always loving a lime green

Who says nature's colors are muted?

quilt progress: the pink stripe

I've got a quarter of a quilt top done! I am loving the mish-mash craziness of having all kinds of random fabrics mixed together.

terrific tie-dye tablecloth!

Hello readers! I have been doing a lot of half blogging lately. I've been doing creative things and taking photos with the blog in mind and I have a list of topics jotted down but I just haven't gotten to the sit at the computer part of the process lately. Ah, well. These things happen!

Dear husband runs a tie-dye day for his high school chem students right before spring break. I am the lucky recipient of any extra dye. Of course I must scramble and find things to dye! How could I turn down this craft? Older daughter already had a white shirt with a stain that was a good candidate. At the thrift store I found a shirt for younger daughter and an extra long white tablecloth for a mere $6! I also found some plain white fabric, a couple of cloth napkins, and some of my own tank tops that I added to the craft pile.

I am going to show you the process of dying the tablecloth since that was the biggest and most magnificent thing I have ever dyed!

We did a spiral using an old broom handle instead of the more typical dowel. Rubberbands wouldn't have been big enough to hold it either so I tied it up with yarn. Thinking of my orange and yellow dining room walls I chose those colors along with purple (matches the couch in the adjacent sunroom).

Then came the slow and patient part of drip dropping the dye onto each section using a pipette. This is, of course, what normal pregnant ladies do in their driveways – right?!

I am really thrilled with how it turned out. We used it at younger daughter's birthday party this year. It looked very festive. I am going to keep my eyes open for other big white tablecloths when I am out thrifting.

beauty in miniature

Even regular leafy trees put out tiny spring flowers!

Chalkboard labels for toy bins

When my girls combined bedrooms they also combined toys. This motivated me to label the bins on their IKEA toy storage containers. I also went to the further unnecessary step of labeling the toy bins in the baby's room. Chalk it up to nesting, I guess!

My main challenge was that I did not want to make the labels out of sticker paper or anything too permanent. I settled on cutting apart an old corrugated plastic sign, coating it with 3 coats of chalkboard paint, and then adhering it to the bins with hot glue. It's been a few weeks and the hot glue seems to be holding up as an adhesive. I imagine they could be picked off of the plastic bins pretty easily.

spring seedlings / beautiful beginnings