Mel Short Shares

Owl Treat Bags

2011-10-31T15:20:00.000-07:00

It's a tutorial, y'all!

I made these treat bags for P's pre-school class Halloween party. I saw these on Pinterest (by Lisa Storms) and thought they'd be perfect. So I decided to make it about eight steps harder. Because, apparently, I am a glutton for punishment. (See: Rapunzel costume)
Sheesh! The girl's gonna have to wear that costume until she turns 20. Sorry, kiddo, you're not allowed to grow yet. You haven't gotten full use out of your Rapunzel dress.

And here's how to put together some little owl treat bags:

1. Get some of the brown paper lunch bags - the ones I used are the 11 inch by 5 1/2 inch ones. (Do they come in different sizes? I don't know.)

2. Print out this template on full-sized 8 1/2 by 11 inch paper:

You can either print it directly onto the cardstock or patterned paper that you're going to use for the owls, or print it out and cut out the pieces to use as a template. I used all scrap paper for mine, but it would be easier to use big pieces and just print on them. I used three different patterned papers per owl. One was the head, wings, and tail; one was the body and eyes, and one was the belly and brow (or noggin topper, if you wanna get technical about owl anatomy). The eyeballs were cut out of white cardstock, the feet and beak were orange cardstock, and I just used a hole punch to get small black circles out of cardstock for the centers of their eyes.
* You can print the template on the front of the paper and have a black outline when you cut it out, or print it on the back. This guy's pretty reversible.

3. Cut out all the owl parts & lay them out how you want them. Now, at this point you could get really creative with inking edges, and stamping, and embossing, and glitter and sequins and paint. . .
I didn't. But feel free to go nuts.

Here is my army of owl minions.

4. Cut the top of the paper bag into a triangle and fold it down, so when it's closed the top is a little V.

Glue the noggin topper on top of the folded-down part. (But be careful to not glue the bag closed.) Hold the top of the bag folded down so you can place the rest of the owl according to where the top of his head is.

5. Put glue on the top of the head and glue it to the front of the bag, under the folded down top.
Then glue the tail at the bottom of the bag, and the body overlapping the tail and under the head.
Add the wings and tummy, on top of the body and under the head.
Add all the eye parts and the beak.
Cut a strip of white cardstock and stamp the recipient's name on the bottom. (Or you could stamp the owl's name. That would make him feel special. Or stamp "thanks for coming to Luke's birthday bash." Or whatever.)
Glue that across the bottom of the body, over the tail and under the wings.
Then glue the feet over the top of the cardstock strip so it looks like the owl is perched on top of it.

6. Fill with goodies and staple the top shut! That's it! Okay, if you don't want to put a staple through the owl's head, you could also punch two holes and thread some ribbon through the top and tie it like a bow. That would really girl these up. Or you could just not overthink the staple.

These were perfect for a classroom party goody bag - festive enough for the kids to be excited to get them, and small enough to hold just a few treats. They would work well as party favors, too, if you're having an owl-themed party. Or any fall-themed thank-yous that need to go in a bag. Or for taking some pumpkin bread to a neighbor. Yum.

Happy Halloween, everybody. Today is a special anniversary for me - three years ago I signed up on Etsy. Can't believe it's been three years! I'm feeling especially blessed today to be a stay-at-home working mom.

Gotta Put on Some Pants. . .

2011-10-05T13:11:00.001-07:00

Any other New Life Ranch alums out there who sing this song EVERY SINGLE TIME they're trying to wrestle their kids into pants? And why is it so hard to keep pants on these kids? At any given moment, there's a pretty good chance that at least one of my children is pantless. I have no idea why.

I'm hooked on Pinterest. Could spend hours and hours and hours there, except I keep getting pulled away to do things like, you know, laundry, and going to the post office, and raising children. But I found this tutorial from Simply Modern Mom on how to take a pair of pants, make a pattern from them, and sew really easy pajama pants.

I tried it out, and it's really the simplest pair of pants I've ever made - and because I made the pattern from pants that the kids already had and that I knew fit perfectly, I didn't have to worry about the weird sizing of commercial patterns! Amazing. P got pants out of hot pink leopard print flannel, and Mr. Man's are made from a (very loved) flannel pillowcase. (One pillowcase is the perfect amount of fabric for a pair of pants for up to an 18-month size.)

The tutorial is completely great, so I didn't change anything. Here are a few tips, though, if you're going to try it:

Be sure that the curve on the back of the pants - for the crotch - sticks out more than the one on the front. This part is important, because it allows for some booty room. And especially for the littles - those diapers need extra space back there!
When you're tracing around the pants to get the pattern, be sure to allow plenty of space for the seam allowance, and even more for the hem at the bottom and the elastic casing at the top. And the pants fit better if the rise is higher in the back than it is in the front. That's all.

I love making clothes for this one. He's more than happy to model. Not like his big sis. This one gave me lots of poses and looks, and even walked the coffee table like a runway! Perhaps he watches too many TV shows with Tim Gunn. . .

For his last pose, he really wanted to show off the waistband of the pants. :)

October Urns

2011-10-03T06:45:00.000-07:00

Good Monday morning! It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood! Mr. Man is on hand to help me blog about the new fall-themed urns we just put out front.

He loves to sit in my lap while I'm on the computer. That's his no-nonsense editor face. He will not let me get away with any grammar infractions!

These urns are from Sam's Club. They have great seasonal outdoor items, and they're cheaper and higher quality than lots of other places. We got them in the summer - they had ivy topped with ferns. The poor ferns had given up (I don't have the greenest of thumbs), so I was looking for a replacement for the fall.
I left the ivy and just cut out the ferns. I got some big ol' pumpkins, and tucked some dead hydrangeas from the backyard in around the base of them. I love the colors of the hydrangeas - this summer, they were a pretty lilac, but as they've faded, they've turned into a great deep purple - perfect for Halloween!

And the new decor even enticed our friendly little spider, who's been camped out in the bushes in the front yard for months, to leave his cozy web and check out it out! He looks pretty Halloween-y, don't you think?

So, wander around your yard and see what blooms are past their prime, but still beautiful enough to do some fall sprucing up.
Happy decorating!

New Little Blanket

2011-09-29T13:29:00.000-07:00

Gotta show off this new blanket that I made. I've had the idea of doing a baby blanket with pennants and the verse "His banner over me is love" for a long time - I mean, what better verse to snuggle a baby up under?

Materials:
one yard of muslin
one yard of white minky
scraps of cotton fabric - six different patterns (for the pennants)
fabric paint and stiff paintbrush
fusible interfacing
white cotton fabric
embroidery floss in black, and four colors that match the cotton fabric scraps
temporary fabric glue or pins
thread to match the muslin
ruler

Equipment:
sewing machine
computer & printer
glass table or big window, or something that light can shine through for the light box

Here's how I did it:

1. Cut a piece of muslin 38 by 30 inches.

2. Cut out 12 pennants out of cotton fabric - two each of six different patterns. I made a template that's a triangle - 6 1/4 by 5 1/2 inches - to cut mine out.

3. Iron 1/4 inch under on all the edges of all the pennants, and arrange them in three rows on the muslin. Pin and machine-stitch them on.

4. For the letters, print out "His banner over me is" onto typing paper in a font you like, really large. Cut the words out, taping them to the back of the muslin so you can see them through the front. (Again, I'm back at that light-box magic.)

5. Using the taped-on words as a guide, paint the letters in fabric paint and a stiff brush.

6. Trace the letters in "love" onto fusible interfacing, and fuse them to white cotton fabric.

7. Cut them out, and pin or temporarily-fabric-glue them to the muslin. (I use Aleene's No-Sew Fabric Glue to hold stuff until I stitch it on - pinning it is too. . . well, dangerous.)

8. Using embroidery floss in colors that match the pennants, back-stitch an outline around all the letters.

9. Using a temporary pencil or pen, trace along where the string to hold the pennants up should go.

10. Use black embroidery floss to back-stitch the three lines.

11. Cut a piece of white minky fabric the same size as the muslin.

12. With right sides together, pin around the edge of the two fabrics, and machine-stitch together, leaving a gap along one of the sides to turn it (about six inches). Clip corners.

13. Turn blanket right-side out, pin, and stitch about 1/4 inch in from the sides, making sure to catch the open gap. (Mind the gap, as they say. You know, in England.) Yeay, you're done! That's it!

Or, even better, just head over to my Etsy shop and buy one. That's easier. :)

Shark Week

2011-09-26T17:43:00.001-07:00

So, this just about sums up how my day went. It's mostly this guy's fault.

But I can't be mad. Seriously, what other one-year-old gets such a kick out of having a pair of pants on his head? He's the best.

So here's my project: I took two short-sleeved tee-shirts and a clip art image (because I have mad skills with the clip art) and turned them all into voila! one long-sleeved layered shirt with an awesome shark on it! Now, full disclosure: this was all the result of a mistake. I bought a gray shirt, thinking I would paint the shark on that using my patented* light-box method. (The light box stuff is posted back in September 2010. I'd link it, but that's beyond my blogging expertise.) Turns out, I couldn't see the image through the gray shirt, so I had to go back to Wal-Mart for a white one. Now that I had $6 instead of $3 sunk into this project, I knew I really had to make it count. I had seen this tutorial on Pinterest for how to turn a short-sleeved shirt into a layered-look long-sleeved shirt, so I decided to try it out. I changed up a bunch of stuff, so here are my steps, complete with poor lighting and the messiest work desk ever. Enjoy!

* light-box method not patented
I started out with two same-sized tees, washed and dried.

I took the gray one - the one I was going to cannibalize for sleeve purposes, and cut up each side seam and around the sleeve seam. You really only need to cut off one of the sleeves, it turns out.

Making sure the front and back of the shirt were smooth and even at the bottom hem, I used one of the sleeves as my pattern, and pinned it up as high as it would go on the shirt.

I cut around the curve of the shoulder seam, and extended the sleeve to the bottom of the shirt in a semi-tapered way. It's very technical. (I like how this turned out, because I used the hem of the shirt as the sleeve hem. I'm no good at sewing on knit, so using pre-existing hems is bonus for me.)

And, here are the sleeve shapes I ended up with.

Next is the only tricky part - with the white shirt inside out, I tucked the short sleeve into the shirt, then placed the long-sleeve addition inside the sleeve and pinned it to the seam. (Okay, what I really did was turn everything right-side out and hold the sleeve where I wanted it, then turned things inside out until I could reach the seam. Otherwise, there's no way I wouldn't have ended up with something inside-out. I'm famous for my inside-out stitching.)

I machine-stitched the gray sleeve into the seam of the white shirt. The goal was to try to just get the seam. I was lucky in some spots. Not so lucky in others.

Then, careful to keep the white short-sleeve out of the way, I pinned and sewed down the bottom of the long sleeve.

I repeated the whole sleeve-attachment process on the other side. Duh.

And there it is! Definitely not perfect, but I consoled myself with the idea that the little man who will be wearing this shirt is in a constant state of motion. The chances of someone actually seeing a seam on a shirt he's wearing are slim.

So, these sleeves are probably more 3/4 length than full-on long-sleeves. Which is fine. If I had used a bigger shirt, I could have pinned my sleeve pattern further up and gotten longer sleeves.

And here's my awesome shark image. I was going for something that screams, "The wearer of this shirt is all-boy! He's a man-child! He knows karate! And more than a thing or two about dinosaurs!" without being too obvious. Subtle, right?

