Do you ever????

Do you ever see a pattern and fall in love with it?

Do you ever know that this pattern is EXACTLY what will look awesome on you????

Do you ever choose a yarn that you love, but feel like you spend too much money on it, but realize it is worth it and you will LOVE the finished product and use/wear it all the time??????

Do you ever realize about half way through that you HATE this for you????

Do you ever just set it aside because it is no longer worth working on?????

This exact thing happens to me ALL. THE. TIME!

I love the yarn, I love the pattern, but when I am working on something, I begin to hate it, for me.  If I am making something for someone else I will continue to love it.  But if it is for me. Nope. HATE. IT!

Here are two of the many unfinished projects in my house right now.  I know I have at least three more but can't seem to find them right now. They are packed away somewhere.

This (above) is a pretty pattern, pretty hand dyed yarns that I paid $20 a skein for and bought 5 of them.  I loved the sample in the shop. It is a shawl. It looks so pretty on the mannequin. I am about 40% done and I don't like it anymore. I haven't worked on it in a month. I am thinking I should unravel it out and make a sweater or something for my daughter instead. Hmmmm......

This was going to be another shawl.  More of a wrap that would go over my shoulders on cold days.  Honestly, I end up wearing a sweater and I don't use wraps too much.  It is made with fun chunky yarn in a pretty blue and lime green pattern. I now HATE it. It is sitting on the floor in my closet and will probably sit there a while longer.  It is about half done and I have no intention of finishing it. I am thinking about ripping it out and making an afghan out of it. I will give it away or sell it if I can.

The only things I love and wear are socks.  I love my socks that I knit and I do wear them all the time in the winter. Other than that, I really hate the things I make. Maybe I need to make a sweater for me instead.

So tell me what do you do with your unfinished projects that you no longer love???

Selling our House

In January we spent a lot of time on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.  We love the beach, walking everyday, the ocean waves, the calmness.  Now this is a vacation to us and we are well aware that when you talk about moving to a "vacation" area the vacation feel goes away.  But the beach is still there, the calmness when you walk on the sand and hear the ocean waves are still there.

In February we were given a great gift from a friend of ours.  She couldn't use her time share in Daytona Beach and offered it to us.  While we were there we fell in love with the area, the beach, the people, the architecture, and the fact that it is so inexpensive to live there compared to living where we do.  We knew we needed to move anyway and sell our house so when we returned we wasted no time and put our house on the market.

Our house is for sale. Notice I didn't say our HOME is for sale.  It isn't our home anymore, it is someone else's home.  Right now it is just our house and we live here for a bit longer. Our HOME is wherever we are, it isn't a place or a building.

We have been madly decluttering and working to get the house packed up and tidied up for people to come see it.  We have had 3 showings so far and no offers but it is early yet and we are hopeful. It will sell. I know it will.

I mean, who doesn't want a bedroom this big???

Yes, that is a KING size bed in there flanked by two three drawer dressers for night stands! There is one on each side.

Selling our house means that we are trying to eat down our food storage, organize our belongings and work to pack up only the items we LOVE.  I will be posting more on the sale and packing and moving in future posts.

Cute little Hearts for Valentine's Day

I made a bunch of cute little hearts for Valentine's Day.  They are so sweet.  I used DMC thread and love making them.  They are about an inch in width and about 7/8 inch tall.

I am thinking that you can put a button in the middle or a brad in there and attached it to a cute handmade card or a sweet layout.

I am selling them in my Etsy Store if you want to purchase them. $5.50 for 6.

Yeah, I have been busy!  I love making these little embellies!  So much fun!

Why we HOMESCHOOL

 Roanoke, VA (Aug.2012)

 New Kent Museum (Sept, 2012)

 Shark Tooth Unit, searching for ancient sharks teeth in sand we got from Calvert County, MD (Sept, 2012)

 Identifying what we found.

 Exploring a butterfly (Sept, 2012)

 Midlothian Mines Tour with Homeschool Group (Sept 2012)

 

Working on a blog entry at home.

