Tile Coasters

I have seen a bunch of these on Pinterest lately…decided to give them a try myself. 

I used sunprint paper from Acorn Naturalists and printed some of my favorite things onto the paper.  “This Sunprint art utilizes sun-sensitive paper that can be developed using plain tap water. Natural objects such as ferns, feathers, flowers or leaves are placed under a transparent cover (provided) and exposed to the sun for from 1-5 minutes.”

These tiles are only .33 each, so this is a great inexpensive project!

I printed them earlier this year and just hadn’t found the right project for it yet, but this one is it!  I used the pages with daisies and ferns for these coasters.  I love the blue color of the paper after it has been developed.

The tiles are actually 3.75 x 3.75 inches, so I cut the paper with my trimmer to be a bit less than 3.5 inches square.  Then I just Mod Podged them right down onto the tiles.  I also made some coasters using scrapbook paper.

The hardest part of the whole project was waiting for the Mod Podge to dry!

I used some self adhesive cork circles to put on the back to keep the tiles from scratching furniture. 

I used matte Mod Podge and applied 4-5 coats to keep the paper protected.  Eazzzzy!!

I am linking up to these great parties!

My first home

If you read my blog you know I went on vacation the first few weeks of October.  I went on a bus tour of New England…with my mom.  It was a great trip and we had such a good time laughing and running around!  I saw a lot of firsts too—Niagara Falls, New York City, whale watching, a riverboat, the place I was born. 

I had not been to Connecticut since I was 18 months old when my mom and dad and brother and I moved from there.  I had always wanted to go, so this trip seemed like a great chance.  Our tour group was headed to Mystic Seaport which was a mere ten miles from New London where my family lived when I was born.  So, mom and I broke free from the group (amid some scandal) and rented a car and drove to New London. 

It was wonderful!  We knew the name of the road, having looked it up before we left and found that the road still was there…after all it had been (COUGH) 50 (COUGH) years since we had been there.  I was amazed at how beautiful the countryside is around there. 

We drove up and down the road several times before we saw this…

The little blue house on the right was the cottage where mom and dad lived when they were first married.  It was so cool to find the house.  And the best part was that we actually got to go inside to look around.  The man who owned the property actually was home and the cottage was between renters so he asked mom if she wanted to go inside. 

While the house looked sort of rough on the outside, it was as solid as could be.  It was built in 1810 in New York; it was moved to Connecticut in 1890.  New London has a submarine base, so navy families lived there and this house was a rental for those families.   Each of the cottages on this property had names…the one we lived in was Juniper. 

Even the little shed outside the house was the same.  My mom remembered it all like she just left it yesterday.  The man who owns it now actually lived in one of the houses as a child when my family lived there, so mom even knew his name.

The yard was bordered by cove on two sides…the view was fantastic!

Mom wondered if the same roses were blooming in the garden.

This is mom with Doug, the property owner. He was so sweet to us, after all we knocked on his back door and he could have not answered the door!

The side of the house, such a cute little cottage!  When I got back home I found pictures of my brother and I in the side yard of the house.  It was so cool to be able to see what part of the yard the picture was taken in. 

We stayed there for a while after Doug went back inside…he told us to stay as long as we wanted.  We walked around the yard and mom talked and I listened.  I didn’t want to leave.

On the way back to the hotel, we saw a sign for Hammonasset State Park.  When I saw the Public Beach sign, I told mom we had to stop. The water was beautiful, the sand was wonderful, the shells were great, the breeze was heavenly!

I had my shoes off in no time with my feet in the surf…

I collected a bunch of seashells, driftwood and pebbles while at the beach…

I didn’t take into consideration that there might be some live things in this group of shells…I tucked my shells away inside a bag inside my suitcase after I washed them.  By the next day the shells were soooo stinky!  And it was only day four of twelve!  I used Listerine to sanitize them and disguise the smell for the remainder of the trip!  The luggage bins smelled minty fresh!  Mom and I laughed every time we opened the bins to get our bags out…

Blog Block

OK, I have not been blogging as much lately…I think I might have a case of blog block.  Every time I sit down to write a post, this happens…the screen sits blank and I end up walking away.  I have a lot to say, but I don’t really want to get down and get it done!  I have projects that I am working on, but hmmm, for some reason, I don’t want to get them done or posted. 

