Hi friends! Sorry I've been mia for a few days (although compared to how often I used to post, that's pretty good!) :0) I have been busy still making and creating but haven't blogged it.
So...let's see what I can share today.
.......

Ok, here is what I made for the ends of my kiddos' "new" beds! I saw this here and loved it, that's when my kiddos still had bunk beds. I thought I was going to dismiss the idea BUT I realized it would/will still work on the regular beds. YEA!

They are book caddies! :0) We don't have a lot of space for bookshelves and I thought i was going to do gutter shelves then I decided on little wooden shelves but finally came back to this. I thought it was the easiest way to go and the less damaging to my walls. (at the time I was still trying to figure out~ plain, beadboard, or chair rail!). I think they turned out great!

I don't think I took a lot of photos for the process but I can tell you about it. I did NO sewing... but I will. See, I got my sewing machine out and the foot was gone! I still haven't found it! So I just used witch stitchery but it isn't holding. So I'm going to have to go back and sew. I'll let you know where it's ok in the project to just iron and where it's best to sew...
here we go...

I came across a bedskirt that we no longer use and probably never will. I didn't want to just throw it out though so I decided to use the middle (the white part that goes under the mattress) for these caddies. I also gathered felt, witch stitchery, and bought some dowel rods. Since the rods are 36 inches and that was a great length for the width of the beds, that's what I went with. :0) (I love to keep it simple)
I used the witch stitchery to hem the sides of my material. I didn't need to do the bottom or top because I knew I was going to go around the dowel rods with those. Oh....also, I wanted them to be around 12 inches deep so I cut them out 28 inches by 38 inches. That gave me 2 inches for hemming the sides and 2 inches for top and bottom to wrap over the dowel rods. (You're going to fold the 28 inch piece up/in half to make the pocket).

I used stitch witchery to hem/loop in the dowel rods. I ironed it WITH the dowel rod in place.

Next I cut4 pieces of ribbon. I then ironed/stitch witched those into place. THIS IS WHERE YOU SHOULD SEW INSTEAD. My stitch witchery isN'T supporting the weight of the books on the ribbons. The ribbons are coming off! SO...sew at least that part, even if you have to do it by hand.

Then I cut out letters from felt, some simple shapes too, and just glued them on with tacky glue.

Last I measured and drilled holes for my eye hooks. I screwed in the hooks and tied up the caddies with the ribbons! VOILA!

I love them!
:0)

Thanks for looking!
~robin





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With all of my crafting, decorating, and creating lately I am constantly on the hunt for things to work with. A few weeks ago I went with a friend of mine to a house that her inlaws were cleaning out and emptying. There was a LOT of stuff stored there, mostly files and childhood boxes of various things. I walked around with her, my eyes searching for some goodies. When I saw a bench that looked PERFECT for me, I let her know that I would love it if her MIL was going to get rid of it. She told me she would ask and see.

A couple of days later she showed up at my house with the bench. :0)

It looked like this:
So I took the top off...just found a place to start and started ripping the leather off, popping out the upholstery tacks. I got it all off and removed the top piece completely. Basically it's a board with a large foam piece on top. They were all still in good shape so I put those aside to use again.
Then I sanded it. I used a rotary palm sander and sanded it a bit. Not tons but enough so I thought it would take paint.
Then...I spray painted it. Yep, you read that right...I spray painted it black. I wasn't sure if the paint would hold, didn't seem like I got enough of the finish off and since this bench is at least 40-50 years old, I wasn't sure what would happen. Well, the paint didn't stick super great. BUT I did a few coats and let it dry. I wasn't worried about perfection because I knew I wanted to go back and sand it a bit again...distress it a little.
So that's what I did. Then I used Minwax Rub On Poly and applied a few coats of that.

After it all dried I went and picked out some fabric. I thought I was going to go for something very simple...maybe some reds and blues...paisley or a simple damask. I knew though that I wanted to incorporate red, blue, green, black, ...etc....whichever ones I could or as many as I could. I saw this fabric and decided to take a chance. It was very different than what I thought I would get.
I love it!
I really do!
:0)
This is how it turned out:
I love it! It looks great in my living room. :0)
YEA!
All it cost me was the fabric...I even took the time to spray paint the upholstery tacks black. :0)

Thanks for stopping by!

It's that wonderful time of year and I LOVE to do the spring cleaning. I'm not a clean person by nature, definitely not. I have to work at it. I have to come up with ways to help make sure I get the cleaning done. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I seem to be a girl who works in spurts. Do you know what I mean with that? I either do no cleaning or I'm cleaning the whole house. I've tried a lot of ways to make me clean a little each day...I have a hard time sticking with them. With trying to do projects and hang out with my daughter (and other kids that I take care of in my home for some extra money), only the bare necessities get cleaned regularly. Read that statement to mean the kitchen and vacuuming. :0)
BUT I love deep cleaning and I love change. Spring cleaning feels just like that...a huge change. A big project.
I love it!
This year I found this website: I Dream Of Clean
I love her entire blog! She gives the kind of tips that this girl needs!
She also has a FANTASTIC Spring Cleaning list broken down to daily objectives and it has me super pumped! I am going to start it tomorrow and I'm so excited!

What about you? Are you doing some spring cleaning?
Cleaning things that don't always get cleaned?

Open those windows, turn up some music, and get going!

