Inadequate Materials

TGIF, everyone! The Captain comes home next week so this'll be my last weekend alone with the kids for a while. Hooray! Just a quick project to share--and it's so idiot-proof you won't even need a tutorial! Despite not being the least bit Irish, I love a good St Patrick's Day celebration, and I like to start early. So as soon as Valentine's Day was over, I took down my pink wreath and got to work on a green one. Here's what I ended up with: If you click on this you *should* be able to see a larger view. This is what I think is known as a rag wreath. It's the kind of wreath we all made in grade school. Bend a wire hanger into a circle and start tying scraps of fabric onto it until you can't see the hanger anymore. I had some beautiful green satin in my stash, so I made strips of that, along with a few lighter green flannel strips for a bit of contrast, and tied knots until I could tie no more. I then crocheted myself a shamrock (cutting one out of ...

I'm so very, very behind here. I had a new craft to share on Friday but life got in the way. Maybe next week. I also have an inbox full of your comments. I'm getting around slowly to visit you all, I promise. Still no tutor here, and I decided last week that it was time to go to Plan B. I enrolled RB in kindergarten for September. Three-quarters of me is thrilled. The rest is terrified. A quick update: This is what the thermostat in my bedroom looks like until the Captain can come home and re-attach it properly to the wall. RB is so bored without therapy, he's getting into everything. A couple of weeks back, he managed to not only pull the thermostat off the wall, but he actually disconnected it. We're lucky no one was electrocuted. Other ways he's been keeping himself busy: Peeing in the toilet and then throwing his toys in there to hear the cool splash.  Taking his clothes off and running around naked 40 times a day (very embarrassing when the school bus...

I wanted to tell you guys all about RB's naked day of destruction this week, but as nothing has changed around here (no Captain, no tutor) and it's been a crazy few days, I haven't gotten to it yet. Stay tuned! In the meantime, I did manage to complete another simple craft which I thought I'd share. As Firstborn has not yet started complaining about my homemade valentines and asked me to buy him nice, socially acceptable, mass-produced Disney-themed ones from the store, I have continued to make them every year. With his help, of course. This year, since his classroom teacher is also a music teacher, I went with a theme I thought would be appropriate. And since I've been fighting down the urge to run out and buy more craft supplies, having a mountain of  supplies here already, I looked around the house to see what was available. For a long while now, my kids have been particularly careless with CD's and DVD's. As a result, we had a pile of scratched-u...

There is actually no hot glue involved in this post. But I thought I might try occasionally posting a super-easy 5-minute craft every so often. And "Hot Glue Friday" sounded more impressive than "Cut Up An Old T-Shirt Friday". This craft--for an easy, no-sew infinity scarf--came to my attention courtesy of my youngest sister, who saw someone do it on Rachael Ray. This brings up an important point. I have never in my life completed a craft that I designed from scratch myself. I'm good at figuring out how to do things, but only after someone else has shown me a picture of it. So any craft I share here will come, at least in the idea, from someplace else and I'll try to give credit where it's due. In this case, if you go to the Rachael Ray website and search around, I'm sure you'll find a better set of instructions than you're going to get from me. But here's what I did anyway. You will need: An old T-shirt or tank top (the kind with...