12/30/2010

Growth


My resolution for the coming year is the same as it has been for the last several years - to see the world as Christ sees it, and to act accordingly. This year I have learned several valuable lessons that I'd like to continue to work on next year. I made this little graphic in photoshop that contains many of the lessons learned this year. For me they are goals to strive for, tangible ways to be more like Christ that I'd like to continue working on, some are more measurable than others. Chances are good that I"ll print it out and hang it somewhere in my house where I"ll be sure to see it... We'll see.
I'm sure Jory's going to get a good laugh at some of these. He's much better about several of these things than I am...

12/28/2010

our year in numbers

(number graphics borrowed from Flickr)


3,300 hugs and kisses
18,000 photos (only about 1,000 of those were of the Peterson clan)
1,095 messy art projects
820 childrens books read
1,100 bowls of cereal eaten
156 loads of laundry folded
2 trips to New Mexico
208 gallons of milk
How do you measure your year?

12/26/2010

From our family to yours


Merry Christmas! We hope your day was filled with as much love and laughter as ours was...

12/23/2010

Christmas Crafting day 5 - Furoshiki


So I had another post in mind for my last one in our series of Christmas crafting, but I was sort of side tracked by a link my friend sent me to Furoshiki, or the art of Japanese fabric folding. Basically think of gift wrapping meets origami. Oh yes. It's rather addicting. Not only does it look beautiful when it's finished. It's so darned easy. I made my cloths out of large squares of fabric, finishing the edges by pressing them and then stitching over the pressed edges. If you don't want to make your own cloths, any square fabric will work - a blanket, bandana, scarf etc. What I liked best is that folded fabric is much more forgiving than paper, so if you aren't happy with the way it turned out, you can just keep tweaking it.
My eight year old was intrigued by the concept, so I made a few extra cloths for him to practice with. So next year, you guessed it, I'll be outsourcing all the Furoshiki wrapping also.

Christmas Crafting day 4 (belated) - vintage card display

I had this post all ready to go yesterday, but time got away from me before I got around to posting it. So today you get two crafty posts...

Recently a dear friend of mine sent me a collection of vintage Christmas cards. After my happy dance was over, I systematically wrangled the cutest ones away from my children to make this temporary display over my desk. Along with the cards, I swiped some of these fun numbers from one of Jory's recent home improvement projects. To set up this arrangement, I arranged the cards on my floor until I came up with a grouping that I liked, and then I just taped them to my wall using the same arrangement. I have a whole handful of these cards, and am looking forward to using them in more art projects like mini books, wall art and so forth. If you have any ideas for displaying the beautiful cards you've received we'd love to hear about it!
It's been a joy to have these little guys right above my sewing machine keeping me company on my late night sewing marathons this last week.

12/22/2010

Christmas crafting day 3 - gifts with style

Everyone knows that presents are more fun to receive if they look great right? So this week as I was fiddling with my sewing stuff anyway I decided to make some fun reusable gift embellishments to go on the gifts I was packaging.

First I made some fabric ties out of scraps that weren't big enough to make bags with. These ties can be pinned on, tied on, or buttoned together at the end. They can be plain or embellished with fabric paint or buttons. You can also layer them with ribbon, fiber or garland for more interest... And best of all, since they aren't sewed on they can be traded out for different gifting events. The red bags can have blue ties on them for Alex's birthday in July. Awesome, I know. They were very easy to make, I just cut long strips of fabric, folded the strip in half so the wrong side was out, stitched, flipped and pressed. Not more than 10 minutes.
As I have been crafting, my kids have been under my feet wanting to "help" every step of the way. So I had them make some button garland to add to our embellishment stash. They had a blast making these little strands, and I'm having a blast finding ways to use them. In addition to wrapping gifts with them, I have a strand on my Christmas tree, and a strand wrapped around a votive holder on my kitchen table. A word of advice - if you're going to "outsource" this craft to little hands, I recommend using a cord that won't ravel as you string the buttons.
And last but not least we have name tags. We have these great (reusable!) wrappings and embellishments, the question is how do the kids know who's gift is who's? Well short of pinning a tacky piece of paper to each gift with the kids name on it, we've come up with a few ideas on how to label the gifts, most of which were dug out of my stash of scrapbook stuff. The first is these great pieces of chipboard. After my children painted them we punched holes in them and wrote their names on them. We also found these cool acrylic monograms that are awesome until you have more than one family member with the same initials.

