I had a plan to make something fun for Katie’s room for a while now. I finally found time yesterday while Katie napped and Ethan painted his own paintings of Curious George. Can you guess what it is:

How about now?

How about this one?

Or:

Did you guess it? It’s a….

whale! Isn’t she cute? To give you some perspective on the size of it, here it is in her room:

I think she is happy with it.

For Easter, I realized I have very few decorations. I found a great project on thelongthread.com here and thought they’d make a cute addition to our home.

To start, you’ll need:

Knit cotton sweater (or yarn), scissors, white school glue, water, balloons, and some wax paper.

I used an old sweater that my sister was planning on giving to Goodwill. Once you cut a piece off it will unravel for you. I was able to get my son to help unravel it as destroying things seems to be especially fun to two-year-olds. At first it was just a few short pieces but the more I pulled, the more long strands came out.

Next, mix 1 part glue with 1 part water in a bowl.  Help your child blow up a few balloons. You don’t need to make them very big, just the size of a large egg. Dip a piece of yarn into the glue mixture until it’s covered with glue and wrap it around a balloon. Repeat with as many pieces of yarn as you need to create the egg.  This messy job is great for kids – my son took some convincing but started to enjoy the mess after a while.

Place the yarn wrapped balloon on wax paper and let dry overnight. In the morning, pop the balloons and gently remove them from the eggs.

Here is the final product:

Let me know if you try these. They are sturdy and can be saved for next year! If you don’t have a sweater you want to cut up, you can use pastel yarn and the project is quick and easy!

Every couple of months my husband and I host a Food & Wine/Beer Pairing Party. It started when he began homebrewing beer and has grown into a really fun seasonal event! This month we decided to do one with Irish themes and I thought I’d share some of the decorations with you.

First you were welcomed by a large shamrock on the door! My two year old got to help with the design on this one:

I have some dried hydrangea from my garden that needed some new ribbon:

And a few other decorations:

Lastly, we made some cards to label food with. We require guests to bring a dish – that fits with the theme – and a beer or wine to go with it. This way people knew what to try with each dish:

If you want to try to host a dinner like this, I’d be happy to share our ideas with you!

Last weekend I had a dinner party to celebrate my husband’s 30th birthday. I wanted something fun and fallish to decorate the table and I had a vision of what I was looking for. One trip to my in-laws house and it was a reality!

I found a great piece of wood in the firewood pile that was flat on the bottom but had a nice curved bark-covered top. I brushed it off in the work sink with a heavy brush to get rid of most of the dirt and gunk. My mother-in-law sprayed it with some Clorox clean-up to make sure nothing was still living in it.

I hired my Father-in-law to drill holes in it. I measured my candles before I left home and they were about 7/8″ so he used that same size drill bit. We made sure they were deep enough and wide enough to fit a regular candle and then shook off the sawdust.

When I got home, I put in these great candles. I love that they look almost wood-like on their own. It was too drab as it was but with a little digging, I found these beads in my craft closet. They give it a nice touch for the fall season.

For Christmas I plan on laying some holly with red beads on the base. All in all, it’s a great centerpiece that literally cost me nothing!

Today, We’d like to introduce you to our other sister, Nichole. We hope she’ll continue to do some posts her as a spoolsister, but we know the twin boys due any day now might keep her a little busy!

Here’s Nichole on decorating her boys’ room:

When decorating the twin’s nursery, we knew we wanted to hang letters spelling their names on the wall.  We quickly grew frustrated that all the letters were plain white with very girly ribbons.  This just would not go with the room’s sports theme!  So we decided to make some of our own….

We found a great website, www.3dwoodcraft.com, where you can purchase unpainted custom cut wooden letters and select the font and size. We chose 10 inch “Flubber”.

Once these arrived, I painted them all with off-white paint.  After this base coat dried, using blue painter’s tape, I outlined pinstripes on each of the letters.  We chose blue and red for the pinstripes and I used a stencil brush for the colored paint.  My husband, Dave, then varnished each letter to get a nice shine.

After the varnish dried, we used a glue gun to attach ribbons to each letter and around a stained dowel. We hung the dowel on silver hooks above each crib.

Voila!