Happy Turkey Day Tomorrow!

Getting back to normal

Thats right, I put up Christmas lights this weekend. It was way too nice out and way too close to the time to put them up to not do it.

The holidays are here!

Because we staged our house back in March when we were trying to sell it, we haven't had any pictures up in our house since then. This weekend I got out the boxes and unpacked those pictures!



Of course cutting the square footage of our living space in half leaves me wondering where to put them all but I think I have it figured out. Now I just need to take the time to do it.

You've got to be kidding me

There are two curtains needed for the living room in our house. After finishing the first one, I was short on material needed to finish the second one. No biggie, even though I had bought the material at Hancock Fabrics, I knew Hobby Lobby had the material and I had a 40% off coupon for there. I had gotten the material to make the office curtains there - same material.

So I went and got some the other day.

And I got up Sunday morning and started working on the curtain. I had one panel I had already cut from the other material and so I cut my new material. I put them face together. Then I sewed.

Then I laid it out.



What the??? You've got to be kidding me right? They're two different colors. It's the same dang material only a slightly different color at different stores. I don't even know why I laid it out right side up. It should have been right side down because I was going to lay the backing on it. Good thing I did though.

Then I got angry and walked away for about 8 hours....and then I spent some fun fun time with my seam ripper.

Adam spent some time this weekend putting in a wood burning stove into the garage. My parents gave us this. They used to heat their house with this and only this stove. Cutting wood in the dead of winter to heat your house. Fun times. Let me tell you...
This garage sure is turning into the ultimate man cave.
Heat source? Check.
TV? Check.
Fridge? Check.
Tools? Check.
He'll never come inside now.


Oh and by the way, I still don't have a kitchen faucet.

Anyone disturbed by me washing dishes right next to the toilet? It's ok, you don't have to eat at my house this week. (I did this after you left Carol - no worries)

Kitchen Curtain

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Here is the kitchen curtain that I worked on last night.

A simple unlined cafe curtain right? Well....

Here is what I sort of intended it to be:


More traditional but yet I had planned on making it not quite so scrunched up.
So I created the bottom 1/2 and hung it up. Looks ok.

Hmmm, where to I hang the rod for the top 1/2? Do I hang I hang it high and cover up the top of the window frame? There are squares at each corner on the window and so I could hang the rod on the top of the window on the inside of the squares. That didn't look right. Or I could hang it on the inside of the frame. There is a blind hanging there right now and I could take that off but it might come in handy so I'd rather not. That left hanging it at the top of the corner squares on the outside.

The top 1/2 that I made isn't that wide though. It fits, but it isn't shirred at all then. Well, I have a pattern or two that also show the top not shirred. Like this top left corner one


This makes it look a little more contemporary but obviously with the material I've chosen, not too much so.

Here's the question. How does this look? Do I want to add some length to the top and make it more shirred or does it look good the way it is?

Additional info: I have something to add to the top to give it a little more color but that will wait until I have all the other curtains finished.

More curtains

More curtains done!







4 down, 4 more to go.

Mother: Click HERE. Then call me. I think I have an idea.

So much for saving....and cleaning

The faucet in our kitchen sink leaks. Add one more thing to the list to fix. I went online last week to see if I could find a good deal. I found one on Ebay. We bought it. It came on Friday and upon taking it out of the box we were relieved to find it to be a nice quality faucet. Yes! However, there was no brand on it. Who would manufacture something and not put a brand on it. Oh well, not a big deal.

So last night we proceeded to empty all the cleaning supplies from under the sink and attempt to take the old faucet off. We couldn't reach the nut. How in the heck did they get it on there?

Adam runs downstairs for some reason or another. He comes running back up. Guess what. Our fridge is leaking. Yes, our brand new fridge. So that gets pulled out into the middle of the room, more tools collected into the kitchen, towels to clean up the water and a shop vac.

Ok, he got the fridge fixed.

Next, his dad shows up with a long wrench to loosen the nut. So now there are all the old faucet pieces laying around. And then the new one and all it's pieces came out. His dad and him worked to get the new one set in place. Pretty soon he came to get me and said that he needed to go to Menards. He broke a part.

We ran to Menards. They don't have the part we need. Since the faucet is from who knows where and made by who know who. So much for buying on the internet and saving.

There is good news. The packing slip has a website on it and Adam thinks he can get a part off of there.

But now the kitchen is a mess. No sense in putting it all away. There is no faucet in the kitchen. At least for a week.

Gone Huntin'

My family hunts. Even many of my female family members. Not me though. I never wanted anything to do with it. It's not that I'm against the killing of animals for food. That isn't the case at all. Sitting outside for days on end in the freezing cold weather DOES NOT appeal to me. No thank you.