So now we have a rather large stash of beautiful, easy to use goodies to wrap gifts with. Which means that I can confidently outsource giftwrapping to the kids, and know that we'll still end up with a stack of lovely items to pass out.
I'd love to hear how you guys dressed up your gifts this year... if you have any great ideas to share let us know!

12/21/2010

5 Days of Christmas part 2


One of my observant readers noticed today's craft was actually in the photos from yesterday. This year we made the switch from wrapping paper to reusable fabric gift sacks. Aside from the obvious earth friendly component of using these sacks, it makes gift wrapping so darned easy.
I am by no means an expert seamstress, but these sacks are really simple to make. I measured out my fabric (giving myself an extra 2 inches on each side, just for good measure), stitched my sides together, and added a drawstring to pull the top shut. Each bag took about 30-40 minutes to make. Then just for fun, I had the kids dig through my scrapbook embellishments and pull out some goodies to finish off the bags.

12/20/2010

5 Days of Christmas Crafting.

This year the crafting bug has hit hard in our household. I don't know if it's because this year has been extra stressful with our added responsibilities, or if we're just a little bit more careful about what we're spending on Christmas gifts, but this year we have so many fun craft projects we couldn't keep them all to ourselves.
So I thought it would be fun to do a different craft project for the 12 days of Christmas, but then I looked at the calendar and realized we only had 5 days left. D'oh. So we're doing the 5 days of Christmas crafting instead. Which in all reality, 5 days a much more do-able commitment for this slightly frazzled Mama than 12. So we'll just go with it.
Our first project was a fun little idea I dreamed up in the middle of the night. I bought a plastic photo book for a dollar at Walmart, the kind that have a removable cardboard insert for the cover. We removed the cover and inserted our own cover with the title of our story. Then I typed while the kids dictated a story of their own creation (it was basically a synopsis of the Swiss Family Robinson with themselves as the main characters). I used Microsoft Word to format the pages to get the text to fit within the page parameters. Then I cut the pages down to fit in the book. I also added some blank pages for the kids to illustrate their text with. The result was a priceless (and durable!) keepsake that cost next to nothing.

12/16/2010

Welcome winter

We had a rather wintery week this week. A little snow and some chilly temperatures have been enough to make us hunker down, and complain (just a little). In the past I've never been a huge fan of winter, not a winter-hater, but certainly not a lover either. This year I can't help but embrace the cold a little differently. This year we have a son who lives near the arctic circle. I can't imagine what it'd be like to get 4 hours of sunlight each day, and face week after week of temperatures below zero. When I think about what goes on outside of Max's window, I can't help but think that we're a little spoiled by our not-arctic climate. Lets be honest, the weather here in Ohio isn't that bad. Maybe this year I'll learn how to stop counting the days until spring. I thought I was so clever last week because I'd outsourced all my Christmas projects to the children. Wrong. All I can say is there was a void left by the absence of craftiness. So this week we're making a miniature Christmas tree forest out of clippings from my parents live tree. There are a few more top secret projects that I'm not at liberty to discuss. But they are really darned fun.
Last of all, we have an adoption update. We had our second interview with our social worker. She still loves us. At this point it's still way to early to predict a timeline for when we will get to make our first trip to Russia, but she was optimistic that we could be called in January or February. Unfortunately we won't be able to bring Max home with us, it's just a "visit". We have to wait until our court case comes up, which won't be until summer probably.

12/07/2010

Christmas crafting


We've been so busy this fall fundraising and keeping up with life that we hadn't really put a whole lot of thought and effort into what we were making for Christmas this year. I won't lie, at times this fall, purchasing store bought cards and gifts sounded like a blissfully simple solution to the mayhem. But not for long. I did what any good mother would do. I outsourced. This year my children are making the cards, the scrapbook pages (a long standing tradition in the Peterson clan), and a few other top secret gifts.
Of course they were thrilled to be included in the Christmas crafting. I'm sure that letting them use the "Mommy only" craft supplies had nothing to do with their merriment.
No, we didn't really have a project in mind when we decided to dye our pumpkin seeds, it just seemed like a good idea at the time...

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