Light box engaged.

I just used black fabric paint and a teeny-tiny paintbrush.

Ta-da! Welcome to shark week, y'all.

Sew She Sews Bib Tutorial

2011-09-09T08:02:00.001-07:00

I love this bib template and tutorial from Sew She Sews! Here's my take - of course, I had to add an initial. Because I put letters on everything.

And these pictures really demonstrate how much Mr. Man appreciates the time and effort I put into making him homemade things. You know, to show him how much I love him and cherish him.
You can tell he feels cherished, right?

I didn't follow the tutorial exactly. (Because I'm the queen of shortcuts.) Instead of putting quilt batting in between two layers of cotton fabric, I used cotton fabric for the top, and just slapped some minky on the back.

And that's how I spent my Friday morning!

Little House

2011-09-08T09:26:00.000-07:00

I ran out of things to do with Penny the other day, so I mixed myself up an Instant Breakfast. I love those things. Then I ended up with an empty box, because it was the last package. So I turned the top of the box into a roof shape, and grabbed some scrapbook paper, scissors and glue, and let Penny go to town making doors and windows to stick on our little house. She loved it! She's been playing with it for days. Isn't it always the goofiest little things that kids enjoy the most?

I'm loving this cooler weather - it's so nice to be able to play outside again! And cooler weather means one thing: Ozark craft fairs! They're just over a month away - October 13-16. I can't wait!
http://nwacraftfairs.com/allfairs.asp
Which ones do you never miss? Any hidden gems?

CraigsList Desk Makeover on the Cheap

2011-08-28T19:18:00.000-07:00

We found this desk for $30 on CraigsList. We needed something in the guest room for the computer to sit on. Now that the guest room will be housing a new baby this winter, we were thinking about selling the desk, but I'm not one to part with furniture that easily. This is also why I'm a terrible poker player: once I'm invested in something, I will go down with that ship. No such thing as cutting my losses.

Here's the before:

Missing trim, brass hardware, oppressive brown color, hole in the back. . . Not a lot too cute about it, except the little critter posing in front of it.

And here's the after:
We slapped on a fresh coat of paint, switched out the hardware, and bulked up the trim to make it look. . . less like it was purchased for $30. My favorite part is the beadboard that we stuck up on the back, in front of the crumbling particle board.

Yeay! One step closer to turning my bedroom into one giant craft room. . . Now, if we could just get rid of that pesky bed.

Book Ledges

2011-05-09T11:38:00.000-07:00

I was born to be an English teacher. I love books. I think they're so beautiful. Especially picture books. Before I became a stay-at-home mom, my career aspiration was to be a Literacy Specialist. I was taking evening classes to get my endorsement. One of the things I learned was that kids are enticed to read when they can see books. (Other concepts in the curriculum were more advanced - it wasn't all obvious stuff.) We put up gutters around the walls in our classrooms so we could prop books up where kids could actually see the fronts of them. It worked! My kids that year really loved to read. And they thought I was wacko for nailing gutters to the walls. But the reading thing, that was important.

I think having the books facing out is especially important for the little kids. Penny can pick out the book she wants based on the spine, but it's so much nicer to be able to see the whole book. Plus, in a playroom, books are all the decoration you need! They're gorgeous! And kids have images from advertisements, TV, giant toys. . . so much stuff pulling at their attention. I wanted to give their books a fair shot at getting used as much as the big, colorful toys.

I am so lucky to have a father who can build stuff. I draw what I want it to look like, and he makes it happen. I based these book ledges on some Pottery Barn Kids magazine racks. Each ledge is an eight-foot by 5 1/2 inch shelf for the back, and another shelf that's 3 1/2 inches deep nailed to it. The support pieces have 1/2 inch holes drilled through them to hold the dowels up.

Here's how you know my daughter is being raised by a Literacy Specialist. She likes to flip through books and "read" them, making up the stories as she goes. This morning she picked up an Alice in Wonderland book, and started out, "Once upon a time, a princess named Eric Carle. . ." Okay, if you don't have toddlers you might not know it, but Eric Carle is one of the best picture book authors/illustrators in the world - he did The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

More to come soon! We finished the dining room over the weekend - I'll give you a hint - the walls are teal!

It's a Blue Kitchen!

2011-04-12T07:11:00.000-07:00

Hey! Remember me? I blog. Sometimes. Not often. Okay, close to never. It's been a super-busy Spring at our house. We've had a lot going on, including diving into our painting projects. We've been in the new house for eight months now, and this kitchen was about to drive me crazy! D was taking a couple of days off work, and as a concession to me, he said that he'd help with painting a room while he was at home. He did not anticipate that I would choose the kitchen. Probably he'll qualify his chivalrous declarations in the future. The big problems with this room were the lighting, the wall color, and the beat-up cabinets. So, pretty much everything. (Someday we'll replace the dated appliances, but that wasn't in the budget.) We took down the awnings, and we tried to take down the wallpaper border. It wouldn't budge. We ended up just painting over it. Ugh. This fluorescent beast has greeted me every morning for the better part of a year. I was not sad to see him go. When we went to Lowe's to pick out new lighting, D took a picture of this thing to ask those friendly folks about how we should get it down. The lighting guy was really tickled to see it. He said that these lights were pretty common in Bella Vista in the 70's. Hmmm. Our house was built in '96. . . (Side note - we usually go to Home Depot - they've been very helpful in the past, but their lighting selection didn't hold a candle to Lowe's. Candle. Get it? Sorry. I couldn't help it.) My knight in shining armor, who's just risked life and limb to wrestle this thing to the ground. Painting the cabinets was a huge project. I had no idea how time-consuming it would be. I'll give you a summary: take off doors; repair; sand; prime; paint; paint; paint; paint; rehang doors. Okay, that doesn't sound like that much work, but it took forever. And the finished product: We left the doors off one of the double-cabinets. I wanted some openness there, and I like having all our pretty white dishes out. I love a plate wall. Especially when all the dishes are white. I found these at T.J.Maxx for $8 and $5. Can't beat it! When P saw the dishes on the wall for the first time, she laughed her big laugh and said, "You can't put plates on the wall!" Au contraire. Two of the pitchers were made by my Granny; the other one was a T.J.Maxx find. And now that the fluorescent light is gone, the dishes actually look white and not dingy! Hooray! Sorry for the lighting in this one - it's too bright outside to get a good indoor shot. That, or I don't know how to use my camera. I wanted a good picture of this window treatment. It's made out of a tablecloth from Williams Sonoma - the only splurge in the room. I bought it months ago, and it was the inspiration for all the colors in here. Turns out, it's super-easy to make a tablecloth into a poofy window treatment - all I did was box pleat it until it was the right width, then threaded it onto the rail. Then I just gathered it up across the bottom and pinned it with safety pins until it looked right. Since it was already hemmed around the edges, I didn't have to sew anything other than making a pocket for the rod. Our next project is the kids' playroom. I want to do a big chalkboard and book storage/display ledges. . . I'll let you know how it turns out. Hopefully it won't take me five months to post again.

Little Bits O' Heaven

2011-01-05T18:58:00.000-08:00

I love, love, love the space I have in my bedroom that I've carved out as an office. Lots of fabric and paper and tools and supplies in that place. All my favorite things. What I don't like is that, because it's a pretty small space, the desk has to face the wall. Or rather, I have to face the wall when I sit at the desk.

Here's my solution: we hung a printer's tray, which I've had forever and am crazy about but never knew what to do with, above the desk. I filled it up with some functional bits and pieces, like stamps and buttons, and some decorative memorabilia. I love looking at it now because every little box has a story behind it.

I laugh every time I see this Chinese fortune cookie slip. "The love of your life will appear in front of you suddenly!" it says. It makes me think of the time that D and I had first started dating, when he jumped out from behind a door with a quilt over his head to scare me. It worked. He had no idea how much I hate to be scared. He knows now. :)

Snow White is for that blasted Halloween costume that I stayed up all night making.

The sheep is for my favorite quote from French literature, "Revenons a nos moutons." Which probably only means anything to me.

I'm not planning on doing any work with those oil pastels any time soon, but it makes me happy to look at them.

(Yes, that's a stamp of my face in the corner. What, you don't have a face stamp?)

The high-rise building tag and snowflake charms remind me of a recent and very special trip to Chicago.

I mean, it's not ideal for one's work desk to face the wall, but I guess if you have to, you might as well put up something that makes you smile. But watch out, because it's easier for someone to jump out with a quilt over their head and scare you if your back is to them.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas!

2010-11-29T12:55:00.000-08:00

Lots of exciting things going on around here! Christmas is coming - every year it's a battle to hold out until after Thanksgiving to pull out all the Christmas decorations and cover the house with glad tidings and cheer. And lots and lots of garland. My favorite decorations are the sentimental ones. It wouldn't be Christmas without Santa and Mrs. Claus, who were made by my sweet Granny. Mrs. Claus had a pretty big scare this year - apparently ceramic figures don't mix well with a two-kiddo house. Cam knocked her head clean off. Fortunately, neither of the children seemed too horrified by the event, and I just glued her back together. Granny wouldn't have minded at all.

Gotta love big, wired ribbon. This year I mashed it in with some garlands to try to take some emphasis away from the giant TV above the mantle. Does it work?
Sigh. No, I didn't think so.
Here are our built-ins, with little Christmas-y bits tucked in here and there.
I traded out the pears that live in this bowl for some shiny ornaments.
My Gordman's clearance candle holders, that this fall were pumpkin stands, are now Santa stages. Or maybe they just had the Santa-lympics, and these are the winners' podiums. What do you think Santa's national anthem would be?
Penny has been waiting all year to get out the One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish ornament. She loves, loves, loves it. When we put away the decorations last year, she mourned over the loss of this thing.

Visions of sugarplums dancing in her head? No. . . I know that look. Something far more diabolical is going on in there.

In other news, my blog just got a make-over! Shalon, of Pretty Lovely Design, hooked me up with a whole bee-themed scheme! I love it - my name and my momma's name both mean "bee," so it's a very meaningful logo for me. What do you think?

DIY Lightbox

2010-09-29T13:49:00.000-07:00

Hello all! They're both napping, so I wanted to share a quick project I did a few days ago.

(Mostly, though, I want to avoid housework.)

I had some brand-new white onesies sitting around and decided I had better do something with them quick - before Mr. Man got too big to wear them!

Now, I've had a much harder time doing clothes for him than I did for P, because Mr. Man's daddy wouldn't be happy with me if I sewed flowers and bows and ribbons and unicorns and stuff on his shirts like I want to. What do boys do for embellishment?!?

So I settled for my favorite quote from a children's book. I found a font I liked at dafont.com, typed it up and got the size and layout how I wanted, and printed it out on a sheet of typing paper.

Now, here's the lightbox part. I put the paper inside the onesie, put the onesie on a glass table, and put a lamp under the table, so it would shine thought and I could see the letters clearly. Then I just grabbed my fabric paint, a tiny, stiff brush, and traced. The whole thing just took a few minutes.

See how dark it is outside? No, I'm not crafting after-hours. That's before the sun rises. My children wake up ridiculously early.

The font is Mandingo.

He's looking at his sister in this picture. I think he likes her.

Now I'm working on a Halloween top for P. I'll post it soon!

