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Howdy! (Yes, I’m an Aggie)

I had to take a few days off of crafting and cooking to tackle a very left-brained project that does not involve kids-income taxes. Now that those are prepared and gone (because being creative on your taxes gets you arrested) we are back to living on right brain time and a new project. Three projects, to be exact, but they all take multiple steps and we will be working on a couple of them with friends. I figured that I would give you a quick taste of “what’s next” so that the blog doesn’t stagnate.

Tomorrow, we will get started on a Valentine’s Day tie-dye project. There is nothing like five kids and a bunch of permanent dye to make an afternoon fly by. The plan is to work with my bud, the tie-dye guru, to make tie-dyed heart shirts the way we tie-dyed Mickey Mouse shirts for our trips to the Merry Ol’ Land of Disney (wayyyy better than Oz, if you ask me, although I’ve never actually been to Oz).

The kids will be designing their patterns and then, as the responsible adults in the group (no snickering) we will stitch the heart patterns with dental floss before the mass dyeing occurs. We have to make sure the patterns are stitched tight enough to keep the patterns intact. Stay tuned…

Also on the Valentine’s Day theme, but sans dental floss and scads of ink, is another shirt project. Ever the glutton for punishment and blog fodder, I am leading my ragtag band of offspring back to the sewing machine. I found a very cool project that makes a design look like it is made of chenille but is really made from gauze. You design a pattern, draw it on a shirt, stitch gauze on over the pattern, cut away the excess around your stitch lines and wash to fray the gauze. Seems simple. Let’s hope the operative word is not seems.

For Thursday, I purchased everything for our gardening project (the one we had rained out last week) and we are ready to get that started with some other friends. We have been discussing gardening for over a year now, sharing tips, knowledge and books, and I have a fun idea to take our gardening to another level. Literally. Like three or four more levels. We are going to make tiered pallet gardens.

I hate to admit that my bright idea dimmed a bit when I Googled it and found that someone else had already thought of gardening vertically in a wooden pallet. Everything is on Google…frustrating. My idea is a little different than the one I found, so we’ll see if we are being original after all. I am putting the pictures of our supplies below. This is the before. I’m excited to see how five kiddos turn this into a garden!

Sorry for no saucy, silly or sweet sayings from the wee ones today. Trust me, they’ll be back tomorrow in full-form I’m sure.

P.S.-We actually have a couple marshmallows left. A good thing, too, because they are really good in coffee!