Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Ten on Tuesday

1. Duluth! Outside magazine's 2013 Best Adventure Hub runner-up. Love that town!

2. Both lovelies are actively eating apples off Dad's trees.  The apples are still green.  I'm willing to wager their digestive track will also be actively eating at them before the night is through.

3. I love the word, espionage.  Maybe it's the way it rolls off the tongue, or the sophistication it implies.  But no worries, you didn't uncover my secret password to anything.... I'd never remember how to spell it!

4. Confession Alert! When the Sarah McLachlan commercials come on TV I either leave the room, hit mute, or turn the channel.  But I'm a sucker for the Values.com ads.

5. On another note, I'm also a huge fan of the colonoscopy billboard campaign decorating Minnesota's highways.  Cracks me up!

6. The girls have mastered the art of checkers. I pity the fool in school who takes them on.

7. This summer is all about ice cream for Abby.  If she could eat it with every meal, she would.  And still, not an inch of fat on your body.  Lucky girl!

8. I realized today when we attempted to do school shopping how much I don't like school shopping.  We left the Medford Outlet with one sweatshirt for each of the girls.  Shoes & jeans go on sale next week.  It was a great excuse to ditch the shopping in lieu of ice cream!

9. Something tells me when the dust settles there is another dog in our future.  I suspect I will be the last hold out.  I love the life & energy a dog brings into our home.... I hate the hair, the responsibility.  Anyone want to take bets on how long it takes?!

10. This might finally be the time for me to try coconut oil! Hmmmm.... now what to do with it?!

Saturday, July 27, 2013

Image Splattered Shirts

I'm always looking for fun, relatively easy projects to do with the girls.  This project proved not only to be a fun project, but it doubles as a fun & creative gift.  Thank you, Reanna Manthe, for the idea!

Supplies:
  • Shirt
  • Computer & Printer
  • Card Stock
  • Freezer Paper
  • Pencil & Scissors
  • Double-Sided Tape or Iron
  • Squirt Bottle
  • Bleach & Water
  • Cardboard

Step 1: Buy your shirts....  I picked ours up at Wal-Mart for under $4/each.  I'm a big fan of the girls fitted V-neck shirts and the bright colors are super fun!

Step 2: Pick your image.... I collected ours from the images on Microsoft Word and Google Images.  Profile images turn out best on the finished product.

Step 3: Print your image on cardstock.... You're going to have to decide what size works best for your shirt.  We made child sized shirts, and I found that printing two images per page made the images the appropriate size.  When your picture is how you want it, but it out carefully.  *You do not have to print out your images!  You can draw the image freehand, or trace an existing image.  However, to make the next step easier, I recommend having your image on card stock.

Step 4: Trace your image on freezer paper.... Once your image is traced, carefully cut it out.

Step 5: Carefully place double-sided tape on the shiny side of the freezer paper, paying special attention to narrow spots.... Freezer paper can be ironed directly onto the shirt {shiny side down}.  However, through the experience of others I learned that this does not guarantee your spray solution will not seep under the image.

Step 6: Stick or iron your image to the shirt shiny side down.

Step 7: Place a piece of cardboard inside the shirt so the bleach solution does not seep through....{I used an empty Swiffer Duster refills box. Bonus: it had a plastic coating on the inside of the box, which made it easy to reuse for all my shirt!}

Step 8: Spray image with bleach solution.... In a spray bottle, make a solution 70% bleach, 30% water.  The trick to getting a splatter affect {see the pink elephant shirt below} is use the mist setting, pressing the trigger gently and moving your hand quickly from side-to-side.  *If the kids are doing the spraying, I highly recommend having them practice using colored water on a piece of paper.  Only one of the six shirts we tried did not turn out, and I believe it is because I used the full-blast setting on the spray bottle and it over powered the image and leaked under the paper.  Less is more when you're spraying the shirt.  You want to get enough around the image so when you remove the freezer paper the image will show through, but not too much so that they spatters don't show.  I highly recommend spraying in the shirts laying in the grass.

Step 9: Remove image.... After spraying I waited about a minute, then gently blotted the freezer paper with a paper towel {so it didn't drip when I removed it} and carefully pulled it off.

And that's it!  Allow shirts to dry, wash and enjoy.


Before....
 
 
....After
 
 



Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Ten on Tuesday

1. Vacation never felt so good.  If only we knew with certainty what our next chapter holds.  I love a good surprise, but this holding pattern is taking forevah!  Thank heavens for the distraction of VACATION!

2. Why is it the longer I go without posting, the harder it is to find anything meaningful to write?

3. I love my Toms; far more than I thought I would. Or maybe more than I wanted to. Benefit of the Toms: less emphasis on having beautifully painted toe nails. Downfall: my new foot tan lines are cramping my flip flop style.

4. Perhaps the reason everyone in Minnesota thinks the mosquitoes aren't so bad this year is because my girls are acting as decoys. This summer I'm trying something new. That's right, I'm giving my little mosquito magnets garlic supplements.  With any luck they'll be much less appetizing to those pesky insects.  It's the hungry Italians we'll have to watch out for now!

5. If it is possible to overdose on watermelon then I think this summer will be that summer. Cannot get enough!

6. That said, I'm patiently waiting for sweet corn.

7. Moving around the country has not only offered me the chance to get to know so many different people, but best of all it's made me realize how genuinely fantastic & humble people are in Minnesota.

8. Finally, finally, I think I've adjusted to Windows 8.  If only I could get all of the apps to work.  Sigh.

9. Recipe I've always wanted to try: Serendipity's Frozen Hot Chocolate.

10. Confession Alert: I refuse to repin or repost anything with a grammatical or spelling error.  Fingernails on a chalkboard....

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Fairborn, Ohio, United States
I'm a teacher by trade, writer at heart & mom in every sense of my being. I never considered writing as a profession, but after I got married and began moving around the country, I began sharing my adventures, misadventures & updates through a sort of e-mail newsletter. I found a true passion in unconventional story-telling that has followed me into motherhood.