How Pinteresting...Highs and Lows by pin

It's been a Pinterest kind of month around here.  Don't know what Pinterest is?  Well, find out at your own risk.

It's an addictive online pinboard where you can pin links to anything you find on the web that you want to be able to find again.  The addictive part is that you can browse gajillions of other pins on any topic imaginable.

But this week, I actually did a bunch of stuff I pinned - with mixed results.  Thus the Highs and Lows.


First I tried some recipes, but they sorta sucked.  Hoped for yummy treats to munch on while the Bronco's let their stress-inducing season fizzle out.  Got boring blah.   Both the food and the Bronco's subpar performance = LOW.  Moving on...


Then I tried to make these cool snow globe things for the kiddos:

Note:  If the recipe calls for water, baby oil, food coloring and glitter.  Don't

• think it will work to substitute Karo syrup for the baby oil and

• forget the food coloring altogether. 

 If you do it ends up pretty lame and your kids keep asking politely, but in a bewildered sort of way, "So...what is this supposed to do?"  Another LOW.

But there were HIGHS:

We did some great stuff in homeschool (click on the picture to get to the link on how to do them):

Do you know what happens if you put a little piece of Ivory soap in the microwave?  Go ahead, let your family make hypothesises.  Hypotheses?  Hypothesi?  Uh, let them guess.  It's pretty cool.  HIGH

 

There was a woman who made a printout for learning about the color wheel 

using water paints and an eyedropper. 

Fun, educational and not very messy.  HIGH.

  

We used tape and finger paints to paint like Monet.

Quick,easy and looks like a masterpiece.  HIGH.  

But the coolest thing that I tried was from a post that said you can IRON FABRIC ONTO YOUR WALL AND IT ACTS LIKE CONTACT PAPER.  Just peels right off when you are done!

Yup,turns out you can iron on paint and it causes no problems at all.  Who knew? 


The lady who gave me this idea (and I think she got the idea here,) wrote her son's name on the wall.

But, never one to let a project be simple, I realized that here was the chance to give Belle that huge wall mural of a tree I've wanted to give her but am too cheap to by the vinyl for!

Well, limited by the quantity of fabric and Hean-n-Bond I had, my grand plan was reduced to a branch with flowers, but I like how it turned out.

Besides the fact the photos were taken inside on a gloomy day, what do ya think?

What's more fun that purple swirly branches with pink and yellow flowers? 

Nothing.

 Nothing at all.

 

(Want a mini tutorial? Click here for one. )

Cool, huh?  If I could redo it I'd smooth out some of the curves (some of them are a little Nightmare Before Christmas-esque), but I'm not going to redo it.  It's for a two-year-old's room.  Two. 



After I finished ironing it onto Belle's wall (which was sort of a weird experience) she said, "Mommy!  I LOVE it!"

Of course at nap time she looked at it and started to cry and said, "I didn't want you to put that picture on my wall!  Take it off."

Nice.  But she's two.  I'm banking on her inherent wishy-washyness.  She'll come back around to liking it.  HIGH.

Fabric Wall Appliques- a tutorial

My favorite Pinterest-inspired project so far!

Fabric Wall Appliques!

Yes!  Just like you use fabric to applique on other fabric, you can create fabric appliques and iron them onto your wall.

And they are completely removable. 

Like vinyl.

Seriously, this is the most exciting household decorating DIY thing I've ever seen. 

Ever.

Just imagine the possibilities....ANYWHERE I would put vinyl I could put FABRIC.  

BEAUTIFUL, COLORFUL FABRIC

FOR SUPER CHEAP.

Excuse me while I stare dreamily out the window...

I got the idea from Sharon at This Thrifty House (and I think she got the idea from Brassy Apple, and that's as far back as my research can take the idea.  Megan from Brassy Apple must be the creative mastermind behind this fabulous idea.) The original post showed Sharon putting her son's name on the wall in fabric (and she states that several years after doing this the letters peeled off just fine without damaging the paint.) 

Very cute, but I have a teensy problem in leaving projects small and simple.  It took about 2 nanoseconds for my brain to jump from "name" to "I can make that gigantic tree mural for Belle's room! The one that I've been dreaming of but have been WAY too cheap to buy from a vinyl wall sticker place."  (We rent, so painting a whimsical tree on the wall didn't seem like a viable option...)

