Feeling Charitable...

I'm always in the mood to help others and I try my best to be charitable by donating my time, my money, and anything else I can. Today I found 2 different ways to donate and I thought I would share them. 

1.) I signed up to be a bone marrow donor today. It's easy, it's free, and it could help save a life. All the info is on this website http://www.marrow.org/ . If you are between the ages of 18-60 and in good health you should check it out. Signing up does not mean you have to donate and the donation process has become easier over the years. Check it out for yourself.

2.) While checking my email I found this video on the yahoo home page.
 http://news.yahoo.com/video/health-15749655/little-boy-battles-cancer-with-monsters-23154740
I found it touching and adorable. Maybe because I work with kids and my fridge is often covered with their artwork. In fact as I type this there is a picture of a purple and pink snail monster battling a purple dinosaur on our fridge courtesy of Miss Leah one of the 5yr olds I often babysit. Of course I had to investigate further into where you could purchase this boys artwork. I found this http://www.etsy.com/shop/AidansMonsters?ga_search_query=aidan+&ga_search_type=seller_usernames his etsy page and I snapped up my favorite drawing right away. I'll be framing it and hanging it prominently in our house. I love kids art work and this ones is special, because I know the money is going to a good place. 

Happy Holidays Everyone!

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle...

We take that saying to heart around here. We wash out ziploc bags and reuse them. We recycle almost everything and we attempt to cut down our waist as much as possible like using cloth napkins instead of paper ones. If we could compost here we would do that too. In our efforts to keep waste to a minmum we've decided that this year instead of buying boxes, wrapping paper, and gift bags that will most likely be tossed after the holidays we're going to put our gifts in reusable shopping bags. I found a good deal on some today and they even come with a smaller bag that could be used as a lunch bag. This way the bag is part of the gift and can either be used for shopping or re-gifted. I know they aren't very Christmas-y styles, but I still love them especially the two on the end and I have someone in mind for each of them.

They're obviously all for women. I haven't figured out what we're going to do for the guys just yet.

We'll probably end up doing what we did last year, creating our own wrapping paper from simple brown paper and paints or markers. Brown paper is recyclable unlike most wrapping paper.

We're also attempting to make most if not all of our Christmas gifts this year too. Wish us luck!

Wind damage...

A couple days ago some crazy winds came out of nowhere and took over the city. It sounded horrendous and made walking or driving very difficult. But sadly it seems the tree in front of our building got the worst of it...

It was a young tree as you can see and from the outside seemed perfectly healthy, but upon further inspection you can see where it split there is some discoloration. Poor thing must have been infected with something. We are so incredibly lucky that it fell the direction that it did. Had it fallen straight back it would have landed flat out on the Lexus. If it had fallen to the left it would have knocked down the fence line between our building and the next. Had the other half fallen backwards there would have most likely been damage to the buildings roof and windows. We're very grateful it fell the one way that it didn't harm anything. Our landlords came to inspect and will be back this weekend to chop it up for firewood. :(

Baby Gifts...

It was only a little over a month late, but we finally finished our baby gift for Jesse's newest nephew Landon Lee Buckingham (born Oct. 1st). Originally I had planned a project to make for him that was very intense and very time consuming... yeah, needless to say I changed that plan quickly. I ended up making him a picture frame (that hopefully matches the color scheme of his new bedroom). As I said in the previous post Jesse is really getting back into the design business especially when it comes to prints on clothing, so we decided to try out hand at making some quality onesies for the new little guy. We bought a pack of plain white ones and some dye. I colored some yellow, some green, and we left some white. Jesse worked on drawings and worked and worked on them. We ended up changing our mind on designs numerous times and then his procrastinating nature got in the way again and thus our gift was delivered a little late. Good thing we thought ahead and bought onesies that were meant for 6-9month old babies. Whew! Dodged a bullet there. Hopefully he and his parents love all our hard work. This might be our new thing... making onesies for new babies. I guess you can say Landon was our guinea pig and I think, so far at least, our little experiment turned out pretty awesome.

Check it out for yourselves...

The picture frame that inspired the final onesie designs. 

The 4 designs we came up with. Jesse's pretty talented.

The monkey turned out to be our favorite. Jesse doesn't like the tiger, but believe me after the adjustments I suggested he's a lot better looking. I think he's cute.

The Polar Bear is right up there as our 2nd favorite. The giraffe obviously took the most work and I especially love how is ground turned out. Kudos Jesse!

The finally finished baby gift. Sorry it took so long Linsey! Hopefully you guys love it and will get lots of use out it.

