In the mood for Christmas!

Yeah, I'm one of *those* people. The ones who like to break out the Christmas stuff at the first sign of cold (or the first week of November). But I have an excuse this year! I've been working with Christmas decorations since *JULY*, so holding off till November is a good thing. :-P Anyways. I made something that I kind of adore.

It's a snowflake mobile! I used the extra snowflakes from my wedding, some silver ribbon, grey thread, and tape. Very easy, and very sparkly. :-)

More Flowers!

The ladies from my church held a craft sale this Saturday, so I made a few flower hair clips and went along. The sale went off really well, I think! Of the 27 flowers I took, I sold 18 and gave away 3. I wasn't expecting it to go that well! And besides selling the clips, I got to sit and chat with some of the ladies from church and get to know them much better. Amazing what you learn about people, given seven hours of conversation!

I didn't get pictures of the sale, but here are the flowers I had left over.

It's been a while

Again! I'm not very good at regular posting. But I might be better now...

Anyway here is something I've been up to:


I hemmed a friend's bridesmaid dress and wanted to do something with the pretty pink scraps I cut off, so I made flowers! Once I made them, I glued/sewed them onto barrettes & clippies so they can be clipped onto hairstyles/button holes/purse loopies. I think making these is pretty much the funnest craft because first you get to sit around and melt little fabric circles and then you get to sew them into flowers!

I used several different online tutorials for inspiration...
Here's one I found after I started making them. I think this girl's are pretty! Her idea of clipping the edges was clever...I'll try that next time.

I saw this one floating around at some point, but of course couldn't find it while I was actually making mine so I didn't use it...but they're pretty, too!

And I saw this one, but was too lazy to cut all the different shapes, so I just used a variety of circle sizes instead.

The basic principle behind all of the tutorials is the same...you cut out some flowery shapes. Then you melt the edges of your fabric so that a) it won't fray and b) it crinkles up in a flower-like way. Sew all your flowery shapes together into one flower (I used a little scrap of fabric to back mine, and sewed all the petals to that). Finally, stick (i.e. glue or sew) a barrette/clippy to the back of your flower. Tada! Yep, it's fun.

I am back from my travels. I was gone for over a month! In the mean time, a little potato plant I'd been trying to grow died.


Not only that, but the entire pint of water that it was in evaporated! Boise is a dry city.
Since we're (mostly) in town for the rest of the summer, we bought a tomato plant last Saturday. His name is Bob. I LOVE the way tomato plants smell. :)


And, on the craftier side of things, I found a lovely bunch of fabrics at garage sales last week! Here is the whole stack, a total of 12 1/2 yrds for 5.65.



I'm especially fond of the prints...the yellow roses,

the tropical birds,

and the strange abstract floral that's on top of the pile. I'm thinking they would make cute skirts or sundresses (and boy are sundresses nice in this weather!). And the solids can go into my "muslin" pile. :)

I'm developing a fabric stash...how happy!

Until next time,
Courtney

My old-ish project

Well, this has been done for a while now but I thought better late than never! :-)

First I got a frame on clearance (and then an extra 15% off with my employee discount!) at work. It was on clearance because someone had tried to glue stuff to it and then ripped the stuff off leaving weird cardboardy residue

So I got some paint (67 cents! - employee discount) and some paint brushes ($1.99 for a set of four. - employee discount)
Then I spent all of about 15 minutes putting several coats of paint on the back and inside edge of the fame. (yay for living someplace where the weather causes paint to dry in seconds.)

Then I used a coupon and printed out some pictures that I've taken of the plants around here at costco for less than $4. Using a combination of stick tack, double sided tape, and some extra paper, I arranged the photos inside the frame on the wall!

I'm still alive!

I promise. :-D I'm just working a lot these last few months. Which is good for my bills! Not so much for my creative side. But we all must make sacrifices in the name of staying alive, and as much out of debt as possible.
Anyways, I *do* have a project I finished a while ago just haven't gotten around to taking pictures of it (my bad). So hopefully that will be up soon! And I know Courtney's disappearing into oblivion for a while so I'll try to step up my game here.

