Happy Mother's Day to Me!

So this May saw me celebrating my very first Mother's Day! What did I get you may ask? We celebrated it by having my hubby put in a new kitchen faucet (the old one was gross as all get out moldy and corroded from not being sealed properly by whoever put it in before we bought the house). It's pretty now.

And later that evening we all went out for sushi! A great little place called Kyoto House in Whitby.  One of the waitresses there is the sweetest lady ever and she even brought Little Badge his only special plate of a couple of slices of avocado!) This is the same place went after our wedding. (It was a small thing with just our parents and two witnesses). So it seemed fitting.

They have these awesome little private booths!!

But between these two events, something awesome happened!  My hubby, being the cheeky man he is, asked me if the neighbors were planning a mother's day picnic under the tree by the curb.  After a few "huh?! wha!? 's" thrown in his direction he told me to look outside.  I took a peek and my immediate response was OMGOMGOMG I'll be right back!  

Sure enough, I got out there and there was a FREE sign. My neighbor was still outside and said sure! Help yourself! And in fact she even got her guy to help me. So, as an added bonus. . .

 

	Happy junk picked         Mother's Day to me!
I finally gots me        some patio furniture!

And not a moment too soon!  With the chairs moved, we went back for the table just as a scrap metal truck drove up. Whew! Now just to figure out if I'm going give it a new coat of paint or not. I'm a bit backlogged with projects so at least it's in really good condition and isn't dying for fresh paint.   But I do keep trying to picture it in bright yellow.

But over all it was a beautiful first Mother's Day.  The weather was gorgeous, the garden was lovely, the food was great, and the junk picking was just the icing on the cake. ^_^ I had a wonderful time spending the day with my amazing hubby and sweet little boy.  I hope all other mother's out there had equally if not even more wonderful Mother's Days. :)  I'd love to hear about yours!


Mother's day aside,  it's been a quiet week.  Spent some time at Value Village on Monday which I'll post about next week.  And Tuesday night I finally finished my Secret Sister's gift!  Can't talk much about it right now but I can give you a little peek at it. . .

Till next time, craft on. :)

A Felt Board For LIttle Badger

When I was little the local library where I lived had a felt board in the kids area. And every time I went there with my mom or after school I would skip past the books, past the computers (the big ol clunky 5 1/4" floppy disk using kind), past all the other toys, and straight to the back corner and stay glued to the felt board till my mom came to drag me away.

So when I started planning my future family I knew one thing was for sure, my little one(s) would have a felt board.

And even though my Little Badge is only 8 1/2 months old now and won't understand the concept of it for a while,  I still went ahead and made one for his play room. This way some of the mom's I invite over can bring their older kids and they won't be entirely board surrounded by baby toys. :) 

So, the materials, if you don't have the felt and batting on hand, can rack up pretty quick but it was worth it to me.  Then again it also depends on how big you make your board. I wanted to filled a fairly big spot of wall so I made mine 2' x 4'. 

To begin you'll need:

• One 1/2" thick board in your size choice  (Again I went it 2' x 4')
• 1 solid piece of felt large roughly the size of your board + 8" to length and width. 
• 1 solid piece of upholstery batting size of board + 6" to length and width.
• A staple gun (make sure you have enough staples for your gun as you'll be putting a staple in roughly every couple inches)
• Scissors
 

Lay down felt, and batting and trim to size around board.	First pull in and staple down corners. Work in opposites.
Next pull one side tight and staple. Then do the opposite side.	Repeat with the other two sides. Then trim off excess felt.

And easy as that!

For the shapes just go crazy. Free hand some specific fun shapes (like clouds, grass, circles, cars, people, animals). For the straight edged shapes I just zipped them all out with a rotary cutter but and exacto knife and a ruler will work lovely as well.

Mount where you want it and have fun! (Or let the little ones have fun.)

In the end I up spending about $60-$70 on the large piece of felt for covering the board,  the batting for making it soft, and the small squares of felt for cutting out shapes.  I could have probably gone of bit cheaper by just getting a 1/4 meter of 2 or 3 colours for cutting shapes but I'm a sucker for variety so I got about 15 craft sized sheets of all different colours.

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My not so Secret Sister!

Ok, I was going to post about something I made but I'm just too floored and excited about this so you'll have to wait for another day. . . 


So, I'm laying on the couch with Little Badger trying to get him to sleep and my door bell rings. After contemplating ignoring it in hopes it was just someone with a clipboard, I decide, just in case it's a friend, I better get and check.  Instead of a person, I open to door to find a basket of goodies on my front porch!

I walk out and look around to see who could have dropped it off, looking left and right. A few houses down I see the lovely Susan of The Food Allergy Chronicles carrying some bundles up her driveway. I smile and wave and carry my mystery package back in.

Upon opening it . . .

As soon as I saw the Cup of Tea* package, the pure vanilla bottle, and the Secret Sister card I put 4 and 9 together and laughed out loud.

And then I started unpacking and my jaw hit the floor.  What an amazing package to receive! So full of things I love!  Packed in my favorite kind of jars!  And as I'm writing this I'm snacking on some lovely homemade shortbread.

Take a look at all the amazing goodies I got!

