Mission Accomplished

I realize that many of you will look at these pictures of my newly reorganized craft room and say, 'Erm....I'm not seeing a difference....', but trust me, there is.

Yes this could use some more work but it's 10x better than it was.  At least I can see things a little bit better.

Same with this side.

And all the newly typed recipes except for one I left on a card because my dad handwrote on the back, 'Good Luck'.  90 recipes took me a few days, not steady work but some here and there, and it really added up.  If I had a half hour to kill waiting for a show I wanted to watch to come on, I'd go in and do a few.  

And here is the binder in all it's glory...organized, tabbed, alphabetized, page protected and everything. I was gonna decorate the cover page more but I ran out of steam cause I was sick. I dug out some pretty stickers to do the lettering and didn't feel like finding more images to decorate with.

I was kind of dreading this project but it turned out to be a really good one, and fun to organize and see come together.  It also didn't take the months and months I thought it would, but I'm glad it's done too.   

The Something Store: TOTAL RIPOFF!!!!!!!!!!

Last summer I found out about a website called The Something Store: The Joy of Surprise.  Their website states:

Your Something May Be Anything

It may be something you need, something you want or something you desire. Your something may be a cool shiny gadget, rare book, party game, handmade necklace, reverse clock, box of gourmet chocolates, popular video game, portable table tennis set, pashmina scarf, set of kitchen knives, pair of handmade earrings, garden tool, kitchen appliance, unique home decor item, electronic equipment, fine crafting tool or an office supply item... Your something will be a brand new item; not used or refurbished.

I was intrigued.  I love grab bags.  Their cheapest 'something' is $10 and you are 'guaranteed' to get a product worth at least $10.  You can also buy $20 somethings too.  I went with the $10 package.  My stepdaughter wanted to try it too, so I ordered 2 somethings which finally showed up in sealed envelopes.  I let her choose which one she wanted, and then we opened them.  Because we were doing this outside on a freezing cold day, I didn't get a picture of her something.  She got some weird brand of body mist that had some amusing drawn graphics on the box, depicting a girl doing an angular back bend.  This is a web image of it:

But mine was beyond lame.  It was wallowing in lameness.  I got a freakin NECKTIE.  What the hell am I going to do with a necktie?  And don't say 'give it to Russell'.  It isn't even pretty.

Despite their claim that it is brand new and not used or refurbished, this necktie has stains on it.

The tie is 'Manhattan' brand and all I could find matching that online was on eBay, where the ties were listed from .99 to about $8.00.  

I sent them an email expressing my extreme dissatisfaction but I have yet to receive a response and don't hold out much hope that I will.  I would love my money back but I'm sure that won't happen either.  

The Something Store is a total ripoff.  Don't waste your money on their garbage.  I wish I hadn't.

Another Hot Mess

I have been threatening, for YEARS, to type up all the scraps of paper with recipes scrawled on them.  It was my intent to do it in 2013 and I'd gathered them all together, then jammed them into a cubby space near my printer. I never 'got a round tuit', and it made searching for recipes quite challenging.  Since I had finally cleaned and organized my craft room, that mess in the cubby really stood out.  I got the craft table cleaned off and decided it was now or never.  The computer takes up so much room that my incentive to get it done quickly is great, because I can't craft.  

So many scraps of paper.  I ended up throwing out a lot of the recipes too....like the 20 different recipes for apple pie.  It's just easier to buy it.  I will make apple crisp, but not pie.  I threw away a lot of sugary baking recipes simply because I cannot be tempted to bake that stuff and leave it around the house because neither of us needs to be stuffing our face with it.  

Some of  my notations amused me.  Apparently writing out 'chicken breasts' took too much time, even though I started writing 'breasts', so I shortened it to 'chix boobs'.

I was thumbing through this cookbook and was about to transcribe this recipe when I read the pink note.  It looks like a good recipe but I guess it 'bums me out'.

I went through all my old vegetarian cookbooks and transcribed all of the recipes I used to make.  I am giving the books to a friend because I never made 85% or more of the ones in there.  I'm sorry but I wish people would stop making recipes that include curry, nuts, fruit, raisins and other really weird combos.  Gross.

I got about 50+ pages typed the first day, and I just have that small stack left to do.  I'd even made handwritten recipe cards and laminated them and all those are being transcribed as well.  My intent after they are printed is to put them in page protectors in a 3 ring binder and keep it readily at hand in the kitchen.  

