Our Thankful Tree

I cut out a naked tree shape
and tons of leaf shapes

we all wrote the things we are thankful for on the leaves.

After we got them all taped up there, I was so shocked at how beautiful it was. As I was cutting out the tree, I thought it looked ugly. As I cut out the leaves, I thought they were ugly too. But when they all were up there, I could not love this thing more. I hope the kids can stand to leave it alone so it can stay up for the rest of the season.

This is my other recent project. My neighbor hosted a class to make these beautiful temple pictures. I'm sure it doesn't look like much in the picture, but we built the frame, mounted the photo, and it even has a texture on the photo to make it look totally professional. I am so in love with it. I am just trying to decide if I want to "antique" the frame or not.



And this is my constant, all-consuming project.

I always have so many projects on my mind. Stupid housework always gets in the way.

Halloween 2010

This year we had 4/5ths homemade costumes.

Jackson was a Mad Scientist

Molly was Medusa

Grant was Superman

Tommy was a mummy

When Molly told me she wanted to be Medusa - I had no idea how to do the snakes. I asked around everywhere and everyone. I had a one neighbor tell me he used to spike his mohawk with elmers glue. We tried it and it didn't really work. Another neighbor told me she used to use unflavored gelatin (Knox). We tried it and it worked so totally great!! I mixed the gelatin slightly stronger than the package suggests. Then I took a section of hair ran some gelatin through it and twisted and rolled it on sponge rollers. It takes a few hours to set up. It turns out really crunchy and hard. The extra cool thing is that it washes right out!!!