Happy Halloween & our pumpkins

Wishing a happy Halloween to those of you who celebrate it!
 

And while we're at it, I want to show you the pumpkins we made this year for my kids school.

My son was given the challenge of creating a piece of Halloween decor using only recycled materials. So we built this pumpkin:

Using two milk cartons, newspapers, and one chopstick. Here it is in the first stages of making...

 ...and painting...

Then we wrapped a piece of green yarn around the chopstick and decorated with some leftover bits of black EVA foam.

For my daughters class we were supposed to actually carve a real pumpkin. But then, mostly due to the high temperatures we've been having these past few days, a few of the early delivered pumpkins started to rotten and my daughter's teacher told us to improvise instead.

And so we did. We cut a pumpkin shape out of glittery orange EVA foam, decorated it and glued a ribbon on top for hanging. 

All in all, I think we fulfilled our mission. And now it's time to sit back and enjoy.

Happy Tuesday, and happy Halloween!

Pompom Pumpkins

At the end of last week my kids school launched a challenge: create a piece of fall decor over the weekend, using only what we already had at home.

Now, I rarely change our home decor according to seasons. Other than at Christmas, everything stays pretty much the same. I may add a thing or two here and there but, realistically speaking, I just don't have the time or the energy for seasonal makeovers. 

So creating something out of the blue, using what we had at home - and, on top of that, something that the kids could make or at least help making - wasn't an easy task for me. After some internal debate (and an early Saturday morning brainstorming session while everyone else was still sleeping) I decided we could make pompom pumpkins. 

I fished a small orange ball of yarn from my bag of yarn leftovers and found a green pipe cleaner in my stash as well. I would have preferred the pipe cleaner to come in a darker shade of green, but I stayed true to the challenge and used only what we had.

I do own a couple of pompoms makers, but this time we just made the pompoms the easiest old fashioned way possible: rolling the yarn over our hands, trying a knot and then cutting the folds: 

Then we tied the pipe cleaner to the pompom and cut of the excess. Since I had yarn to make three pompoms and there was only one pipe cleaner, we made sure to cut it in a way that would allow us to make three pumpkins.

Then we just trimmed the pompoms to give them a bit more shape.

And here are our pompom pumpkins, all three of them:

I wasn't totally happy with the shape of the pompoms - but then, I've never been really good at making pompoms, not even when I use the pompom makers.

The kids, however, were happy, so that's all that matters.

And the best thing about those pumpkins? The pipe cleaners are so easy to bend that you can use the pompom pumpkins to make a garland, just hanging them over a piece of ribbon:

In time, I may get myself a new ball of yarn and pipe cleaners and try to make a few more pumpkins, because it was a really fun project, but for now we'll settle with these.

Happy Tuesday, 

Party invitations: go digital with Paperless Post

I was born before computers were a widespread commodity. In Portugal cable TV arrived in my late teens and I was introduced to Internet sometime during college. So it's no surprise that until recently I used paper for everything. I'm not sure if that makes me sound old or just old fashioned but that was the way things worked for me.

A couple of years ago, though, I started to run out of space to store all my physical books (my name is Teresa and I'm addicted to books). In an effort to declutter (you can read about my decluttering efforts here) I made one of the biggest changes in my life - I switched all my books to digital.

And after that first step, the digital transformation in my life turned into something similar to a snowball. I digitalized photos, notebooks and even my favorite recipes now live in a Pinterest board (you can read my post on how Pinterest can help you declutter here).

So when I was contacted by Paperless Post, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to go fully digital with  my kids' birthday party invitations too. Both my kids have birthdays during the summer months, which means that we usually get the family together on the actual dates but then, in late September/October I organize birthday parties to invite all their school friends - the weather still holds up pretty well, it's easier and cheaper to find venues that fit in all the kids, and everyone is back from vacation and past the first chaotic weeks of the new school year. So, yes, perfect timing. 

Paperless Post is an online stationery company that has tons of different designs to choose from. You can check the kids' birthday invitations using this link, but there are really invitations and cards for all occasions.

Seriously, how cute are these?

