We believe in...

I love blank canvases!  I love that every blank canvas always looks like it's just itching for craftiness to strike!  I had never really been attracted to using smaller canvases until I saw a small one that my friend had decorated.  I got to thinking that it might be fun to do a series of small canvases and group them together into a larger project.  I bought 12 5x5 canvases , thought up a theme and got started! Here's how it turned out:

I covered the 1st 3 canvases in book pages from an old but decent looking book that I knew I wouldn't mind being without.  I used tacky glue to adhere them to the canvases then brushed on a couple of thin layers of Mod Podge.  Using a combination of chip board letters and letters cut out with my CriCut.

Our family believes in music!  We have music on at our house regularly.  Even with all of the noise produced from a family of 7 music is essential...or at least that's what we think!  I used a Sharpie to do the draw it then filled it in with acrylic paint so it looked a little weird.  I keep thinking I need to touch it up.

We believe in wisdom!  We believe in thinking things through and trying to make the very best choices possible.  For this one I used patterned scrapbook paper to cut out an owl body.  I then used a small glass to trace circles for the eyes and pupils.  I free-handed the beak and feet.  The paper that he's glued to was ripped into strips, glued down then Mod Podged.

Family is vitally important to us!  We spend a lot of time together and enjoy the little world we have created in our home.  Again, I used scrapbook paper and stickers to mat the pictures onto the square and triangle. I was really happy with how this one turned out since I had a little trouble with it in the beginning.

In our family we believe that love is the most important thing.  We encourage our children to have love in their hearts for everyone and especially for each other.  I painted the canvas purple before getting started on the design.  Love is strong so I used pebbles from Glass Beach that my father-in-law had given me for Christmas.  I painted some of them red for the actually heart but the rest of them are their "natural" color. 

We believe in peace.  Peace is a fragile so I used wire and very small buttons to make a peace sign.  I then hot-glued it over the peace sign I had painted on a canvas.

Diversity is what our family is all about.  We have many different people in our family...  Gay, White, Mexican, Samoan, Catholic, Atheist, Disabled, Typical, etc.  We believe that all people are equal.  We believe that diversity is what paints this world beautiful so the rainbow was painted onto the canvas.

We laugh a lot in our house.  We believe in laughing at each other and laughing at ourselves.  I used paper and stickers for this one.

We believe in Karma.  We joke about it a lot of times but really I think there is some truth to the idea of Karma.  If you send good things into the universe, good things tend to come your way and vice versa but I also think that Karma also has to do with your attitude  toward the "good" and "bad" that comes your way.

God.  We each have a different relationship with Him...for some of us it is complicated and twisty like the yarn and for some of us it is simple like the popsicle sticks.  Either way we trust in Him.

The finished canvases!  I was really happy with how they turned out.  These canvases tell a lot about our family and what we are all about.  

Thank you for checking out my latest blog post! 

Now Go! Be Crafty!

Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

One thing that you will not find in our home is peanut butter.  Probably a little unusual for a family with 5 kids but because my husband is allergic to peanuts, we are all diligent about checking labels.  We steer clear of any products containing peanut oil, peanuts, traces of peanuts, m&m’s (I know!).  Fortunately, none of the children inherited his allergy so when my hubby went on a work trip recently, I did something for the kids that I had never done before…I baked peanut butter chocolate chip cookies!  I fooled around with the recipe until I found one that produced the kind of cookie that I wanted.  The kids devoured them…SUCCESS!  

Lori’s Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

2 ¼ cups of flour

½ teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

1 cup (2 sticks) softened butter

1 cup granulated sugar

½ cup brown sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 large eggs

2 cups of semi-sweet chocolate chips

¾ cup chunky peanut butter

1 cup milk chocolate chips (optional)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.

In a small bowl combine flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt.

In a large bowl beat together butter and sugars until creamy.  Add eggs, vanilla and peanut butter and stir until the mixture is well-blended.  Gradually add the flour mixture and mix together well.  Stir in the chocolate chips.  Drop teaspoonfuls of the dough onto baking sheets (I sprayed mine with Pam first.  The baking sheets, not the cookies.)  You will need to press the cookies with a fork, a spoon or your fingertips because they will not spread out much while baking.

Bake for 8-12 minutes then remove and cool on wire racks.   I tend to like my cookies a little mushy so I kept mine in for about 8 minutes but they were still pretty soft at 12 minutes. 