I am pretty ambivalent about where I want my blog to go..I would really like to host a link party weekly, I am sure I could do it, but wonder.  Maybe no one would link up…hmmm.  I would like to do more personal posts, but not sure if the blog would be as followed. 

I have been meaning to host a giveaway for 500 followers too!  But I haven’t yet! It is crazy for me to think about having 500+ followers!  It is very wild to think that I would have followers at all…  I was so thrilled one morning last month to find that I had been “stumbled” and had 340 page views in one hour, in the middle of the night even!  I need to figure out how that works!

I did make a new banner for the blog and I love it.  I use picnik.com to make my banner and my buttons, it is such an easy site to use and it is free! OK, enough rambling for now!

I can’t see the trees for the forest…

Since it is a few days from Halloween, I started working on Christmas…Ha ha…gotta keep ahead of those holidays.  No really, I am doing a craft show in a mere 10 days, so I am working fast and furious to get some more things done. 

Some of those things I need to get done are these stacked wool felt upcycled Christmas trees.  I call them Christmas trees, but I guess they could be any type of tree.  I have seen them in a few places in the blogosphere, and I made some of them last year.  The circles are in 18 graduated sizes, each tree uses 2 of each size circle and they are strung together with two pieces of wire (which allows them to bend and I like to pose them like Dr. Suess-ish creations) up the center of the circles. 

Most of them are just a random assortment of colors…I try to keep a lot of green among the mix, as they are trees, of course!

I top each one with a felted wool ball.  I have used different colors for the tops but I love these cream colored ones the best.

On the bottoms I put a thick layer of wool felt to hide the wires and to make them look more “professional”.  

After all, it’s all about looking professional (not!).  That’s why I use the unstained deck as my background…

Oh, and I hand cut these circles out on Saturday and put the trees together on Sunday…I made 17 trees…so that means a total of at least (I had a few left over in certain sizes and I had to cut a few more of certain sizes) 612 circles and I have the blisters to prove it!

I am linking up to these great parties!

Ellen

The first in a long time…

Vacation that is…I took a vacation!  It was lovely.  I went with my mom on a trip to New England…we had a blast and I was so honored to be able to go with her.   I know I haven’t been blogging much, I thought I could do so from mom’s iPad, but that was too hard and too time consuming, so I decided to just wait.

I knitted my way across the states of Illinois, Indiana, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Maine, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont.  I am one of those people that can knit and watch scenery out the bus window at the same time so it was perfect for a trip like this.

Here’s my finished products…I had a new pattern for a knitted dishcloth and took probably 10 skeins of Sugar and Cream cotton yarn.  I ended up with 5 great new dishcloths and several wool flowers I made from scrap yarn (no pics yet for those).

Here’s my mom…we are eating at Applebee's somewhere on the way there. We went on a bus tour, which wasn’t very fun, but we survived it!

Finding this little blue cottage on the right was the highlight of my trip.  Mom and I rented a car and drove to Gales Ferry, Connecticut to see if we could find this little house where my older brother and I were born.  We drove and drove, thinking that perhaps the little house was gone.  We drove past the house four times before we realized this was probably the one! 

More about this later, and I will have pics of Niagara Falls, the ocean and lots of other places we went.  I just wanted to post something to let you all know that I am still here!

Ellen

Yesterday and today I have been traveling by bus to the east coast with my mom. I was born in Connecticut and haven't been back there as an adult, so I am really looking forward to seeing Connecticut. We are now in New Jersey, so I thought I would post a few pics of the great little resort where we stayed last night. The bus ride itself hasn't been very much fun, but we will be there in a few hours.