shout out :)

I grew up two steps behind my sister. She is awesome. She is a South paw, so her brain  has the capacity for a lot more literal nonsense than most of us can fathom. Luckily my parents were aware of this and didn't expect me to be on her academic level. Unfortunately, I can not say the same for all of our teachers in school. After having my, towing the line of geniusness sister, I guess they expected me to measure up to her smarts. But I don't, and that is o.k. with me. I stopped measuring a long time ago (in more ways than one, I don't even want to know what my waist size is). So if you are looking for a blog that blows you away with its literary ability and what not.....

Not a bad picture, considering it was taken by a six year old!

http://www.stop-drop-roll-rachel.blogspot.com/

I love her and she is awesomely crafty too!

I can't even measure up to her hair length! :)

No more burnt pots in the back yard!!

If you know me personally, Then you probably already know that I am forgetful.  O.k. in all honesty....I am a complete SPAZ.

I love sweet tea. My mother always makes fresh tea every day, so that is what I grew up drinking. I like to brew mine in a pot over the stove, however, I am REALLY bad about forgetting that I put a pot of water on to boil. Eventually I smell the horrible stink of smoking burning metal pan, but at that point, I don't want to leave the stink in my kitchen, so I toss it into the grass in the backyard. I do eventually go retrieve the scorched pan and throw it away (O.K. fine...my husband does this for me).
I used to use metal tea kettles, but after I burned three in less than 6 months, my husband wouldn't allow me to buy any more.
So, anyway, here is my new solution to my spazzyness (yes, that is a new word that I just made up).
I now use my Keuhrig to heat the water.

I just ran the water through, without a k-cup, into a glass with tea bags in it. Let it sit for awhile and mixed it into sugar and water in the tea pitcher!
My mother used to use her coffee pot to make tea in, however, once in awhile she would make coffee in it for a guest and then our tea tasted like a coffee for several days. This does not happen with my Keuhrig! Yeah! Finally no more burnt pots littering my back yard, my coffee tastes like coffee, and my tea tastes like tea ;)

The shirt off his back

My husband loves to shop more than any straight man that I have ever met in my life. This is not a bad thing! We love to go on shopping trips together and if we had more money we would do it a lot more often. As I mentioned before in the famous UNDERWEAR post, He has clothing issues. He can't stand to wear socks, underwear, or t-shirts very many times without buying new. I on the other hand am a bit of a slob. I am currently wearing his sock cast offs, jeans with a hole in the thigh, and a t-shirt sporting the Bible school theme from three summers ago(In my defense, I am just at home with my girls, and they don't judge me based on my clothes).
So, anyway, my mans clothing quirks seem to work out great for my crafts. He is a nurse at our local Emergency Room hospital, so he wears scrubs all the time. He insists on wearing white t-shirts under his scrubs so his manly chest hair doesn't hang out, which is a good thing because nobody wants a nurse who looks like he just came from the 1985 cast of Magnum P.I. Like most of his clothes, he won't wear them very many times before he says they aren't as white as the day he bought them, and therefore clearly unwearable.
I happened to have an idea for a star shaped rag rug, so I cut up some of his white shirts, found some red and blue scrap material from my mother's giant hoard and here is the result:

I started out using a pattern for a star shaped afghanhttp://www.angelfire.com/va3/heartfeltangels/littlestarafghan.html, but that didn't seem to want to lay flat nicely as a rug. I changed it up a bit after a few rounds.

If I would have been thinking clearly (which almost never happens), then I would have written out my own pattern. I am going to try and work one out soon.

Forget Easter Eggs, this year we dyed Easter dresses!

I'm a little behind, but better late than never, right?
Like a lot of church going people, Our family has always had the tradition of new dresses on Easter Sunday.  This year my little girls (they just turned 4 years and 8 years, bless these non-teenage years!) wanted their favorite colors of dresses. Although orange seems to be a trending color right now, I couldn't find anything that cute in my price range. I will admit, my price range is pretty low since I am a stay-at-home-Mom and I'm just really cheap anyway! I found a couple of cream colored dresses at Target (I love that place!) that were on sale for $12.99 a piece.

Cream.....very pretty, but very boring. We really are NOT boring people. When I say WE, I really mean myself and my girls, because my husband would be more than happy to go with the boring crowd any day. I love him with all my heart, but he is a white wall, white ceiling kind of guy, so sometimes he freaks out a little about my choices.
I went to walmart and purchased bottles of Rit dye (purple & orange, I can't remember their offical color names). They weren't expensive, about $3.00 a piece.
I followed the "dye in your washing machine" directions. I just left the lid open on my washing machine for quite awhile so it could soak without spinning around ( I have an older washing machine, so I don't know how that would work out with some of the new machines.)
FYI: some types of fabrics dye better if you add salt to the dye bath, so be sure you read the directions on the bottle and be prepared to add about 1/2 to a full cup of salt.
The dresses turned out perfect. the only part that didn't dye was the thread, but they still looked great!