Love Blocks

Ya, ya...I know it's March and that love was the theme for February. But...this is one of the posts that didn't make it in time. And...it goes with the post that went up on the blog last week, so it's just going to happen today. Embrace the chaos!

These Love Blocks are the back sides of the Lucky Blocks. Yup...they're reversible! Oooh...fancy. Actually, it's just a nice way to reduce the amount of blocks that Collin had to cut and the number of blocks I have to store in between holidays. Believe it or not, storage space is not unlimited in our house.

Like I showed you in the post for the Lucky Blocks, these are pretty easy to make and they don't take a lot of supplies.

To make the Love Blocks you'll need:

* 4-5 sanded wood blocks cut from a 2x4. You'll need five if you want the heart and if you want them to be reversible with the Lucky Blocks.

* Patterned paper.

* Letters.

*Adhesive for your letters.

* ModPodge and a paint brush. I used a foam brush on these and I may have lost my love for them. Not one, but two of them decided to disintegrate and find their way to the trash can during the project, leaving little black foam specs all stuck up in the ModPodge. Bologna foam brushes, bologna. (Boloney? Ya...I don't know if you're supposed to use the proper spelling when you're using it as an insult or not, but I'm pretty fed up with foam brushes.)

Anywho...let's put these puppies together.

The directions are obviously the same as with the lucky blocks. Measure the height and width of each of the blocks. Cut out your paper to the measured dimensions. When in doubt, cut just a titch smaller. It's easier to adhere paper that's a little smaller than the wood block than it is to mold the paper over the edges...especially if your paper is a little on the thick side.

Adhere letters to their corresponding papers. I like to use my sticker maker for this. The sticker maker likes to run out of adhesive before I'm finished using it.

Attach the paper to the wood block using the Mod Podge by applying the ModPodge to the paper and then attaching to the blocks. This will minimize your wrinkles. I found an even easier method this time and actually adhered my paper to the blocks by running them through the sticker maker. That was a horrible idea. The lack of ModPodge under the paper made it more difficult to avoid wrinkles and seal the edges. Any trapped air bubbles with this method will be twice as ugly than with the ModPodge method. You will curse. Don't try to avoid the ModPodge. You will be sorry.

Let the blocks dry. Make sure you wait enough time in between Mod Podge applications in order to prevent excess bubbles or wrinkles in the paper.

Coat the tops of the papers with a thin layer of ModPodge. Make sure you get fully over all edges. Repeat this process two to three times until you get the finish you're looking for.

And you're finished. Tada! In the end, I've decided that I like the matte finish better for these projects. The gloss finish tends to accentuate the wrinkles in the paper. I prefer to hide my boo boos.

Summary Sunday: 1st One on Monday in 2014 Edition

Yup. It's Monday...and I'm doing a Summary Sunday. Like Annie likes to say, "no judging". It's been an interesting few days. Let's just say that I should definitely start working towards getting posts done a few days in advance. Hahahaha...I'm laughing just reading myself write that. If you know me at all, then you know I'm totally a procrastinator. Me having stuff done super far in advance just never happens. Like, ever. But it would be nice. I'll keep dreaming.

I am obviously just not one of those "together" blog writers. If you thought that up to this point, you might want to look up the word gullible in the dictionary, because your picture might be there. I'm just about as much of a disorganized mess as they come. Which makes this even more entertaining...March is all about spring...including spring cleaning. This will be a challenge for me. We'll see how it goes.

This Summary Sunday post will be a little bit different. Not only is it a summary of last week, I also need to do a month end wrap up for February. To be completely honest, I have no idea how to do that without making this a total mess. So good luck to you as a reader. Because this might be brutal.

February's theme was love. That actually did go well. Thank goodness. I need something in this post to be positive in the accomplishment category.

There were lots of love themed posts during the month. I talked about how Collin and I met, got engaged, and finally got married...and we spent some of our wedding gift cards by having a delicious brunch at Brick 29.

