Ducks

A week ago I took an early morning trip for groceries and on my way I pass a lake. I ventured out with my camera and thought I would stop and get a few pictures.
I interrupted a momma duck and her little one but they were kind enough to let me get a couple pictures before they swam away.

Hope you have a ducky day.

Getting grubby

I've added to my grubby candle stock

Just look at all that grubby goodness. Near the end I wasn't being as careful as I was when I first started and I think I like the way those candles look better than the first ones.

I did decide to go with 2 of the long candles because it was just easier to wrap a little homespun fabric around the two

Just Duke

Angels among us, the final episode

Are you tired of hearing about this one little project yet? Well I promise that I'll move on to something else tomorrow.
Today I show you the finished project for my clothespin angel garland that I saw on Our Pioneer Homestead.

With the 12 angels (actually there were 14 but I didn't show the other 2 in the picture the other day) and 12 stars I was able to make 4 garlands.
Each garland has 3 stars and 4 angels except for one that only has 2 angels.

The garlands with 4 angels are about 40 inches long and the one with 2 angels is about 36 inches long.

These aren't the best pictures and I hung this in two different spots trying to get a good shot.

Maybe if I had hung one of the other colors it would have shown up better. Anyway I was pretty happy with how these turned out. I was going to make a few more but ran out of the clothespins and when I went to Joann the other day they didn't have any.

Angels among us part 2

When I saw the tutorial for the clothespin angel garland on Our Pioneer Homestead I knew that I wanted to make it but once I got so far I wasn't sure if I was going to make it exactly they way she did or not.

While I was cleaning up my craft room last Saturday I found something that I decided to use with the angels.

Oh my stars, I really liked this idea.

I made stars out of craft sticks. They are called skinny sticks and I got them at Wal-mart. After gluing 5 sticks together into a star shape I took them outside to paint them with a brown textured paint. I wasn't going for complete coverage just so that they weren't the original unfinished wood.

FYI. When you are spray painting outside and your item is on newspaper and not very heavy even a little wind will blow it all over.  I walked away to let them dry and when I went back this is what I found. Insert whatever 4 letter word you think I may have spoken here :)

Hey even the newspaper looks kind of cool. I wonder if I can use this for something

Tomorrow the third and final part.

angels among us

Because I took so many pictures doing this project and it was kind of spread out over 2 weekends working on it I"m going to spread out the posts and doing it in segments.

I saw a tutorial on Our Pioneer Homestead for a clothespin angel garland. A couple of weekends I got all my stuff together and parked at the dining room table.

While I worked on making the angels, Duke napped in the chair next to me.

When I was done I had a dozen clothespin angels.

Tomorrow part 2

Yard sale find

What a beautiful weekend it was. I hate that it's Monday again and back to the daily grind. While I'm heading off to work Duke said he would show you what I found at the yard sales on Saturday.

I don't have to go to work like mom does but I hate Mondays just as much because I can't go outside until mom and dad get back home. I do get to take lots of naps though.

Here's what mom spent $2.00 on at the yard sale. Dad and I both just sort of shook our head at her but we both told her that if that's what makes her happy then it's ok with us.

Mom said that she's seen angels made out of the shutters and that's her plan for them. Dad said that her plan is more like letting them sit in the basement and collect dust. I wonder which one of them is right.

only 1 bad thing

What a wonderful day it was yesterday. It was warm, sunny and perfect. A few blocks over they were having a neighborhood yard sale so I grabbed a bottle of water and went for a walk to see what I could find. I did make one $2.00 purchase that I'll show you later in the week.

Other than that, I spent a little bit of time crafting, I did a little cleaning and even though I did say I was going to stay away from the computer, I did spend a little time in front of it.

I've been wanting a more summery look for the blog so I worked on that and thought I had what I wanted. I did a new header and was totally annoyed that it's cutting it off even though it's the same size as my previous ones. Since I have no idea how to fix that I put in an old one and now I see that it's cut off on the right side too.

Well this is what the new header was supposed to be

Today will be some early morning shopping and I think I'll work on some more projects.

Have a great day

UPDATE: I finally got the new header to fit. I can't believe it was as simple as remembering to click shrink to fit

grab a slice of sunshine

OK so this isn't sunshine but I'm going to be trying to enjoy the sunshine today and this was as close as I could get.

Whatever you do today, I hope you are enjoying yourself

Green Bark

White dog

No connection.

TGIF

It took how long?

Some projects I work on go quickly and some take a little bit longer to put together. A few things I recently finished however took an unreasonable amount of time to complete.

About a month or so ago I was trying to jump start my crafting motivation. I dug into a box of unfinished projects and pulled out some wood pieces that I had cut out over 10 years ago. Yes, that does say TEN YEARS.

I realize these are out of season at the moment but these will be going to the craft show with me in August.

The one in the upper left hand corner is a new one but all the rest sat for years unpainted waiting for me to finish them. The gingerbread man has a small ginger bread hanging off the one side. I cut that out of the picture.

