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Showing posts from January, 2013

Presidents' Day Party...Invitation

I'm throwing a Presidents' Day party and you can too. I'll help you out! We still have a couple of weeks to plan it, so check back often and see what I've posted to help you get ready. Today I'm giving you the invitations. Better print them out and get them sent off soon! Wren P.S., In the coming days, look for posts on food and decorations for the party!

Released back to the universe

Sometimes you know you should get rid of something. But you don't. You hem. You haw. You put off. Never mind that you don't seem to have a space for it. Or a need. Or even a good excuse. You know you ought to move it along and yet you just don't do it. These are the times I remind myself of secondhand treasures I've found. They are things that are meaningful to me, things I love, but I have them only because someone else released them. I found this table in an alley, brought it home, and have moved it from corner to corner in my basement...for several years now. I love its character but it just doesn't fit in my house, or my life. Today I let it go. I was almost certain no one would want it. It's too chippy, too beat up. But I couldn't bear it to go in a landfill, so I put it on Craigslist. I figured it was a very long shot, but with a low asking price, who knows? It didn't even take five minutes before I heard from Kris. She (I figured it

Annual sugar consumption...what's yours?

I've always loved chocolate chip cookies, or as my best friend and I called them, CCCs. We could eat a bag in one sitting. "Chips Ahoy!" Yes, matey, even the name seemed to call to us. We'd wash them down with a gallon of milk and then lay around in our hot, sticky dorm room, lounging off the sugar coma, not even remotely sorry for what we'd done. Uhhhhh, even now I'm feeling the craving coming over me. I don't do crazy things like that anymore. Well, maybe it's a little crazy to keep track of how much sugar you eat in a year. But that's what I'm going to do. I read in an article that the average annual sugar consumption in the U.S. is about 150 pounds. Maybe it's some tiny scrap of competitiveness finally surging within me, but I'm curious as to how I measure up. In this chart published by the USDA, you can see that Americans, on average, consume 65.6 pounds of cane and beet sugar. I'm not sure how I'll compare to that but

Fabric Magnet Tutorial

Writing your New Year's Resolutions or goals for the year is great but almost as important as writing them down is remembering them! So to help you stick them up where you'll see them often, I'm going to show you how to make magnets out of scrap fabric and free advertising magnets.   Start by collecting some magnets. You could also use magnetic tape.    Peel back the plastic-y coating on the magnets. Use your fingernail or an X-acto to get it started. I had better luck with some magnets than others. You don't have to get every tiny scrap off but get as much as you can, while leaving most of the paper coating on. Use the magnets full size or cut them smaller or into interesting shapes. Using regular white glue, put a fair amount on the paper side of the magnet. Use your finger to spread it smooth.    Glue the magnet to the wrong side of some scrap fabric. Cut along the edges of the

How to set goals

 Do you write New Year's resolutions? Here are a few tips for making successful resolutions or setting goals at any time of the year: Goals should be: 1. Measurable The very best goals are measurable and specific. The reason for this is simple: how will you know when you've achieved your goal if there is no clear finish line? It seems obvious and yet this is one of the biggest problems most people have when they set goals. Here are some examples: "Lose five pounds" is better than "Lose weight." "Be able to run three miles and do five pull ups" is better than "Get in shape." "Spend fifteen minutes a day studying" is better than "Learn French." Furthermore, if you just write a goal like "Enjoy life more" or "Be healthier," not only is it hard to know just when you've achieved this, it's hard to even know where to start. It takes more work to write a measurable and specific goal but ju