1 John 3:18

Wow, it has been a while.  I guess I'm just not much of a blogger...I love to read other people's blogs, but I can almost never seem to get up the gumption to write my own.  Such is.  I guess I will just post occasionally, when the mood takes me.

So I will be back in the classroom in a couple of days.  It's most likely a temporary subbing gig, but we shall see.  But, since I am starting out the school year, I thought that I would make the classroom a bit more inviting.  It's essentially four cinder block walls, two doors, and some boards (one of them a Smart board..woohoo!). There are no windows...bleh.

I decided that some of what I am going to do to lighten the place up a bit was to use free printables from around the web.  I found some that I like, but I wanted that perfect something.  I finally decided to make my own.  I used a Bible verse (I am teaching Sacraments and Morality at a Catholic school, after all) that is one of my favs.

I thought that I would offer it here as a free printable to any who wish to use it:

Fonts used:  Sloppy, SPQR, Amelie, BeckerMonolineModernNF, Edmunds, Goodfish, Henry Morgan Hand

I also made this one, too, but I'm not as fond of it.  But, again, if you want to use it, feel free:

Font used:  Festival

Project 365 - Week 6

2/5

 This is the "art" that I shared in this post.  I hung them using these.  They're pretty nifty.

2/6

 A garland made from patches I collected while in Europe.  This is hung in my craft room.

2/7

 A twig wreath I got from Jeffrey Alans.  I have since added some dried lavender to it.

2/8

 New curtains!!!  Hooray.  I got these at TJ Maxx for $10 a panel.  They're a a linen and cotton blend with copper grommets.  They are absolutely perfect.  I was going to make my own curtains from drop cloths, but this is so much better.   I love them!

2/9

 My vintage sarsaparilla bottle with some extra dried lavender.  Nothing fancy, but it makes me happy.

2/10

 Homemade valances, just hung.  We finally have window treatments!!  Hooray!  It only took a year and a half.

2/11

Hand painted sign.  The wood was a random bit found in a moving van years ago.  It has a lot of character.  The word laiterie is French for a farm dairy (not to be confused with crémerie, which is a shop that sells dairy products...by the way, I got this all from the internet.  I took Spanish in high school and German and Spanish in college.  It's just that French is always a classic in decor).

Alright, that's all for this installment of Project 365 - 2011!  Tomorrow I should be pretty much finished with my kitchen fix-up.  I will try to get some photos taken and posted.  It's nothing fancy, but it looks a ton better.  The sad thing is, though, I think I forgot to take any before shots.  Oops.  I'll do a search through my archives and see if there is any at all.  Regardless, at some point in this next week I will post photos of the kitchen.

Enjoy your weekend!!!

Weeks 4 & 5

1/22

My niece, once again.  This time she's munching on a fortune cookie.  Her smile cracks me up.

1/23

 I couldn't think of anything to take a pic of this day, and I had just hung these up, so...  The birdcage image is from the Graphics Fairy.  I got the bird on the bottom at Hobby Lobby a year or so back on clearance.

1/24

I started working on my kitchen.  The first day I got a few cabinets painted gray.  I will post non-Hipstamatic photos of the kitchen when it's all done.

1/25

 Still painting cabinets.  They took forever.

1/26

 More cabinet PAIN-ting.  Still, it had to be done.  We never painted the cabinets when we moved in.  We started the process, and all the doors and drawers were sanded and then for some reason rehung.  It was a bit too shabby to be shabby-chic.  :)  They look soooo much better now.

1/27

The last day of painting cabinets!  Hooray!!

1/28

I started painting the walls in my kitchen this day.  The new color is so soothing.  I love it.  Definitely better than the cornflower blue on my walls before.

1/29

I painted the hall between the dining room and my kitchen.  This was the best change.  The color before was this bright, cheery yellow that I loved in sunlight.  The problem was that, at night, with the lights on, it looked like the yellow of banana Laffy Taffys.  Hideous.  We originally painted the walls before we moved in, and we did all the work during the day.  I had no way of knowing how bad it would look with artificial lighting.  Oh well.  It's gone now.

1/30

 I built a new shelf for my pantry.  I wanted to move our toaster oven and our microwave in there so I would have more counter space.  The shelf is a temporary solution.  I want to eventually build in wooden shelves in the whole space (which is pretty large for a pantry).  I have a plan, I just need the time to do it.  After the kitchen is done.

1/31

The pre-blizzard snowfall.  This only gave us a couple of inches.  It was pretty, though.  I was so excited for the blizzard.  I didn't have to go anywhere and our house was already pretty well stocked.  I figure, what's the point in worrying about it?  I still try to see things the way I did when I was a kid, and I'm pretty sure kid me would have been glued to the window the entire time, just watching.  So, that's pretty much what I did during the whole thing.