Mmmm, Comfort Food

2010-09-17T16:20:00.000-07:00

Big, emotional day for me. Lots of highs and lows. Among the highs: finding my brother-in-law's birthday present that I had hidden (a little too well) in a frenzy of cleaning before a party. Happy birthday, Steven - a month late. Among the lows: trying to get a faulty product issue resolved and having to face off with a bully over the phone. Reminded me of teaching high school - the kids who just come at you with such a negative attitude that you can only wonder what made them feel so insecure. It's a little more jarring coming from a grown man, though. I keep reminding myself that everyone's fighting his own battle, but I still wish this guy had acted like a decent human being. Sigh.

So, a day full of big smiles and more tears than necessary calls for comfort food. Comfort food wrapped in piecrust, served in a ramekin. Ramekins are awesome! Have you ever been served anything in a ramekin that wasn't heavenly? No, me neither.

We tried this recipe last week and loved it. It's another Real Simple magazine "Fake It, Don't Make It" recipe, this one from September of '04. Now, I must reveal why I have these random old recipes lying around. Whenever I see a recipe I like, I tear it out, hole-punch it with one of my numerous hole-punches (why do I believe I can't live with fewer than 3 three hole-punches?), and slide it into a notebook that I keep with my cookbooks. Then, when D and I are meal-planning for the upcoming week and nothing is really sounding good, we bust out the notebook of sounds-good-we'll-try-it-someday recipes. After we try one, it goes in the trash if it's not a hit, or gets copied onto a notecard if we'd like to see it again, and stored in my notecard box, which is my go-to recipe storage place. Wow, that sounds like a high-maintenance system! But it's really not. Well, maybe it is. But it works for high-maintenance me. Now on to the deliciousness.

Individual Chicken Potpies

8-ounce bag frozen mixed veggies (we used a Steamfresh - it was great)
2 refrigerated piecrusts
10 3/4 ounce can cream of chicken soup (who decided that 10 3/4 ounces should be a standard amount of anything?)
1/2 cup milk
2 cups chopped cooked chicken or turkey (get a rotisserie chicken from Wal-Mart and shred the beast - the white meat is around 2 cups)
1/2 tsp garlic salt
1/2 tsp black pepper

Preheat oven to 375. Defrost the veggies in microwave for about 3 minutes. Cut two piecrusts into quarters, for a total of 8 pieces. Coat the inside of four ramekins with vegetable cooking spray, line the bottom of each with a quarter of crust, mold it to fit. In a large bowl, stir together the milk and soup; add the veggies, chicken, garlic salt, and pepper; mix. Spoon the mixture into the ramekins (we had some leftover mix), and top each with a piecrust quarter. Pinch the edges together, folding the extra up on top. Channel your grandmother while you cut vents in the top (because nothing's more grandmotherly than cutting vents in the top of piecrust - it's a fact). Place on a baking sheet and bake 35 to 45 minutes or until golden brown.

Bon appetit!

Speaking of bon appetit, if you like cooking, or French things, you've probably already seen Julie and Julia. But if you haven't, check it out. While we're on the subject of movies, you should avoid The Ugly Truth. I wanted there to be anything redeeming about that movie, but there wasn't. Alas.

Now go eat some piecrust!

Yep, It's a Slipcover

2010-09-14T07:53:00.000-07:00

When we moved into our new house, I decided that instead of reds and greens as accent colors in our living room, I wanted to go with blues and yellows. Great! On a budget of approximately $27. Not so good. Especially since our loveseat is a nice, mossy green color. (I bought this piece of furniture seven months pregnant. Do not buy furniture when you are that pregnant! You will not make good choices!) This loveseat is comfy, but it definitely wasn't fitting in with the new turquoise and teal accents that were making their way into the living room. I've always had the idea that I could sew slipcovers for furniture, so I decided to try it out.

Now, I was concerned, because I have also always had the idea that I could cut hair, until one horrible evening a few years ago when I tried my hand at my sister's hair. With Motown blaring on the stereo, I slowly watched in fear as I hacked her poor hair to death. (Have you ever been in a wreck? It was like that - a slow-motion I-can't-believe-this-is-happening-right-now-make-it-stop kind of experience.) I was assured by the hairdresser that we both went to at the time that I did not, in fact, have the gift of haircutting. And that I was to never try that again.

There is an e-book at pinkandpolkadot.blogspot.com that's super-helpful if you just need some motivation to get started. No patterns, exactly, but lots of information and encouragement. Here's part of the intro:

"I want women to make their homes beautiful and encourage them in the process to not live by
fear, but believe THEY can do it. Don’t be afraid to cut fabric. Don’t be afraid to just begin somewhere and on some piece of furniture that you do not love right now. Just go for it."

Yes! Yes, I will buy 10 yards of fabric, drape it all over a piece of furniture, and cut and pin and pin and cut and sew and welt and sew until I am ready to break up with my sewing machine. And that's serious. My sewing machine and I have been on solid terms for about 18 years now.

Here's the basic process:
1. Go to I.O.Metro Home and buy lots of upholstery fabric. (No, I'm still not a paid advertiser. Just a devoted customer.)
2. Wrong-side out, lay it over the sofa in the general area it'll end up covering.
3. Tuck and cut and pin where you'll sew the seams.

4. If you're doing welting (which I totally recommend), you have to pin it in while you're adjusting.
5. Drag the whole thing to your sewing machine and sew, sew, sew wherever you've pinned.

6. Put it back on the sofa, adjust and re-sew if needed, and pin on the skirt. Then sew, sew, sew the skirt on.

That's it!

I won't get into all the details. If you have the feeling that you could do it, you probably can. I will share some things that I'll do differently the next time:

* Be sure to get a fabric with no stretch at all. It's a beast to work with that much fabric to begin with, and if it has any give, it'll stretch out of shape while you're sewing it.
* Leave lots more fabric to tuck than you think you'll need.
* Because there's so much fabric, next time I'll set up my sewing machine on a big table instead of the desk. I spent as much time wrestling the fabric to stay put as I did sewing.
* Next time, I'll definitely hand-baste while the thing's still on the sofa instead of just pinning.
* I'll do a more decorative skirt next time, too. For this one I just did box pleats on the corners and in the middle front, and that looks a little plain to me now.

So now we have a loveseat that's a nice, neutral mushroom color. It looks lovely with the turquoise and teal accents, and when the inevitable kid-messes happen on it, I can just whip it off and clean it up. Overall, I think it's a totally do-able project, and something that I'm kind of excited to do again. Maybe our slipper chairs could use a face-lift. . .

Calzones

2010-09-10T07:03:00.000-07:00

Gotta share this new recipe that we tried last night. It's rare that there's something that's a win with everyone in the family - and this got rave reviews from all of us! It's modified from a Real Simple recipe from 2006. And it's a "Fake It, Don't Make It" recipe. I like those. :)

Calzone

Ingredients:
box of Jiffy pizza dough mix*
flour for work surface
1 cup ricotta
1 cup shredded mozzarella
3 tablespoons grated Parmesan
one package ground turkey sausage*
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 14ish ounce jar pasta sauce (we love the Classico Florentine Spinach and Cheese)

* The original recipe calls for a one-pound bag of refrigerated pizza dough, which we couldn't find, so we used Jiffy. It also wanted us to use 4 ounces of roughly chopped salami. I do not eat salami. So we used the turkey sausage.

1. Heat oven to 400.
2. Mix the Jiffy mix with 1/2 cup hot tap water. Cover 5 minutes and let rise.
3. Brown the turkey sausage and drain.
4. Divide pizza dough into four equal portions, and roll each one into a circle (about 7 inches), and put dough on baking sheets lined with aluminum foil.
5. In a medium bowl, combine ricotta, mozzarella, Parmesan, and turkey sausage.
6. Spoon cheese mixture onto pizza dough rounds. Get a little water on edges of dough, then fold in half and press edges to seal. (We ended up with way more filling than would fit into the calzones. Don't know what I did wrong. But it's fine if you have someone in your family who will nibble on the leftover filling while you cook.)
7. Brush the top of each calzone with the oil.
8. Bake until golden, 20 to 25 minutes. Serve with warm pizza sauce on the side.

Bon appetit!

Labor Day Sale

2010-09-05T19:32:00.000-07:00

Head over to melshortshops! I've finally gotten around to sewing up some new covers out of fabrics that I've fallen in love with, but have just been sitting around my house for a while. I'm so pumped to finally have them in my shop, I'm throwing myself a Labor Day party! Well, it's more like a sale on all my new stuff. . . But that's like a party, right? Anyway, it's just for Monday, so check it out!

Thanks for putting up with my shameless self-promotion! To reward you, here's a picture of the adorable-ness that lives in my house:

Watch Out, Pre-School

2010-08-17T16:06:00.000-07:00

I don't know if pre-school is ready for this one.
But she has a first-day-of-school outfit ready to go!
I whipped it up today during naps - the kids were merciful and agreed to nap at the same time today. Sometimes they're so generous!

She was completely excited about trying it on and putting a fashion show on for Daddy, but when I pulled out the camera, she got evasive. But you get the idea.

I'm excited about it because this opens up a whole new world for me:
Etsy shops with patterns and fabric! Woohoo!

Here's the shop that has the circle top pattern:

http://www.etsy.com/shop/katievarela

The awesome thing is that it's totally inexpensive, and it's a file that gets sent to you almost immediately, so if you're like me and want to start a project just as soon as you get an idea, it's great. You don't have to run to Hobby Lobby for a pattern. (Though you can't beat 99 cent Simplicity and McCalls weeks at Hobby Lobby. I always look out for those and stock up.) Also, the circle top pattern that I got was an 11-page booklet with very detailed instructions and a color photo to go with each step. Awesome!

And here's my new favorite place to drool over fabric:

http://www.etsy.com/shop/WhipstitchFabrics

Such beautiful stuff. And I'm so limited in local fabric shops - I'm totally excited to have stumbled on this one.

The pants are from Simplicity pattern 4203. But there are a ton of pants patterns out there, and they're all the same. I picked this one because it has little walking slits in the sides of the hem. And because I already had it. :)

So P is going to hit the pre-school scene looking precious, and I've gotten one more thing knocked off my to-do list! Yeah!

A few weeks ago, my sis told me about this site about a fictional couple, Gary and Elaine, who live in catalog houses. It's HI-larious, and it's made me laugh as I try to decorate a new house on a very limited budget:

http://catalogliving.net/

It helps me remember that catalogs are good to look at. . . not so good to live in.

Happy crafting!

Playrooms and Panic Attacks

2010-08-07T12:23:00.001-07:00

Oh my goodness. This room could not get any messier. The challenge of a designated playroom is having the room be completely overtaken by all the stuff to play with. So stressful. You can see this room from just about everywhere else in the house, so it's gotta at least not make me have a panic attack when I look at it. That's my absolute minimum standard of organization for my house: if it's panic attack-inducing, it's gotta go.

When it's at the point where you can't even walk though the room, much less have space to play, somethin's gotta change. I had already gotten rid of all the toys the kids don't play with, so I didn't need to purge - I just needed a better system.

Order must be restored.

Here's my solution: five giant Rubbermaid boxes that each have a selection of toys in them. I've left out the stuff the kids play with every day - P's kitchen supplies, Mr. Man's walker-thing - and of course, some books, because reading is fundamental, people, but other than that, everything's boxed up. The original idea was to designate one box per day, so on Monday, get out the Monday box, but I don't know if I'm going to follow that. We might just get out one box and play with it until we feel like putting it away and getting out something new.

