February 16, 2016

Wood Connection Craft- Home Decor Wall Arrows

My sister, Jamie and I are guest bloggers for The Wood Connection Blog.  We get to share our ideas of how we use their crafts.  We each post about once a month, it's a lot of fun.  Here is one of my posts...  We have been doing this for at least a year now, if not longer.

Hi Crafters!  Now that Christmas is over and all put away, I've been having fun decorating my home for the first time since we moved in.  I'm not quite ready to decorate for Valentine's Day yet.  I'm just enjoying the simplicity of my home and finally having something hung on my walls!  These wall arrows were perfect to add to my decor.  As you can see my colors for my kitchen/dining area are neutrals, blue, and a touch of mustard.


Here are the supplies I used:
3 wood wall arrows (in the Valentine's crafts)
sandpaper
foam brushes
paper cutter
wood glue
paint- White, Sea Foam, Charcoal, & Quaker Grey
3 patterns of scrapbook paper



First, I lightly sanded all the edges.  

Then I traced half of the arrow shape onto the scrapbook paper and used my paper cutter to cut it out so I could get straight lines.  

Then I painted the sides of all three arrows white.


Next, I painted half of the arrows Sea Foam, Charcoal and Quaker Grey.  It doesn't matter to paint a line straight down the center because you will be covering the other half with paper.

Then use your wood glue to glue on the paper.  
Use THIS tutorial to glue on the paper.

After everything was dry, I sanded all the edges again.

Then... (the set of arrows comes with wall hangers), hammer those to the back. 
 And last hang them up on your wall!


It was the perfect touch to my collage wall!  This wall makes me happy!




January 27, 2016

November 2015






Fall time was a lot of fun at our house.  This is our tree in our front yard and it's first drop of leaves.  There's lots more to come!

This was my fall craft I made for The Wood Connection blog.  I love how it turned out!  You can click here if you're interested in seeing how I made it.

I love driving down my street, it's so beautiful with all the big trees.



LOVING the leaves!!!  

We bought a large tarp to put over our tent trailer for the winter.  First we had some fun with it indoors and made a fort!

Paxton got to bring home the class pet.  His assignment was to hang out with him and then write a journal entry about it and add pictures.  So he dressed up and we took several pictures.


Sure love our sweet Graham!  He's a good little snuggler in the mornings.



The boys were great helpers when it came to smashing the leaves down in the garbage cans.  But not great helpers when it came to bagging the leaves.  They just wanted to get inside the bags with the leaves.  It was a lot of work cleaning up all the leaves, but it was worth it.  We had lots of fun playing in them, even on clean up days.



House Updates

Painting days and progress on the house.  The goal was to have it done by the beginning of December.  He was pretty close, we just needed to get the mantel up.  The mantel went up about mid December!  I am loving my house!  Now to work on decorating it!


 The Aquarium
 Our friends invited us to the aquarium.  They played in the playground area most of the time, but they had to leave early so we went and explored, the place was almost empty!


 Disney on Ice
 We got invited to Disney on Ice with my whole family.  The kids all seemed to love it and so did Rem and I.  Grandpa was awesome and bought all the grand kids a glow toy.  The show was amazing, especially Tangled!



Food Bank shopping
 We love this tradition with my extended family to go shopping for food to donate to the food bank.  The kids get a little wild at the store!
            

 Happy Thanksgiving
We were with my Dad's side of the family this year.  We love going up to the cabin to celebrate.  Of course there was a delicious dinner and great company of most of my family and cousins!

Dessert and movie time for the kids.

California/Disneyland Vacation
(It was hard to narrow down how many pictures to post)

We had a blast on our vacation!  The kids were at such fun ages for Disneyland! 
We first stayed at a nicer hotel in Manhattan beach for 2 nights.  We got to spend some time at the beach which Paxton LOVED!  I'm so glad, the last time he was at the beach he did not want to get in the water.  This time it didn't even matter that it was cold, he got right in!  We call Pax our polar bear.  Graham on the other hand didn't even want to put his feet in the sand!  He got used to it and ended up loving it, but forget about the water.  Towards the end of the day he was okay with dipping his feet in the water for a little bit.  Hopefully next time we got he'll love it as much as Paxton.

Jamie and Dan and their kids came and hung out with us one day at the beach.  They were staying further away with Dan's grandma.




The second day at the beach was a colder day and it was a Sunday so we spent the day playing in the sand, walking the shore, flying a kite, collection seashells and  watching the sunset.  It was a beautiful day at the beach being with my little family and hardly anyone else on the beach.


Then we drove to Anaheim and checked into a not so nice hotel (we figured we would be at the park all day, so we didn't need a nice place).  We pretty much just got settled and went to bed.  Then the next two days we went to Disneyland and California Adventure.  We just did one day at each park.  It was perfect.  Dan and Jamie joined us on our Disneyland day.





At the end of the trip Paxton said his favorite ride was Indiana Jones!  This definitely surprised us!  So proud of him for trying out just about every ride we went on.  I did however go on Tower of Terror by myself and still loved it!  The rides that Paxton did not like were Goofy's Sky School and  Radiator Springs.  We taught him the word that day.  If it's a little scary, but fun then it's a thrill and you liked it.  If it's just plan scary then you didn't like it.  I think some rides make is tummy uneasy and that's why he doesn't like them, the ones with drop in them.

Graham loved everything we took him on!  He couldn't go on anything too scary anyways.


Graham was a little unsure of meeting his first character, Sully the monster.  But I don't blame him, Sully is huge!  After that he LOVED all the other characters we met.  He held onto Olaf's nose, kissed Pluto's nose and gave them all running hugs.  


Waiting for the Parade.  We were lucky to get front row seating at the last second!

We were a little nervous taking Paxton to Disneyland because he has had a fear of most rides.  But he did awesome!  Rem told him that if he went on every ride he asked him to go on then we would by the kids each a toy at the end of the trip.  Poor Graham fell asleep too soon to pick out his own toy.  Paxton picked out Oswald so it was only fitting to get Mickey for Graham.  Good thing he loved it!

(hate it when I can't get my pictures to flip the right way)

Here's the boys with their stuffed animals.  Yes Paxton is fake sleeping here, Graham is not.  He didn't even wake up during his diaper/PJ change.

The kids loved the vacation!  I'm so glad we went!