Westie Wednesday

Duke informed me that I haven't done a Westie Wednesday in quite some time so today is all about him.

I'm not quite sure but I think he was giving me the evil eye here.

A tasty treat and a trip outside will have him happy in no time

Serenity

While I was out in the back yard I took a picture of the one tree and bird bath. After I got it on the computer and played around with it a bit the picture just sort of said "serenity" to me

I hope your day is filled with serenity

A safe haven

It would appear that my house remains a safe haven for dust bunnies. I retreated from all forms of house cleaning and spent the weekend doing things I classify as fun

One of those things was making some drilled grubby candles.  These are rather small candles and I would have preferred a larger one but these were the cheap ones.

I started by using a 1 1/2" spade drill bit to drill down in to the top of the candles. You want to go do far enough that you can fit  a tea light in there.

Gather some spices. I used a mixture of instant coffee, cinnamon and cloves.

You'll also need some mod podge or you could also use white glue watered down a bit. I mixed mod podge, a little water and some instant coffee and brushed it on the candle then rolled the candle in the spice mixture,

I let it sit for a while to dry then did the top. After that dried I went back and redid a couple spots that were a bit bare and let it dry some more.

Final step was to spray with a clear acrylic, let dry, tie on a little piece of homespun fabric and pop in a tea light candle. You could also use a battery operated tea light for a safer candle.

planting trees?

So even though I did manage to get a lot done yesterday it wasn't necessarily the things I had planned on doing. It was  a beautiful day and far too nice to stay inside and clean.
After doing some morning grocery shopping Wade and I got some much needed yard work done.

Wade decided to plant last years Christmas tree in the burn barrel. It's been laying behind the shed and it'g gotten very dried out so he said it was ripe for torching. I told him not to do anything until I got my camera.

It did not take long at all for this to burn

 

Wade's very own burning bush.

And she's off

I got busy last night and did some crafting. I made some more of those grubby candles and then drilled large holes in some other candles. More on that to come.

So I'm hoping that once I've had my morning coffee I'll be able to get moving today and get some other things done. I need to do some grocery shopping, a little cleaning and hopefully more crafting.

Today I just have a couple pictures from a recent walk. This is just down the street from our house.

flowers for you

Since I was a bit neglectful yesterday not posting at all and falling behind on visits I wanted to make it up to you by giving you flowers today.

My poor Lupines are laying on the ground along with the peonies thanks to some recent rain.

I'm going to spend the weekend trying to catch up on some cleaning, some blog reading and some crafting. Wish me luck

A short roll

Some of you may know that I'm going to be doing a craft show again this August. I've had since last years show to work on things and I haven't done very good. I have lots of ideas but just can't get myself going to get anything made.
I did have a very short roll last weekend and made some grubby candles.

I don't have any fancy equipment just an old pan and a baked bean can. I melted down some old candles that were the right color that I was looking for. After the wax was melted I moved the whole pan to the sink and close to where I was going to be dipping.

I bought these plain white emergency candles at the dollar store. I dipped them in the wax then rolled them in a mixture of spices then repeated it one more time and laid them on the wax paper

I thought they looked pretty good and I even tried it with a votive candle. I really liked how that one came out but it wasn't quite as easy to dip down in to the can.

Now I need to decide if I want to package them in twos or threes. I'll wrap a piece of fabric around them with a tag. Which would you prefer 2 or 3?
I would have made more of these but this was all the candles I had to dip. I made a trip to the dollar store and got more of the emergency candles so now I need to get my act together and get busy.

I can finally show you

A while back I won a giveaway on Lin's blog for 2 greeting cards. They are from her cousin Tracy who designs great custom greeting cards. You can find her work at Sincerely Yours by Tracy

So I've been wanting to show you the cards but couldn't because one of them was for Amanda and she sometimes reads my blog.
Now that she got the card I can finally show you.
One was for her and the other one was for Wade's birthday. I don't have to worry about him seeing it, he never looks at my blog

Working with Tracy was super easy. I just told her who the cards were for, when I needed them and a little bit about what they liked. She took care of the rest.

A special day

Today is a very special day because 30 years ago on this very day my daughter Amanda was born.

A great big happy birthday to her today

I took her out to lunch yesterday at Cracker Barrel and then we did a little shopping afterwards.

party of one

I threw a little party last night. I was the only one who came and I didn't even bring myself a gift. I went to bed and didn't bother scheduling a post for this morning. So today I woke up, told myself the party is over and to suck it up buttercup.

In other news. I've been using Feedly as a replacement for google reader. I don't love it and I don't hate it, it's ok I guess. I've heard a lot of bloggers going to Bloglovin though so I thought I would try it out.

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

a handy fence

Just down the street from me, on the other side of the tracks,

you will find a very handy fence.

The hand prints on this fence appear to be made with mud. I think someone was having fun.