This way, all the toys are still accessible - I didn't want to put them in closets and forget about them, because they're all things that the kids still like, but now we can actually see and play with what's out, instead of tripping over everything and being overwhelmed by all the stuff.

I still think it's a little messy to have all those boxes stacked up, but it sure beats having the contents all over the floor!

Guess who's happy to have some clear floor space to play in? This guy!

And I'm Back!

2010-06-28T11:29:00.000-07:00

I'm back on Etsy! My shop was closed for waaaaaaaay too long while I was busy having a baby (yeah, it takes a long time) and moving to a new house. I miss having the shop open so much more than I thought I would. I love sewing things, for sure, but I wasn't anticipating how much I would miss the collaborations with clients. Just love the creative process, I guess. :) I'm only putting a few things up on the shop right now - some of my best sellers from last year. But I'm so pumped about some of the new things I'm going to be listing in the (hopefully near!) future: name pennants, wall letters, personalized pillowcases. . . and I'm also looking into the exciting world of scrapbook page kits! (Do I sound too amped? Because I can't really overemphasize how much I've been looking forward to this. . .)
www.melshort9.etsy.com

Ta-Da!

2010-03-31T07:07:00.000-07:00

Finally - here it is! Mr. Man's room. Back in September, I posted some "sneak peek" pictures of the room ideas, and promised an art installation covering the window. . .

The little guy on the right was my inspiration for the room - I got this totally 70's owl card for my first birthday (it wasn't even retro at the time!), and my mom, who never throws anything away, passed him along to me in a giant portfolio documenting every little piece of my childhood. (She was a scrapbooker before there was even a name for it.)

(I found the alphabet print in the middle of the picture at the cutest shop on Etsy. Perfect for this room!)

Then we chose this orange for the walls, after collecting lots of paint chips and spending weeks narrowing them down, with different strips taped up all over the walls. (When you're thinking about committing to a paint color, it's super-important to see it on the walls it's going to live on in all different lights. The Nester has a post here that is much more thorough and eloquent on the subject of choosing paint.)
Here's my post where I talk about why we did the scallops 3/4 the way up the walls. I'll give you the short version of the post: scallops were easier than painting the whole room.

So this window was the big challenge.
It got even stickier when I realized that I really wanted to put the crib right in front of the window - that that was the best place in the room for it. We got a curtain rod at Hobby Lobby (with the 40% off coupon, of course) and climate-control curtains from Target. The curtains are fantastic - they really do keep out a lot of the cold, and they block all the light. A bonus for middle-of-the-day naps. So the regular rectangle-shaped part of the window was taken care of. The half-circle part of the window was a bigger challenge. Why not just hang the curtain rod at the ceiling and cover the whole thing? Check out the tops of the walls - they angle in near the top, so a curtain rod as wide as the window couldn't fit at the very top - it would still reveal the top four inches of that blasted half-circle!

We ended up getting a big sheet of foam core board at Lowe's and slicing the half-circle pattern with a steak knife. I bought two cheap plastic tablecloths in the most neutral pattern I could find and glued them on the front and back. Up close, it looks like straw. Who makes these tablecloths? Why straw? That's not appetizing!

I used a quilt pattern that has adorable applique owls, and just made them out of scrapbook paper instead of fabric. Then I embellished them, because that's what I do. And it won't be very long before I can't use things like glitter in the decor of my son's room. So I'm getting it in while I still can.

I cut out branches and leaves, arranged them across the tablecloth-covered board, and glued everything on. I tried to arrange them according to which owl I thought would get along best with whom. Yeah, I even overthink craft projects. But the owls don't have names. That would just be silly.

We were lucky - once we got the thing done and popped up into the window, it stayed there. Which is a good thing, because I had no idea how in the world I was going to secure it. And it's too big to fall into the crib and suffocate the baby. I've thought about every possible scenario of my decor going rogue - I think we're safe.

That's right, boys. I've got my eye on you.
So after the bright walls, my goal was to keep everything else as neutral as possible - brown and cream bedding, simple accessories. . .
What's that you say? With the curtains open, it looks like this bedroom is located approximately one block from the sun? Exactly.
I love this lamp. It has a very 70's vibe, and the color is fantastic! The inside of the shade is the same lime green as the lamp base. I found it on sale at I.O.Metro Home - the best place in Northwest Arkansas for random, awesome furniture finds. I wanted to get things for Mr. Man's room that will work in different contexts - I didn't want to end up with two rooms full of nursery-only stuff that I'd have to replace once the kids were older. I think this lamp would be great in a living room, and I think this brown-on-brown chair and ottoman will probably live in my bedroom one day.

More decorating with not-necessarily-little-kid stuff. This print is actually from an old calendar - that's a great place to look for cheap wall art. When calendars go on sale after the beginning of the year, I keep an eye out for pictures or illustrations that speak to me. They're great if you just need one piece, or do a collection of 6 in matching frames - a big visual impact for very little money. Like this collection from Crate & Barrel:

You could buy these six prints for $369. Or you could do the same thing with calendar pages for, like, $90.

But I digress. Back to the owls.
He's my favorite. Don't tell the others.

That's the room! And it only took me seven months to finish it! :)

Easter Baskets

2010-03-28T12:35:00.000-07:00

So Easter is almost upon us and I'm gearing up for a week full of fun with the kiddos. One of my favorite bloggers, Becky Higgins, introduced a new blog just started by three creative sisters, called eighteen25. They have the cutest idea for a kids-craft where you make baskets out of yarn - head over and check it out if you have toddlers who love to play in watery glue. And that's every toddler I know.

I'm having a blast putting the kids' baskets together.
I thought it would be hard to do a basket for a 3-month-old, since he can't eat anything and he's limited in what he can play with, but we found some great blocks and a sweet stuffed giraffe who plays a song and waves his head around. . .
The highlight of P's basket is a microphone that we found. Because what that girl really needs is voice amplification.

I adore Pottery Barn. Sometimes I play-shop their online store and just dream of how beautiful my house would be if I could afford whatever I wanted from there. But I know that I wouldn't really be happy with doing that - that part of the fun of decorating is in finding things that I love for a price that I'm happy about. I was reminded of that while I was play-shopping their Easter goodies. That crinkled-shredded-Easter-paper-basket-filler? (Yeah, that's the official name.) It's 29 cents per bag at Target. And Pottery Barn has it for $8. Seriously, PB? That's just silly.
But they're still great for inspiration.
I'd love to use the paper filler in these three trifle bowls I have, and stack eggs in them, like little paper nests. Perfect Spring table centerpiece!

Pancake Fridays

2010-03-23T06:22:00.000-07:00

Family rituals have been on my mind lately. Not too long ago, P and I started celebrating Pancake Friday, which is exactly what it sounds like. Now P wakes up asking if it's Pancake Friday, and when it is, oh boy, that girl gets into it. She loves to measure ingredients and tell me when the pancakes are ready to flip, and I love eating pancakes. :) (We make a half-batch, by the way. We don't take down a whole batch of pancakes by ourselves. But I wouldn't put it past us.)

I think the thing she likes the most is that it's something different that I make a big deal about, that it's deliberate time for the two of us. (Lately, Mr. Man has been joining us if he's awake. I let him smell all the ingredients, like I did when P was that age. She liked it. He just looks like he's angry that I'm not letting him eat any of this. I think he'd take down a porterhouse steak if I'd let him.) This one little ritual has made me realize that I haven't been deliberate about making special rituals for our family.

It's not just everyday rituals - I've realized that I haven't done holidays as big as I could have. The kids are so young, my excuse is that they wouldn't remember and it wouldn't matter to them. But starting with Easter, I'm going to start making deliberate family rituals - for holidays and special weekly or monthly routines.

And wouldn't you know it - here's a post from Tsh at SimpleMom about the same thing I've been thinking! I love her Friday dinner routine - sounds like a great start to the weekend.

Home Staging

2010-03-17T08:28:00.000-07:00

So, remember how I just figured out what to do with this corner of the living room? Well, we decided to try to sell the house, which meant the desk had to go. I've been watching a lot of the HGTV sell-your-house shows - one of the biggest rules is to designate one purpose to each room, and only have stuff in that room that supports that purpose. (I totally get it - how much time did I spend telling my high school students that they should only have sentences in their paragraphs that support the theme of that paragraph? Ugh - sometimes I'm really glad I'm not teaching anymore.) So goodbye, living room/playroom/office; hello, living room. Only seating. And that blasted TV.
I found the chairs on sale at Overstock.com. I'd never ordered furniture from them before, and I was very happy with all of it - the chairs only took four days to get here, and they look lovely and were easy to put together, and you can't beat $2.95 shipping for two big chairs.

And remember how I just re-did the mantel? That all had to go - too cluttery. Just sconces now. (I found them at Gordman's for $8 apiece!)

And remember how I just painted Mr. Man's room orange? Yeah, not the smartest move in terms of resale. Our agent came out to look at the house yesterday, and he said the paint shouldn't be a deal breaker as long as we keep the furniture in there. Or maybe we'll find a buyer who wants to decorate in Cheetos-orange. Who knows. (But the owls did get a thumbs-up - I'm still going to post pictures of the whole room - I promise.)

My little girl walked through the room and just said, "Mom-Mom sings me a song and it makes me happy." Totally out of the blue - I was not singing at the time. One of the greatest thing about having kids is that they're required to love your singing voice, no matter how off-key and horrible it is. And one of the greatest things about almost-three-year-olds is that they always say just what they're thinking, and usually it's funny stuff.

Here she is with Uncle Steve and "Anna-manda."

How did this guy get so big? What happened to newborn Mr. Man?

Any advice from people who have sold their homes recently?
Has anyone sold a home recently? :)

Paint Chips

2010-02-24T11:22:00.000-08:00

Yikes - it's been a while, right? It turns out, having two kids in diapers doesn 't leave much room for creative pursuits, much less blogging about them. But here I go. . .

This is a scrapbook page layout where I used some paint chips tucked into a faux-pocket behind my main picture to reinforce the green theme. (I love paint chips - don't you? I look at them whenever I'm in a home improvement store. And now, Disney has paint chips that are stickers shaped like the Mickey Mouse head in the color of the paint! So now I pick up paint chips for P - that girl is a sucker for stickers. Okay, fine - I am, too.)

These paint chips were left over from when I painted P's bedroom. Now that I'm writing about it, it seems kind of gross that I chose a green color for her room that is the same as the mushed-up baby food peas that she used to smear all over herself. Hmm.

I did another layout for a niece with the orange chips from Mr. Man's room. I never throw anything away. It's ridiculous.

Also, the "green" in the title is made out of Shrinky Dink plastic! I think it's available at Hobby Lobby - I found this stuff in my arts & crafts stash, which represents years and years of never throwing anything away. I used huge stencils, traced the letters with thick Sharpie, then baked them. (Nothing is more fun than baking Shrinky Dinks! I might be easily amused. . .) Then I painted the backs of them with green acrylic paint. (See how the 'g' is broken? Apparently, skinny parts don't bake well.)

In other news, I'm thinking about opening my shop back up on Etsy. I really miss it! I'm trying to figure out the logistics - how to do it so I can enjoy it and not get overwhelmed. Or, you know, neglect the children.

Dressin' Up My Dresser

2010-02-06T19:49:00.000-08:00

P has my old dresser in her bedroom. I had it in my room for as long as I can remember - it makes me happy that my little girl is going to grow up with it, too.