These cookies are SO YUMMY!  I won’t get to make them very often but if I could I would.  Oh, and in case you’re wondering, my husband is completely ok with the kids enjoying peanut butter when he isn’t home especially since they love it so much.  It does, however, require extra special care to ensure that all utensils and cooking surfaces, clothes that the kids may have gotten any peanut gunk on are all cleaned thoroughly.    

Thanks for checking in!  I can’t wait to show off the canvas project I’ve been working on for the next blog post.  See you soon!

Now Go! Be Crafty!

Lego Bookends

Our boys are obsessed with Legos!  They seriously have tons of them and create these huge cities and buildings and just about anything else that they can think up. So, for Christmas my husband and I bought them some Lego idea books which I now frequently find thrown around their room.  They don’t have shelving in their room and I kept thinking that they need some bookends for their dresser but cute bookends are usually expensive.  Thanks to an idea that I found on Pinterest, originally pinned by Apartment Therapy, I came up with a solution.

Materials:

2 bricks (Home Depot, 40 cents each)

2 pieces of red 12x12 scrapbook paper

2 pieces of blue 12x12 scrapbook paper

1 piece of red paper

1 piece of blue paper

Tape

Tacky Glue (I love the Scotch brand)

Mod Podge

Foam brush

I wrapped the bricks in one of the sheets of paper and then taped it down and wrapped it again beginning with the opposite side so that the entire brick would be covered. The 2^nd time I wrapped it I didn’t use tape (because it would show). Instead I used the quick-drying tacky glue and then turned the brick so that the side with the glue was against the counter.  This allowed the glue to set.

While the bricks were busy adhering to the paper, I picked out 2 pieces of scrapbook paper that we only slightly darker that the colors used on the bricks and drew 8 circles on each.  I used a shot glass as a pattern to make my circles.  I cut them out and then glued them onto the bricks with the corresponding colors.

After all of the pieces were glued onto the bricks I put on a couple of coats of Mod Podge using the foam brush to spread it evenly over each brick.

I let the bricks dry overnight and then they were ready to use!  The Mod Podge even gave them a shiny coat which made them look even better.

I really liked the way these turned out and the boys LOVED them!  I’m hoping that the bookends help the boys keep their books organized but I’m also kinda hoping that they don’t decide to throw the bookends at each other because I’m thinking that might hurt or break something. LOL!

Now Go! Be Crafty!

A Priceless Branch

We have a couple of trees in our front yard that like to shed their leaves all over our yard and occasionally a branch or two will break off and land on the grass.  So, one day we were getting back from somewhere and there was this branch in the front yard. For some reason I thought it was kind of cool so it went into the house with me and hung out in the living room just waiting for something crafty to happen to it.  It’s now been in our house for about 2 weeks and finally today it got the makeover it’s been waiting for!

One of the trees in our yard that so generously dropped down one of its branches for me to play with…I started by painting it red.

I used my CriCut to make hearts….awww. Then, using Picasa, I turned some of my favorite pictures of the kids into black and whites.  I printed, cropped then matted them onto black card stock.  The hearts and the matted pictures were coated with a thin layer of Mod Podge. This gave the pictures a little bit of a canvas-y look.

Using a hot glue gun I secured the pictures to the branch.  I glued some of the hearts to the branch and used curled wire to make “springs” to attach the rest of the hearts.

The finished branch!  I don’t know what the deal was with this branch but when I saw it I instantly thought, “I wanna do something cool with it!” I have to admit that it wasn’t a wildly impressive, amazing branch yet now it's something special.  Now it is the keeper of some of my favorite memories with my most favorite people and that makes this branch priceless to me.

Now Go! Be Crafty!

Pebbly Mosaics

When I was younger my parents used to watch a lot of sitcoms.  They loved Three’s Company so, if you’re ever in a Three’s Company Trivia contest I’m your gal!  The thing about watching sitcoms back n the day was that in a half hour all problems that were laid out in the first 5 minutes were neatly cleaned up and solved.  Nothing like real life, right?  But the funny thing is that any given episode of a TV show usually has a theme and for some random reason all of the characters seem to be going through similar things simultaneously.  This part of the formula seems a lot like real life to me.  You know what I mean…it’s kind of like buying a white car and all of a sudden there are white cars everywhere you drive.  Is it really that everyone has one or is it that because we have one we automatically become more aware of the how similar we are to others?   I think it’s because we are all constantly trying to take in everything around us and process how it all pertains to each of us personally.  My point?  Actually, I was just trying to say that at our house it seems to be all about Rome this week.

