Thrifty Winter Decorating

It's been cold out so we've stuck to indoor activities the last few days, which means thrifting, cleaning and decorating for this momma in her spare time.
     Our bedroom is the least cohesive room in our house. I just can't ever decided what I want in there. I start one way and ALWAYS get off track. Most recently I was daydreaming about yellow and grey, but the grey has never really come into play since I'm on a thrift store budget and pretty grey has not shown it's face in my local shops. Navy on the other hand has.
    So, at some point I decided to go with it, and navy and yellow have become my base colors in decorating our bedroom(even if yellow is playing a background role in this design). In my last few trips a splash of cherry red in my findings has brought it home for a cohesive look and despite the fact that our room desperately needs a new coat of paint I thought I'd share my lovely thrifty winter look.

 

Our awesome duck quilt found at salvation army for $3. It reminded me of Justin's room when we first started dating. The man had little ducks all over the place. This quilt is a bit hipper that the ducks of old thou. Thrown together with some pillow cases out of my vintage stash in yellow, blue, and red. Perfect, well Brobee and Murry seem to like it anyway.   

Very cool velvet tapestry , brings some more red into the mix, also found at salvation army. This was a great find, for me anyway, because the glaring white wall behind our bed was driving me crazy and I needed something.  

 

and to finish off my little mini make-over I sewed a red doily to the top of my lamp shade, for an added punch and to help dull the light, since we still co-sleep with the bear and we need a dull light for nigh-night time. my doily fix totally beats the piled up scarves I had been using trust me! a thrifty little bedroom make-over that only cost me around oh, 5 or 6 bucks, plus a little fishing in my stash of vintage brickerbrak!

 

I'm currently working on getting a tutorial on a woven felt catch-all basket together, So look for it to be up in the next few days. thank for reading!

Righteous Recipes: Split Pea with bacon

 

Now that Tasty's is open, Justin has taken the day shift for him self and  is home every night for dinner for the first time in our marriage. So, I've never had to do a real dinner time until now. It took about two weeks to really get it in my head that "yes" he would be home every night and that I needed to start cooking! Thank god for Family Circle , it has gotten me threw quite a few dinner times in the last few weeks. Their recipes all have pretty easy to find, affordable ingredients and so far no real complaints from my master chef husband on any of the ones I've tried. A few Sundays ago I tried their split pea with bacon recipe and it was a hit. Justin being the southern boy he is, grew up with split pea soup, and now it's one of the comfort foods he's known to make on cold days. I on the other hand did not.  So when I saw this recipe in the February Family Circle, I decided to try it out. The recipe is as follows:   

Ingredients

• 6 slices bacon, diced
• 1 medium onion, peeled and diced
• 3 carrots, peeled and diced
• 2 ribs celery, trimmed and diced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 1 pound bag green split peas
• 1 32 ounce box vegetable broth
• 2 teaspoons fresh rosemary, chopped
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper

Directions

1. Cook bacon over medium heat in a large pot for 8 minutes. Remove half with a slotted spoon to a bowl. Add onion, carrots, celery and garlic to pot. Continue to cook 5 minutes.
2. Stir in split peas, broth, 2 cups water and rosemary. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Reduce heat, cover and cook 40 minutes or until peas are soft. Season with salt and pepper.
3. Ladle soup into bowls; top each with a little of the reserved bacon bits.

When I made it, I used 10 slices of bacon, because who doesn't like more bacon and I served it with corn muffins. If you decide to try it out, let me know how you liked it. Oh, and no I've got no affiliation with family circle, I'm just a fan. Thought I'd let you know now since I've got a few more righteous recipes coming up out of family circle, but they won't always be ; )   

Felting Wool

 So, recently I saw the Around the world felted wool blanket tutorial over at the Purl bee and decided we had to have one for our house. Unfortunately , the $12.50 a sheet price tag one the felted wool they sell in their shop is way a bit out of my price range. So, I set to work looking for wool at my local thrift shops. Living in southern Georgia wool sweaters where not super plentiful, but wool blazers were! So I decided to try felting them, too. Looking in the womens section I was able to find a huge selection of solid colors and it was fairly easy to find 100% wool.