Oops.

I just figured out that I wrote someone a thank you note for something they didn't give me. Lol...good thing my friends have a good sense of humor! :-D I'll bet they were puzzled.

Excellent news! Noble got a job. :) Hopefully she will still have a little spare time for awesome projects, but for right now, she's making money!! Woohoo!

I'm not. :-D

I did make socks (and broke my personal record by making the whole pair in 3 days!).

And the muslims we buy our eggs from gave us this cute little banty egg. The man said, "Belief or not, is chicken egg!"

Another project underway: unraveling this sweater and making it into this sweater

More artsy pictures of yarn and rapidly raveling sweater:

A quest!

Hey y'all! So with swagbucks I've managed to collect quite a few magazine subscriptions which means I have growing collection of big pieces of paper! :-P Anyways, I need to think of a clever way to store said magazines; hence the quest. :-) If y'all have any ideas I'd love to hear them!

Yikes!

Once more, we are not dead! I just lent my camera's SD card to my husband so his Latin class could make videos of themselves. It should be back soon and then there might be pictures of things like bread, bags, vacuuming, and me gearing up to sew!

I should probably explain, meanwhile, that I can "sew." That is, I can successfully turn on the sewing machine and use it to stick pieces of fabric together. And I can even embroider. What I cannot do, so far, is make the stuck-together pieces of fabric *fit* me. Fitting patterns = tricky. I try about once a year, and that time is rolling around again......

So keep a weather-eye out for the amusing pictures. :)

A Laundry Day

So today my oh-so-chic project was the laundry. I've been helping my mother with laundry ever since I was little, but I just had this realization:

Now that I'm married, I am the Underwear Fairy. Just like the Tooth Fairy magically knows that you lost a tooth and comes to give you a note and a quarter, the Underwear Fairy magically knows when you're almost out of underwear. Then she washes it, folds it, and the next day you find it there in your drawer again...even though you didn't tell anyone you were almost out of underwear! It's magic (sadly, you don't get a quarter when the underwear fairy finds out you've worn all your underwear).

When you're the Underwear Fairy, you know the tricks of the trade. But to everyone else, it is definitely magic.

Haha, ok. Pardon my flights of fancy. :) But it just made me laugh to be the underwear version of the Tooth Fairy.

I didn't take any gruesome before and after pictures of the laundry because a) they wouldn't be that gruesome (since there's only two people in this apt.), and b) who wants to see other people's dirty laundry? Not me! :)

But I thought I would share my project with you. 'Til next time!

Courtney

Short Project!

I finished off a jar of Lemon Curd from Trader Joe's today and the jar is just *way* too cute to get rid of, *and* I had some glass marble vase filler things so I *needed* flowers to put in my new vase. So I hauled out my scrap book paper bin, found my flower stencil, got some old beading wire and a few tiny washer beads and went to work. :-)

The flowers.



The flowers in their new vase!

Sporks, Foons, and Knives.

That's right, silverware! Yay. :-D Mine has been getting pretty scarily water spotted since we moved to AZ where our apartment came with a dishwasher. (Not dissin' the washer here, since I love being able to load two meals worth of dishes into it and have them *all* be clean in less than an hour. O.O) Anyways, spots, lots of them, and weirdly enough, rust! Yucks.





And I promise, that's not food, it's just water spots.



So this week I hauled all of my scary silverware from its comfy resting place and spent an hour or so scouring all the weird stuff off. It's all so nice and sparkly now! I even washed out the holder!



See?

A New Adventure: Wilbur the Sourdough Culture

Here is a very low-maintenance project I am working on: a sourdough starter! Ryan and I are trying to become freakishly healthy people, which means we've not only been eating whole wheat bread, we've been eating sprouted grain whole wheat bread. Oh my. Can you get much snobbier than that? Haha.