According to Megz (our oldest daughter) the Romans were the creators of mosaics.  I didn’t know this but she has become quite educated in all things Roman since she has a project due on the subject this week.  Coincidently, our middle son (Jake) and I began working on mosaics made out small pebbles and some “sand” that my father-in-law brought me from Glass Beach.  Rome Week at our house!

Here is the “sand” that my sweet father-in-law gave me for Christmas (I, thinkJ) last year.  I’ve since learned that this “sand” was actually created by years of dumping by the people of the Fort Bragg, California area.  The people there basically turned the ocean into their dump and the weather and the waves pounded the glass that was dumped into millions of small, smooth, colorful pebbles.

Jake draws a picture on a canvas and then uses acrylic paints to paint the pebbles in different colors.

Jake and I use the colored pebbles to fill the canvas.  We used hot glue…I burned myself repeated, Jake didn’t!

Jake’s completed his mosaic using paint and pebbles.  The minute it was dry he found a spot to hang it in his room.

My completed mosaic!  I opted to use paint underneath the pebbles so that none of the white canvas would show then I coated it with Mod Podge .  I also chose to cover the entire canvas because mine will actually end up being part of a set that I am creating and am WAY excited about.  The sketch on the right shows what I have in mind.  When it’s completed I will be sure to include it.

Next time we will introduce you all to the branch that’s been hanging out in our living room waiting for something crafty to happen to it.  Maybe by then it will have met up with some creativity!

Now Go!  Be Crafty!

Now Go! Be Crafty!

So, first things first, WELCOME to my blog! This rock came with our house just waiting for something colorful to happen to it and finally it did!  Now our Welcome Rock hangs out by our front door, welcoming friends and family.

We have a very crafty household…school projects, just-for-fun projects, work projects.  There isn’t a day in our lives that one of us isn’t creating something.  Our family consists of 2 parents, 5 kids and 2 dogs.  We don’t have cable instead choosing to survive on Netflix and Hulu (don’t worry about us though we have become accustomed to roughing it…hee hee. Actually, Hulu and Netflix seem to be enough; they have just about everything.).  Because we don’t allow the kids to watch as much TV as they’d probably like to and because they only play video games on the weekend, a lot of free time is spent creating.  Our 2 daughters love to paint, draw, bead, etc but are currently addicted to making duct tape wallets.  Our 2 older boys LOVE building things out of Legos and drawing buildings and contraptions.  Our youngest is 2 and hasn’t stopped dancing long enough to figure out what craft he most enjoys.  As for my husband and I…well, I just have to create something daily or I will not be fun to live with while my husband, though creative, is in complete denial and insists that he’s more of a techie type.

We have a craft room that isn’t as organized as I would like it to be BUT I can’t seem to stop working on one project or another long enough to really take the time to organize it!  In that room are all the goodies necessary to accommodate just about all of our crafty needs!  We have so many ideas constantly floating around in our home and some of them are really cool so I decided that we needed to have our own blog.  This blog will not only feature our crafts, it will also feature our adventures.  You will learn a lot about us…our way of thinking, our traditions and our take on what being a family means to us.  Our first ever blog post is devoted to showing off some of our recent creations but future posts will also include a little more about the 7 of us and our wild, loud, crazy, perfectly blended, crafty family. 

One of the duct tape creations...I think just about anyone that knows us now owns a duct tape wallet from our "collection".  The girls and I had some seriously fun bonding time while making these one afternoon. 

My sweet father-in-law brought me some "sand" from Glass Beach.  He said, "I thought you would find something neat to do with it."  Some of it made it into bottles but I still have a bunch that is just waiting for me to do something with it!

I make my own salsa but my oldest daughter LOVES Pace Picante salsa...I know! At least my husband likes my salsa!  Anyway, one of my upcycling projects: an empty salsa jar that received a new lease on life as a decorative candle holder.

Our son was super excited about turning 11.  We aren't quite sure what it was about 11 in particular that made it so exciting for him but it was.  So, he made a little Lego sculpture to commemorate the special occasion!  My husband and I were impressed with how he used the Lego "guys" to make it look more creative!

Sometimes cool things happen and you just HAVE TO take a picture of the coolness!  We were making scrambled eggs and I looked down into the bowl as I was about to crack the 5th egg and our breakfast was smiling at me!

I was WAY proud of my itsy bitsy spider from Halloween that I had to include him in my introductory blog post.  I think he's cute and he makes me smile so here he is!

Thank you for checking out my first ever blog post!  I’m really excited about trying new projects and taking adventures that we can share with anyone who might be interested!  See you soon!

Now Go! Be Crafty!