap at the end of the month. As you can see, I haven't added photos yet, but I have quite a few picked out. Some of Ben's favorite things that I'll be documenting are: trucks, dip (like ranch for his nuggets), grapes, his sand & water table, and Elmo.


Aside from the ribbon and the accent pieces, I used my Cricut entirely for this craft. Using my SCAL2 software, I cut the bracket frame journaling tags (free .svg file found here). I also used SCAL2 for the lettering, using sf Natalie font (found free here ).

I did a three part layer on the ribbon. The base ribbon is a stretchy blue gingham ruffle ribbon that I centered a plain green grosgrain ribbon on top of and then a sunny yellow rickrack ribbon on top of that. I glue dotted each layer together and cross stapled at the ends.

I found these fun ribbon embellished paperclips in the scrapbook accessories aisle at Hobby Lobby. I loved how they picked up on the polka dot theme of the background paper and tied in to the whole color scheme.

The paper mats are actually from way outside the scrapbook aisles. As I was making my layouts, I realized I didn't have enough of any one color card stock to make all the mats for eight layouts. I started doing multi color - I had enough card stock to do each of the five mats per layout a different color.... I just didn't like the way it looked. By the time I changed my mind, Hobby Lobby was closed but I was too impatient to wait. I went to Target and wasn't impressed with their card stock options. I was inspired to match the mats to the lettering background - which happened to look like kraft paper (it's actually card stock). Well, Target ended up being sold out of their rolls of kraft paper. I thought "lunch bags!" and off I went only to discover Target's lunch bags are not, in fact, brown - they're blue & red. As I was headed dejectedly away, a stack of yard leaf bags caught my eye....

I brought them home, trimmed 'em to size and they look perfect.

xoxo, Sarah

Menu Plan Monday

Do you menu plan? I do. I've found that if I'm left trying to figure out what to make the night of dinner, we'll do one of the following: I'll make either spaghetti or burritos or we'll go out for dinner.

Not so great.

I love my spaghetti and my burritos (and so does my family) but it gets boring eating the same foods over and over. Now that we're a single income family, we simply can't afford to eat out more than once a week.

So, I menu plan. I started planning just for the week. Then I go ambitious and started planning for the meals in between pay day. Finally, I started planning for the month.

At the beginning of the month, I sit down with my Excel spreadsheet and I plan out my menu, one week at a time. I've been making an effort to cut down on the amount of ground beef our family consumes, so I try to split the week up into meatless, chicken, chicken/ground beef alternative and ground beef dishes. I usually plan at least one "breakfast for dinner" meal towards the weekend - these are easy to shift around if we end up getting together with family. We typically have ingredients for pancakes/waffles, eggs and hash browns on hand.

Here's an example of my menu plan worksheet:

{I highlight the meal in lavender after I've made it - to help myself keep track}

After I plan out my meals for the month, I list every single ingredient that meal requires underneath the heading of the meal. I try to shop for as much of the ingredients for the month that I'll need at once - so I'll buy all the canned goods towards the beginning of the month and anything else that won't expire before I need to use it. Then I make my list of what I can buy ahead of time and those items I need to buy for just the next week of meals (like bread, fresh produce, etc).

In any case, this was a long and drawn out post to show you what I've got planned for my family for the coming week. I'm linking this up to Org Junkie's Menu Plan Monday.

What's on your menu this week? xoxo,Sarah

Customized Travel Bottles.

Long time no post! I'm aiming to put an end to my crafting hiatus and that starts with this post.

The hubs, bubs & I are getting ready to fly out to Chicago towards the end of the month for a 2 week-most-expenses-paid-extravaganza. Hubs has started a new job locally, but their HQ is in Chicago, so the bubs & I get to go along for the training ride.

Anyway, I've been making lists & checking them twice about what to bring with us on our trip. Packing for 2 weeks for 2 adults is daunting enough, add packing for a toddler in to that mix and you have a heck of a long list.

For our shower necessities, I wanted to jazz up the bottles a bit. I started out with some clear plastic travel bottles like so:

Using my SCAL2 program, I typed up the words I wanted for each bottle: shampoo, condition {I would have put "conditioner" but the surface space I'm working with is small and taking those extra two letters off the end made a big difference}, his & hers {for each of our body washes}. I could have used one of my cartridges, but I liked the clean lines of the Arial font for this project:

I had those cut to a left over piece of black vinyl I had laying around from a previous project:

As you can see, I had to cut "shampoo" and "conditioner" more than once - the blade messed up on one of the "o's" in "shampoo" and "conditioner" didn't look right, so I changed it to "condition" and recut.

Once cut, I layered on some transfer tape and burnished the finished words onto my plastic bottles - viola!

I have no idea how the vinyl will hold up to water - let's hope my 20 minute craft project doesn't run down the drain with my shampoo suds in Chicago! LOL! xoxo, Sarah

Pin Wreath.

Back in September, I was perusing Martha's site and I came across this wreath. At first I thought I could make this for free - I had clothespins and I knew my mom had some embroidery hoops that she wasn't using any more. After a first dismal attempt {Martha's guide says to use mini clothespins and I thought I could use regular ones - turns out there isn't room for very many that way and they were too heavy to stay on the hoop with wood glue and hot glue wasn't a long lasting solution}, I splurged on $2.24 worth of mini clothes pins and set out to remake it.

The result:

All in all, this project probably took me 20 minutes (and half of that was struggling with the bows - I suck at tying pretty bows) and it was practically free.

I'm planning to leave this up all year and just switch out the ribbon for the appropriate season to display birthday cards and other mailed pretties (Susan & I have a pretty steady card exchange we do at least once a month, more often when the mood strikes us).

What sorts of methods do you use to display your holiday cards?