Glad to have that project finally done!  I've only been meaning to do it for the past 10 years!

Through the Wardrobe

I love Narnia.  I've been wanting to do a Narnia-themed project for quite awhile but wasn't sure what or how.  This project has taken months of researching and planning.  I decided I wanted to do the Wardrobe with Lantern Waste on the other side.  I had a wooden cigar box that would work perfectly if I could find all of the elements I was gonna need.  I started by first tearing off all the stickers and painting a few coats of dark brown on the outside and inside the lid.  I painted the inside of the box white.  I had looked at quite a few wardrobe designs on line and I really liked the actual one used in the movie with all of the carvings, but that was going to be hard to find or do.

I had some cool sun design stickers that sort of looked like they were carved and inlaid with turquoise.  I also had some mirrored paper that I modpodged to the lid and added flattened gold bead caps to the corners as mirror holders.  

Voila!

I used a piece of actual wood paper on the inside of the door and left it 'unfinished' (ie didn't paint it dark brown) because some closet doors aren't finished on the inside.  In a perfect world, I would have had furcoats, or at least partial fur coats, hanging on the inside but I didn't.  Then I found a vintage lion image in my Victorian decoupage design book, and put him on the inside cover.  I like the fact that the image is turned in the direction of the scene.

What mostly held up this project was trying to find decent paper for the background.  I needed winter woods and none of the craft stores had anything like that.  I was in JoAnn Fabrics and was really bummed because it was the last store I could find and they had nothing either.  As I walked towards the front of the store, I passed the paper napkins/tablecloths display and spotted these birch design napkins.  Yes, that will actually work really well.   After one of the napkins was trimmed and adhered to the back and sides, I had to put a styrofoam strip for the lamp to stand on because it didn't look good down at the bottom.  It needed to be up a little higher.  I found the lamp at Walmart...it's battery operated and had a 2nd one but I cut the wire off it so that I could just have one.  I had to cut a notch into the cigar box so that the wire could fit without getting crushed. The wire is run behind the styrofoam, through the notch and the battery pack is glued onto the back of the wardrobe.  After I stuck the lamp to the top of the styrofoam, I painted some of the bits white and added glitter glue to the white, to make it look like it snowed. I didn't use white paint or glitter on the branches because I thought that would be too much. Next came the addition of twigs I got out of my yard.  Finally, I stuck the fluffy stuffing onto the styrofoam to hide it.  By the way, I found out that you need specific styrofoam glue.  E6000 seemed to start melting it and everything I read online basically said there's no way around it.  

Sunny & Cold

The temps continued to plummet after the blizzard.  We woke up to -5*, which is the coldest temp I have ever felt in my life. However, it was a 'dry cold', and as long as the wind wasn't blowing, it didn't feel that bad.  The snow was still too deep to traipse around in but I did get a few pics.  I'm glad I got them because we had a rapid warm-up with rain before the temps plummeted into the teens again.  Most of the snow is gone now.

Hanging off the roof...as the temps slowly warmed, this slid further out.  Afraid of having it dumped on us or the dogs as we exited or entered the house, Russell knocked the edges off with a shovel.

I love how the shadows look on the snow.

Up the street from me.

Looking down my street from the corner.

Marsh grass is so pretty.

My mailbox flag looked like a dragon.

Sunset on a pretty day

Brrrrrr on my car

Wordless Wednesday

Snowmageddon 2014

Boy did we get walloped with a blizzard on January 2 & 3.  A classic winter Nor'easter.  It started early the morning of the 2nd and luckily as snow and not freezing rain and ice, like last February.  It snowed all day and howled all night with wind.  Fortunately there were no power outages because the snow wasn't heavy enough to take down limbs and lines.  We woke up on the 3rd to massive drifts and accumulations of over a foot.

Had to shovel just to get out the front door! 

Sun peeked out briefly, but it remained cloudy and windy for quite awhile.

My car!

Good thing we didn't need the generator...it would have required some serious work to get inside that shed.

Coneheads!

A few hours after I took these, we decided to go back out and continue shoveling the driveway.  It's a short driveway, but covered in 2 feet of snow it seems like miles long.  Two guys in a pick up truck with a plow happened by and offered to do our driveway for $25.   It was a total win-win.  They made some quick coin for 5 minutes of work, and we didn't have to kill ourselves shoveling.  They cleared in front of our mailbox as well.  We gave them $30.  Worth. Every. Penny.