 Making masa, Native Americans Unit (October 2012)

 Political Rally (October 2012)

 Seeing our candidate at the Political Rally (October 2012)

 Exploring the James River (November, 2012)

 VA Museum of Fine Arts (Nov, 2012)

 Back to the James River (Nov, 2013)

 Civil War Workshop with homeschool group (Nov, 2012)

 Outer Banks, NC (Nov. 2012)

 NC Aquarium (Jan, 2013)

 Petting Sting Rays

 Playing with sharks (after a great lesson in plate tectonics)

VA Science Museum (Jan, 2013)

 Steam Engine Lesson by Dad.

 Tin Can Telephones (A. Bell Unit, Jan 2013)

 Shelling and ID- Pea Island, NC (Jan, 2013)

And that is why we homeschool!  Most of these activities happened during a regular school day for most students.  We explored our world and learned much more than we could if we were sitting in a desk in a school building.

Homemade Laundry Detergent

Remember this???  I made some homemade laundry detergent and posted it here.  I have been very pleased with this recipe.  I knew we did a lot of laundry in our house but I expected it to last about 4 months rather than their "6 mo-1 year" estimate.  I used two scoops for each load and was very pleased with the results from the 2 scoops.  Therefore mine only lasted 2 months.

I am off to the store to get some more ingredients to make it again.  I am going to cost average it out today to see how inexpensive each load is.

UPDATE***

I priced it all out and it cost me about $10 for the batch.  Each batch lasted me two months and that comes to $5 a month.  I am not going to price it down further because honestly I don't know how to go from lbs and oz to TBS.  That just seems too hard and I have better things to do with my life that scoop out each TBS from the big jar and count. LOL

I think $5 a month for the amount of laundry I do is quite cheap!  I am sticking with this.

Have a great day!

Planning for the Christmas Holidays

I am SOOOO not an organized person.  I always feel like I have a zillion balls in the air and that they are all going to come crashing down at the same time at any moment. I feel like I have ADHD but I know that I don't.  I just have too much going on.

So this year, this season, we are doing things a bit differently.  There are a few different factors that make this holiday season a bit different.

First, we are NOT going to Disney World.  Since 2007 we have gone to Disney for a week or so just before Christmas.  This meant that I had to be super organized because I would have to have everything ready for Christmas prior to us leaving for Disney as we would often be returning on Christmas Eve or on Dec 23rd.  So it ALL had to be done.  Not this year.

Second, we have like NO money for extra things.  We have enough to buy some gifts but we are not doing extravagant things and have no extra money to do other stuff that we wish we were able to do if we weren't going to Disney.  We aren't buying new decorations or more lights for the front of the house, or anything we don't NEED.  Not this year.

Third, because we are homeschooling we actually have a bit of extra time on our hands and we tend to sit around "wishing" that we could go here or do this.

Extra time + NOT going to Disney + NO extra money = Mom has to be creative.

So this is what I did.  I took an inventory of the things I wanted to do and then I surveyed the kids and asked them to give me their top 5 things they wanted to do this holiday season. Next I crossed off everything on their lists that would cost a lot of money or that included "going to Disney World".  I ended up with a nice list of things.

Some of the things the kids said were:
go Christmas caroling
go look at Christmas lights
have a party for our friends
bake cookies
go Christmas shopping for each other


Some of the items on my list were:
go look at Christmas lights
string popcorn and cranberries
do some baking
read 'Twas the Night Before Christmas" together
read "The Christmas Carol" together

Then I looked at the calendar and printed out a December calendar and started to add things on it.  This way we will have some things to look forward to each week.

We have an extra week this year and with us not going out of town we have a lot of extra time we usually don't have. I hope that this year we will be able to make some great memories just the 5 of us that won't cost a lot of money.

What do you do to plan for the holidays?  Do you have any fun things you like to do each year that doesn't cost a lot of money?

Have you ever looked on Amazon and found great craft books for FREE???

I have recently as I have been looking for some new ideas.  Yeah, I  know Pinterest is there but I like to look in different places too.

Here are a few books I found for the holidays.  These all were free when I posted them and when I purchased them.  Please check the prices of them before clicking to purchase.

Did you know you can read these books even if you don't have a Kindle or a Kindle app?  Yes you can and this is how I do it.  I downloaded the Kindle app to my PC and I read them right on my computer.  I also can read them "in the cloud" on the internet using no app at all.  How cool is that?




















This one looks interesting!