For the longest time I've wanted to replace the square wooden handles with pretty girly ones. But I didn't want to spend any money on it. It's pretty hard to find free handles. Restoration Hardware's not giving them away. Neither is Anthropologie, or even Home Depot. I finally found some on Etsy - a set of 13 vintage white ceramic handles that had never been used before. (Thirteen? What an odd collection. . .) For less than $17, including shipping. So that's close enough to free for me. Here's the shop were I found the handles: Castleberry Antiques.

Aren't they cute? P helped me put them on. It's scary how good she is with a screwdriver. Thanks, Handy Manny.

Toy Story

2010-02-01T17:06:00.001-08:00

I love looking back at pictures and noticing the everyday stuff - the background mess, the clothes. . . the stuff that I don't usually highlight in my scrapbooks. My favorite scrapbook pages usually end up being about the everyday stuff. Like my little girl's favorite toys from her first year.

For this page I took pictures of all her favorite toys against a white background (the toys were so bright - I didn't want a busy background, too) and numbered all the pictures. In the margin I put the number, then journaled anything important - who the toy is from, it's name, stuff like that.

And I'm terrible with titles, so when I do one I like, I make a big deal about it. I generally don't even put a title on my scrapbook pages; when I do, it's a song title, or movie title, or something like that. Words that aren't my own. I remember agonizing over the title of a Shakespeare report I had to write in high school. Titles traumatize me. I like this title of this page, "Toy Story," because it's a kids movie title that also describes this page, but also because it looks bold and simple. I got the idea to fill in one letter with monochromatic buttons from a scrapbooking magazine. I can't claim it. But I like the way it turned out!

So my resolution is to make more space in my scrapbooks for the everyday stuff, not just the holidays and vacations.

Mr. Man approves. :)

Stamp Happy

2010-01-12T11:00:00.000-08:00

I use stamps on just about all my projects - on cards, scrapbook pages, gift wrap, clothes for the kiddos. . .

Recently, I've started altering some of my less-than-favorite stamps to make them more useful. Here's some stuff I've done that I've been happy with:

1. Use markers instead of ink pads. You can use just part of the image. I like the "thanks" in this stamp and wanted to use it on a card, but I didn't like the first part of the phrase. (A thank-you card is pretty much everybody's way of saying thanks. . . It seemed silly to claim that it was my way.) So I just colored in the "thanks" with a brown scrapbooking pen and stamped before it had dried. I really like this because I have a lot more pens than I do ink pads - lots more colors to chose from.

2. Another thing I've done is cut up clear stamps. I liked the owl in this one, and it was on sale, so I couldn't pass it up. I would never have an opportunity to use the stamp as is, so I just cut off all the words. I think he makes a pretty cute card.

3. The last thing I've done to alter my stamps is slice off the edges of messy rubber stamps. You know those rubber stamps that don't have very deep images, and it's really hard to get a clean picture with them because the edges always get ink on them and then show up on the paper? No? Just me? Okay, I had that problem with some cheap Christmas stamps, so I just took a craft knife to the edges and sliced off everything that had leftover ink on it. It cleaned it up nicely! (No pictures, you just have to take my word on this one.)

I love stamps. Have I said that? I've ended up collecting lots of stamps, some of which I use, some of which are collecting dust. My favorites are these clear swirl stamps from Oriental Trading Company.
I use them on all sorts of projects, mostly as background decoration. Here are some bags I made, where these stamps sort of ground other images and just provide some texture.

Here's a shirt I stamped for P. It was a white shirt that ended up with stains on it, so I dyed it and stamped some swirls around the neck and down one side.

Here's a card where I cut a swirl out of patterned paper - the swirl stamp just adds another layer of swirliness. (The spell-check wants me to change "swirliness" to "surliness." That's not something I try for in my cards.)

And here's a bonus picture of Mr. Man before I go.

Things That Make Me Smile

2010-01-05T11:34:00.000-08:00

I love my little necklace holder. It's hanging in my closet, and it makes me smile every time I see it. I'm a big fan of necklaces and earrings and, well, anything shiny, and even though I don't wear very much jewelry (occupational hazard) it makes me happy to just see it. I didn't have any drawer or countertop space I could use for jewelry, so I wanted to make something that would hang on the closet wall, out of the way. I used a serving tray with shallow, straight wooden sides and just screwed in some little hooks along the top.

I nailed a couple of those saw-tooth hangers into the back so I could hang it on the wall with two nails. Now my necklaces have a pretty little tray to hang out in - it takes up absolutely no space, keeps my necklaces tangle-free and on display, and the tray is a lovely backdrop for my necklaces. (I put a shallow shelf just below the tray to set a small jewelry box on - that's where my earrings live - so all my jewelry is in one place. The shelf is also home to my Precious Moments figurines that I can't display anywhere else but that are, well, precious to me.)
And speaking of things that make me smile every time I see them, here's our new little guy:
Ah, so thankful to be home with him and have all of us together! He's awesome!

Not So Scared of Santa

2009-12-10T11:22:00.000-08:00

Penny just went to visit Santa at the Arvest Financial Center - it's the optimum place for her to get lots of personal attention with the most people cooing over her at once. Definitely a strategic choice for a Santa encounter. Last year she was a little afraid of Santa, and this year she was wary, but she at least sat on his lap and didn't cry. We kept trying to get her to look at the camera and smile, but she kept glancing back at Santa like she didn't completely trust him - she's a smart girl, and she can tell this whole "Santa" bit is a little half-baked. But the girl does love accessories - she was a lot more comfortable once she was in a Santa hat.

So Christmas is coming soon, and I thought I'd share a coffee cake recipe that my mom has made forever; I think it came from the Little Rock Cooks cookbook. It's perfect for Christmas morning, or any time you have company for the weekend, or, alright, Tuesday afternoon it's pretty good, too.

Cinnamon Coffee Cake

1 box yellow cake mix
3 3/4 oz box vanilla instant pudding
2/3 cups vegetable oil
3/4 cups water
4 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp butter flavoring
1 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup chopped nuts

Filling: 1/4 cup sugar & 2 tsp cinnamon

Mix the first seven ingredients for eight minutes. Grease and flour Bundt pan. Cover bottom of pan with brown sugar, and sprinkle with chopped nuts. Alternate cake batter and a sprinkling of filling mix in three layers. Bake at 350 for 40 to 50 minutes.

Glaze:

1 cup powdered sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp butter flavoring
enough milk to thin glaze

Glaze with 1/2 of mixture while hot and still in pan. Cool cake for several minutes, then remove from pan. Top cake with remaining glaze.

The key here is the greasing of the Bundt pan. This coffee cake takes a while, but it isn't hard to do at all, and any excuse to eat dessert for breakfast is, I think, totally worth it.

Quick Camden update: We went to the doctor today, and everything's going very well. Dr. Pickhardt said that if we wanted to start thinking of a date to induce, he was available the 26th. So without any signs that Cam is in any kind of a hurry, it looks like the 26th might be our date! That would be exciting - to know exactly when we were going to be at the hospital and be able to plan around that. . .

And hopefully I'll get pictures posted of his room before he gets here. I'm waiting on our chair to get in, and I have just a few more art projects to do before it's actually finished. So it's coming!

I'm Crazy about a Pillow!

2009-11-14T18:05:00.001-08:00

Look at this pillow from Crate & Barrel! I'm crazy about it.

I'm taking a break from working on my last batch of Boppy covers before I officially go on maternity leave (I think I'm going to miss them!), and I was thinking about what I wanted to put in the middle of the kitchen table, now that it's not going to be adorned with my sewing machine and yards of fabric all the time. I'm really looking forward to having that as an actual table instead of a work space. You know, for things like eating meals there. And sitting down to look at a magazine. Or even read a book! Well, I can dream, right?

So looking for centerpiece inspiration, I headed on over to Crate and Barrel's website, and I found this pillow. I have to make it. Just a pillow cover and some felt buttons sewn on. I can do that!

And it'll look perfect for Christmas! I was wanting to switch out some botanical pillow covers that I've had for forever, anyway. So that's my next project. Well, not my next project. I have to finish about six other things before I can start on it. But it's totally on the list now!

And yeah, this is an entire post about one pillow.

Well, I have to add that Penny's with me at the desk and I just looked down and she was gnawing on the corner of the desk. So I don't know what to do with that. Any parenting advice?

Little Bits O' Fall

2009-10-27T14:47:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to share a couple of pictures of the mantle, all dressed up for fall. The cake stand, pitcher, and trifle bowl were stuffed in a back cabinet in the kitchen. The fleur de lis, French books, coasters and stripey ribbon were in different places in the house. Most of my decorating comes from cannibalizing other arrangements in the house. Some people call it "shopping your house." I like the word cannibalizing. So that's what I call it.

In general, I'm not a fan of fake botanicals, but I have to make an exception for fall-colored leaves. I found these branches at Hobby Lobby (for half-off, of course), and I liked that they have sticks and acorns and little pinecones in them. I'm thinking that for Christmas I'll just pull the leaves and replace them with some red berries. And maybe I'll work in some sparkly, spangly sticks, too! Christmas is a great excuse to glitter-up the house.

And, if you're going to be making/decorating gift bags this Christmas, here's the easiest thing in the world to do to make a personalized bag. These are just plain kraft paper bags with scrapbooking paper cut out just smaller than the front, then inked around the edges and glued on. I cut green strips of paper and just stuck letter stickers on top. I used left-over letters, so I ran out of some of them. Instead of buying more letters (I'm totally cheap) I cut out the outline of where the letter used to be and stuck it on red paper, then cut it out. Insta-letters! (The J an S in Jason and the S and C in Jessica are done like this.) Before I glued the green name strips on the paper, I lightly traced where they would go, then stamped on the background paper so the stamped images would be peeking out from behind the strips. Super-easy, and I just used a few sheets of paper and left-over letter stickers.

Next up: we worked in Cam's room this weekend, so as soon as I get pictures up, I'll show off all the owls. Here's a sneak peek:

Corner-of-the-Living Room Makeover

2009-10-16T14:14:00.000-07:00

We're in the process of turning our living room/playroom into a living room/playroom/office. Whew! That's a lot of stuff going on in a little room. The original plan was to do Cam's room half-nursery/half-office. There just wasn't enough space in his room. So we had to find a new home for our computer; we ended up sticking it in the corner of the living room, which totally threw off the balance of the room. I'm hesitant to post this before picture; could my home really be this messy? Am I so used to it that I don't even notice it until it's in a picture I'm considering sharing with the world? In my defense, this was taken at the end of a long day that came at the end of a long week.
Bleh. Not pretty. I'm a big believer in arranging seating in a way that's conducive to conversation, not just against walls, but to do that you have to have things against the walls to draw the eye to the edges of the space - otherwise, your room would be visually reduced to the space of your seating arrangement. So I added some Pier One curtains (on sale, of course), a hand-me-down lamp from my parents, a Lowe's shelf and a printed canvas from Hobby Lobby. I also had to take a hard look at how many toys we were keeping out in the living room. It's a daily battle. Where do they all come from?

Here's what we ended up with:

So now the office space is kind of it's own defined area, and the curtains make the cornice box look more intentional and not like it's just floating at the top of the room.

