Finishing projects

This is one of our crafts we did on vacation. Several relatives are extremely gifted in the craft department and love stamping and scrapbooking. My cousin Tammy came up with this idea of a desktop calendar. She made these 4x6 calendar pages on white cardstock and left the top blank. Then she cut out squares of colored cardstock and smaller squares of white cardstock. We stamped different designs on the white squares to coordinate with each month.





It was fun to embellish the designs with brads or use different color inks to stamp or color the stamped image. It was enough creative license to make you feel proud of what you did but not too much where you felt overwhelmed and no idea where to begin. The current month sits in a clear plastic frame and the rest wait to be showcased. After each month is over, I'm going to save them for my scrapbooks - how cool is that?

The other project was one we did in my mom's group at church. Several in our family are very good at sewing (I have a very talented family) so I passed along this sewing project. You start with a rectangular placemat and add some grommets, fold it in half and sew the sides up and add some ribbon and you have a bag! The really cool part was that I actually sewed my own bag myself! And it was really neat seeing what everyone came up with. The bags looked so good. I wish I had taken pictures of others but here are my two so you can see what the finished project looks like. The pink one is the one I sewed myself and the brown one is the one I had made at mom's group. I'm planning on trying my hand at sewing some more soon.

Speaking of finished projects, our living room ceiling is finally done! Josh ripped out the old, ugly tiles around the end of April. He bought the boards and my mom and I stained them in early May. Josh's dad came down to help put up the drywall but the beams weren't put up until a couple weeks ago, again with the help of Josh's dad. Yesterday, Josh installed the ceiling fan. Ta-da! Our old ceiling fan didn't have lights and wasn't installed very well - it swayed and wobbled the whole time and I was always worried that it would fall down when someone was standing under it. It was also very noisy and almost too powerful - you couldn't have it on when you were reading the paper or it would fly everywhere. This one is whisper quiet and so secure. It's just lovely.

So now where are we in the scheme of moving? Well, I can't decide. I've started listening to Dave Ramsey and I think that what I want right now would make us "house poor", as he calls it, which means that the house payment would be so high it would make us poor. I have also started thinking it'd be really nice to get new windows in the rest of the house. We've already gotten new windows upstairs, in the dining room, bathroom and kitchen so there is just our bedroom, the living room and the office left. The windows are pretty old and in bad shape so it'd make a huge difference. I think that would give us time to save up more money and finish other little projects without stressing too much and then we could list early next spring. But I could change my mind later today. :) The thing is, I really want to move but I also want to be smart. I'd rather not potty-train two toddlers with this tiny bathroom but there are worse things that could happen.

I haven't forgotten about Owen and Rachel and the big lake - I just don't have pictures so that will have to come tomorrow.