2/1

 Blizzard!!!  If you look closely, you can barely make out the mail truck across the street.  Poor guy.  I would not have wanted to be out in all that blowing snow.  The sad thing is, he probably mostly delivered junk mail.  I only received ads for Dish Network and Farmers Insurance.  Nothing good.

 

2/2

 This is our car the day after the blizzard.  This was such a hassle to get unburied.  Luckily a neighbor let us borrow their snow blower.  Bless their sweet little hearts.  There was just too much snow for our one little snow shovel.  The end of our drive had about 4 feet of snow, between the wind and the snowplows.  It would have taken us forever!!

2/3

 I got this at Meijer on sale.  I have a thing for cows, and I have been wanting one of these for a while.  I believe this one was $3.47, which is tough to beat.  I think I may leave it up beyond Valentines Day.  A little touch of red never hurt anyone.

2/4

A door stopper makeover.  I painted it the same color as my kitchen walls, to bring a bit of the color into the hallway (which is a light tan color).  I then gave it a bit of glaze, wiped it down and ta-da!  It's so much better!!

Thanks for looking at the photos.  I know they're not fancy, but they're not supposed to be.  They're just a diary for me.  Something to look back at later and remember what I was doing.  I'm just into my Hipstamatic app right now.  It's sooo much fun.

Until next time!

Have some superfruit...

blue

I made blueberry muffins this evening, and I had to take some shots of the fruit.  I'll probably have some more edits sometime soon.

I will post my 365 photos tomorrow.  I promise.  :)

Kitchen Wall Art for the Slightly (or very) Nerdy

I have a confession to make. I'm a bit of a nerd. This is something that took me a while to accept. But when my nerdiness didn't diminish upon reaching adulthood, I decided to embrace this about myself.

Now, I also married a nerd and he's much nerdier than I, to be honest. And he's a huge Tolkien fan. I like Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit more than the average person, but he's almost a fanatic. He reads all the books of JRR Tolkien's notes that were compiled and annotated by Christopher Tolkien, his son. I haven't been able to bring myself to do that. (Although, I don't really have to, since hubby dearest shares all the many details with me...)

So, onto the wall art. I've been working on my kitchen recently. We never got it finished before we moved in and after we moved in I had other projects to work on.   Besides that, I kind of hated the colors I painted it. The cornflower blue and bright yellow (which in certain lighting looked like banana Laffy Taffy, which I didn't realize until after we moved in...oops) combo got old very quickly (whatever was I thinking?). I got sick of it, and have just completely changed the look of the room. It's still a work in progress (I have to paint the ceiling and the counter tops yet), but it is definitely looking a lot classier.

Well, I decided I also needed new stuff for the walls. Something far less kitschy or tacky than the cow clock my husband got me when we went to Switzerland (on a high school band trip). It was time for the clock with the udder pendulum to moooo-ve on. My tastes have changed a bit. Definitely for the better. :)

So, after an exhaustive search which yielded nothing I was absolutely satisfied with, I decided to make some of my own. I wanted something vintage, but fun. So I made these:

 The images are from The Graphics Fairy, of course (nest image and spoon image).  I love her blog!  It's definitely one of my favs.

The quotes are both from Tolkien.  The first is from The Hobbit.  If you have read the book, you know where it's from, and if you haven't read it, you should.  It's a great book.  If you are having trouble reading the text it says:  "A box without hinges, key, or lid,/ Yet golden treasure inside is hid."  I bet you can't guess what it is.  :)

The second quote is from the Fellowship of the Ring.  It's from a poem Frodo recites at the inn in Bree.  Tolkien did his own interpretation of "Hey Diddle Diddle," complete with the dish running away with the spoon.  The quote reads:  "And O! the rows of silver dishes/ and the store of silver spoons!/For Sunday there's a special pair,/ And these they polish up with care/ on Saturday afternoons."

I guess the idea was to have something that expressed my husband and I's nerdy selves but wasn't tacky.  I hope that these fit the bill.  :)  I'm going to get frames for them tomorrow and hang them up.  The walls are looking a little bare without the kitschy-ness I had before.  (Even bare walls are an improvement.)

Feel free to download and use these yourself, if you want.  I'm hoping that others enjoy it, too.

Oh, and I will hopefully post the past couple of weeks worth of Project 365 photos sometime during this weekend.  I haven't forgotten to take them.  I just haven't gotten around to blogging about them.  I spent all last week covered in paint and almost no time on my computer.

Have a wonderful weekend!  Enjoy the game, if you are into that kind of thing (remember, I'm a nerd...I'm really not into sports.  Besides, the Bears aren't in the game, so I'm even less interested than I would otherwise be.)    :)

PS - If you are curious, the font on the wall "art" is a free font called ""Schoon."  Well, the punctuation is actually from a font called "Valley Forge," since Schoon doesn't have punctuation.  I had to improvise a bit.