I'm not in love with the lampshade. I wish it was a dark color. And I would love to have toy storage that blends with the living room, instead of being primary-colored plastic. For that matter, I don't love the computer in the living room. In my ideal world, the living room would be free of screens of any kind. (Don't tell D. He would not approve of my ideal living room.) But this room is a work in progress, like everything else in this house. I know there are crafty things that one can do to change the color of a lampshade, but I'm hesitant to jump into that one. Besides, it would be number 28 on my list of projects to get done in the next five weeks. Speaking of winding down all the projects, I'm going to be closing up my Etsy shop sometime in November in preparation for Cam getting here. So if anybody's thinking about ordering Christmas presents, now's the time. (Or if you're a Short, now is the time you're in full-out Christmas present-buying mode, anyway.)

Here's a fun slipcover I just did for a friend of my sister's. I love how it turned out. I'm thinking about doing an owl one for Cam.

Etsy is Good for my Ego

2009-10-02T07:40:00.001-07:00

http://thismamablogrocks.blogspot.com/2009/10/mel-short-shops-review-and-giveaway.html

Check me out! This is a review of a nursing pillow slipcover and onesie that I did for a sweet stay-at-home momma who just started the neatest blog. We're doing a giveaway for one slipcover and onesie set, and there are lots of things you can do to enter; they're all painless. So head over, and check out the other stuff she has - I'm so impressed with all the different information and useful stuff she has on her blog.

Here's a mint green all-minky slipcover I just sold on Etsy - sometimes when I make one of these, I just want to keep it. This is one of those. I think Cam needs one just like it.

www.melshort9.etsy.com

What I Did This Weekend

2009-09-28T17:03:00.000-07:00

D and I decided Saturday night that Sunday would be a good day to paint the nursery. I have planned on painting in there for months, but for the longest time it felt like jumping the gun, like it would be weird to have a finished nursery and just be a couple of months pregnant. Then, all of the sudden, I discovered that I had become VERY pregnant, with no weekend in sight to take care of such a big project. So Sunday was our day.
I was inspired by this nursery in Pottery Barn Kids:

Sigh. I would live in Pottery Barn if I could. But I really liked the way the color only went partially up the wall, and I liked that it ended in an interesting motif. I knew I wanted to do orange, and having all of the walls orange seemed a little too much. Also, the ceiling line in our room is weird, and I didn't want to mess with it. (A scary number of my decorating decisions are based on not wanting to mess with things.)

Pottery Barn has a Peter Rabbit silhouette in their room, which is way more intricate than anything I would ever do. I settled for half-circles. Here's how it turned out:

I wanted a motif that echoed the big half-circle window on one wall, since that window is sort of the dominant thing in that room. Oh, how that window has been a decorating challenge. But that's another post. To outline the pattern on the wall, I got a scrap piece of paper and a dinner plate, traced the plate and cut out the circle, then folded it in half. We decided how high up we wanted the scallop pattern (higher than most of the furniture, low enough to not have to mess with the tops of doors and windows), measured and marked the height around the room, and D held up a yardstick while I just traced the half-circle onto the wall with a pencil. I tried to not make it perfectly match up in any corner, so it wouldn't look like I had obviously started at one point.

Here's the big half-circle window:

We went with Behr satin finish paint in "Poppy Glow." (It took almost two gallons, at about $25 a gallon.) This is after weeks of raiding Home Depot's paint chips and taping them up all over the walls to consider. I wanted something bright and fresh, but not overwhelming. Right now it looks perfect for Chester Cheetah's nursery. But I think it'll tone it down to get all the furniture in there, and curtains, and the crib bedding, which is all brown and white and tan. . .

So I think it was a successful venture. It looks whimsical without being too cutesy. It makes me think of a gingerbread house. Not a scary kid-baking one, a fun one.
The whole time we were painting I just kept thinking about scaring away potential buyers when we put the house on the market - is it a normal new homeowner thing to be obsessed with resale value? Probably. We now have one bedroom that's Cheetos orange, and another that's mint green with polka dots. Not everyone's taste.
But I have to say, D was a champ. Painting's not really his thing, but he totally pitched in and did whatever I asked him to do. Basically, I spent the day painting the scallops and he painted the rest of the room. And he went to buy paint and supplies. And he finished the second coat for me after I just crashed. (It's always surprising to me when pregnancy is actually physically limiting, instead of just being a good excuse to go back for more lasagna.) So kudos to D. I think he was just excited about not hearing me talk about needing to paint that room anymore. :)

Next up for that room: furniture, bedding, window coverings that include something to go over that blasted half-circle part. . . It's all going to be owl-themed - lots of browns and creams, with orange and yellow. I have a couple of art projects planned - one big owl painting, and a bulletin board repurposed as a card-displayer. And I'm warning you now, I'm calling the window treatment an "art installation." So, get ready for that.

TMI

2009-09-21T14:43:00.001-07:00

Okay, this isn't a crafty post. It's exactly the kind of post I wasn't going to do - it's all about me. And it's personal. So if "Mel's health and wellness" isn't a topic you're looking to brush up on, please feel free to skip this one. I promise craftiness next time.

So, two years ago when I was pregnant I had these weird symptoms (severe itching with no rash) and P was born early with weird symptoms (premature birth, fetal distress, meconium, jaundice). At the time my doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong, and by the time P was born, the focus was on getting her healthy and out of the NICU.

I mentioned the itching to my new doctor at my last appointment (my old OBGYN moved, so this guy wasn't around for all the drama of the last pregnancy), and he started asking questions and ended up saying that it was probably a liver condition called cholestasis. So I got home and googled the heck out of it, and that's absolutely what had happened to me! It's apparently a really rare thing (less than 0.5% chance of getting it) that I don't have any of the risk factors for. (Sorry to end that sentence with a preposition - I couldn't bring myself to type, "for which I had none of the risk factors." I wish there was a way to not end sentences with prepositions that didn't sound stilted. But I digress. . .)

The good news is that I feel a little bit better about my ability to tolerate uncomfortable situations. At the time all this itching was going on, people kept telling me that pregnancy made you itchy and uncomfortable; it's just something you put up with. (Again with the prepositions!) Since this disease doesn't have a rash to go along with the itching, it's easy to get overlooked because a little itching is normal. When you have cholestasis, however, the itching is intolerable. (I can say that - medical officials use that word, so I'm not being dramatic.) I seriously felt like I wanted to rip my skin off, and I didn't sleep for weeks because it would not let up. (See? TMI - I warned you!) So it's good to know that I'm not just a complete sissy who couldn't deal with normal pregnancy discomfort. It's also pretty good timing to be finding out about this. If we had known with P, maybe we would have been able to do something, but since that didn't happen, it's kind of good to not have had this to worry about for the past two years. It usually doesn't kick in until the third trimester, when pregnancy hormones are really goin', so I wasn't really at risk before this. So now that we know, we can prepare and be ready, but not get stressed about it before it's a real concern. And I feel really confident about my new doctor - Mark Pickhardt at Mercy. I've only had a handful of appointments with him, but he seems so competent and he listens and doesn't interrupt, and now, being able to suggest that it was this liver thing that had happened. . . most of the personal experience stories I've read about about women with cholestasis involve the patient stumbling on information on the internet and having to convince their doctors, who have never heard of it, that it's serious and it's what they have. So I'm blessed to have a doctor who's apparently very knowledgeable.

The bad news is that there's a 60 - 90% rate of recurrence, which means we're gearing up for probably having to deal with it with this pregnancy, too. Also, the risk of stillbirth is so great that early delivery (by 36 weeks) is the standard. There are a ton of tests and monitoring procedures that have to be repeated weekly or twice weekly after you're diagnosed, and the goal of treatment is to control it a little bit - there's no easy fix. So P was born at 36 weeks, at which point most babies' lungs are developed, but hers weren't quite ready. And boys develop slower than girls (a fact painfully clear through life, not just in utero), so the concern is having to deliver the baby before he's developed enough. Which is sickening - we spent two weeks with P in the NICU, and it was absolutely the worst experience of my life. To know that we might be in for that again. . . not encouraging.

The funny part is that I've been researching and talking about this so much lately that it's really gotten in my head. You know how if you're thinking about spiders and bugs and creepy-crawlies you start to feel like they're crawling on you? I keep obsessing about itching, and feeling like I itch. Because at this point we're kind of waiting for it to happen. Not in a fatalistic way, just to know that we need to jump to action if it does.

Here are some of the sites where I found the most (and most helpful) information about cholestasis:

www.itchymoms.com
www.mayoclinic.com/health/cholestasis-of-pregnancy/DS01033
www.americanpregnancy.org/pregnancycomplications/cholestasispregnancy.html

Again, my apologies for the lack of craftiness. I'll get back to it soon. I'm looking for a way to scan in scrapbook pages so I can post and brag about those. The problem is that our scanner can't do 12x12 pages; neither can D's at work. . . Any ideas?

Upholstered Headboard How-To

2009-09-13T19:29:00.000-07:00

My entire life, I've dreamed of having a big, four-poster, canopy bed that sits imposingly in the middle of a ginormous bedroom. What I have right now is a little bitty bedroom and a bed on a metal bed frame. Oh, that metal bed frame. We've shopped for an actual bed, with a headboard and foot board, but we've run into some roadblocks. First, our bedroom is so small that any bed that adds length to the bed (like those scrolly sleigh beds) is right out. Also, it's hard to tell what we want to get, since right now our bedroom is a mish-mash of hand-me-down furniture and bedding that is comfortable and functional, but doesn't really reflect us. (And by "us," I mean me. D's contribution to the decor in the bedroom is a Harry Caray figuring on the bedside table. Yes, I sleep with Harry Caray watching over me.) Oh, and a bed isn't exactly in the budget. So the best option for us was for me to tackle the daunting task of putting together an upholstered headboard myself. It wasn't especially difficult, and I'm pretty pleased with the results. Most importantly, the total project cost was around $85. I did a lot of research before I started this project and my process was a mess of steps from lots of different sources that I chose because I liked the way they looked, was able to understand them, and though they'd be the easiest way to do it. The bulk of the instructions came from a website called bejane.com. When I went back to check my link it was gone. Odd. The steps here are modified from mostly that source.

So here is the much-anticipated tutorial on making your own upholstered headboard:

1. Decide on the size and shape you're after. The width is easy - just measure the width of your bed. Our king-sized bed is 77 inches wide, but measure yours - apparently, there are some big discrepancies. A classic rectangle is the easiest option, but I wanted a curvy line at the top of mine. (There are already a lot of boxy rectangles on that wall - two cornice boxes, a big rose picture, the bed itself. . . I wanted to soften up all those lines.) To figure out the height, you might want to painters-tape off what you think you want on your wall and live with it for a couple of days - it needs to be high enough to clear your pillows when they're set up, but if it's too high, it might overpower the room. I made ours pretty low because the room is teeny-tiny.