©Broken H Photography

I congratulated my parents on an impressive 36 years of marriage...and they celebrated with some time together in Hawaii. (I'm jealous.)

I made the first of our new 2014 holiday decorations - which is actually our only Valentine's Day decoration. We then spent our Valentine's Day together as a family, eating sushi and watching the Olympics.

I reminded you to date your significant other all year round...and we went on a family date with my brother, his wife and my adorable niece to see The LEGO Movie. Which, by the way, if you haven't seen it...you need to. It's hilarious and cute and wonderful.

And then I piled on the DIY wedding crafts.

Our wedding canopy...

©Broken H Photography

Glitter Glue Mason Jars...

Wedding Invitations...

and my favorite post of 2014 so far...the origami wedding flowers that took me forever to complete.

Oh...and somewhere in the middle of all this awesomeness came some additional fun at our place...our heaters died. Space heaters and our gas fireplace are now our good friends as we save up for that joy.

And then I got sick. Yup. That was fun. I had to cancel a day of work and felt pukey and had a swimming head for about three days. Not my idea of a good time.

You started out good February...and I really did like you...but you ended on a very sour note. I think I'm okay with saying goodbye to you.

Now...how about last week...

Last week we got surprised by a band concert. We found out Sunday that Darian had a concert on Monday night. That was awesome. Well...the timing wasn't awesome, but the night was. We scrambled to make our schedules work and showed up at 5pm for the Potato Feed. Darian played great and we all had a good potato dinner together. They had a raffle going that night for some baskets full of prizes. Collin's office made a donation that got us a pile of entries and...well...we won. We won a lot. We never win anything. But somehow that night we won like six times. Total craziness. And I got an iPad out of the deal. Sweet.

As for the blog...

We already talked about the posts I posted, so I get to skip that one.

Books I Read: I finished Passion by Lauren Kate, the 3rd book in the Fallen series. I'm holding steady at one book behind schedule on my Goodreads goal and I have my Nook nice and loaded with a good selection of books for the next few months.

Recipes I Tried: We had potatoes on Monday night, does that count? Ya. Right. I was sick. No way I cooked people. (Yes, I should probably rephrase that to make it make some actual sense, but I'm enjoying the fact that it resembles one of those eCards about the need for appropriate punctuation and grammar far too much to fix it.) I made the men cook and we ate some leftovers on the other nights.

Projects I Worked On/Finished: Well...this post is getting even easier since I accomplished a big batch of zero last week. Boom! Laziness is paying off. I spent a lot of time bonding with my bed. We're good friends.

Favorite Pin of the Week: I love these cute little sock owls over at Craft Passion. Seriously...how cute are these? And the tutorial makes them look pretty straight forward to make too.

Wow. Longest review post ever. That only took me two hours. Ok. I'm going back to my evening now. And then I'll be starting on some crafting stuff later this week. Because the blog schedule says I have to. Fine. So be it. Crafting it is.

Summary Sunday: Money Pit Edition

Perhaps you're familiar with this movie...

Source: IMDB

It feels like my life right now. In the 1986 film version, Tom Hanks and Shelley Long play a couple who buy a home that turns out to be a complete lemon. Things begin to fall apart the moment their purchase is final.

In our life, our house has somewhat fallen suit.

In 2009, the upstairs water heater (which was inconveniently built into a closet that prevented full access) decided to explode, sending water down through the walls and ceiling to the first floor. In 2011, the main level water heater died. I was in the shower getting ready for work when I had that revelation.

2013 was a banner year for destruction. At the beginning of last year, the wind knocked over one of our front light pillars. The second followed in August. In May, I turned on a hose in our front lawn to discover that I had left the hose on during the winter, thus freezing the pipe. It repaid me by flooding our basement. That little piece of joy took over six months to repair. In June, one of the air conditioners died.

And then there was this week. Apparently 2014 will not be the year of no home disasters. We are already expecting that we will need a new sprinkler system come spring (ours is some obsolete disaster with no clear cut ability to blow out the lines and prevent freezing and destruction of valves). That was going to be spendy enough. But it will be nothing compared to what decided to befall us this week.

