Memories of a Shirt

This was the result of a weird coincidence. I was looking through old pictures a few months ago, reorganizing mainly, when I realized that, completely by accident, Tony had worn the same shirt to the birth of both of our children. Three years apart and what are the odds? Pretty low actually, as Tony has about 70 t-shirts. As luck would have it, the shirt was still in one piece. M honey is hard on t-shirts. He finally asked me if I wanted him to set the shirt aside before it got ruined. I agreed, and set the shirt with my craft supplies. Well, there it sat for several weeks until this idea came to me.

I picked up this 12×12 shadow box at Wal-mart, along with 4×4 pictures of Tony holding the kids when they were born. It was also sweet looking at the differences in him between the kids being born.

Holding Arthur he was so amazed, that wonder on his face. We were both young when he was born, I was 21 and Tony 23, so he still had his baby face! Sorry about the glare on the frame, there was no good angle, I tried them all!

Then here, three years later, he’s all, “Yeah, they gave me another one!” I made up little slips of paper with the kids names and the date they were born.

When putting the shirt in the frame, I folded it around the fabric backdrop that came with the frame and used safety pins to hold it in place. I couldn’t bring myself to cut the shirt. Then I used more safety pins to attach the pictures. I was going to use straight pins, but I apparently don’t own any. None that I could find anyway!

For giggles, I also added another slip of paper with the date of the project. Tony found this especially amusing.

So what about you? Do you have shirts that hold special memories? Maybe a concert t-shirt? This would work well for a way to display the shirt and a picture of you meeting the band!

Writing with Sparklers

I love playing with my camera! I love taking photos to capture moments in time. Once something happens, it will never be quite the same again. This moment will probably happen again, but I was excited nonetheless, that we could capture it on camera!
I have a nice camera, it’s nothing ultra fancy, but it works great for me!

Not the best picture of the camera itself, but it is a Canon Powershot SX130. Favorite feature overall is the 12x optical zoom!
Again, not the best picture, but on the right hand side, about half way up the camera, you may see the option for ISO. This is the feature I utilized to photograph the sparkler writing.
If your camera has this option, what you want to do is set it to the lowest possible number. I’m sure an actual photographer could tell you exactly what ISO is, but all I can say is that it slows down the shutter speed.
After a but of experimenting, I realized I would have to do one letter at a time. Fancier cameras will enable you to slow down the shutter speed even more, doing longer phrases or designs, but I managed to have fun with mine. Especially utilizing a collage maker afterwards!

This one was a little trickier. I actually used 2 sparklers, one for each side. Took several shots, with Tony manning the camera, but I was pretty pleased with it! For those of you who are Mortal Instruments fans, you can just see Jace inside the heart. It was a coincidence, whether you believe me or not!
Fourth of July has just passed so keep an eye out for good deals on sparklers! Have some fun outside, and bring your camera along!

Bottlecap Magnets

I’ve actually done something similar to this shortly after I began blogging. We started, inadvertently, collecting bottlecaps awhile ago when we hung up the bottle opener Marlboro sent me as a birthday present. I hung a basket under it so Tony didn’t have to keep catching them to throw them away. It’s been working great!

I have always loved repurposing things, and I’ve discovered many new ways to do so through Pinterest.
I also have a great love of putting pictures up around the house! You start by finding some pictures that have a small focal point, like a face or an animal that is 1″ or less in size. The original pinner said to use a 1″ punch-out, but my supplies don’t run to such things, so I just used scissors. If it’s not a perfect circle, that’s fine! Once your picture is small enough to fit in your bottlecap, pour a small amount of mod podge into the cap and press your picture down. Make sure the picture is fully covered.

Don’t worry, your picture will be invisible until it dries. It’s supposed to be like that! The original pinner says to use glue to adhere the picture to the bottlecap, then cover with a glaze. I used mod podge on my previous bottlecap project and that turned out great. Check out those results at https://superstevied.wordpress.com/2013/03/31/cute-little-doo-dad/
Once you have your picture under your layer of mod podge, you’ll have to let it sit, at least overnight, to dry. Once it’s fully dried, so you can see your picture again, cut your magnets to fit the back of your bottlecap. I know the next time I do this, I’m going to buy the heavy duty round magnets so I can use these to hold up assorted items on the fridge.
For now, I can’t wait to see the kids reaction to these magnets in the morning!
Original pin came from http://doitdarling.com/2013/03/02/fridge-magnets-out-of-bottle-caps/

