To make my dry laundry detergent, I found the recipe from Adrielle Pyper on YouTube and varied mine per the video.  She uses a hand grater and stirs her ingredients by hand.  I’m not able to do that so I use my food processor instead.  I want to make sure that you are aware that this puts off a lot of dust into the air when you use the food processor.  So if you have any kind of allergies to dust or detergents,  you might want to use the hand stir and grate method instead of mine.

The ingredients are :
Fels Naptha -you’d need three of these for one bar of Zote
or
Zote–I use this in white.  Pink is scented and white is not.  If you don’t want to use the Purex Scent Crystals to make your detergent have a nice scent, you can go with the pink Zote.  It’s not overly scented, but does have more scent than the white Zote.  You will find this in the laundry detergent section of your Walmart, Target or grocery store.

I cut the Zote into cubes and then run it through the food processor on the shred function.  I do all of the Zote before doing anything else.

I make my detergent in three batches and use big bowls.  I divide the Zote into three equal parts and put one part in the food processor with the cutting blade now instead of the shredding blade.  I put the other two parts into big bowls. Zote is $2.64 for a bar.  I also added one bar of Ivory soap which is 40 cents and ran it through the food processor.  Add to them in three equal parts:
a box of Washing Soda $3.97
Two 1 pound boxes of Baking Soda $1.64 for two
a Box of Borax $3.89
An Oxy Clean type product–I buy mine at the Dollar Tree and I use three pounds or three boxes $3 The containers from the Dollar Tree come with their own scoop and the scoop is a little bit over 2 tablespoons.  You can use these for the laundry detergent, as you use 2 tablespoon for a regular load.  An extra dirty load, use 3 tablespoons.
Purex Scent Crystals one bottle $3.47 (don’t put this in the food processor)

You will take all of the ingredients except the scent crystals and spin them through the food processor until it is finely ground then put the batch into a large container (like an old detergent plastic container).  Once it’s in the plastic container, add 1/3 of the bottle of scent crystals and stir them into the mix.  Do the same process with the other two batches making sure you continue to add the scent crystals.  Again, you use 2 tablespoon for a load of laundry and 3 for a really dirty or extremely large load.

The total to make this recipe is $19.01 which is 6 cents a load for three hundred loads. Tide is roughly 18 cents a load on sale.

I made a couple of great videos today and can’t wait for them to go live.  I found a template for a coffin the size of a Butterfinger candy bar but deeper, so I can put another small treat inside.  I thought it would be fun to give them filled with candy to our trick or treaters as we only get 10-15 of them.  I found some fun Halloween material I had laying around, and covered the candy with it and put a mummy on top of the material.  I decorated the lid of the coffin with a skeleton and some bats and the word “boo.”  I think it would have been better if I had made a mock up of it first and found the bugs before doing the video, as the lid was a little bit longer than it needed to be.  I made sure to note it on the video though, so others can alter their templates so their lids fit more snugly than mine did.

Then I got serious about making the wreath for my great niece.  I wanted to make a skull on a wreath with long fake eyelashes and a black wig and a lavender feather boa.  I just didn’t think that was going far enough so I added a tiara (of course she needed a tiara,) and a big hand mirror.  I think she came out really cute and I cut the back of the skull off so I could drop two battery operated tea lights inside so the skull will glow.  It came out so cute, at least I think it did.  Rich just kind of snickered when I showed it to him.  I hope our niece likes it.  It’s definitely a conversation starter and she can leave it up all year long as it doesn’t say anything about Halloween on it, just has the skull.  Well maybe she can’t keep a skull on her door year-round, I’m not sure.   All I know is that skull had some serious bling going on.  If I could have found a way to give it lips, I would have put some lavender lipstick on her as well.  You can never have enough lavender..  I can’t wait for the video to go live, I’m really proud of it.

