Okay I’ve been trying for days to upload this picture and just now sent in a support ticket. For now - check out my swap picture here at Flickr. Yay! Helen sent me great stuff - I’m still planning what items to use for the solar print paper. I remember first playing with that in elementary school and I know I still have it in my box of old stuff.

I love, love, LOVE the pin cushion! Would you believe in all these years of crafting/sewing/etc., I don’t have a pin cushion? The top of my sewing box is a soft, pin cushion’y thing so I usually use that. But I’ve always wanted one and could never find the exact one that I figured I could keep forever. So thank you Helen, for giving me something that I was, for whatever reason, unable to get for myself. I love the color and the bag that it came in.

I love it all actually! Beads, beads, highlight tape (who knew it came in more colors? and why didn’t you tell me!), solar paper, etc. I love getting packages in the mail and I’m glad to have met and befriended Helen.

I have these three small’ish mirrors that I got from IKEA. I wanted to decorate them with pebbles or something and hang them. Well I ended up buying these plastic pieces that stick on and .. well they just looked like crap. So I never hung anything up. Up until today, they sat on a file cabinet in my bedroom with my husband asking what I was going to do with them at least once a week.

So I am doing something! I took off all the plastic decorations to prepare to paint the frames. The mirrors are small, 4 x 4 maybe? And then there is a good sized frame around it, like 4 wide? So decorating them would look awesome. I think I’m going to stencil on them, I found a couple of great graphics. But getting those plastic pieces off was so tough! A few of them came off easy, but I forgot that we glued others down. So I had to use a butter knife to kind of pry them off. And now I have two blisters! The suffering we do for our crafts.

I hope your weekend was as good as mine!

I keep jumping from project to project! I have a room - well, maybe half a room - devoted to craft stuff. I have lots of supplies for the crafts I love to do and regularly am doing *some* sort of project. Lately, I have a lot I “need” to do and keep jumping around.

I have wanted to try the freezer paper stencil t-shirt thing ever since I saw it. But never got around to it until a few days ago.

I have a home improvement project to finish - I need to sand and paint a drywall repair.

And then I am making a pegboard holder thing for the laundry room - which I have had the supplies for about a month now and just now getting to it!

So I jumped around - we found a graphic and made a stencil for one shirt, and painted that yesterday. And I made the frame for the pegboard last night. But I still haven’t sanded anything for the drywall. I suppose that’s today.

Though I am itching to finish some projects that are in the middle stages. I have a small basket with a few things, so at least it’s not too full! A lot of the time I am about instant gratification with my projects. Which of course is a good thing because it gets done!

So the other day we made a trip to our local craft store. I love that place. We walk the aisles of the crafts we are most interested in and I am lucky that I have turned my children into crafters as well.

The unfinished wood projects were all on sale and they were itching to get something. They’ve never painted anything before - other then my carpet and that wasn’t exactly a good thing - so I’m not sure why they were in insistant. We ended up picking out two birdhouses. Of course they wanted to paint first thing!

But I waited until yesterday afternoon. They did a great job - my daughter is four (five in August) and I am impressed with how well she did. I could compare it to her coloring - she tries to be precise and stay in the lines.

Her birdhouse was like three little tiny houses stuck together, with a yard. Here she is painting the fence purple.

My son on the other hand, he had to stick to the foam brushes because, well, he’s a baby still! Slightly messy and more interested in instant gratification. LOL

We have a few little things to glue onto the houses but I was a little annoyed at the paint I found on the floor this morning. Totally my fault so we waited until this afternoon to glue - when we realized the little things were lost.