Unfortunately I was limited by the quantity of fabric I had (trying to use up my stash) and the amount of adhesive I had bought, so my  gigantic tree mural turned into a pretty big branch with flowers. Still a big enough project to be worth doing (and probably messing up.)

This is how it turned out. You like?

So here's how to do it.  (This really doesn't require a tutorial.  Basically buy the adhesive and follow the directions for creating a fabric applique.  Except instead of ironing your applique onto another piece of fabric, iron it onto the wall.  But that would be too short of a post for me.  I'm wordy. So here's a tutorial.)

Oh, and tutorials are a little boring.  So here's a play by play of my project.  If you are bored, the actual steps are in bold.

FABRIC WALL APPLIQUE TUTORIAL

Step 1: Raid the fabric stash that takes up massive amounts of space in your (son's) closet but you barely ever use.  Realize you can use up the pink swirly fabric that you tried to make into maternity pajama pants but you ended up stuffing the "pants" (for lack of a better word) deep in a box out of shame, fervently thanking God that no one saw you try to wrangle your pregnant body into them.

Step 2: Get some Heat-n-Bond Lite (the purple kind - Sewable for light fabrics).  It was under $4 and the sum total of the money spent on this project. 

Step 3: Draw a nice little picture on the papery side of the Heat-n-Bond.  (If you are doing letters, trace them backwards.  Really, it's annoying to ALWAYS forget this when appliqueing letters.  Especially when you are making a present and trying to fit "Lena" onto a tiny scrap of the perfect fabric for the wall in our little friend Lena's room.  Then you know once you retrace the letters backwards and cut them out and give them as a gift, her sew-savvy mother will see the additional lines on the back and know you traced them the wrong way the first time.)

Step 4: Iron the Heat-n-Bond onto the wrong side of your fabric per the instructions and cut out your picture.

This is not my iron.  Mine has that burnt up goo on it from ironing something or other too hot.  Which, by the by, I also found out how to fix through Pinterest.  Iron a dryer sheet.  So there ya go.  Edit: That whole cleaning tip did NOT work for me.  Just made my house smell like hot dryer sheet.  And not in a good way.

Step 5: Peel the papery part off the back of your fabric, place against wall and iron (I used "silk" setting) for about 20 seconds.  Presto Magico!  Gorgeous wall art.  And it does peel off just fine.

 
Final note:  If you decide to do a four foot long branch with lots of curls and swirls, you can use painters tape to position it on the wall until you are ready to iron it.  I do not recommend positioning and taping everything up before you remember to peel off the papery backing.  I have heard that doing that exactly doubles the time required for this part of the project.



Cool, huh?  If I could redo it I'd smooth out some of the curves (some of them are a little Nightmare Before Christmas-esque), but I'm not going to redo it.  It's for a two-year-old's room.  Two. 

Belle's first reaction:

"Mommy!  I LOVE it!"

Of course at nap time she looked at it and started to cry and said,

"I didn't want you to put that picture on my wall!  Take it off!" 

(sigh.)

linked up to:

Fabulously Flawed

A Little Tipsy

I Heart Naptime

The Shady Porch

Cute, Not So Cute volume 2 (and homemade powdered laundry soap)

For about the last three years I've made my own powdered laundry detergent and I know I've chatted with friends who want the recipe (but I honestly can't remember which ones), so I thought I'd post it.  It's stupid-easy to make, works great and is practically free compared to store bought detergent. (Unfortunately, I can't remember where I got it to give credit where credit is due, but the recipe is tangled about here and there in the world wide web...)

But a post about laundry soap?  BO-RING!  So I'm interspersing soap-making instructions with a new volume of "Cute, Not So Cute." (Because we wouldn't want a short post, now would we?)
 

The soap 

I was always irked to finish my grocery shopping by dropping a 

$17 box of detergent into my cart (made extra expensive because it was 

dye/fragrance free for my sensitive-skinned kinfolk - 

why exactly does less ingredients = more expensive?  

Riddle me that.)

I had seen recipes online for DIY laundry soap that is super cheap and works great. Cleans well, keeps colors bright, doesn't irritate anyone's skin, yada yada yada.    

