I Hate Greeting Cards

This is nothing new, some of you may be all too familiar with my card giving antics. Blank stationery and invitations are fine, I have a whole collection of that! It’s going into a drug store and picking out cards that I drives me nuts. If I’m crunched for time, or don’t want people to think I’m cheap for making my own card, I will try to look for greeting cards in Whole Foods, Trader Joes, or even while I’m traveling abroad (that’s rare). At work, we print our own birthday cards, and pass them around for everyone to sign. It might be my favorite task at work, and it’s definitely not in my job description! At home, I will usually get Estelle to make some sort of crayon or paint creation on card stock and fold that bad boy in half…poof, just like that, a free greeting card!

I was a little more inspired this past week thanks to some freebie cards I picked up in the Craft Lab located within the gallery of Craft Spoken Here, up through August in the Perelman Building of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

I needed to make a card for my dad’s belated Father’s Day gift. I had an “A Ha!” moment when I figured out that all of his names that we call him have three letters. I folded an 8.5″ x 11″ piece of card stock in half, and wrote out Joe, Dad, and Avô (means grandfather in Portuguese) on top of each other. I drew dots along the letters, used a sewing needle to poke holes on the dots, and erased my pencil lines.

Next, I used some sort of backstitch to sew the letters. I had been wanting to get back into hand embroidery, so I had a couple colors of cotton embroidery floss sitting around and needles with big enough eyes. I wouldn’t even call myself an amateur embroiderer, so I cannot give you stitch instructions. If you are you slightly familiar with a needle and thread, I’m quite sure you can figure it out.

The results, front and back:

After I was done, I covered up the back with card stock using double-stick tape. Not too shabby?! Although, I really should have been folding laundry instead of doing this. Oh well, I think this fed my creative spirit more so than laundry. Dad, hope you liked it!

Stephanie

Bedroom Light Fixture

My parents are in town, which means we have 4 extra hands to help us with the toddler and the house! This morning the guys took down our loud and unreliable ceiling fan light in our “master” bedroom, and replaced it with a new fixture from Schoolhouse Electric Co. The verdict? We like it! It just needs a bigger, cooler light bulb. The glass bubble shade makes the normal-sized light bulb look puny. We might opt for a long Edison bulb, but we will wait to see how everything looks at night before we make any purchases. See below for some before and after images, and check out our mad egg-dying skills  from this morning.

Before:

After:

During:

Same view after:

After (close-up):

Stephanie

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly…plumbing

Rule of Homeownership: the moment you spend money to upgrade a non-essential item in the house, it seems that something essential will break very soon.

The good: we bought a new light fixture for our bedroom last night from Schoolhouse Electric! I’m sure you’ll be hearing about that upgrade soon.

The bad: we knew that we had plumbing issues when our bathroom and kitchen sink were slow-draining and gurgling. We knew it might be serious when we noticed the drain in our back yard overflowing earlier this week. We bought some drain cleaner and plastic snakes to help urge the clogs onwards.

The ugly: David goes to snake the kitchen sink drain before we even used the liquid cleaner. He’s doing his business and hears a crunch followed by flowing water. Oops. He poked a hole in the u-shaped drain trap. He borrowed a big wrench from a neighbor, and attempted to take off the corroded trap. It’s rusted on, and he only manages to break off bits of it. Now, we’re down a kitchen sink and doing dishes in the basement laundry sink.

We’re waiting to hear back from the plumber. I’m sure this all won’t be cheap, but we know it could be much worse. We suspect that the flushable toddler wipes might be to blame for the clogs since all of this mess comes a couple of months after E has been daytime potty trained. Why do we feel the need to use these things?! Toilet paper is just fine for us adults. I think we might not buy them anymore, but wipes are still handy on the go.

Looking on the positive side, the area below the kitchen sink will be clean and organized after all of this! We also know that if/when we renovate the kitchen, we have our basement sink to help us through the ordeal.

Stephanie