Hannah's summer quilt!

Finally, I've done something to mess up my computer in a new way, and now blogger is allowing me to post a photo! Here is the photo of Hannah's quilt that she made during the summer.  She's planning on using it for her Excellence Project at Young Women in Excellence later this Fall. She did a great job on it!

Apron Swap!

So, I received my wonderful apron from my swap buddy Catherine, who lives in Australia, about a week and a half ago!  I'm just now finding taking some time to post the picture of it.  It is so much fun, I love it!  I hope you can see from the picture that it has a dishtowel sewn right into it, what a clever idea.  It is perfect for me because I'm always tucking a dishtowel into my apron pocket. Thank you Catherine!

Apron Swap

I finished my apron for the apron swap! I'm swapping with Catherine from Australia.  I'm so excited to receive something in the mail from Australia! Michele gave us the heads up about the swap, it was sponsored by Rhonda from  http://down---to---earth.blogspot.com/ , her blog is about loving your home and living simply. Anyway, my apron will be in the mail tomorrow on it's way to Catherine.  I hope she loves it.

One finished gift!

Michele inspired me to create an Amish puzzle ball for Oliver for Christmas. He can't read yet so I'm pretty safe to post this:) Kirsten has already witnessed me putting it together so it's no big secret to her either!  So I have ONE finished gift! Yay me!  I have several other projects to work on so I'm off to get busy sewing.  If you would like to make a puzzle ball yourself you can check out these tutorials here and here.  Have a happy day!

Fall, Fall, My Most Favorite Time of All!

This past weekend I worked up these cute little pumpkins using the tutorial found here. I added the hemp because I felt like they needed a little bit of vine on them. I love them! Keyki loves them too, when I brought them outside to take photos she snatched one off of the bench and I had to chase her around the yard to get it back!  I also spent all morning this morning cleaning out my tomatoes and pumpkin patch. These are the lovely pumpkins that I found (literally) in all the overgrowth.

Pumpkins make me smile:)

Family Room re-do

For a few years now I have been wanting to paint our family room.  The time finally came! I'm glad we waited too because last year I picked up a bunch of paint chips and hung them on the wall so that I could decide which one I liked the best.  They were all shades of tan and gray.  I guess I was in a gray mood last year.  Well, I pulled them all down just a few months ago (classy huh, they were looking like wall art or something after that long!).  We went to Lowes and just picked a color. It's called "Betsy Ross House Moss" it's very cheerful and warm and not gray at all.  Of course since the paint is moss green the forest green carpet had to go...that may be the reason why my projects take some time to happen, because one thing always leads to another.

 Here is our finished family room!

Well, almost finished.  I need to hang the pictures back up and figure out curtains. I hope it doesn't take me years to do that!

Weekend project

Saturday was such a wonderfully warm day that we spent the whole day outside working in the yard.  I have a spot that I have wanted to turn into a birdhouse garden.  A few years ago I put plastic over the area and killed the lawn/weeds growing there.  The plastic got removed and then the weeds grew back!  It's been that way for a couple of years now, full of weeds and good intentions...  I didn't get a weedy before picture but there were so many that it required a pickup truck and a trip to the dump.  Here is the product of our day's work.

We will put a weed guard down and fill it with decorative rocks to finish it up, but it's a huge improvement from how it looked before.  Plus it helped with my organizing/declutter projects, I was able to get those big posts and the birdhouses and plant hooks out of my garage and shed. Yay!

Next thing I need to work on are lovely little baby boy things. 

Our grandbaby is due to arrive next month! 

Project: Simplify

I'm participating in Simple Mom's Project: Simplify! The project this week? My wardrobe and closet.  I had a bit of a jump start on this project because we had gone through our clothes in January and sent quite a pile to the Deseret Industries Trift store.  I turned all the hangers backwards so we could see what we were really wearing and what items we had kept 'just because we may wear them'.  The Project:Simplify gave me the push to go through all my clothes again, a lot of the clothes whose hangers were still hanging backwards were put in the give away pile.  A few are still backwards because it's just too cold to wear them yet! I got rid of a big pile of stuff, I can see and vacuum the floor in my closet now without moving anything! Yay! Here are my pictures BEFORE:

and AFTER:

Now I'm ready for next week!

Baby!

I get to be the next Grandma Atkinson! We're getting a baby BOY...So I have been purchasing little pieces of flannel to make a quilt or a receiving blanket.  Maybe both, but now that we know it's a boy I need to get started. (I was buying both boy and girl fabric up to this point, so the girl stuff will go in the stash for now)

Closet Space

We went through our closet and donated a bunch of clothes a couple of weeks ago. I still think that there are items in there that we are not wearing, so I have turned all the hangers backwards in an effort to narrow it down some more. This is one of those you can't be in denial exercises.  After the clothes are worn and washed they go back in the closet with the hanger the right way.  If, after a season is over, those clothes are still hanging on a backward hanger in the closet then you DID NOT wear them.  They will leave our home...even if we think we should keep them just in case.  This will be a long term project as each season comes and goes.  (Notice the empty space on the shelf above!! That is where the big box of pictures was!! A clutter free spot.)

Finished Scrapbook

Yay! One project done!  This took me almost a month of Sundays to finish but now all the pictures I have of my childhood are in one book instead of eight falling apart magnetic books in a box.  I'm really surprised that all of it fit into one book.  There are no fancy scrapbooking papers, stickers or wavy scissor cuts, just simple white paper and pictures (that is how they were in the old books, so that is how you will see them here.)  Now I have one uncluttered shelf spot in my closet.  Done...now on to the next project!

Scrapbooks

Again with my New Years goals... I have a big box in my bedroom closet that is full of scrapbooks from my birth to pre-married life.  They are all made with those "magnetic" sticky scrapbooks.  Some of the pictures are falling out and some are stuck so well that I may have to cut them off of the page.  My plan is to peal them all out of the books and get them into an acid free scrapbook that I can share with my kids, without worrying about the pictures falling all over when we turn the pages.  This project will satisfy two of my goals! Loosing that box will get rid of clutter in my closet, and working toward completing my scrapbooks is another goal. This box is a project I have put off for too long.  Wish me luck!

So Nathan has spent quite a lot of time over at Kirsten's house the past couple of months working on his "super secret project" for everyone for Christmas. He found some old hardcover books and using just the covers he created new little journals for all of us. He covered them with fabric and cut and bound new paper to go inside. They really are wonderful! Thank you Nathan!