I came home from work on Tuesday night and walked in the door to an odor of something burning. Turns out, it was coming from the vents. We shut off the basement heater and figured we should get someone out to inspect it...surely it needed a servicing. Oh, if we were only so lucky.

As luck would have it, we discovered on Thursday that not only do we need to replace the basement heater, we also need to replace the upstairs one. You know...unless we want to throw money at repairs that will last less than a year or we all want to die of carbon monoxide poisoning or burn down our house. And of course, they are both linked to the air conditioning units...one of which (as I mentioned earlier) died last year. Grand total for repairs? Ugly. 5 digit ugly. Needless to say, that will not be happening right away.

So...we've spent the weekend using a few space heaters to keep things warm and we'll be waiting for what we hope will be a decent tax refund to help us fix at least one of the two units.

Yup. That was my week. Fun times. What else did I do?

Posts I Posted: Most importantly, I wished my parents a happy 36th anniversary...on the correct day.

I shared my technique for getting perfect glitter distribution in mason jars and explained how I designed my own wedding invitations and saved over $200.

Oh...and I revived the post on my date box (and over 160 date ideas) to remind everyone that dating is a year round event, not just for Valentine's Day.

Books I Read: I finished two books this week and now I'm only one book behind on my Goodreads goal. Yay! Slowly catching up. I finished the Divergent series with Allegiant by Veronica Roth and I continued to read the Fallen series by finishing Torment by Lauren Kate and starting Passion.

Recipes I Tried: No new recipes this week, but it was a good week for budget friendly recipes. We dusted off my old recipe for beef stroganoff...one that I hadn't made for quite a while. It was nice to get it back in rotation. I made some super easy goulash, but used a jalapeno chili that gave me terrible heartburn. Collin also pitched in with one of his standbys, a very bachelor friendly meal we call spread.

Projects I Worked On/Finished: I started attacking the crop room clean up this week. It promises to be one heck of an endeavor. I sorted through and boxed up all of the wedding stuff that had been cluttering up a quarter of the room, so I can actually see some carpet again. I think the next step will be emptying everything out of the closet so that I can start reorganizing the shelving in there. I also have a good DIY project in mind. We'll see how it goes.

Favorite Pin of the Week: I only did a smidge of pinning this week. My time was spent on other things apparently. But I still found a couple of fun things. My favorite is simply something that appealed to my sweet tooth. It's a recipe for horchata from Love Bakes Good Cakes. I'm a big fan of the cinnamon sugar rice drink, but I've never had a recipe for it at the house. Now I do. And I intend to use it.

And that's it. Phew. Now onto a new week...let's hope this one is a little less "fun".

DIY Wedding Invitations

I've told you that we worked very hard to keep our wedding economical. The first stop for saving money on our DIY wedding was our wedding invitations.

I've been scrapbooking for about a decade and making cards here and there for about as long. I figured that I could handle the invitations. And I did. It ended up saving me about $200.

 

I chose a gatefold design...I just liked the look. And as much as I despise the task of printing on vellum, I do like the look. So I bit the bullet and designed my invitations to include a vellum overlay.

The printed portion of the invitation was fairly easy. I had to buy my envelopes, so I used them to decide on my size. I picked ivory envelopes to give everything a bit more of a vintage feel and to blend with the tea stained paper that I was using for my flowers.

The card base was a 5x7" piece of silver gray cardstock. I cut these from 12x12 sheets that I purchased for 4/$1. I chose a couple of fonts and a scroll design and built the layout in Microsoft Publisher. They were all printed on my HP inkjet.

I used the remainders of the gray cardstock to make the RSVP cards. They were also designed on Publisher.The maps and directions were designed and printed onto plain white paper.