And it's not only the digital invitations, you can also use Paperless Post to to send out reminders for the party and track your RSVPs. You just need to import your contact list and they take care of the rest (this is the part of the service I have yet to test, especially because it involves using Coins instead of actual money - I'll let you know how it goes in the coming weeks).  Click below for their step-by-step guide:

https://paperlesspost.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002275863-Getting-Started-Step-By-Step-

Here are the two invites I've started customizing for my kids (translated into English from the Portuguese originals and minus the personal details, because I'm not posting those online):

Don't they look great? Now I just need to finish customizing the envelopes. My son has yet to decide on his, but my daughter's envelope is looking like this now (still work in progress, so don't mind the text):

Want to know what's next for me? Paperless Christmas Cards. Which will also be a first in our house. I've already started browsing designs (here's the link if you want to check them out too: <https://www.paperlesspost.com/cards/category/holiday-cards) but I still need to build my mailing list for that.
 

I know from experience that when going digital, the first step is always the hardest. So check out Paperless Post today and have a look at all they have to offer. At the very least, you'll be fascinated by the amazing designs. And if in the end you decide you still want to stick to paper, they have that option available too.

Happy Monday,

This post was written in collaboration with Anagram Interactive and I received 800 free Paperless Post Coins. Other than the first image at the top of the post, all other images and the Paperless Post logo come from the Paperless Post website and as such are not owned by me. All opinions are my own.     

6 tips to save money on school supplies

If you have school age children, you are most likely by now looking at lists of school supplies. I know I am. Long lists, usually, which means a lot of money spending. 

No matter how much you want to avoid it, you will always spend money on school supplies. But there are ways to spend a bit less, and I wanted to tell you about some of them today. I also included a few links to sites with amazing back to school ideas I have successfully used in the past.   

Refurbished Laundry Basket

When my husband and I got married in 2004 and moved to our first house together, I bought a cute laundry basket to put in the master bathroom. Years later, after having two kids and moving to a bigger house, I got a bigger laundry basket for the laundry area kitchen, but I also kept the old one. It still lives in our bathroom. 

5 tips to start (and stick to) blogging

This is not exactly my usual kind of post, as I'm mostly a crafty girl. But inspiration strikes us unexpectedly sometimes - the topic actually came to me while reading a magazine which featured an article on blogging. Mostly, the article associated blogging success with a large list of tools and techniques successful bloggers apparently use.

And that made me think. Now, I have nothing against tools and techniques, they are useful, even essential, no matter what you do. But I feel there has to be a bit more than that. Like everything in life, I firmly believe that if you want to start and stick to something, you need to love what you do. 

Fabric Covered Wooden Box

Ever since I made the custom tea tray sets I've been looking for another opportunity to use self adhesive fabric, just because I found it so easy to work with. 

Well, I finally found the right project. We needed a gift box for a little girl and because I couldn't find exactly what I wanted in any store, I decide to make one myself. 

I bought a wooden box, plain but pretty inexpensive, and then splurged on the self adhesive fabric. 

 

 

Covering the box with the fabric was pretty easy. The trickiest part were the metal clasp and hinges. I decided no to cut the fabric to shape beforehand, thinking it would probably be too hard to get the measurements exactly right. So I just covered the whole thing and the used an x-acto knife to trim the excess fabric. 

I got the white wooden letter at the craft store and the lace came from my own stash. Everything was glued over the fabric. 

Here it is, ready for wrapping: 

Oh, and because I had enough leftover fabric, I also covered the inside of the box with it, to add a bit more of flair. 

Overall, it was a very quick and fun project, and I still think self adhesive fabric is great. Though obviously you can always replicate the same effect with regular fabric and glue, with the self adhesive it comes together so much faster. 

Happy Monday,

Upcycled Summer Shorts

Creating summer shorts out of old jeans is one of the easiest upcycles you can make, and one that I tend to dedicate myself to every summer - trying to increase the useful life of my kids jeans which, invariably, become too short to last another season. If the the jeans are still in a relatively good condition (holes in the knees don't count as you'll cut them out anyway), I usually turn them into shorts.

Basically you start with something like this:

And turn it into these:

All you need to do is to cut out the excess length and hem your new shorts. And then let your creativity run free and embellish those shorts however you want.

For this pair I used a cute polkadot gathered ribbon, and because I had a lot of it I decided to add it to the front and back pockets as well.

It took me less than half an hour to do all this. Now I have one  unique pair of summer shorts for my daughter and I still saved money in the process. Win-win all the way!

For more ideas on how to reuse & upcycle kids pants & shorts, click below:

Happy Monday,