Is that something crafty??? Why Yes! Yes it is!

Can you believe it!?! I almost can't but I was literally forced to do something crafty! Ok, maybe not forced but I did something and I like it. I think it needed an extra oomph but the recipient of said craft is not too into pink and shiny stuff so I hit a brick wall while designing this.

It's just a little name plate that she can put up in her new cubicle and apparently she likes skulls and crossbones.  So This is what I came up with, simple yet so totally Barb! By the way, I totally freehanded and cut out this skull and crossbones myself.  Toot Toot! I found the picture online, I drew it on black paper with a pencil and cut it out with my Xacto Knife.  I highlighted all the areas that needed it with my white craft pen and VOILA!  The big "B" is from Cosmo Cricket Letters and the "arb" I cut out with my Cricut. The little board was actually something that I won a long time ago and was just sitting in my office collecting dust and waiting to be refurbished. I'm sure it's happy now.

So in other news, I've been in a Blog Hopping mood. I've been to the ends of the internets and back and I have found some amazing, creative, fun blogs that I'd like to share with you. So click it up and check out these gals!

Sew Much Ado
Eighteen25
Crap I've Made
The Creative Crate
A Girl And A Glue Gun

I'll be back to show you some other creativity going on in my house! Sooooo excited!

Orange and black and more ORANGE!

It's Halloween time again! I pretty much failed on the decorations department this year. I think it just creeped up on me and I lost track of time and I'm SUPER busy so not many decorations at all! One thing that we ALWAYS do though, is pumpkin carving. This was our go at it!

No guts no glory..... she took those guts out and enjoyed it!

Alex is becoming a perfectionist, she loves to draw and her design is awesome as always!

Although Mikayla loves everything creepy she stuck to the kinder, gentler theme of Halloween for her pumpkin this year, a wizard!

They all concentrated hard, figured out their design and go to work! It's always fun to see what they come up with. I love it.

Nevaeh had fun like always. I still have to do my pumpkin so I did some googling today to get some ideas and I think I'm ready to start... now to find the time!

The treeeee... at last!

It's been a long time coming, but can you believe.... I finally took pictures and uploaded them of the "tree" on my daughter's wall? It only took a few months but here it is finally! To jog your memory, this was the inspiration:

I knew that I wanted something similar and by no means was I going to buy a decal to put up because I figured I could do it myself. :) So this is what I came up with... and my daughter loves it, so that's all that matters.

It's not nearly as full but I really didn't want to "clutter" the space too much. I mostly just wanted the effect, which I got and I'm happy with.
As you can see, it goes all the way to the baseboards but you can't really tell because it's partially hidden with the nightstand, which is okay because I thought I was a bit dull anyway.
This is a bit more up close. You can see a little more details to the flowers. The tree trunk and branches were all hand painted on with regular wall paint. The flowers were a bit more tricky. I cut out the flowers with my cricut and rolled the edges with a pencil to make them 3 dimensional.
The center of the flowers are the flat sided marbles, I really don't even know the purpose of those other than I've seen people make magnets out of them and I've seen them in goldfish bowls. Who knows?!?
I spread out the flowers throughout the wall and slightly onto the next wall, to give the effect that they are being blown off the branches. My daughter loves this!
Here you can really see the 3-D look of it. Everything was hot glued onto the wall and I love it. I don't think we'll be redecorating this room soon so it's there to stay for a while! :)
I'll be back to show you the next ongoing project in my house soon! All to save a few bucks!

I HAVE SHELVES!!!

Can you hear the excitement? I only say it with caps and exclamation points because I'm THAT excited. Why you ask? Maybe because I've only bugged about them for ohhh sayyyy 1 year!! They are nothing fancy by no means... They are simple... They are dark... They are Martha Stewart and I love them!
You see... You may remember my closet, my under the stairs, should have been a coat closet, closet. I don't think I should have to waste an entire closet space just for closets. So it evolved, it was a Toy Closet/Room for about 4 years. My daughters loved it, it held all their favorite, most used and most loved toys.... until..... the toy closet ended up consuming my entire downstairs and I couldn't take it anymore. I moved the toys upstairs to another extra closet and claimed the stair closet as MINE!