I despise laundry. I REALLY do. For YEARS I have also despised my laundry room. It's can't even classify as a "room" really...it's the itty bitty entrance from our garage. That's it. In the past it hasn't been organized and that made it MUCH harder to actually use it as an entrance...with the space being so tight it was just annoying. Honestly, even with it now organized you can't use it if you are carrying anything in your hands. But...at least it is now organized and I dislike it much less.
:0)
It started out worse than this....It started out with baskets on the floor in front of the washer and dryer. Of course that made walking in and out a nightmare. There was also a rolling metal rack between the washer and dryer that collected junk. Didn't have anything on it really important. The dryer also collected stuff...I used to store the detergents on top of the dryer.
I thought I took photos of it at that stage but I can't find them....

SO...this is when I thought my laundry room was organized and beautiful. :0) The rack was gone, new baskets were purchased to fit in that space, and we could walk in and out much easier. I put up the two smaller shelves to store detergent and various things. It was WONDERFUL! I was pretty proud.

yep, I thought it looked great and was finished.

Then I started crafting and organizing my house for real.

It's amazing how relative things are huh?

Now my laundry room looks like this:




I got diaper boxes from a friend and covered them with black material and a ribbon trim...SUPER easy.

I bought $1 "party buckets" from the grocery store and put supplies in them. Each bucket is something different. I made my own laundry detergent and put it in the red metal boxes. Those are boxes that used to be in my kitchen...back in the day...as canisters. Glad I held on to them!

I also made the adorable little containers for Tea Tree Oil and Vinegar. Those containers and dish were finds at Goodwill. They weren't a set at all...but I think they turned out great...black spray paint is one of my favorite necessities in life. :0)

(I can't find the before photos of these...the bottles were plain with silver lids. The tray was a white ceramic with blue painted trim and a blue "c" in the center. I painted all of those black, made the tags, and used ribbon I had on hand.)

I wonder what it will look like another 6 months from now. Will I continue to make improvements? I love it now and can't imagine anything else but thankfully everything in my house is continuing an upward movement of becoming cleaner, personalized, and more organized.

How about you? Are you make improvements in an area of your home?
:0)

I'm a pretty laid back Momma. I'm ok with my kids playing in mud, helping themselves to art supplies, covering my car in sidewalk chalk handprints, etc. So when my kids wanted to paint rocks in the backyard, I thought Why Not! :0)

When they wanted to extend the painting to other things, I let em' go with it again. My only rule was not on our house. (they made sure that didn't mean the back porch slab :0)

Turned out beautiful to me. Don't you think the playhouse looks better now? :0)

The fact that my daughter wanted to dress up as Super Girl to do the painting...that's even better.

:0)

I love to start each season with a little "party". We don't always do it, sometimes I don't take the time to get it all together. I always wish I had.
The one season I always seem to do a party for is spring. I LOVE spring. I feel the same way about fall/autumn too. :0)

This year we did a few activities and had just a couple of friends over.
Here is what we did:
for a snack: we gave them fruit of every color, in matching bowls. They were instructed to make something "springish" with the fruit. They brainstormed first and came up with flowers, rainbows, and bugs. Caleb made a rainbow, Georgia made a flower (and then made a rainbow afterward)


One of our activities was painting little pots. They each had soil and seeds to put in their pots after they dried.

Another activity was one of those simple kits you can buy...the foam craft kind. Each child got to decorate 6 eggs with various stickers.


We also had a craft with little cut out flowers...we decided we were finished though and the kids were ready to run around and play outside together. Where we live spring also means Fiesta... and that means cascarones! FUN FUN! :0)

We recently cut apart our kids' bunk bed into two twin beds. I am so glad we did!
When I was prepping the bunk bed I took off a bunch of extra boards. Boards that were the steps for the ladder, boards that made up the side rails, etc. I knew right away that I would figure out something to do with those boards! They were all cut nicely, sanded, etc... I wasn't going to let them go to waste!
Here is the first project with my "new" wooden boards.

See, my kids LOVE to COLLECT! Anything really~rocks, feathers, "things that are silver", GoGos, bottlecaps, keys, ETC. It's kinda crazy.
Well, now that we are redoing the kids' room, I wanted to find a way to display and have access to all of their "collections".
I have recently reorganized my laundry room (there will be posts in the future on that :0) and we had a little metal cart/rack that we weren't using anymore. I stuck it in the garage until I knew what I wanted to do with it. Well, now I knew!

So first the rack got a good cleanin'. My wonderful assistant loved the job and did a great one too!

Then I took 4 of the boards that were a PERFECT size for what I had in mind. I decided to cover them with scrapbook paper, modpodge it on there. I thought I was going to do a background paper and then a solid color and then the words...but the boards were around 14 inches long...longer than scrapbook paper. So I had to come up with something else.
I only had one sheet of the background paper so I had to make it stretch. Going through my stash of paper I decided to grab my paper cutter and make stripes! I knew that would give me the most use for one piece of paper. I cut the patterned paper and the coordinating solids. I made strips 2inx1in. I only had to cut one long piece 2inx12 in of each of the coordinating solids. The patterned paper was cut into 2 in strips and then cut all strips into 1 in pieces. :0)


After gluing (modpodging) the stripes on, I sat down at my Silhouette and decided on labels. I LOVE how they turned out!

They each had a couple of coats of modpodge on them and then I also gave them a good spray with some clear spray paint.
Next I grabbed my drill. I measured 2 inches from each end and that's where I drilled a hole.


After that I simply twisted in some eye hooks. Super easy!

Then I used jute to tie them up onto the rack.

I LOOOOVE them! I think they are adorable and my kiddos now have plenty of containers to store all of their collections! They love it too!

(PS...thank you to Target who had these great containers in the dollar bin! I almost started jumping up and down...as I filled my cart with them!)
:0)

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