Andy Warhol inspired photo

Our anniversary is coming up and I wanted to make N something to hang on the wall and decided to make an Andy Warhol inspired picture.

I'm not very familiar with photoshop so it took a lot of work and a lot of tweaking. I worked on it for a big portion of two days. Figuring out the colours was taking a long time and finally I just decided to stop fiddling with it and leave it as is and am content with how the colours turned out.

This turned out soooo much better than I thought it would. I was so excited that I gave it to N today...over a week early for our anniversary. :-) He loved it!

Here is a close-up and a picture of it hanging on the wall in our basement.

It is 16 inches by 20 inches and I put it in a "frameless" frame (basically just glass and a back with little clasps to hold the glass in place). I debated between this and a black frame and am so glad I chose this one.

Swiffer Cover

I found a tutorial to make a swiffer cover on Berlin's Whimsy and really wanted to make one. Using a reusable cover is much better for the earth (no more throwing away a swiffer pad after each time) and much cheaper. I bought the towel for about $2 at a thrift store and only used half of the towel to make it.

I don't have a swiffer so I offered to make one for my sister. I offered to make it a long long time ago and just now got around to doing so since I'm going to see her this weekend. I haven't added the velcro yet (in the tutorial I linked she used buttons but I decided velcro would be much easier) and am going to add it once the cover it on the swiffer so I make sure to put it in the right place.

Since I don't have a swiffer I just used my imagination and pretended it looked really nice on a swiffer. :-)

I'm going to give it to my sister this weekend and add the velcro. I'll be sure to post pictures!

New shelves = organized office supplies

Near our office area in the basement we have this cabinet.

We've never really understood the point of it so it's been empty since we moved it. When we toured the house and opened it in just had a telephone book in it - so apparently the previous owners didn't put it to good use either. It's just an empty cupboard with a plug in and a phone jack.

Our desks were getting out of control with office supplies everywhere so I decided we were going to make use of the random cabinet space.

We measure the inside and went to Home Depot. We bought a piece of wood and metal brackets.

 

N did all of the cutting (and painting.....so he did most all of the work).

N put the brackets in - two on each side.

We made sure that the shelves fit before we painted them white.

Then N painted the shelves white (we had a random can of white paint) and painted on a clear glossy coat and then put the shelves in!

I was super impressed with what a good job N did.  And now instead of an empty cabinet we have something useful. :-)

Then I filled it with office supplies!

We placed the shelves so that we that the battery charger would fit plugged in.

We had a few random boxes that I used (the clear and blue containers are from Ikea) and I also made a bunch of origami boxes out of thick card stock. They worked perfect and are filled with rubber bands, binder clips, thumb tacks and paper clips. I think I might make labels for the boxes.

This is a blurry picture but you can see two boxes in the corner. The stacks of paper are scraps of paper with "Notes" and "To Do" for notes. I keep a stack of each on my desk and use them constantly - I just printed on the backs of used paper and cut the pages into fourths.

Easter Eggs!

We always try new things when dying Easter eggs so this year we cut out shapes with electrical tape and used some vinyl stickers.

N made these Mario themed eggs - he used electrical tape for the mushrooms and the star.

He also made this "3-D" egg - I took a photo of each side.

I made two polka dot eggs with q-tips dipped in colour.

I used electrical tape on this one.

I used a vinyl J sticker - it worked the same as the electrical tape. 

N made this face - apparently it's a Behelit

Some more eggs that my in-laws dyed.

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter everyone!

The weather is getting nice and it's starting to feel like Spring is finally here! We moved into our house at the end of the summer last year so we weren't sure what kinds of plants were planted outside.

We say some green leaves start to come up in the back and were excited to see a daffodil start to bloom.

When I went to check the mail yesterday I even noticed some flowers coming up in the front yard - around the base of a tree. I'm not sure what type of flower this is but i love the purple colour.

I'm excited to see what other types of plants and flowers start to grow.

Last year we hung out on our deck a lot (ate dinner on the deck, read books, relaxed, etc.) but we didn't have any patio furniture. We usually just brought out blankets or our card table/chairs. We decided we needed to buy something right away this year.

