Watch Out

 There should be a saying or a maxim or a true-ism or a proverb to the effect that when any two Hanna sisters get together for any length of time...watch out! No, seriously, Watch. Out.

After spending an evening and a day with Marcy earlier in the month, I figured that I had learned just enough skills to enable Suzanne, Keira and I to each make a necklace or two this weekend. Yeah. About that. Um...I've got pictures of around 26 necklaces (and one bracelet),  that we made over the past two days. (there are two or three more glass tiles that didn't make it into the pictures)

Impressive? Sure, but you've also got to factor in the dress that Keira made, the pile of mending Keira brought to put through my serger, the skirt (complete with zipper and waistband) that Suzanne made, and the curtains that I whipped up.  And two trips to craft stores.

Watch out.

The Betty Neels Collection. From L-R: Fate is Remarkable, Never Say Goodbye (aka From Poland with Love), Ring in a Teacup, The Girl with Green Eyes (aka Lucy Lockkit's Locket), Henrietta's Own Castle and Caroline's Waterloo.

$21 Challenge

As I am now a stay-at-home Mom again, we find that even though Kevin's new job absorbs my $800/mth income, it still doesn't leave a huge amount left over for savings. We do put a little away each month, but we would like to put away a bit more. Kevin has asked me to try to our food budget down to around $400/mth, which is a bit daunting for a family of 5. I am already pretty thrifty, but I haven't been able to get below $500 for the last couple of months.
So, I am taking on the challenge!
I spotted this challenge while perusing thrifty tips on Youtube (you can really get sucked in!). I do have a pretty well stocked pantry and have been dabbling with meal plans for a while... and I love a good challenge! So, I am going to start this on Thursday 4/11.
Anyone game to join in?

Spring Cleaning... Results Show

Spring Break is a big cleaning week in our home. As I tell my kids, "If you don't work hard in school you will get stuck doing a job you hate... like doing manual labor and cleaning up after others." For some reason they are always very excited to head back to school.
Our goal was to get rid of a bag-a-day of stuff and unpack a bunch of boxes too. We cleaned and painted, and organized 10 spaces in 7 days.

We purged 3 bags of stuff from our laundry / linen closet area.

After putting up 2 extra shelves, and reinforcing the existing one, we finally have a great storage / laundry area. Best thing: the 8" shelf just behind the washer and dryer.

The boys' room took a day and a half to sort through. I didn't take a before picture, but suffice it to say, it looked like an episode of hoarders. We purged 2 bags of stuff, a bunch of old books, and organized an entire bin of future clothes.

After many, many hours of cleaning and sorting, the boys are happy with the results. Best thing: Found a $10 bed frame with attached spring to maximize storage space underneath and head room above.

The garage! What can I say? We pretty much moved in and chucked everything that we didn't need right away into the garage. I didn't keep track of all of the stuff we threw out, but surprisingly, it wasn't a lot.

After one and a half days, this is the result. It could still use some more organization, but at least it is usable now. Best thing: Bike storage area Kevin put up.


Overall we got rid of 10+ bags of stuff, put up 11 shelves, painted 3 spaces, hung countless pictures, unpacked 7 boxes, and taught my rugrats a great lesson :D

Crafting with Marcy

I spent Thursday evening crafting with Marcy. I'm hopeless at making jewelry on my own - there's just too many tools and wires and pins and beads and and and...my eyes tend to just glaze over when I'm in the jewelry section of Michael's and I always end up walking away empty-handed. Not this time. I now have a little firmer grasp of how the stuff goes together and what I would need to make some types of necklaces (the easy types).

Marcy put this together while coaching me in remedial jewelry construction.

One necklace, three options.

This was pretty fun to make - and super simple. Love the alcohol ink used for the aging effect.

Same-ish technique here.  Again, simple.

                  Two more necklaces...has anyone noticed a common theme to all of these?                    Interchangeableness (my spell checker assures me that interchangeableness is not a word, but I disagree).

Spring "Cleaning"...

...that's my name for these fiber-rich muffins.

Most of this recipe can be found in the family cookbook on page 28.  Colleen's Famous Bran Muffins is the actual title, but since I've altered the recipe a bit, I feel justified in altering the name too.

Spring Cleaning Muffins

Cream together:
1/2 cup butter
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs

Mix in:
2 cups of buttermilk* with 2 1/2 teaspoons of baking soda stirred in

Add to all of the above:
2 1/2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups Bran Buds (cold cereal)

Optional stir ins (I like both):
1 cup blueberries (fresh or frozen) and 1 cup shredded coconut.

Makes about 26-30 regular size muffins.  Bake at 400' for 20 minutes in greased muffin tins. (I usually make these in cupcake papers - they stick a bit to the paper).  These freeze quite well and make a great mid-morning snack or a breakfast-on-the-go or while you're doing spring cleaning.  Let's go with that.

March Madness Wrap Up

I would like to thank all of those that participated in the March Madness Challenges. I have to say we have a pretty talented group here. I think we need to draw in a few more participants for our next big challenge though. Let's hit up Jody, Josie, Marcy, Gabi and any other extended family that could contribute to our collective. I'm thinking we do a summer kick off in early June?

Thanks for all the great ideas. I know I will be using a couple of the recipes in the near future. Way to go family!!

Ikea Hack

There is a cottage industry built around taking stuff  (cheap, cheap stuff) bought from Ikea and hacking it.  Genius, I say.  I don't tend to think in those terms--I mean, if I'm paying full price for something (even a cheap, cheap something), I don't want to have to give it a make-over right out of the gate.  But I do have some things around the house that are from my "It's cheap and we can afford it and, hey, I'll find a use for it later" days.

Meet the totally uninspiring pine magazine holders:

There on the bottom shelf--looking as ill-favored and vexing as can be.

Mayor Blah-ddington from the village of Lesser Blah-ville and his faithful manservant Mr. MacBlah, no?

And here's what they were hacked into.  (Flag on the play!  Improper use of the verb 'to hack'.) Hacked as. (Flag!)  Hacked from. (Flag!)  Shrug.

I wasn't really going for this look when I started but here's how I got there.

I stained the holders a dark walnut, went to Picnik and found a font I liked and plugged in the words (which were chosen from a Pride and Prejudice vocab list. HA!) "odious" and "vexing" (chosen because they were roughly the same length) in and cropped the image to just around the words. I pasted that into a word document and stretched the image so that when I held the holders up to the screen, they over lapped horizontally and fit vertically.  I traced them with simple clear contact paper (bought ages ago from GW) and cut out. 

I laid the stickers onto the front edges and then painted with four or five coats of interior semi-gloss.  I was hoping that this would give me a nice crisp, mod line but when I took the contact paper off, some of the paint came too.  No worries.  We roll with that sort of thing at Casa Dominguez. 

Then I smoothed down the paint that had lifted and went to spray a polyurethane coat.  Eek! It wanted to eat through the paint.  But it turns out that that was pretty cool as well--like I'd sanded it down that way. 

I can't wait for the conversations to start.