Runaway October

So, my pho­tographs are typ­i­cally pretty… blah. I took pho­tog­ra­phy in High School, but for some rea­son my brain is just not trans­fer­ring those skills to digital.

One of my goals this year is too get bet­ter with my cam­era and coin­ci­den­tally The MCP Project 52 signups hap­pened to cross my path.

Here’s the gist:

MCP Project 52 – It’s a way to encour­age cre­ativ­ity, make pho­tog­ra­phy fun, and pro­vide a chal­lenge with­out actual pres­sure. Par­tic­i­pants will [sic] shar­ing their art work and images weekly while inspir­ing each other.

The theme of the first week, which I am slightly behind on, was “Around The House” so here’s my go.

Click to embiggen

I fixed some of the overblown and added a vin­tage photo fil­ter to it.

I hop­ing that if I keep fid­dling with my cam­era every week that I’ll get bet­ter. Hope­fully.

If you’d like to join–and we’d love to have you–the infor­ma­tion is here. And be sure to stop by the Flickr pool of all the par­tic­i­pat­ing pho­tos here. There are some out­stand­ing pho­tos in there!

I WON! I am SO not kid­ding. I WON!

I’m usu­ally not one to answer my cell­phone from Unknown Callers, but for some rea­son I answered this call. Then I talked very calmly, to a lovely woman named Stacey (because I’m sure she didn’t want to hear me squeal), hung up the phone and THEN squealed like an idiot.

Check out the offi­cial announce­ment here. This is my goofy appli­ca­tion. I feel so dumb writ­ing these things. Thank­fully the judges must have a sim­i­lar sense of humor.

They asked just a few things from me; To keep my pas­sion and con­tinue doing exactly what I do and to cross­post on a blog that they will host for me. In return, they will spon­sor a few of my crafts. And I’m hop­ing for a serger. Maybe my Etsy shop is closer than we all think?

I haven’t got much infor­ma­tion from them, but do you know who’ll I’ll tell first when they give me more info? Besides imme­di­ate fam­ily and the neigh­bors and the guy at the con­ve­nience store and every­one on Face­book and all my sec­ond cousins twice removed? You Guys! Yay!

And, in con­clu­sion, thank you — to all of you who voted, all of you who encour­age me when I hold up a project, wrin­kle my nose and ask “Does this look stu­pid?”, and to who­ever gave me my cre­ativ­ity since both of my par­ents claim it wasn’t them and it was my Great Aunt Kather­ine, whom I never met and thank you to Prilosec!

I’m ram­bling.

Now, really in con­clu­sion, Yay! Thank you!

Alright guys, I have a favor to ask.

Some­hwere along my inter­netty trav­els, I came across a sweep­stakes of sorts. Prilosec OTC, the heart­burn med­ica­tion, is offer­ing a spon­sor­ship. For any­one, for any rea­son. Accord­ing to the FAQs, it’s for around $1000, which isn’t much but is $1000 more than I can use on my hob­bies right now.

The selec­tion cri­te­ria has 4 sec­tions: Pas­sions, Cre­ativ­ity, VOTES, and Community.

So what I’m ask­ing from you is your vote for lit­tle hum­ble ol’ me. You do have to reg­is­ter to vote, but it should only take a few min­utes of your time to vote and leave a com­ment. And if your nice enough to vote and I win, most likely you’ll ben­e­fit in a round about way, come birth­days and Christ­mas.

Oh, and don’t read my dorky pro­file, I’m so bad at fill­ing out these things.

Thank you!

Not too long ago we bought two sets of the Svala table and chairs from IKEA for our “play­room”. I was kinda bummed they came unfin­ished but then got excited that I could do what­ever I wanted with them. I mean, who doesn’t dream of this per­fectly coör­di­nated play­room that looks like it came straight out of a Pot­tery Barn or Montes­sori guidebook?

Svala from Ikea

The kids had dif­fer­ent ideas, as usual. Within a few days they had scrib­bled all over the top with crayons and who-knows-what. Even the table legs had been col­ored on. I’m totally psy­ched with the cre­ativ­ity com­ing from these two lit­tle boys. Psy­ched. Too bad they didn’t con­sult me first because their art­work totally didn’t go with my Pot­tery Barn color schemes.

Daisy Dreams lam­i­nated cotton

I recently came across a tuto­r­ial for an oil­cloth table cover from Twig & This­tle, that I thought was a great idea for the boys’ work­space. I had some oil­cloth that I picked up from my favoritest fab­ric coop but it was very girly.

Then it occured to me that I had a yard of chalk­cloth in my stash. That would be per­fect! It’s fairly water resis­tant for spills and such, and I could whip out the chalks when the kids were bored. Score!

Kathleen’s tuto­r­ial included adorable lit­tle scal­lops around the edge, which I thought would be okay if done in a nice manly color, like black

chalk­cloth. But man, chalk­cloth is hard to work with. I didn’t have quite enough to cover both tables sep­a­rately so I did one cover for both tables pushed together.

I ended up just hav­ing straight edges with a lit­tle bit of dec­o­ra­tive stitch­ing.  I think it turned out pretty good and the kids have throughly tested it. Heck I even ended up eat­ing on it last night because we had a HUGE crowd to feed last night.

Chalk­cloth Table Topper

Pretty Col­ors

This is seri­ous business…

(Declan was still napping)

So if you’re in need of some­thing sim­i­lar head on over to Twig & This­tle for the exact instruc­tions. Or you can check out Oil­cloth Addict for a no sew cus­tom chalk­cloth table top­per, also.