Pillowcase wrapping..

Wow its been over a month since I have blogged anything! Its been a very longgggg month indeed.. Two wisdom teeth pulled in October, two weeks later got food poisoning, a week after that came down with the flu. Good thing to come out of all this.. I lost some weight! Not being able to eat for several weeks for several reasons will do that to ya! Yay me! :)

Today I'm going to share an idea my son thought up. (which I'm sure has been done before) What to do when you have to wrap something that you don't have a box for..such as these stuff animal backpacks.

My son came up with an idea to use a pillowcase. We use every pillowcase in the house he so kindly drove me to the store. Since he has his learning permit "Of course I'll drive you to the store mom!" We purchased white pillowcases and some fabric paint.

We used paint brushes and painted the girls names free hand. They came out really cute!

Placed the backpacks inside and tied them with some ribbon. Now the girls have two gifts in one!

Not too shabby, good job son! 

sharing with ...

Tricked out goody bags

 I'm slowly getting things together for the "Trick or Trunk" Halloween party my brother and sister-in-law are hosting. Its still a week away so the baking will have to wait but I got a head start on the goody bags. I caught a pic on pinterest and followed the link.. it ended up that someone was selling these cute bags with faces printed on them. I found slim tall pretzel bags at Wal-Mart on the Wiltons baking isle. (which happens to be in the craft department) They were only $1.50 each.

I took a black sharpie and went to town making my own silly faces.

Filled them up with some goody's and tied with ribbon.

No shipping and handling fees here! For photo purposes I used left over candy corn from when I made the krispy treats. The faces will show up better if you can find a solid colored candy. Using white candies you could make ghosts as well!

Vintage Birdcage

Hi all! Remember my weekend of Antique Alley and I found this vintage birdcage?

I removed everything from the inside and painted it white. I had saved the flowers and birds to reuse once the paint was dry.

Deciding not to put all the greenery back in I think worked out well. Keeping with neutral tones and rearranging the birds having them both on the inside. 

I did make one mistake which was not lifting the door when painting. So you can see the green in certain spots but hey its not going to be opened for anything I can think of so who will know, right? 

Now to figure out where in the house to display my new birdcage..... 

Have a great weekend :)



Sharing this at :

Fall Decor

After seeing a tutorial on using pumpkins from Dollar Tree I had to do some! Then I found a bunch of smaller ones plus gourds at Dollar General, decided I'm doing them all! Thank you Artsy VaVa for tutorial and inspiration!

I also found these cute ladies 

Everything got painted white and a few pumpkins got plastered with Mod Podge and pages from an old book

I had found these do it yourself stamp sets at Walmart for 97 cents each.

You can combine stamps onto the clear square to make your own unique stamp.

They peel and stick and you can wash, remove, rearrange and reuse them!

Here is the finished look!

And this is how the ladies turned out, love how the words showed up.

The pumpkins and gourds I spiffed up are so cute!

I wrapped some old books and used my new stamps

So cute!

Thanks for stopping by and having a peek at what I worked on last week!

I'm sharing this at:

Monogrammed Plate

At a recent trip to Hobby Lobby I spotted small squarish monogrammed plates for $9.99. Of course they were out of the letter "S". Oh well I thought and ended up at Goodwill and their 50% off everything day and behind a woman with 3, yes 3, carts full of jeans which came to a total of $800 then half of for $400!! Wow, it was crazy in there that day! But while there I looked at the dishes and spotted this little plate and loved the details of it...

So I whip out a black paint marker and went to town 

I used my Cricut and cut out a stencil then filled it in

Here is how it turned out

I had found a few months ago a plate holder $2 at Burke's Outlet it was white so I painted it black

For $2.25 I have a nice addition to the kitchen!

My motto is there is always a cheaper way. It may not present itself that very day but eventually it will!

Sharing this post at:


Thrifty 101
Not Just a Housewife
The Girl Creative
Elle Belle Creative
The Shabby Chic Cottage
Funky Polkadot Giraffe
Gluesticks
Iron Violet Designs

Niece's Birthday

My brothers girls both have birthdays in April and are turning 4 and 6 yrs old.

Aren't they cute!

 They both play soccer and love listening to music and dancing. I bought them each a kids song CD and then at Dollar Tree found these cute soccer baskets.

 Bought a few toys to throw in as well as piggy banks which I personalized using my Cricut and stickers.

Everything goes in with some tissue paper

Then I added handmade gift tags

Happy Birthday Madison and Macie!

Trash to storage

Another blogger gave me an idea for dog food storage and well I just couldn't find a container like what she had used. Also I needed something that was narrow since I have limited space. And this is what I came up with a total cost of $15 since all I had to buy was the trash can, already had the vinyl.

So it went from this

to this...

Big enough for a 25lb bag of dog food

 Looks alot better then a bag propped against the wall!