I love just laying out on the deck so joked that I just wanted a bed for the patio. We were at the store and found a comfortable swing. N was looking at it and realized it folded down into a bed! We bought it and N is working on putting it together.

We've had quite a few bees flying around so I bought a bee trap to hang by the flowers and hopefully keep the bees away from the deck. We'll see how well it works.

 Well I'm off to dye Easter eggs (I'll post pictures soon!). I hope you all have a great Easter.

Blog? What blog?

It's been quite some time since I've posted but don't worry, I haven't abandoned ship!

With work and school I have had zero time to do anything relatively fun and that includes crafting and blogging. My classes end in two weeks and then I'll be back to my blog!

Happy Valentine's Day! Treats!

Happy Valentine's Day!

What are your plans for Valentine's day? N and I are planning on going to dinner and a movie tomorrow. There is a great theater near us that serves food while you watch the movie.

I got together with an amiga (you can see her blog here) the other day to bake some treats for Valentine's Day.

We definitely went over board with the amount of treats that we made! I went over to her house at 4:30 and left a little after midnight. We took a few breaks for grocery shopping and dinner but spent the majority of our time in the kitchen.

First we started making the cake balls from Bakerella. They were supposed to be made with red velvet cake but when we couldn't find that at the grocery store we bought devil's food cake instead. They turned out pretty good - very tasty. I think I just need to work on my dipping and decorating skills. :-) The recipe said it would make 45 - 50 balls....we made 84. That means we each got 42 each!

We covered half in white almond bark and half in chocolate almond bark.

We made some of the almond bark pink and tried to decorate them...

Censational Girl posted about making chocolate covered caramels and they looked amazing so we decided to make them. The original recipe was from Smitten Kitchen. After gathering all of the ingredients we realized that the original recipe was for salted chocolate caramels...not chocolate covered caramels. We decided to stick with the recipe and made chocolate caramels. They were interesting but good. N decided that out of the three treats I brought home these are his favourite.

The last thing we made were brownie/cookies. This recipe is also from Bakerella. The recipe called for regular chocolate chip cookies but when we didn't see that at the grocery store we decided to use oatmeal chocolate chip cookies instead. It turned out great and N and I have each had one as a breakfast dessert for the past two days. :-) Mmm.

Valentine's Day - Chocolate of the Month Gift

N got me these pink roses a few days early so I gave his gift on Friday.

I tried to think of something N would really like for Valentine's day and I immediately thought about chocolate. He loves, loves, chocolate. 

I decided to get him a "membership" to a Chocolate of the Month Club. And by "membership" I mean... I'll be buying him a new chocolate bar at the start of each month for the rest of the year. 

When I gave him his first delivery with a chocolate bar for January and February he thought it was "the real deal" (a real chocolate of the month club) until he started reading my job answers to the frequently asked question page that was included in the envelope. :-)

I designed a membership card and a punch card and laminated them both so they looked professional. Packing tape worked great for lamination. I used the font Nite Club which I downloaded from dafont.com.

Front of membership card:

 

Back of membership card:

Front of punch card:

 

I even put the months in Spanish on the back just for fun.

Next I made a welcome letter... (PDF of letter)

 and a page of frequently asked questions (PDF of frequently asked questions).

I put the letter, frequently asked questions, membership card and punch car in an envelope. 

I went to the co-op and bought the first two chocolate bars. I was holding a handful of chocolate bars trying to decide when a man came up and commented on how many chocolate bars I had. I explained that my husband has a chocolate problem (addiction) and I was buying him some for Valentine's Day. He laughed and recommended two bars. I thanked him for his recommendation and bought the two bars he suggested.

January's Chocolate bar

February's Chocolate bar

As an added bonus, this bar has a love poem inside. :-)

I put the bars in a box, wrapped it with a paper bag and put a sticker on it. 

Then I used ribbon to tie the box and envelope together to give to N. 

 He loved the gift and is excited to receive a new chocolate bar every month for a year. I'm excited for him to share the chocolates with me....:-)

I have uploaded the membership card, punch card and letterhead. For some reason the text on the membership card looks pixely...it didn't look like that before I uploaded it so I'm not sure what happened.

PDF of the letterhead.

Front of card.

Back of card.

 

Punch card.