I think I mentioned the little kid’s chair that I recreated into a plant stand.  It’s finally finished and has five magnets on the top front of the chair so I can change out the images as the seasons change.  I probably already mentioned this, but I did red and blue stars, daisies and a big wooden Happy Halloween and small sparkly plastic pumpkins to attach to it.  I had already given my girlfriend the mum that I was going to put in the chair, so I’m going to take my chair to a local greenhouse and photograph it with different plants in it for the video.  I need to have something inside it so you can see how cute it will look once it’s filled.

I’m also going to go to Big Lots and Dollar General to look for something similar to the hat I want for on my wreath I’m making for my great niece.  I’m just not sure about the wreath form either and want to make the wreath today so I’ve got to get serious about making some decisions.  I don’t really like the tiara, so if I can find a replacement that makes me happier, I’m going to take it back.  I really want this wreath to be adorable and won’t settle until it is.  I think I’m going to cut the back off of the skull and try to drop one of those small battery operated tea lights into it and see if it makes the skull glow.  That would be really fun if it works.  I bought the tea lights at the Dollar Tree hoping that’s the case.   So I’m going to finish the chair video and make and video tape the wreath.  Once those projects are in the bag, I’ll get the wreath in the mail and be highly relieved.  Hey, I wonder where the phrase “in the bag”  originated.

From the “Phrase Finder”

Virtually secured – as good as in one’s possession.

Origin

The term in the bag with the meaning of ‘virtually secured’ is American and came into being in the early 20th century. It is slightly predated by an Australian/New Zealand version of in the bag which had a different meaning. That was in use by 1900 and is defined here in a later citation:

Sidney John Baker’s The Australian language, 1945 – “A horse set to lose a race is said to be in the bag.”

Of course, that isn’t the meaning of the phrase as we currently understand it. The current version was coined because of a tradition of the New York Giants baseball team. This was recorded in May 1920, in the Ohio newspaper The Mansfield News:

“An old superstition was revived at the Polo grounds, New York, recently when Eddie Sicking was dispatched to the clubhouse with the ball bag at the start of the ninth possession of one run lead. This superstition originated during the run of twenty-six consecutive victories made by the Giants in 1916, the significance of it resting in a belief that if the bag is carried off the field at that stage of the game with the Giants in the lead the game is in the bag and cannot be lost.”

 

Somehow I think I remember looking for this origination before.  It tells you how well my memory works.  I guess I always thought the phrase simply meant that whatever you were doing, it would definitely be completed.  So maybe I’m not using the phrase in the proper context.  Geez, I’m going to have to rethink this one.  Sometimes it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie. Haha, I threw that saying in just for fun and won’t even look up it’s origination.  Oh, who am I kidding, I need to know now.

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

Posted by Elyse Bruce on December 31, 2010

 

 

Who would have guessed this term goes all the way back to the Bible.  I learn something new every day, and sometimes a couple new things.

I made a date to deliver the invitations after 4PM, as well as spend time with her husband (our good friend who is ill.)  His birthday was last week and I know he loves sweets, so made him some brownies and wanted to make him a cute and fun birthday card.  I have the Crazy Dog stamps from Tim Holtz that I absolutely love and wanted to make a slide card with them.  I haven’t made a slide card on video and wish I had done a video when I made a slide card last year with the Crazy Bird stamps.  I had the birds fighting over a kite with the string end of the kite in the beak of one bird and the kite sliding back and forth toward the other bird.  The card was adorable and I just realized I didn’t have my YouTube channel when I made that card as it was in August of 2015, and I started my channel almost a year ago, in October.  I think I’ll recreate the card for my girlfriend whose birthday is November 2nd.