Once those were done, I printed on that pesky vellum. I used 8 1/2 x 11" sheets with each sheet containing vellum for two invitations. I chose the phrase "Eat, drink, and be married!". It took me a day to whittle that down from three initial choices, but it seemed the most lighthearted and the most like us.

I carefully laid the vellum out throughout my scrapbook and crop rooms in order to let them dry without smudging. I did wreck a couple of them, but overall there was only a little bit of error and waste. It turned out better than I thought it would...one of those things that came from learning the hard way on other projects. The first time I used vellum it was a smudgy disaster.

It was a bit of a trial and error process to get the gatefold design just right. I started each invite with a piece of 12x12 plum cardstock. Just like the silver gray, I bought the paper at 4/$1. I wrecked a couple of sheets of paper before I figured it out.

I cut it down to a 12x7 and marked the width out 2.5" from the center on each side. I scored lines at these marks and used a bone folder to crease the paper along those lines and fold the outside flaps in.

I cut the sides down to 2.5" from the right hand crease line and 2.75" from the left hand crease line. This allowed the two sides to slightly overlap when folded into the center.

Once I had the width of my folds, I marked the center of the height and cut diagonally with my paper trimmer to the points from both top and bottom.

It was a slow process, but it went fairly smoothly once I figured out the measurements I needed to use. I also did everything in an assembly line style, completing one step on all of the papers before moving to the next step. That seemed to keep me on track and reduced the amount of errors I made in measurements.

The printed cardstock was adhered to the center of the purple gatefold with an adhesive runner. The vellum was laid over the top of the printed cardstock.

Once the gatefolds were turned in, I wrapped a pair of ribbons around (one silver, one purple) and tied a knot. The edges were cut at an angle to prevent fraying. The ribbon was tied loose enough to slide on and off the card for opening.

The finishing touch was the paper flower glued to the center of the knot. The paper flowers were fairly simple to make. I used a Fiskars flower punch and tea stained book pages. Two flowers were offset and glued together. I curled the edges and inked them purple. A purple starburst was punched from the leftovers of the purple cardstock and adhered to the center of each flower. An adhesive crystal was then placed on top of each starburst.

The total cost for my invitations and envelopes ended up at about $60. I was very happy with the way they turned out.

Now...to share a little bit of wisdom I learned along the way. Postage can be a headache. If you are mailing invitations of any kind, I suggest you go to your local post office and request a dimensional standards template.

The template will tell you what sizes will qualify for particular postage charges. In my case, the invitations were too thick for standard postage since they couldn't easily fit through the slit cut in the template. That meant that my postage was 0.60 per item.

The template was also handy for determining what postage to place on the RSVP cards. I designed them to fit within the postcard space, thus saving us about $0.13 per item.

And there you have it. If you have a little bit of craftiness in you (and access to a basic design program and printer), you can do this yourself. It's worth it if you're wanting to pinch a few pennies here and there.

Good luck!

Love Isn't Just for Valentine's Day

We're now a week out from Valentine's Day...but that doesn't mean that the month of love is over. So...this is your reminder to show love every day.

It's easy to start to take your loved ones for granted when you've been together for a long time. Sometimes seeing them every day and dealing with all the little frustrations in life (or the big frustrations) can make it simple to forget how special love is and how it needs continuous attention to stay healthy.

So...keep dating your significant other. No matter what. It doesn't have to be fancy and it doesn't have to be expensive, it just has to be you and them.

To help you...I'm reviving the posts for my Date Box.

For 160 Date Ideas (ranging from free to night on the town)...click here.

To make the box...click here.

To make the dating cards...click here.

Show your loved one that you love them 365 days a year. Happy Dating!

Happy Anniversary Mom & Dad!

Today my parents have been married for 36 years. Wow. And...I remembered. Well...technically this is the second time I've "remembered" this year. I called my Dad up on January 19th to wish him a happy 35th anniversary. I was only off by one year, one month and one day. I'm an awesome daughter.

My parents were high school sweethearts.

They've set a pretty good example for me and my brothers over the years.