But sprouted whole wheat bread is spendy, and I'm trying to find ways to be good and economical. So I'm trying sourdough -- reportedly even better for you than sprouted wheat, and cheaper if you do it yourself.

This is frightening. Sourdough is alive. It's a little civilization living on your counter -- a civilization that depends on you for all its food, water, and warmth. Yikes.

I named mine Wilbur. He's not quite a week old yet, and so he's not a real culture yet. But by Thursday (if he makes it that long, and I don't forget to feed him), he will be a real grown-up sourdough culture, ready to make bread.

So I've spent the last few days peering under a towel every few minutes and seeing if he's growing at all.

Here is a baby picture:



I started him in a measuring cup, but now he's moved into a big red bowl.

I used the kefir sourdough recipe from this page:
Dom's Kefir-cheese in-site
But the guy who wrote those is very lackadaisical about care-and-loving-of-sourdough, so I got my theory and details from this page:
Sourdough Home

Isn't my (almost) sourdough cute? :)

--Courtney

Fear Not!

No, we didn't die! The projects I've been working on these last few days are presents for certain people, so I can't exactly post pictures of them yet. :) Haha, that's the trouble with Birthday Season in my family. A lot of projects suddenly become hush-hush.

But I'm thinking about trying to learn to sew again...this should result in amusing pictures, if nothing else. :)

Soon!

--Courtney

Bear with me.

Alright, I (Noble) caught a stomach bug this weekend so progress on getting things looking so pretty and picture-fied has been moving *veeeeeeeeeeery* slowly! And it doesn't help that my stolen wifi is uber slow either. >_< But! I'm feeling much better and hopefully things will get rolling here soon, and without wreaking too much havoc on anyone's life. I'll try to point out any significant updates with a post, but if that doesn't happen you can pretend it's a treasure hunt. *beams*

*edit* So the header is a bunch of pretty pictures for y'all to look at until I can pull together some pictures that go more with the blog. Ciao!

Surprise!

In honor of Groundhogs day (well, maybe Groundhogs day is just a coincidence, actually), we've added another member to HAIH. Maybe you'll see her in the future....

Firsties.

Hi everyone! I'm Noble, the other sister, *dramatic bow* and as my first project I decided to fix the desk in the living room. As you can see from this picture it was pretty frightening, and a huge eyesore which is a problem since it's the first piece of furniture you see when you walk in the front door.

So I worked a little bit of elbow grease magic on it and voila! Much better. :-) Of course, I couldn't just stop at the desk so then I rearranged all the furniture in the living room but I forgot to take a picture of it so that will have to come up later. (I adore moving furniture around.)
And! I didn't watch any late night talk shows while fixing it. :-)

A project!

Hi, my name is Courtney (everyone: Hi, Courtney!), and today I only watched half of an anime episode. (everyone: Yay, Courtney!)

Instead I did some things away from my computer! One of the things I did was tidy my poor messy dresser top. Tada!



Here it is afterwards (success! And I promise I didn't just cram everything into the drawer):



Did worthwhile things today: check. :-D

--Courtney

Haih.

Introductions are so awkward. You wonder, "Did I maybe already meet this person before? Last week?" Or if you know you didn't, then you wonder, "How much should I say about myself? Just my name? Where I'm from? A chronological list of the jobs I've held for the last 10 years? How many siblings I have? My favorite kind of toothpaste?" Ok, maybe we're not that neurotic. But it's still a hard decision.
We'll give you the basics. Noble. Courtney. Married to respective Husbands (hence the housewives status). Discovered that online tv shows (among other distractions) are so tempting, when there's a world of fun stuff to do and see (and take pictures of!). Here is our antidote: a blog, for showing (and talking about) the cool things we did instead of (or while....) indulging in our tv tastes. Cause everything is more fun if you get to show somebody pictures of it afterwards. And there's two of us because as Solomon says: "Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil." (Plus this way each of us gets at least one reader!)

So this is our endeavor. Cheers!

Courtney and Noble