I had a bone that came with the Crazy Dog set and thought I would try to use that as my sliding object.  I’m not sure what I was thinking, because the object that slides has to be large enough to cover a penny or a dime and that bone wouldn’t cover either.  So I had to come up with something else to use to slide, and found a stamp that looked like a beach ball and went with it.  There were small tennis balls in the Crazy Dog set, so I stamped out maybe fifteen of them and colored them with alcohol markers and attached them all over the front of the card above and below the dogs. Oh, I had some paper with grass on it and used that as my background, so having the dogs and all of the balls around looked perfect on the grass.  I stamped a third dog inside the card with a bowl of food. All in all, the card was really cute and this time I did make a video.  The video had it’s normal pitfalls, but the card is cute and playful and great for someone who is ill to forget about things for a while.  (The brownies were a big hit as well.)

I’m almost finished with the invitations, but decided they needed something on the sleeves.  I had bought some light pink tiny rhinestones that worked perfectly and it took less time than I thought to apply them.  I had thirty five rows that allowed me to easily attach seventeen of the invitations and then the other seven or eight, I had to piece rows together on the sleeve as the rows weren’t long enough to complete two sleeves.  I thought it would be a lot worse to attach eight rhinestones in a row and then another five to make one sleeve, but it was really not awful.

I did have to re-Stickle (not exactly sure how to say that any other way), because some of the outfits weren’t really glittery and I wanted them to really be consistent.  I had a bottle of deep orange that looked great but was kind of thick and really hard to apply evenly.  I guess if I had to say the part of the project that was the most time consuming, it was Stickling.  (Now I’m just making up words left and right.)

I made plans to hand off the invitations tomorrow and will be so happy to get them out of my hands and into hers so I won’t have to worry about ruining them.

I had some time to play while I waited for the Stickles to dry so I went to my favorite store, the Dollar Tree and a side trip to Joanns.  I’m making my great niece a fun and funky Halloween wreath and knew part of what I was looking for, but not all of it.  I saw a video where a woman bought a skull at Dollar Tree and worked it into the side of a wreath.  I really liked the idea, but didn’t want to do what she had done.  When I started looking at the Halloween things (they are really picked over now), I found the skull but also found a black wig and a lavender feather boa and an ornate hand mirror and a large tiara with lavender and pink accents.  I decided to make a dead princess theme for my wreath.  The skull would have long black hair and a tiara and then around her neck would be the boa and on the other side of the wreath would be the mirror.  I bought some matching flowers that I’ll glue down here and there.  The only thing I’m not really sure of, is what to use as the wreath form.  I have foam forms and wire ones and I have a foam form that’s already covered with grey yarn that I could leave the yarn as it is or spray paint it black.  I’m not crazy about the tiara but really liked a hat I found at Joanns that’s a Halloween theme that would be so cute on the wreath, but it’s $14.99 with 50% off.  I just can’t see spending $7.50 on a hat.  It is adorable though and so much more cute than the tiara.  I don’t want to start the wreath until I’m sure about everything I want to use on it, and right now I’m stuck on the wreath form and the hat/tiara.  Decisions, decisions.

The invitations are coming right along.  I have all of them painted and the ribbon on fourteen of them and the Stickles on five.  So I have five out of twenty five finished!  I’m shooting to have them done by Sunday and hope that it’s doable.  I have things that take time to dry like the ribbon that really wants to unbraid itself and required Fray Stoppa (catchy name huh?) and wet glue to keep the ends from unbraiding.  I’m not sure why it didn’t occur to me that this ribbon would be problematic, I just bought it because it was cute.  Note to self–I need to be more practical when it comes to projects like this one.

I was going to go to a couple of garage sales today just to give myself a break from the invitations, but helped put up the video instead and then went back to working on invitations.  I am going to get out of the house for a little while tomorrow, or I may end up making some big mistakes on the invitations because I’m so obsessed with them.  I may not get them done on Sunday either, because everything takes time and I don’t want to rush it and have some of them turn out looking crazy.  (That could happen, you know.)

If I didn’t tell you already, I finally finished the child’s chair for my girlfriend.  It’s crazy, but I had one out of sixteen embellishments whose magnet I glued on backwards.  It is now glued on correctly and I’m going to take some final photos tomorrow and put the video together once I finish the invitations.  I’m really looking forward to getting back into other projects as it seems I’ve been making these invitations for a month or so.  Ok, at least two weeks..  It’s definitely feeling like I’ve been doing these for a lot longer than I have.  Remind me I’m not equipped to do a project like this again.  It’s just too life consuming for me.