They show each other affection and respect. They're pretty good at compromising. They've taken care of each other and been each other's best friend.

I think it's pretty impressive. I consider myself lucky to have them as my parents.

Happy Anniversary Mom & Dad! Love you!

Happy Valentine's Eve: Countdown to Kisses

I have a confession. It's an obvious one, but a confession none the less. I am a craftlifter. For those of you who are scrapbookers, you know that scraplifting is taking someone else's page layout and using it to design your own. Craftlifting is the same principle, but for other crafts. In my case, my well professed love of Pinterest is what allows me to craftlift.

It's well known that our family is full of Halloween fans. Because of that, we have plenty of Halloween decorations. However, we have very little in the way of decor for other holidays. Part of my mission this year is to make crafts that will allow us to celebrate holidays more equally all year long.

Today is one day before Valentine's Day. I was actually planning on having today's project featured on the blog about a week and a half ago, but paint and mod podge have been the bane of my existence with this particular craft. Better late than never, right?

I found this cute little "Countdown to Kisses" idea on Infarrantly Creative. The original plan called for inverted chocolate kisses inserted into holes that had been drilled in the board. The kisses get eaten one by one as the days grow closer to Valentine's Day.

I liked the cuteness of the board, but I'm not a fan of decor that requires resetting every year. I can move a peg, but I don't really feel like renumbering kisses each year. Yup...I'm that lazy. So I revamped the board to work with my particular style. The best thing about my revamp? I busted out some old equipment that hasn't seen much use lately.

I started with a 15 1/2" x 18" board that was a leftover shelf I purchased from ReStore for $1. I did have a small Pinterosity. The board was veneered on one side, but was otherwise MDF. I chose to use the MDF side for my facing. That led to a surface that is slightly textured. Not what I had planned. It looks fine otherwise, but it isn't as smooth as it could be. Oh well...an error I can live with.

I painted the board red with standard paint since I was out of spray paint. That worked fine, but did require a little more time. It took me four full coats of paint to get a good solid color. That was the beginning of those fun delays I was talking about. I figured two coats would be sufficient. Nope.

Once the paint was dry, I adhered the lettering. I used white vinyl and patterned paper that were cut out using my Pazzle (a machine similar to a Cricut or a Silhouette). The vinyl was self adhesive. The patterned paper I ran through my Xyron to make into stickers.

After adhering all of the wording, I needed to clear coat. Initially, I sprayed on a basic automotive clear coat. In fact, I put on three coats of the stuff. Meh. It just didn't give me the look I wanted. So I busted out the mod podge. Two thick coats of Mod Podge Gloss later, it had the sheen that I was looking for.

Now it was time for the numbering. When I started the project, I wasn't sure what I was going to do for numbers. I had considered using the vinyl and just plainly adhering the numbers to the board. I also thought about making a hook system using wooden discs to hang. But then I went to Archiver's liquidation sale. So sad...one of my favorite stores is closing. But...I lucked upon these cute little wooden numbers...for $3. Boom.

I glued the numbers on using Elmer's glue. Nothing like old reliable.

Lastly, I needed to fashion some way to mark the days. I had considered making everything into magnets, but I didn't have a magnetic cartridge like I thought I did. I did however have a laminating cartridge. I punched out a heart using my old Sizzix machine. It's nice to know that the older supplies I have still have a good amount of use left. I layered the heart with two additional pieces of paper to make it thicker and larger and then laminated it. I punched through the laminate with a simple circle hand punch and increased the size slightly to allow for the heart to fit over the wooden numbers. Now the heart can simply be moved from day to day as the month marches on.

The board can be mounted with photo hangers to allow it to be placed on the wall or it can be put on an easel for easy table display. I'm leaning toward the easel just to make it easier for Darian to move the heart.

All in all, not a difficult project...just a time consuming one. If it weren't for layers of goo and drying time, this could have been finished in one day. It's okay though, it was worth it. And now we have a decoration for Valentine's Day. One holiday down. Tada!