1. Amazing homemade shortbread cookies.

2. Oh so yummy home made caramel sauce

3.  Amazing homemade shortbread cookies drizzled in oh so yummy homemade caramel sauce.

4. Recipe for previously mentioned shortbread cookies.

5. Sugar free Werther's Original Toffees

6. Homemade pure vanilla in a GORGEOUS glass bottle. 

7. Creme Au Caramel Rooibos tea from Cup of Tea

8. A beautiful bone china tea cup and matching saucer with violets on it. (One of my fav flowers and colors!)

9. Burt's Bees Lip Balm with SPF 8 in it.

10.  St Dalfur strawberry preserves with no sugar added (sweetened with grape juice. Sooooo good! Had some right away!)

11.  Stevia plant!

12. I've already used gorgeous but I can't think of anything else to describe just how beautiful this scarf is!  

All of this, just for me!!!! I almost cried it was so amazing. And all bundled up in purple tissue (again my favorite color) and packed up in a cute little basket.

Thank you so much Susan!  You are amazing!  And thanks to Carla over at My 1/2 Dozen Daily for organizing the swap! I better get back into my art room ASAP and get crackin' on my Secret Sisters gift!

*Cup of Tea is a local place just down the street from here that has amazing teas and my favorite place to go for rooibos.

That Sneak Peek I Promised

Better late than never?
Here she is, partly primed...

Only problem is the weather is a little cold and wet the next few days so work on her is on hold till the weekend.  Till then! 

My Treasury Monday #2

Hello Monday! How was your weekend? Mine was lovely, mellow and full of family time and crafting.

I got a good chunk of work done on my gift for the Secret Sister Swap over on My Half Dozen Daily, played tag with Little Badger (thought tag with an 8 month old leads to sore knees very very fast but so worth the giggles), did some work in the garden, and finally started a furniture project that's been sitting in the garage for the last month waiting for the weather to get nice enough to start painting.

You haven't seen the before of this one yet so I'll try to post a sneak peek of it later today. But for now, to celebrate my finally getting started on my very first furniture project, here is a treasury full of repainted beauties!

'A Little Bit of Paint Goes a Long Way' by LifeinaLens

Re-purposing and repainting old worn out furniture. This treasury is to celebrate my starting my very own and very first repainting furniture project!

Lovely Antique Desk Han... peintalamain $425.00	Electric Orangey-Red Sc... SalvagedFurnit... $150.00	Repurposed Dining Room ... MyAppleTreeAnd... $300.00	Distressed Teal Cabinet... SOSRestoration $350.00
Unique Ball and Claw Fo... peintalamain $165.00	Vintage Painted & Distr... HandpaintedbyC... $299.00	Turquoise Paint Washed ... OfftheCurbDesi... $4500.00	Cute retro school kids ... unlapindanslet... $140.00
Pink Converse Hand-Pain... ThePaintedAlle... $450.00	vintage chic nightstand... VintageChicFur... $175.00	Vintage French Provinci... HandpaintedbyC... $379.00	French shabby chic,blac... shabbyfrenchst... $70.00
Hand Painted Olive Gree... meredithmbrook... $450.00	40% DISCOUNT Upcycled G... CarlaValverde $180.00	French Provincial Buffe... Artisan8 $895.00	antique distressed vani... Vanitymyaffair $235.00

Treasury tool by Red Row Studio

A Little Lace

A two in one. A thifty project.

So, back at Easter, my little boy, (who from hence forth shall be called Little Badger), my hubby, and I went to Laval Quebec to see hubby's Grandparents. It was a lovely time fill with good food, good company, egg colouring, and seeing Little Badger meet his Great Grandma and Great Grandpa!

While I was there, hubby's Grandma pulled me downstairs, took me into the bedroom there, and opened a drawer in a children's wardrobe. Inside was this lovely pile of hand made crocheted laces, trims, doilies, and other odds and ends that. She started pulling bits out telling me how each one of these were all made by her mother. All threadwork, delicate and beautiful. And then, to my awe, she finished off the show and tell with,"Here, Take it all!"

And so I ended up with a wonderful assortment of handmade lacy things!

Add to that a little bag of lace trims I snagged at Value Village last week for $2.99 and I had me a nice little pile of laces.

But where to keep it?

Thats when I remembered a cute little tutorial I read a few weeks ago on Todolwen's blog on making lace cards.  So I did just that.

Now, I made the pretty little lace tags, though I kept them all in English, and for simplicity reasons I skipped the pretty scrabook paper. But for it's just enough to look nice and be functional for this project since I will actually be keeping the lid on the box to keep ol' butterfingers *points to self* from knocing it down some day and ended up with a lace explosion.

And here they are all nice and finished and organized in a pretty purple box!




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Just how croppy was it?

Very!  My art room has exploding in an attempt to sort through and filter in the big pile of free scrapbooking stuff I got from my friends mother who decided she was never going to scrapbook again.

Hopefully I'll have that all sorted and cleaned up soon so I can get back to my baby album I'm working on. Lately I've been attending a monthly crop day where a bunch of us meet at a local church and from 10am till 8pm (though I usually leave around 4-5 because I need to be home for bedtime routine) we crop away the day.

Here is some of the progress I've made so far....







That last one still needs the buttons tacked down up near the bear yet but that's about it. But I still have a long way to go.  I'm almost to the birth and then I have his first 5 months printed out. With another 3 months of pictures in waiting.

Needless to say this one's going to take a lot more work. But not today! Instead I'm off to the zoo with my hubby and little boy to celebrate my 30th birthday!


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