Adams family doesn't hunt. He has some uncles who do but it isn't a big thing with them. But this year, he decided he wanted to join my family. So my dad let him borrow his brand new gun and he went out into the cold and sat with my dad for hours and hours on end. Since it's his first time he sat with my dad in his blind. Since we have had so much rain lately, there is still a lot of corn in the fields and the deer are hanging out there instead of in the woods so they didn't really see a whole lot happening. After many hours of sitting there in the freezing cold I guess they decided it was time for Adam to go out on his own. After only 5 minutes of being on his own Adam got his first deer! I'm so proud. My dad got one at about the same time and Adams was much bigger :)

It's also a lot of work. We do our own butchering. The deer must go from this:


I won't show you all the pics I took this weekend but it goes through multiple steps until it looks like this:


Then we send this to the locker. They will be making us some jerky and grinding up the rest so I can make whatever I want to with that later. It'll probably get turned into more jerky in the dehydrator and some summer sausage. It was a successful weekend and Adam will be joining them again next year.

Burp Rags 2.0

Babies Babies Babies!

Aren't they just cuter in pink? Ok, Ok, not necessarily but I just like pink :)




We got Adam decked out in hunting gear as he is joining my family hunting this year. He's never hunted before. It's going to be an adventure!

Weekend - Sorting Photos

I really didn't even pick up my camera this weekend except for to clear out the memory card so I don't have anything cool that I can show you I did this weekend...

I did however spend some time organizing the photos on my computer. This is something I struggle with knowing what the most efficient way to do this would be. So I just took a very simple approach. In the main "My Pictures" folder I created folders for very broad subjects such as:

Family
Holidays/Birthdays
Events
Weddings/Bachelorette Parties
Pics of Us
118 W 6th
352 N 19th

Etc.

Then within each of those I created sub-folders.
Such as:

Family: Then a folder for each person's name
Holidays/Birthdays: 2007 Christmas, 2007 4th of July, Adam's 26th Birthday, etc.
Events: Trip to the zoo 2007, Circus 2008, etc
Weddings/Bachelorette Parties: Each person's name
118 W 6th: A folder for each room in the house

I seemed to be able to organize all of the photos that were just floating out in random folders. I pondered sorting photos by date but that just would create too many folders and the photos should have the date taken attached to them anyway. PLUS, that is what my blog is for! To help me remember when I did what!

I'm sure each person needs their own system but I think this one will be what works for me. I have them all on my hard drive right now but plan on putting them on an external hard drive soon and storing that in a fireproof/flood proof safe.

Got one finished!

Well, one curtain is done. Here's a pic - I'll try and get an up close one posted later.

Communting

Commuting an hour to work each way isn't so horribly bad. The hardly getting to be home is.

If I want to exercise and have to go to the grocery store like I had to last night, I'm away from home from 7-7. I go to bed at 10:30 so I really only have 3 usable hours a day at home.

Besides the fact that most of my day is spent not really doing what I want to be doing, when I do get to finish a project, there is no more natural light left. I haven't gotten a ton of great photos out of my camera that I know is possible because I need natural light. Needless to say, the following photos kinda suck. I either had to use a flash which washes out parts of the project or use no flash and lighten it in Photoshop.

I made this little guy for our United Way craft fair at work.




Not to mention that you don't have enough time to spend on a project getting it perfectly right, there is dust on the door that you hung your project on....

Help!

I'm working on making curtains for the house. This is probably my third big sewing project on my own so I'm having an issue. As I sew, it's bunching up. Why's it doing this?





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The weekend...

This weekend was PERFECT! The weather was gorgeous combined with gaining an hour of time = PERFECT!

Halloween was on Friday and Halloween in a small town is just SO MUCH better than in the city. All kids come out and many of them are friends kids or family.
Abby was the Grim Reaper. She never wants to be anything cute - always gory or evil :) Here she is with the bucket I made her. I could hardly get her to stay there long enough to take the pic and she was off to another house to get more candy!


Saturday we had a hayrack ride. The night started out like this:

Can you tell what's going on here? Oops.

The hayrack was good. Complete with hot chocolate, cute kids and caramel apples!


Sunday was wonderful and we got a lot done. We did some yard work since it was so nice and it was really my first time dealing with a lot of leaves. When I was growing up we lived on a farm and didn't worry about leaves that much and our last house was in a new neighborhood with baby trees. So I raked the leaves away from the house and Adam came through with the lawn mower....only to blow them back up against the house. Ugh. So I raked them back away again and he went and got a different mower with a bagging system on it and we got them all picked up.
I got to go meet with some girlfriends for coffee in the afternoon and Adam got his first paying tree cutting job. I even got to take a nap on the couch which hasn't happened in a while and it was amazing :)