I needed to make a thank you note for friends who coordinated a big landscaping project at a friend’s home whose been ill for over a year.  Our friends made the food and found twelve other volunteers for the project.  I really appreciate all of the work he put into it.

I’m using a tag that I eventually cut down with a Creative Memories personal trimmer so that it fits on a 4 1/4 x 5 1/2″ card base.  I stamped the typewriter from Close to my Heart set called Typed Note.  There are a lot of sentiments that you stamp inside what would be the paper as it comes out of the typewriter, so I used a thank you sentiment from the same set.  I used Onyx Black by Versafine to stamp my sentiment.  I layered it on a ripped paper from an old French textbook.  I used Frayed Burlap ink from Distress ink to distress my French paper with a Judikins brush and used Memento Tuxedo Black ink to go around the edges of my tag.  I used the Frayed Burlap on the tag as well.  I used burlap ribbon to go through the top of the tag but it was too thick and I ended up not really loving it and should have gone with a thinner ribbon.  I used some double sided tape to adhere the French paper to the craft colored card stock that was 5 1/2 x 4 1/4″ .  The double sided tape didn’t adhere the paper so I used some Tombow Mono adhesive glue to glue it to the craft card stock.   I’m not sure of the dimensions of the French paper as I just tore it using the card base as the guide.  I used foam tape to adhere the tag to the French paper.

 

Today was a much better day in my quest to finish twenty five baby shower invitations.  I freaked out about it yesterday, and I mean, FREAKED OUT!  I decided that I would take a deep breath and make these in an assembly line fashion.  They are in the shape of a onesie, and Rich printed the insides with the information about the shower.  I cut out all of the onesies and then realized some were cut too high and had to be remade, so that put me behind.  I decided to stamp all of the center images before doing anything else.  I was going to change the design from a little girl dressed as a witch holding her Halloween candy bucket to holding a small heart.  I made four or five and then decided it was way too much work and required changing stamps in the Misti and cleaning my hands with every stamp change and then changing colors of ink and masking the candy bucket.  It was just way too involved.  I decided to leave the stamp and use one ink and no masking (initially, more masking comes later.)  So I stamped all of the images and then decided it was time to make a mask of the little girl so I could stamp a big background stamp behind her.  I found one in my stash that looked like a background to a little girls’ outfit and went with it.  I chose a really light pink for the background, even though their theme is more Halloween, as the shower is October 30th.  I know it’s late getting the invitations done, but I was just given the final information on Monday or Tuesday of this week.  So I used the Misti and masked and stamped all of the backgrounds and then used the same light pink and distressed around the edges of the onesie.  So far,  they look ok, not great.  Next step, tomorrow will be to color all of the images then make a collar around the neckline with ribbon I purchased.  The ribbon is turning out to be a nightmare as it’s braided and every time I cut it, it unbraids.  I used my ribbon fray stop on the first one that I finished and I think it looks all right, but am worried about having to fix twenty-four more frayed ribbons, Yikes!  After the neckline is done, I am going to put Stickles on the little girl to make her stand out and then I should be done.  Oh, and I already put glittery matching pink washi tape on the back of all of the envelopes.  Rich and I were talking about how long this process takes.  I had a doctor’s appointment and used my timer to make sure I wasn’t late.  I had twelve minutes when I started it, and to mask, stamp the background, and distress the cards it took almost six minutes per card just for that step.  Can you imagine how much time I’ll be putting into this project?  Good thing I really love the family I’m making them for.  I’ll be honest.  I am going to be extremely relieved when I deliver them and they are out of my hands.  I’m having nightmares about spilling things on them or making some horrible mistake that isn’t fixable that affects a lot of them (like stamping them upside down)….  I’m going to be so happy when this is done and I can get back to making videos of every day normal projects.  I did make a video of the first one I made.  I’m not going to put the video up until I can show the huge stack of the rest of them to prove I actually completed this project.  I maybe shouldn’t get the cart ahead of the horse here and just keep plugging away at the next step.  I’m going to take the morning off tomorrow and go to some garage sales and then back to onesie land.