 After felting all my collected wool, I found that the suiting gives a thinner loft than the sweaters that I liked very much for this particular project. I think this is because they are a thinner thread and tighter weave to begin with than the knit sweaters. Also, the suit wool doesn't shrink  as much as the knit sweaters, so you'll have more of it in the end. It defiantly felted though and made beautiful squares.

 

Felting your own wool is pretty much the easiest thing in the world. In fact you've probable made some on accident before. All you need to do is: take your gathered wool apart. (e.i. cut sweaters in to front, back, and two sleeves, for the blazers it's a bit more work with your seem ripper but you'll be happy with the amount of fabric your left with at the end of the process,promise). Then, wash on hot with cold rinse and don't forget the soap. Wool is usually dry clean only so it probably won't be color safe so either wash like colors together in batches or if your like me and just want to get it done, invest in some Shout Color Catchers so your colors stay true. Repeating the wash cycle and/or using the dryer on your wool will give you tighter felts, so experiment and see what you like best. Me, I like a once round in the wash and then a rack dry. once your wool is dried hit it with your iron set to wool with steam after that it's ready to go!  

Note: your pieces do not have to be 100% wool for the felting to work, but the more wool in the garment the better your final results, so I would suggest skipping anything lower that 70% . Also, note that you can felt other natural animal fibers so alpaca , llama , if you can find it try felting it.  

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Here's a picture of all my squares all laid out before I bagged the rows. So far I've got one and a half of my rows sewn together. Once I'm actually sitting down working on this, it doesn't take long to get a row done. It's just finding the time to sit still with out a toddler grabbing at me for attention. So I think this will be an on going side project and I'll keep you up dated on my progress. Anyway, I'm pretty happy to be getting this blanket for under $50 instead of  $300+ , plus I've got so much extra felted wool now! I just can't decide what to do with it all!

Project Playtime: Cloud Dough

So, my son is almost 2 and I'm always looking for fun and cheap things to do together while daddy's at work. I've seen "Cloud Dough" floating around the blogosphere for awhile now and it seemed like a good place to start with the outdoor messy play. The recipe is really easy, one bag flour to one cup baby oil. The flour should still run through your fingers and feel like flour but when you pack it it should mold and hold it's shape.

 

To make just the dough costs around 3 or 4 dollars, but I also got a plastic tub with a lid to make and store it in  (3.50) and some cheap kitchen utensils to play with for him (4.00) all from the dollar store, so I spent about $10 for this project. I would also suggest a vinyl-flannel backed table cloth to play on. If yours is anything like mine, part of the fun is dumping it out and throwing it in the air and the vinyl will help with clean up. I got mine at goodwill for a 1.99 still in the package, but if your not so lucky as to find one at the thrift store K-Mart has them for around $5, which is still a steal compared to the fancy-shmancy mess mats they sell at the baby store. And it will be bigger! 

this stuff really is fun to play with so wear something you don't mind getting messy in. 

 

 he's hard at work cook'n up something good just like daddy!

 

 His tongue sticks out when he concentrates. His daddy does the same thing, and it makes my heart giggle every time I see it.

 Eventually, we decided it was better to take the pants and socks off , at lest for him, momma kept her clothes on the whole time. Well, I did end up taking off my socks.

i would make "cloud dumplings" and bear would take them for his recipes.

this was a pretty darn fun activity and it kept him entertained for almost two hours! which is unheard of for my busy 22month old. but all good things come to and end and then it was into a bath to wash off the extra flour.

When he was done, I just packed all our "gear" into the tub with the dough, then used the drop cloth to gather and pour the rest of the dough back into the tub. Put the lid on and your ready for play some other day : )

Now,I know I haven't posted in awhile. Sorry. I had a lot going on, and it got farther and farther away from my last post and I wanted to do something really AWESOME  for my big return to blog land. Then I realized that was just stupid! While I hope you did think this post was great and I'm gonna do my best to post regularly, I'm still a work at home mom to a 2 year old and I can't do it all. So, you'll just have to forgive me when I have lulls in my posting, and I'll try to make up for it with semi-awesome posts upon my returns ; )