I will have before and after pics for sure! I intend on using this closet as my "fabric" room! I can't stand the excitement really! I'm sooooo happy... So these were some of my manyyyy inspirations, and although I know I will not be able to turn my "closet" into one of these.. I can pretend, and oogle over these ones!

I love all the colors on both of these! Mine won't be nearly as colorful but I hope for it to be just as organized! Thanks to Patty Young over at ModKid for the above inspiration, she is awesome!
I want to color coordinate all the fabric folded in it's cubbies just like this. Thanks to Jenny from All Sorts for the above inspiration. She is amazing! I really can't wait!

I also want to look for a spool holder like the one above that was featured at Craftzine back in 2007. If I can't find one affordable I'm definately going to try to make one! Wish me luck!

Still making lists.. still not finishing them...

It's ridiculous all the lists I make and then remake and forget and rewrite and nothing seems to ever get done. I won't repost "the List" because frankly... I'm sick of the list and all the pressure! haha.. Okay. So I might go back and see what actually got done on the list and one thing I know is that the flowers on my daughters wall still are NOT done, I started, put some up, ran out of flowers and had to cut and curl more. I finally did that but they are going up tonight! No if, ands or buts about it, I will get them done after work today. Why? Because my sister is coming into town and I'd rather not let her see it half done! Pressure! I work well under pressure! :)

For now though.. here is s sneak peak of the Cherry Blossom Tree wall.

The picture isn't the brightest (from my phone) but the complete pictures will be better... The tree trunk park is all painted onto the wall, flowers are all paper (4 colors), curled the ends with a pencil so they were more 3-D and added the marbles for the centers, everything hot glued to the wall :)

I'm sure my husband will kill me if we have to redecorate this room and take the flowers off. Oh well!

Going to sew something....

I figure I will need more than a few hours to do the flowers on my little girls wall, so I'm going to wait to do that for the weekend. In the meantime, I have only a few hours at home that I'm not sleeping, because my schedule is TIGHT!
Wake up, shower, get ready, make lunches, go to work, work all day, pick up the girls, go home, make dinner, get them ready for swim class, go to swim class, get back, bathe the children, put them to bed..... thennnn this is the part where I decide if I want to flop on the couch and watch the TV, read, get on the computer or work out (work out never, ever, ever, ever wins - but I still contemplate it).
So this is the little bit of time I will take this week, today or maybe tomorrow to create some tutu's for my little one. You see, she's in ballet and she's almost the only one in class that doesn't have a flurry little tutu, so she asked me for one finally. I got the tulle on sale at Hobby Lobby for .77 cents a yard, got a yard of every color and we'll see what I make!

My inspiration for the ones I'm about to make are these from Tiara's Boutique

Progress.....

So I finally started decorating my girls' rooms. There are 3 of them so it takes me some time to figure out what I want to do and how I will do it.

My youngest is all about everything being PINK, she loves every shade of pink and she really doesn't care what it is, so long as it's pink. Needless to say her room is like Pink Heaven. Everything is PINK! So pink that it has pink on top of pink, but of course it's different she says because they're different shades....

So for her room I decided on this....

(image from google image: cherry blossom wall decal)

......as inspiration only.... I wasn't prepared to go out and buy the decal for this. I'm grateful that I can paint with some artistic ability so I started working on it in her room, free hand.

This is the progress from beginning to present, which is not yet complete, I will be working on it more throughout the week and through the weekend I'm sure.

This is the blank wall, I imagined it and started painting...

The tree trunk looks a little skinny/narrow I know, but really it wouldn't matter too much because I was planning on putting the nightstand back where it was, as you can see below.

As I went up I just randombly put branches how I thought they should flow. I had no reason to do what I did but I looked at the example decal picture and kept going.

This was still a semi-rough draft of the branches. I did them with paint but I did a lighter outline of them and went back and colored them in with the thickness and darkness that I liked.

This is the finished copy of the branches, all painted in and dark. It extends to the right of the bed and passes it by a couple of inches. I didn't want it to just end where the bed ended. I'll post new pics on how the flowers come along :)