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Cute, Not So Cute

Cute:  Belle does this hilarious stomping thing where she hunches over a bit, sticks her hands out in front of herself, squints up her face funny and takes tiny steps, stomping as hard as her 22 lbs can do with each step.  It's hilarious.  Picture a scene where some American Indian, dressed in traditional garb, is doing a stomping dance around a huge bonfire.  That's what she does.  Like this beautiful girl:

Image credit

And how Belle would love to wear something like that.  She's a smidge Cherokee from her father's side and it shows. 

Not So Cute: The other night I was trying to calm Liam down and get him to sleep (Any of you notice that I only talk about around three topics on this blog?  There's bodily waste products that don't end up where they are supposed to, odd things my kids do and issues arising from getting Liam to sleep.  Perhaps I need to branch out...), he was almost dozing off when suddenly there was this BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM and the floor of his room began to shake.  His eyes snapped open and I expected air raid sirens to start going off. 

I left the now crying Liam in his bed and ran out to find Belle, just inside her room (which is two feet from Liam's room), doing her stomp dance (as though her little legs were commercial grade impact hammers instead of tiny twigs) and singing a chanty sort of version of Away In a Manger.  And I didn't find it cute at all.

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(back to the soap)

Ingredients

1 cup washing soda (sort of like baking soda but found in the laundry aisle)

1 cup Borax

1 bar of plain, old, regular soap  (I use Ivory)
(NOTE: The recipe calls for Fels-Naptha soap which can be found in the laundry aisle or sometimes with the regular soap, but I find the fragrance of it foul, so we use Ivory...)

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(back to Cute, Not So Cute)

Cute: My parents came to visit and gave Dalton Connect Four for Christmas.  Then my mom played about a hundred games with him.  There was lots of, "Now wait!  You have to look at both of our pieces!  You might need to block me!"  Or "Now wait! You have to look at both of our pieces!  Is there a way you could win???"  And so Dalton "won" a lot of the games.  

Then D needed a potty break and headed upstairs yelling, "Mommy!  You play with Grandma while I'm upstairs."

Me: "Do you think I can beat her?"

Dalton: "Oh yeah!  She's not really very good at that game!"

And I laughed hard at how cute it was that the thought he was better than her.

Not So Cute: Grandma leaves town and now I'm stuck playing Connect Four.  So I continue the incessant coaching ("You have to look at both of our pieces!").

D: I don't need your help, Mommy.  I am good at this.  I can play you.

Me: Oh, really?  Ok.  All I'll say now is "You have to look at both of our pieces..."

And he continued to play in his devil-may-care sort of way while I literally bit my tongue to keep from nagging helping him and none-too-subtly stacked my yellow pieces into a line. 

Then suddenly his eyes lit up.  "I WIN!" he shouted as he dropped in his little red piece completing a line of 4 right in the middle of the grid which I had not at all noticed, being too busy only watching my own pieces.  

 "Mommy!  You have to watch both our pieces."

Not so cute.

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(back to the soap)

Directions

1.  Shred the bar of soap in the fine section of your cheese grater.  This is as hard as the recipe gets, which isn't hard because soap grates REALLY easily.  So easily, in fact, that you should watch your thumb knuckle and make sure it doesn't hit the cheese grater.  I've heard that really hurts. 

 2. Add one cup Borax and one cup Washing Soda.  Mix together. 

Viola.   That's it.  Oh, and the great part?  It takes ONE TABLESPOON PER LOAD.   

Yup. One tablespoon for a ginormous load of towels or a humongous load of pee-soaked bedding or a monstrous load of poop-filled baby pajamas.  

One Tablespoon.

Some fancy math:

Borax < $4/box

Washing Soda < $4/box

Ivory soap < $0.50/bar

That means a recipe of this costs about $1.50 and I get around 50 loads from each recipe. 

That's 3 cents per load or 

$1.50 for as many loads as a big box of store bought soap. 

Yup, that's how ya stick it to the man!

Hmmmmmm, who is "the man"?  

Proctor? or Gamble? 

PS: This laundry soap doesn't make the water all sudsy.  Don't be alarmed if your water isn't.  It's still cleaning stuff, I promise.