As I said Jesse is the artist and I'm the muse. I help him come up with ideas and then give him ideas on how to improve his original sketches. We really do work well together. I've even been known to pick up a pencil and help him improve his drawings, but I'm honestly not as talented as he is. He constantly impresses me. Now that we have 4 letters of the Alphabet down maybe we should go for the whole thing. Hmm... 

P.S. You better bet when we have a kid we'll be making all kinds of clothes for them.

Team Artwork...

As you may know Jesse's true passion is screen printing. He interned at a print shop for a while and fell in love with the process. He used to burn screens in the bathroom of his old tiny apartment. He's been saying for years now that he wants to start his own print shop. He has designed shirts for friends, a local non-profit, and even sold a few at a local clothing store. I got him a couple books about screen printing and stenciling for his birthday. Since then we've been making shirts together just for fun. We've made a few for friends as gifts, but mainly just playing around making shirts for ourselves. This has really got his creative juices flowing, so he bought himself a book about starting your own screen printing business (it came complete with plans on how to build your own 4 color press, which he intends on doing soon) and he got himself a stencil cutter. We've been having a blast lately. We're planning to build the press with help from my lovely family, since we are lacking tools and the space to build it. Then we'll really get to designing and hopefully start selling stuff on etsy.com. Baby steps... I'm just glad that he's finally taking the steps and not just talking about it. This is a good thing.

 Taking over the kitchen table.

Screen print test.

The stencil book I gave him for his bday.

Luchador Mask Print.

Humming Bird w/flowers Print.

Stereo Print.

The gray and black striped is my my long sleeved shirt and the black and gold is Jesse's t-shirt.

 

 

There will definitely be more to come. In fact we have some more designs finished, but they're gifts for people, so we can't show them off on here until we give them away. We've also made an art list and every week we've decided to at least work on if not finish one project on the list. It's funny how we need to make this a priority when its something we love doing, but sometimes you just get tired and lazy.  Lists are helpful for me, I just hope they work for Jesse to and we can keep up this pace. I think we make a pretty great creative team. I see myself as the muse and him as the artist. It's worked well for us so far.

Laundry time...

As I mentioned before we've been experimenting with making our own laundry detergent. We tried the wet soap method, but that's a lot more work than it's worth if you ask me. So we experimented with the dry soap recipes out there. I think we've finally come up with the perfect concoction for us.
Here it is...

Laundry Soap
1 cup Borax
1 cup Washing Soda (not baking soda)
1 bar Ivory soap (finely grated)
*optional Oxy Clean booster

For every bar of soap you grate into the container you need 1 cup each of Borax & Washing soda. As for the Oxy Clean Booster we added 2 scoops per bar of soap. When I say scoop I mean the small scoop that comes with the container. It's maybe 1 or 2 Tablespoons in size. This time I grated 6 bars, added 6 cups each of Borax & Washing soda, and then boosted it with 12 small scoops of Oxy Clean (or the knock off brand). Combine all the ingredients in a medium size Tupperware container and mix thoroughly. We bought a small 1 cup measuring cup to use as our scoop. Small loads get 1/4 cup, regular loads get 1/3 - 1/2 cup depending, and large loads get 3/4 cup.

Here are our ingredients.

The finished product.

It may not look like much, but this soap will end up washing all our laundry for the next couple months at least. Making our own soap takes a little work, but in the end we save money and avoid the perfumes and dyes that I'm allergic too. Store bought detergent costs you an average of 30 cents per load where as the homemade stuff is more like 2 to 3 cents per load. Plus, our clothes come out cleaner and fresher smelling than ever before. We also hang our clothes to dry to not only save some more cash, but also to help out the environment. I'm really going to miss the dryness here when we move. I'm sure I've said it a million times before, but clothes that are hung out to dry here do so in no time. It's amazing! The work going into making this detergent is minimal really just a little measuring and maybe some grating with a traditional cheese grater if you don't have a food processor you're willing to get soapy. I am definitely in the market for a small food processor that will be my soap making processor, but for now I'm working out my shoulder and arm muscles making soap every few months. 

*As a side note we also use perfume free liquid softener in our wash. I've heard of recipes for making your own softener, but I have yet to try them out.  We're currently using unscented Ultra Downy Free & Sensitive. Our clothes always come out soft and fresh. 

Fancy Dinner...

On the final night of our vacation my family and I went into Strawberry Point to their old hotel for a nice dinner. I think I speak for both Jesse and I when I say we had a great time on our vacation. It was definitely a much needed break. We enjoyed our time relaxing, fishing, site seeing, and cozying up in the cabin with you mom, dad, Dave, and Chels. Thanks for inviting us. Hope to do it again sometime.
Love you!