Busy bee

First of all Happy Chinese New Year to all my readers in “Bloglandia”. Or Gong Xi Fa Chai for those whom understand Chinese. In the lack of massive amounts of energy, this year we opted for just cleaning house and not decorating for the Chinese New Year as we have done earlier years. Out new year dinner was as tradition entales, steamboat. Yummy!

The year of the Monkey ended with bumps and scratches for all the girls in CasaR. The last day of the year was a cold one and resulted in icy streets and super slippery. If you happened to be in our neighborhood Friday afternoon, you would have seen the three of us scattered over the sidewalk as we all slipped on the icy sidewalks. To this day, my” mummy heart” still hurts a little when seen SweetieLs face…Hopefully the year of the Rooster will be better…

poor little one

This weekend I did some repair work on SweetieS winter coveralls. Just before the weekend I saw that the seam had started to fall apart. Rather than wasting a perfectly usable coverall, I looked into how to patch it up.

So Saturday I took a trip to my local fabric store Stoff og Stil and looked for fabrics I could use. My requirements for the fabric were “simple”, it had to be durable and semi-waterproof. I found some waxed (I think it’s waxed) and a cool Paw Patrol fabric. SweetieS was superhappy with the result. Now to see how it holds up with the daily wear and tear SweetieS puts it to…

I also finally finished my second Skappelgenser. Well this one has a twist to the original pattern. I had knitted it one size too small. Rather than starting over I added cables on the sides. This sweater is knitted with Drops Big Delight in the color Rosehage (01) and Drops Brushed Alpaca Silke Lys beige (04) on 7mm needles. For this project I used about 7 skeins of each.

finally done…	close up of the cable along the sides

Now of to play with my latest toy, the Gyro-cutter. I bought this cutter iwth plans to kiss cut stickers for my planner. So far my first impression is that it works great. I bought mine of Ebay, from this seller.

Here I cut out the text “April” from a printed label sticker.

- How have you started your year of the Rooster?

A “quick” DYI

This DYI project was quick to assemble but not so fast when it comes to the accquering of the supplies.
With kids in house we buy raisins on a regular basis. One day when I had an empty box at hand I though these might work…for a bottle rack for all the drinking bottles the girls have.
So we went from this…

a small chaos of drinking bottles

to this…

using these…

They are simply glued together using a hot glue gun. Still need a few more raisin boxes. Happy with this solution.
-have you done any DYI projects lately?

Shake, shake, shake

Last years Christmas card from CasaR was a shaker card. To make the card I used the We’r’memory keepers Fuse tool. Bitten by the shaker cards bug I thought I would make more….but I want the shaker bits to be personalized for the recipient. So no mass production of cards to have at hand.

I made a shaker card for my nieces birthday, but of course I forgot to snap a picture.

Well this weekend I made one for one of the girls in SweetieS kindergarten….Happy birthday Dina! I had some postit shaped like an iphone, so inspired by a card I saw on pintrest, I made this…

I just love my Wink of Stella pens, they as such a nice shimmer. I used the clear pen for the iphone background. For the bubbles I used a sky blue and a purplish pen. Not sure if the picture does the shine justice….

I tried taking a picture of just the background…

I think I’ll just link to a video by Jennifer Mcguire here. In the video she shows how she adds shine to cards using the Wink of Stella pens.

-have you made shaker cards?

New year, new possibilities

A belated Happy new year dear readers. Hope the new year has been good to you so far…

The past weeks I have been playing a stay-at-home-mom. Kuddos to all you stay-at-home-moms! You are doing a wonderful unappreciated job! Having that said, it’s good to be back to work.

I had a few extra days off work, to complete my latest projects….reorganizing our home. I’ve had time to think over the past few weeks, and concluded that a clean organized home equals a happy home. I started writing a list (me and my lists) over what I wanted changed. And the wishlist wasn’t very short….I started with moving the girls toys from the living room to the attic/play room. Over the holidays we got tired of constantly tripping/cleaning/stepping on toys all over the living room. The girls still have the Expedit in the living room, just with way less stuff. I’ve keep things like beads and coloring stuff. But clearing storage space and making a play area in the attic was the biggest task. The attic has, until recently, been a guest and office room. So it took some time to just repurpose the space.

After an inspiring read on a storage solutions post by Estella (love that she is from Singapore and into much the same things as myself….) and this post to be exact, I was inspire to redo the girls clothing dressers also. This way the girls can quickly get an overview over what they have in the drawers and get the clothes out much more efficiently. As an added bonus, the clothes take up much less space!

before…	after…

I great tip I got from blog reading was the “random cubby”. My OCD prefers that everything has it’s place when being put away. So the random cubby is for the quick clean ups. For when you are in a hurry and don’t have time to find the corresponding parts/place for everything. Just need to find a cute and handy cubby….guess I should plan for a trip to IKEA soon. The list of handy stuff to get is getting longer and longer as I progress in my reorganizing.

After this first wave of reorganizing I have decided to take a break. Let the dust settle and see how well my chosen solution works in real life…

-how to you organize your kids toys?
-have you come over some supersmart organization tips?