2. Gather your materials:

1/4 inch plywood that's big enough for your project (for mine: 77 x 27 inches); make sure it's not warped or damaged: about $25 at Lowe's or Home Depot

2 inch foam as big as the headboard (at Hobby Lobby, sold in big rolls): about $25 - if you can't find one piece that's big enough, it's not a problem to put two side-by-side; you won't be able to tell on the finished product

batting to cover the whole thing, plus six inches on all four sides (at Hobby Lobby, with the fabric and interfacing - you can buy the cheap stuff; it doesn't have to be super-soft): about $12

interior decorator fabric - enough to cover the headboard, plus about six inches on all sides (shop at IOMetro Home on Walton and F Street in Bentonville first - they have modern fabrics for $7.95 a yard - that's a ridiculously good price): about $20

buttons to cover (at Hobby Lobby, they're with the zippers and thread in the sewing department - I chose 3/4 inch buttons, and I got six of them): about $6

something to fasten the headboard to the wall - a 2x4, flush mounts, or French cleats - see step nine for details

a staple gun with 1/4 inch or 3/8 inch staples

a roll of butcher paper or wrapping paper, if you're going to design a curvy top

a jigsaw to cut out a curvy top - if you're just going to do a rectangle, they'll make a cut or two for you at Lowe's or Home Depot, so you don't have to make any cuts yourself

a superlong needle to attach the buttons - I used a doll needle

embroidery floss, toothpicks, glue, tape measurer, pencil, marker

3. Cut out plywood in the shape you want. If you're doing a curvy top, measure out the width of the headboard in butcher paper, then freehand the design. Decide which side you like better, fold paper in half (so you'll have a symmetric headboard) and use that side as the pattern to cut out the paper. This is a good point to stop and tape this up to the wall for a few days to figure out if you like the design, and if you have the height perfect. (I didn't do that. I just went for it.) Lay the butcher paper out on the plywood, measuring to the desired top of the headboard and matching that up with the top of your design. Trace around the top, remove the butcher paper, and use a jigsaw (or a dad who's gifted in the art of carpentry) to cut out the design. (The top picture has the butcher paper laid out on it - you can barely see it because it's so close to the color of the wood. The next picture is the cut-out shape in the wood. And my carpenter-dad.)

4. Measure where you want the tufted buttons to go, and drill small holes through the plywood. I used six buttons in a diamond pattern. You can definitely do more than that if you want a more padded look. The more buttons, the fluffier it'll look. If you want to do streamlined (or if you've chosen a fabric with a strong pattern or a monogram) you don't have to do buttons at all. (This picture shows P doing the measuring. I would caution that having a 2-year old do this step isn't your best bet. I know she looks like she knows what she's doing, but her math was a little off. . .)

5. Lay the plywood on top of the 2 inch foam and trace the shape onto the foam - you can use a Sharpie or any marker that will mark on foam. Cut the foam out with regular scissors. (If it's just a touch sloppy, that's okay - you can see mine is a little rough.)

6. Lay your fabric, face down, on a big, clean, open space. (I used my living room floor. So I settled for just any space.) Lay your batting down on top of it. (Fabric and batting should be about the same size.) Oh, lots of how-to sites recommend that you iron your fabric before you start this step. I didn't, and it turned out fine. If your fabric is super-wrinkled, or if it would make you feel better, by all means iron. Then come over to my house. I have some shirts. . . Lay the foam on top of that, then line up the plywood on the top. At this point, you should be looking at a big headboard sandwich with batting and fabric sticking out on all sides about six inches. Peek under the fabric to make sure that it's lined up square - that whatever pattern is on it is going to sit evenly and not be wonky.

7. Gently pull the fabric and batting up over the top center of the plywood and staple on the back on the wood. Go to the bottom center of the headboard and pull and staple there, too. Next, do the center of both sides, so you have four staples in the middle of the four sides. From there, you can flip the headboard over to make sure the fabric hasn't shifted on you and the pattern is straight. (Of course, I didn't check mine. Decorate by the seat of my pants, I do.) Go back to the bottom of the headboard and gently pull and staple your way around, working out from the center of the bottom, top, then sides. When you get to the corners, pull and staple however makes it the smoothest on the front - it'll look like weird hospital corners on the back, but who cares what the back looks like. If you're working with a curved top, you might have to snip the fabric and batting a little bit to make it lay smoothly in the curves - just make sure you aren't cutting fabric that's going to be visible. I think the more staples, the better. Also, I love staple guns. Would use them all the time if I could. (Again, another step not ideally suited for a 2-year old.) When you're done stapling, check one more time to make sure the fabric is straight. Now is not too late to rip it out and start stapling again.

8. Cover the buttons with scrap fabric (there are instructions on the button package - it's very easy). Thread a super-long needle with embroidery floss (all six strands at once) and slide it through the hole you drilled in the back of the headboard. Lace the button onto the needle, then get the needle back through the hole. If you can do that from the front, congratulations. You're probably a decorating ninja. I couldn't get the needle back through the hole, so what I had to do was unthread the needle, then push it through from the backside again, but this time backwards, so the part that came out the front was the eye of the needle. Then I rethreaded it and pulled it through. Kind of tedious, but I was only doing six buttons, so not the biggest deal in the world. I got all the buttons on the headboard before I started tying them. The tying is a two-person job. One person pushes the button into the headboard from the front, making a nice, deep tuft, and the other person ties the embroidery floss in the back. I tied it around two toothpicks, so the knot didn't sink back through the wood, and then I topped each knot with some glue so the thread wouldn't slip. (I used my fancy scrapbooking glue, but Elmers would work.)

9. Time to attach the headboard to the wall. There are a few ways to do this. You could screw the whole thing onto 2x4's, so it looks like it's on stilts, and screw the legs into the bed frame. This is the best option if you're renting or don't want to put holes in your walls. To get the right height on the legs, the headboard should sit one inch below the top of your mattress, and the legs should extend most of the way up the back of the headboard. I also saw a lot of how-to's for making headboards that described using flush mounts, which you can buy at Lowe's or Home Depot, that screw into the wall, and into the headboard, and then the pieces fit together to hold the headboard up. Again, just center the headboard over your bed and let it rest one inch below the top of the mattress. What we did (and by "we" I mean my dad, because at this point we were into "carpentry," which is not my area of expertise, so he took over) was split a 2x4 at an angle, screw one piece horizontally into the headboard, and one piece into the wall, so that the headboard is just resting on that piece, and it's weight is keeping it up against the wall. If you're going to do this, make sure to get the wall piece into studs, and make sure that the screws you use on the headboard are short enough to not pierce through the headboard.

10. Sit back and bask in your decor proficiency. Congratulations. And send me pictures if you try this.
Since I've done this headboard, I keep noticing awesome upholstered headboards in magazines and catalogs. Here are some of the best ideas I wish I had had myself:

I love the line on the top of this one. Interesting, but not too girly.

Monogrammed headboard! I love this idea. Wouldn't have worked for me. (I don't think D would have appreciated a headboard with just my monogram on it. And if it had two, would that just look like a seating assignment?) But for a kid's room? Adorable! (Grrrr - I can't find a picture! I'll keep looking and post it if I can find it again. But you can imagine it, right? It's awesome!)

Quick Rhea Lana's Update Plus New Slipcover

2009-09-01T18:29:00.000-07:00

So my mom and I hit the Rhea Lana's pre-sale today. If you're in the market for gently used and relatively high-quality kids' clothing, toys, and furniture, don't miss it. It runs through the end of this week, in the Hammons Center / Embassy Suites Conference Center in Rogers. Before you go, you should know it's pretty overwhelming. There's one giant room of clothes, ranging from preemie to maybe toddler size 5 or 6. There are also some glider chairs, cribs, maternity clothes, shoes, and miscellaneous stuff like monitors, Boppies, and books in that room. The other room, which I didn't even make it into, has bigger toys and furniture. I consider myself a pretty competent shopper and I only made it through maybe a fifth of one room. It's very crowded, and there's very little space to move around. (I also went on pregnant ladies night, so there was quite a bit of space taken up by bellies.) If you go, be sure to take a giant shopping bag - bags are not provided there. And don't take in a big purse, or, whatever you do, a child. There were some kids there, and those were some miserable mommas.

I went looking for baby boy clothes and maybe some maternity clothes, and I did a pretty good job. Total damage: 11 footed sleepers, 7 pairs of pants, 2 pairs of overalls, 6 long-sleeved onesies, one button-down, one sweater, and two hats for baby boy Smith, plus one cute top for me: $95. Not bad.

Also, here's the newest slipcover I've made and put on Etsy. I love the Razorback red against the black and white polka dot background. Just in time for football season!

Pumpkin Cookies

2009-08-31T14:59:00.000-07:00

There's no better way to celebrate crisp fall days than pumpkin cookies. (Surely it's not still August. . .) Once again, I have to credit my mom with this recipe. It's a family favorite, and anybody I can convince to try them is won over to the pumpkin side. Don't be put off by vegetables in cookies - you've got to try them! And count them toward your daily intake of veggies. Or just make them and give them to me. My feelings would not be hurt.

2 cups flour
1 cup quick oats (Quaker, of course - does that count as a Pepsi shout-out?)
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup butter, softened
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup Libby's pumpkin (not pumpkin pie filling - just pumpkin)
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
(optional: icing, peanut butter, candies, raisins, nuts)

Preheat oven to 350.
Cream butter, add two sugars. Beat until light and fluffy. Resist the urge to eat this mess. Is it just me who's tempted?
Add egg and vanilla. Mix well.
Add flour, oats, baking soda, cinnamon, salt, and pumpkin, mixing well after each addition. Stir in chocolate chips.
Drop 1/4 cup balls of dough on lightly greased cookie sheets, allow plenty of room for them to spread out; bake 20-25 minutes. Cool on racks.
Decorate with toppings like jack-o-lanterns.
*Okay, I don't do the decorating. I'll probably start when P gets old enough to get into that. Until then, what I do is drop the dough by tablespoons onto cookie sheets and bake about 14-16 minutes.

Also, this week is a children's supplies consignment sale at the John Q. Hammonds Center in Rogers called Rhea Lana's. Here's the website. I've never been to this before, but I've heard from other mommas that it's good stuff. I'm new to the outfit-my-children-in-used-stuff idea, but some of my favorite blogging mommas swear by it, so I'm going to try it out. That, plus I get in a day early because I'm currently pregnant. Maybe they do that to keep all of the cranky, slow ones out of the way once the real shopping starts. :) I'll report back on how it goes.

One final idea. I just got a new lotion from Bath & Body Works called Optimism and today's the first time I've used it. Call me crazy; I honestly feel more optimistic today! How's that for the power of persuasion? Or maybe Bath & Body Works really knows what they're doing. . . maybe I should go back and see if they have something called "Motivation to Clean the House."

2009-08-31T09:56:00.000-07:00

Rule of Thirds Greeting Card

2009-08-20T09:11:00.000-07:00

Greetings and good rainy day! It's a good day - we're almost through the awkward gap between my birthday and D's when I'm two years older than him. He's agreed that, starting this year (since I've hit 3-0), he's just going to pretend that he's my age. So, happy 30th birthday!
I wanted to mention to my "followers" with limited blog experience that you can leave comments in the guest book at the bottom, even if you can't comment at the end of a specific post. The comment part is easier if you have a g-mail account. No pressure. I won't call you out on it.

Okay, here's the project of the day: greeting cards. First, the envelopes. I have a template for an envelope from Fiskars that I bought at an SSD garage sale, but you don't need one of those to make your own cards. Just carefully unfold an existing envelope that you like the size of, and use it as a pattern. Trace around it (I like using double-sided paper, so it looks special from the outside and the inside), cut it out, and fold in the flaps and glue. That's it. Super-easy. To make a card to go in it, measure and be sure the folded card is 1/4 inch smaller on all sides than the folded envelope. (My cards need to be 4 1/2 by 5 1/2 inches to fit the envelopes, so I cut them out as 9 by 5 1/2 inch rectangles.)