Make your own stationary

You know those lovely stationary sets which have the faint picture in the background? Normally flowers or something generic, they’re pretty, but a little bland. Granted the art of letter writing is all but dead, but I really hope it makes a come back!
I can no longer link to this pin’s original home, but once again, I got lucky and the directions were attached to the pin. Even then, the directions were more like a guideline because my Word program works a little differently.
You start out in Microsoft Word. Go over to insert and click on photo. Once your picture has been inserted, be sure that it fills the full page. Try to pick a picture that is very clearly focused on the subject. An overly detailed photo may not come out clear in the end.
The original pinner gave slightly different directions, which you can view on my board ‘coolness’, my user name is ads061006.
However, I will tell you how I did it. I think it’s actually easier than the original way. It was almost too easy, to the point I wasn’t sure I could blog about this, but it did turn out beautifully!
All you have to do is go to the top of the screen and click on the tab COLOR and pick the faintest one you see. Pick something that looks like a very pale, or ‘washed out’ version of your photo and click on it.
All you have to do to finish up is put some loose leaf paper in your printer and print up your own individualized stationary.
I chose this picture of Tony and I because we are both wearing dark colors and the background was very light. It made for a wonderful background photo. Make sure you allow the ink to dry completely before writing on it.
Granted you wouldn’t want to use this for anything super formal, but I’m thinking down the road for birthday gift thank-yous. Especially if they are personalized with a background picture of the child holding the gift that person gave, or you could do a general one for everyone of your child blowing out birthday candles.
Needless to say, there are a lot of things to use this one for!

Boy picture options

This is another pin that there really isn’t much to say. My son has a lot of cars. I thought about using regular hot wheels, but decided the Pixar Cars would be much more fun.
There are so many of these. You can see a lot of them here, but I probably had enough to do a double layer around his whole body! When Arthur was first born, we decorated his room in Pixar Cars. When we finally moved into our current home (and out of the apartment) we painted his nursery in Cars colors and purchased a ton of Cars. We left them in the packages and hung them around the room like a border.
They stayed up in his room until around the age of 4 when he discovered that standing on his bed, using his Pirates of the Caribbean sword, he could knock them down. Every day, Tony or I would find new car packaging tucked into his drawers or hidden in his closet. So we just had a mini-Christmas and opened them all. Hench the million Cars filling one of his thirty-one bags…….
Laying them out was a lot of fun. He even helped a little, and shockingly, Chiara sat and watched instead of undoing our hard work! I took several shots back to back (the burst setting on my camera is not the best) but this was by far my favorite, especially after putting it into Instagram and playing a little. I got an amusing shot at the end of our puppy seeing what was going on.
After our photo session, Arthur had a good time setting up his own little cars world, so it was a good hour!
This site has several ideas for great boy photo shoots. I loved this one for a little while, but I deliberately made myself wait till I was closer to a birthday for my boy. Now I have his 6 year old photo! I am looking forward to developing this and hanging it up. I hope you guys have fun with whichever idea you decide on and have as much fun as I did!
My inspiration came from here

Cute little doo-dad

This was a nifty little picture I came across while surfing Pinterest one night a while back. It looked a little complicated, but I simplified it a little and it ended up being a lot of fun!
My husband drinks beer so securing the beer caps was the easiest part of this! I have lots of pictures of my children floating around the house so I decided to do a Valentine’s Day theme since I had some cute wallet size portraits left from Chiara’s first Valentine’s pictures.
Mod Podge is just a good thing to have around the house if you enjoy Pinterest. I’ve done several projects involving it so I started buying the big containers! I cut the pictures down to size so my kids faces fit inside the cap and then you put a thin layer down over the pictures. I kind of swirled it around my fingers to make sure it would stick good and proper and that it would be evenly covered. I always manage to forget how white this is when you first lay it down. It did take a while to dry, but as you can see by the finished picture, it turned out great.
The original picture of this project had the caps attached with little metal links and a ribbon tied with a bell at the bottom. Obviously I adjusted to use ribbon and I am very happy how it turned out. This is a quick and easy project and I’m already thinking about making a more Christmas appropriate one to hang on the Christmas tree!
Original picture for idea found here