Decorating Fun

My Dear Sister,
I'm super glad you had a good trip to New Orleans!! It looks like lots of fun stuff!

You've already seen this stuff, but I wanted to brag on our craftiness!

As you know, I did some redecorating at the house and put up your pinterest inspired Christmas present to me!

The hearts have my favorite places centered in the heart cut-out. I wanted to make the photos above and below the heart locations match where the photo was taken, but I was overruled as too OCD. I used a pinterest inspired tool to hang this arrangement because it was harder than it looks. I am here to tell you the best ever tool for haning pictures is this:

Details on how to use it are at this blog (which is also where this photo is from): http://mmscrapshoppe.blogspot.com/2011/07/picture-frame-hanging-tip.html

Go and hang in happiness!

I also hung this section with the same tool.

In addition to all this, I went to Hobby Lobby and had a custom cut matte made for the piece of artwork we picked up the last time we went to ArtWalk in Alpine. It came out pretty good if I say so myself. A piece of art, matte, and frame for roughly $70. Not too bad!

The art was done by a student at SulRoss. The frame was from Garden Ridge - Jamie picked it out. The matte from Hobby Lobby.

Next I get to frame this:

Oohh and you should check out the Painting with a Twist website...they have cool paintings to choose from and the next time I go, you're going with me! It was super fun...even though you don't really drink wine. Still fun.

I hope you had a good week off since it was Spring Break for you! Have a great weekend!
-E

Upcycling - Our parents' powers combined!

Dear Emily,

So, here it is - the long anticipated blog post from Heather. I hope it lives up to your high expectations ;).

I have gotten deeper and deeper into the idea of upcycling. I think its kind of a stupid, cheesy term but the idea is sound for me. Recycling is fine, but if you can skip the step of processing packages that have been processed so that you can then reprocess them into a new package it seems that is to be desired. I've been rethinking the whole "reduce, reuse, recycle" slogan and how we as a society have sort of stopped worrying about the reduce/reuse part.

So, I'm making mini greenhouses out of milk cartons for winter sowing like this:

And, I've been admiring pictures of repurposed things like sweaters into pillows, booze bottles into cups and plates (you use something called "slumping" in a kiln to make them into plates - and I just happen to have a kiln in my garage at the moment), and other various items.

What I'm sort of struggling with is finding USEFUL and not ugly, trashy uses for, well, trash. My most common trash is paper (which I'm going to start shredding and using in my compost), cans from canned food (I still don't know what to do with these - I am NOT making a bunch of pencil holders), plastic bottles/containers like those in the pic above, and glass. I'm going to start saving the glass jars that I can use for canning, like some spaghetti sauce jars. There are so many cool projects for wine & alcohol bottles, that I'm going to start saving those, too. Plus, if my dear sister gets around to making wine, she'll have a slew of bottles from me!

And that brings me around to the title of the post. I'm starting to feel like a combination of our mom and dad. Hoarding things that most people throw away was definitely a dad thing. "I'll find a use for that dead blower dryer someday". And crafting and repurposing is definitely a mom thing (i.e. sweater buttons made out of cut pieces of antler). It makes me feel proud, crazy and creative all at the same time. Weird, huh?