I’ve decided that I’m not really equipped for producing multiple reproductive projects.  I’ve been seriously devoting my time to making the twenty five baby shower invitations.  I’m absolutely serious when I tell you that I haven’t gotten ONE completed.  Not even ONE.  I’m starting to panic and am not really sure where to go from here.  I had Rich made me an extra invitation (since he’s printing the insides), and I’ve already had to use it.  I’m freaking out because I don’t want to disappoint our friends but clearly, this project is much too big for me.  It would be different if I was making one and then using a copier to reproduce them.  But I’m stamping and masking and then coloring and putting in a background stamp then using ribbon (that frays like you cannot believe.)  I’ve never tried to make something twenty-five times let alone something as important as invitations.  I should have chosen an easier design, but honestly, I didn’t think this one was that hard to do.  Little did I know that it would be a virtual nightmare for me.  I’m putting way too much pressure on myself and need to just forget about the project and take one at a time and forget about the other twenty-four.  Geez, I don’t think I can do it.  This would be a great time to consider anti-anxiety medicines.  Yikes, I’m freaking out for no good reason.  Ok, I do have one good reason.  The insides are so complicated, Rich doesn’t want to try to make any more of them.  It took him all afternoon to make his first twenty-five, and he had to reprint nine of them because the ink ran low and changed colors on some of them.   That little reprint took all last night, so I really hate to ask him to make more.  I’m not going to freak out, I’m not going to freak out, I’m not going to freak out.   Does Jennifer McGuire freak out?  Does Lindsay freak out?  I seriously doubt it.  I’d be thrilled to know that somewhere there’s a blog post from one of them saying they have a big project like this and are scared they aren’t up to the challenge.  That would make me feel so much better.  Enough stalling, I need to make some invitations.  Cross your fingers for me, I may never leave my craft room again since I may never finish them.

Oh and I worked on finishing the chair for my girlfriend early this AM, and super glued my fingers together and the magnets aren’t matching up, so some of the pieces have the wrong side of the magnet glued down so they keep trying to flip over and that’s making me crazy as well.  Another project I may never finish.  It’s been a never ending battle of which project can break me.  Call the people with the straight jackets, I’m going to be needing a room.

I wanted to replicate a Christmas wreath into a Halloween wreath.  So I bought an 8″ wide wreath form from A C Moore and five sheets of scrapbook 12″ x 12″ paper from Joanns.  I cut my 12″ paper into 1 1/2″ strips.  I used Art Glitter glue to attach the papers to themselves.  I pulled the strips of paper through the inside of the mold and made sure that they were even and then glued it all the way to the form and made sure it was tightly adhered to itself.  The Art Glitter Glue worked really well for this, but any fast acting glue would work.  Overlap the strips so you can’t see the mold.  I made four strips of each of my papers and had a total of six papers that were double sided.  I had to use one of the backs of the pieces of scrapbook paper because you end up needing one extra piece or you will end up duplicating papers side by side at the end. Before you put your last paper in place,  wrap some thick twine or thick embroidery floss around the form and tie it so it will be what you hang your wreath from.  Then apply your last paper.  After all of your papers are glued down,  you will cut your banner ends out of your papers.  You can either made a template and cut each with the template laying on top of each paper or eyeball it and cut your banners by cutting into the middle and then cutting diagonally to the center cut on both sides.  I added a spider web doily behind the wreath and some embellishments I had in my stash.  I added some plastic spiders as well.  I thought it looked really cute when it was done.
I recommend doing this project on a silicone mat and keeping a wet wipe handy to wipe excess glue with.