Easy Rule of Thirds Card Design
For this card, I used the rule of thirds to guide the design on the front. (Rule of Thirds: imagine a tic-tac-toe board over a square space and arrange elements at the intersection of the lines, not in the middle square.) Since my card is a rectangle, I imagined six squares instead of nine. I found six coordinating paper scraps to be the squares and cut them out, then rounded to corners for a more finished look. (I got double-duty from a few of the papers that are reversible - I used both sides.) I put the message, "thank you," on the bottom corner square, then treated each block as an individual picture and just cluttered it up with embellishments I had on hand. Greeting cards are great for scrapbookers - we always end up with scrap paper and extra little embellishments, and making cards gives us more justification for our obsessive collection of supplies. ("But D," I say, "it's for scrapbook pages and cards!" You can see what a convincing argument it is.) I also like to use found items on cards - I don't worry about archival-safe when I'm doing cards, so I use tags that come on clothes, I cannibalize other greeting cards, I cut out pictures from magazines. . . For this card, the top middle square is a price tag that came on a jar of buttons - I just used the back of it.

On Paper Selection
For each card, you'll need one double-sided piece of cardstock for the envelope and one coordinating piece of paper for the card. Be sure that one side of the envelope paper is light enough that you can write an address on it - the inside can be as busy as you want it to be. For the card paper, make sure you can write legibly on the side that will be the inside of the card. If you're in love with paper that won't let you do that, an option is to cut out a rectangle of plain coordinating paper and glue it to the inside of the card for your message. If you're using 12x12 inch paper, you'll need a whole sheet for one envelope, and you can get two cards out of a single page. I usually buy two pages of the envelope paper and one page of the card paper, so out of three sheets I can get two card-and-envelope sets.

Happy scrapping! Oh, and I finally got some new slipcovers up on my Etsy site! I was inspired by Anthropologie and decided to use non-literal names for all the different designs. D totally didn't get it, but I'm going for evoking emotion, here!

New Boppy Covers and Baby Clothes

2009-08-15T04:48:00.000-07:00

Just had to share a few new Boppy covers I'm working on. Sometimes I feel like I'm in a rut with them and need to do something different; I think I have creative ADD. I've been trying to figure out a different way to do the zippers, and I found it! I've started putting them on the back of the cover instead of around the outside seam, so they lay flat and look a lot more professional, I think. (You can kind of see on the second picture - there's a flap covering the zipper, so you can just tell where the fabric changes.) So that, combined with the boat-load of new zippers D found for me on clearance (what a guy!), has really got me motivated to work on these things again. And I love these new fabrics! Especially the scroll one. It's almost a dove gray or light, light blue, and the scrolls are in faded-looking black with white shadows. Very sophisticated, but still in soft baby colors! I'm always looking for baby stuff that's not too sweet. They're brand new; I haven't even put them on Etsy yet. But pretty soon, check them out at my Etsy store.
More to come. . .

I'm afraid poor little baby boy Smith is going to end up looking pretty in pink in all his sister's hand-me-downs, so I've started shopping for manly baby clothes. (Actually, P and I just needed to get out of the house yesterday and didn't have a legitimate errand to run, so we hopped on over to Gordmans, where you can find things at a price that makes you believe you desperately need them.) Nine tops, four pairs of pants, and six pairs of socks for just over $50. That's right, I'm a professional. Does anybody else arrange and photograph clothes after a successful shopping venture? No? Just me?

Black Bean Soup

2009-08-06T16:51:00.000-07:00

The dear husband is fervently planning his tailgating schedule. This can only mean one thing: Razorback football season is upon us. Well, almost upon us. In the middle of these sweltering days (and me with an 11 ounce internal heat pack) I'm looking forward to crisp mornings, fires in the fireplace, leaves changing colors (as they do best in the Ozarks), and even Razorback football. I love fall foods, too, and I wanted to share my favorite recipe: black bean soup, which has been just slightly modified from my momma's version. Don't be fooled; this soup is not messing around. It's hearty and filling, and totally worthy of being whipped up, even while we're still in the middle of summer.

Black Bean Soup
one or two cups chopped celery*
one or two cups chopped carrots*
one or two cups chopped white onion*
1/2 cup minced fresh cilantro*
1 (10 ounce) can Ro-tel
4 (15 ounce) cans Ranch Style brand black beans
2 tablespoons butter
* I buy a package of celery, a package of carrots, one big onion, and a bunch of cilantro. I chop them all up and use all of the celery, carrots, and onion, and about half of the cilantro.

1. In a large pot, melt butter. Add celery, carrots, and onion; cook 15-20 minutes, until tender.
2. Add Ro-tel, beans, and cilantro (don't drain any of the cans); heat to a boil.
3. Reduce heat and simmer at least 30 minutes, up to a couple of hours, stirring occasionally.
Serve with shredded cheddar cheese, sour cream, cornbread, corn chips, or whatever.
Makes 6 to 8 servings, and is great left over.

Enjoy! And go Hogs!

Oh! And this is exciting - we found out today we're having a boy! So P will have a little brother to torment this winter. She's very excited. She saw the DVD of the ultrasound (scary - all ultrasound pictures make the babies look like Skeletor - or maybe my kids just look like Skeletor), and she pointed and squealed and laughed.

Also, a few people have asked me why I'm blogging under my maiden name. It's just because my Etsy shop is under that name, and that's because my e-mail is "melshort," and that's because I've had this e-mail since I was Mel Short. So it just sort of happened; it's not an intentional pen name or anything.

Poetry and Sarcasm Don't Mix

2009-07-25T05:39:00.000-07:00

One of my goals as a mother is to expose my baby to everything beneficial and healthy, even if I don't particularly enjoy it. So yesterday I broke out an old book of poetry, thinking I would read her a couple of poems while she scribbled on her AquaDoodle (thanks Uncle Steve). I started reading Mary Oliver's "You Are Standing at the Edge of the Woods," and all of the sudden, I started to cry. Now, I am four months pregnant and not entirely unemotional right now, but that's an odd reaction. And I remembered that poetry has a way of making me burst into tears. I wouldn't say that I love poetry, but I went through the requisite poetry stage when I was about 14. You know, girls, the stage where you would write hearfelt if painfully rhymed verses about life and love, or what you imagine life and love might be about, based on movies.

I have had a bad experience with poetry. In school one time I was forced to write a poem by a well-meaning English teacher, so my friends and I decided to cook up the cheesiest poem we could think of. I don't remember when this was - I was old enough to be dabbling in sarcasm, but young enough to think this idea was really cool. I still remember one verse: "Soaring high with dreamer's knowledge / Of the worlds that lie before." Awesome. So I turn it in, and of course, my teacher enters it in a contest, which it, of course, won. (Did you read the part about "dreamer's knowledge?" That's gold.) My prize was that I had to read it in front of the whole school. Worst punishment for goofing off in class ever.

So this blog is supposed to be devoted to making stuff and general craftiness, but today I just wanted to share this Mary Oliver poem. The tip of the day is to try something that's good for you, even if you don't think you like it. And don't get sarcastic when you're forced to write a poem. It will come back and bite you.

You Are Standing at the Edge of the Woods

You are standing at the edge of the woods
at twilight
when something begins
to sing, like a waterfall

pouring down
through the leaves. It is
the thrush.
And you are just

sinking down into your thoughts,
taking in
the sweetness of it -- those chords,
those pursed twirls -- when you hear

out of the same twilight
the wildest red outcry. It pitches itself
forward, it flails and scabs
all the surrounding space with such authority

you can't tell
whether it is crying out on the
scarp of victory, with its hooked foot
dabbed into some creature that now

with snapped spine
lies on the earth -- or whether
it is such a struck body itself, saying
goodbye.

The thrush
is silent then, or perhaps
has flown away.
The dark grows darder.

The moon,
in its shining white blouse,
rises.
And whatever that wild cry was

it will always remain a mystery
you have to go home now and live with,
sometimes with the ease of music, and sometimes in silence,
for the rest of your life.

Wall Letters

2009-07-21T08:07:00.000-07:00

Hello world! Today I'm kicking off my blog, devoted to arts and crafts and ideas for projects. I'm a stay-at-home mom who loves making stuff, and who's always looking for thrifty ways to make her home and family more comfortable, well-decorated, or organized.

The first project I wanted to share is a super-easy one: these wall-hanging letters I made for my little girl's room. I bought the wooden letters at Hobby Lobby for $2-4 each and painted them to match her green, white, and brown room, but they didn't have enough punch, so I decided to scrap them! (Scrapping usually solves problems - it sure didn't fail me this time!) Here's what I did:

1. I picked out five 12x12 inch patterned papers, one for each letter, at my favorite local scrapbook store (Signed, Sealed, Delivered in Rogers - it's a dangerous place for me - beautiful home decor AND scrapbooking goodies). I didn't worry about matching the papers, I just looked for pretty designs that had mint green, brown, and pink in them. If you're going for a more coordinated look, pick papers from the same line, or use the same paper for each letter.

2. So I laid out my paper, face down, and traced the letters backwards onto the paper. (With some of the papers I was careful about the placement so I was sure to get - or avoid - designs. The paper I used for the 'P' had some writing on it that I didn't use, and the first 'N' had some fun flowers that I wanted to arch over the top corner of the letter.) Make sure you buy the wooden letters that have straight edges - if they curve toward the front part it'll be harder to get a clean line. For that matter, make sure you get letters that are less than 12x12 inches if you want to use standard scrapbooking paper.

3. I cut out the papers in the shape of the letters, made sure that they matched up well, and then put the wooden letters aside. I just worked on the cut-out paper until the end when I attached them. I inked all the edges of the paper in brown ink. (I ink paper edges pretty much anytime I cut something out; I think it makes it look more finished, and in this case, tied the mismatched papers together.)

4. Then I looked at each letter individually and let the paper dictate what kind of embellishments I used. Here's what happened:

For the 'P:' I used brads to attach green plastic flowers down the side of the letter. I layered big sequins on some of them, too. This paper was busy and shiny to begin with, so I didn't do much.

For the 'E:' I secured three lengths of ribbon around the letter and added three flowers - the top two are layered and attached with a brad and a button, and the bottom one is a die-cut that I used dimensional paint around the edge to give it more presence.

For the first 'N:' I loved the floral design, so I used the little dots radiating from the center of the biggest one as a guide and glued little rhinestones on. This one took the most time, but it's shiny and I can't resist shiny!

For the second 'N:' I painted chipboard paisleys mint green and brown, and painted clear glitter glue over that. It's subtle, but it lets the other letters stand out.

For the 'Y:' There was already a design in lines and circles running down the side of the paper, so I used that as a guide and embellished with a rub-on ribbon and some dimensional pink dots.

5. After I had scrapped all the letters and let them dry, I put non-permanent scrapbook tape around all the back edges to stick them to the letters. When we change her room decor, I'll just tear off the paper and have the painted letters again, so P will be able to decorate the letters however she wants to.

This is an inexpensive project that covers a good bit of visual space on a wall. It's $2-4 per letter, plus $1 or $2 per page of scrapbook paper (and that's if you buy the patterned paper full price, which I rarely do). I had all the embellishments on hand, so I'm not counting those in my cost total.

The letters came with little teeth hooks on the back and are pretty light, so they're just hanging by tiny nails. Great for me, since I love to change rooms up and hate repairing nail holes.