Gingerbread Competition!

This year my siblings wanted to do something as a family other than music, so they set up a family gingerbread competition!  They got everything set up and all I had to do was show up and be creative.  It was so much fun!  And we all got a little competitive:

 This is my sorry attempt at making the Hogwarts Castle, complete with Hedwig, a dragon, and the Quidditch Pitch.

 My sister tried to make the manger scene and ended up putting them in an igloo instead of a stable.

 This is my little Hedwig.

 ... and Hogwarts before it snows.

Since my dad drives a school bus for a living, he decided to make one!

This is Halloween...

This Halloween I did what I have been wanting to do for many years.  Since I nanny and take care of kids on a daily basis, and I used to carry a giant bag that had anything you could think of in it, I used to fancy myself Mary Poppins.  I have actually been called Mary Poppins by family and close friends, so I decided to take it and run with it this year!  My entire costume cost $30 this year, as I bought most of it from Deseret Industries and other thrift stores.  I made the umbrella handle and the hat, and I borrowed the carpet bag from a friend.  I think it all came together pretty dang good!  One of the best things was hearing my students get so excited about my costume.  They couldn't remember the name of who I was, since none of them had ever seen the movie Mary Poppins. One of my students ended up calling me Harley Popper!  So cute.

#RedForEd

I write this here because I want to get this out, but I don't want to inundate people with it on social media.  I tend to post a lot about the #RedForEd movement that is happening right now, and that is because I believe in it 100%.  Here is why:

When I was a little girl, my favorite thing to play was school.  I would use stationary paper from my grandpa's CPA office as assignments for my dolls, and then I would "grade" them.  I knew, even then, that I wanted to become a teacher.  As I got older, school was like a second home to me.  I loved being there, learning new things and being able to help others do the same.  It seemed like every teacher knew me, and my teachers were my heroes.  They still are.  I would sit and chat with them before and after school as I helped them grade papers or set things up for the next lesson.  In high school, I began to notice how things around me were being affected by the budget cuts in schools.  Pretty soon that was all you heard about, and it was the main topic of many of mine and my friend's discussions during lunch. We knew what was happening.  In volunteering to help with elementary school orchestras, I quickly found that the fine arts program's funding was very slim to none, and that that was the first thing on the chopping block in the next round of budget cuts.  In high school and college, I campaigned at concerts, assemblies, and on social media about keeping the fine arts in our schools, because that is one of the things that our kids need the most!  Unfortunately, this was a battle lost.

Over the last ten years, I have desperately wanted to become a teacher, because that is who I was born to be.  It is not a choice for me, it is a calling.  However, I have taken so many other routes in college trying to steer clear of this profession because I knew the outcome was not a financially stable career.  Heck, I changed my major in college eight times trying to figure out what else I could do that would measure up to even a fraction of what the teachers do on a daily basis, but that could pay me more.  I went and got a Bachelor's degree, with two minors and a language certificate, and that still wasn't enough.  I needed to be a teacher.  I am currently a paraprofessional in an elementary school and I love every minute of it.  In addition, I have decided to go back to school to pursue my lifelong dream of becoming a teacher, and I am working on classes to get my teaching certificate in Special Education. I know that there are lives of students that I can change for the better, because my teachers were the ones who changed my life.  Sadly, I can't even go and visit my former teachers anymore because most of them left not long after I graduated. With this in mind,  I know that funding public education should be the top thing on the governor and legislator's lists right now, but it is not.  They have tried to ignore us, to shove us out and write us off as greedy, among other fun name-calling endeavors they have decided to pursue. This is not okay with me.  This is not only un-professional of them, but it is personal for me.  The way that our state government is acting right now tells me that they never cared about my education while growing up in AZ, and they don't care about me now as an individual who is doing everything in her power to make sure that the children she comes into contact with on a daily basis have a better and brighter future because of their education. Our schools desperately need more funding, and that is what we are fighting for!  #RedForEd  #SaveOurSchools

Post-Halloween Post: Part 2

As if it wasn't hectic enough at this time of the year with everything going on, my brother asked me to make his costume, too!  And it was actually kind of fun to do, but it definitely stretched my limits as a seamstress.  He told me he wanted to be Dr. Strange, and we got set to work!  The under shirt and pants were easy to do: we just had to find a long-sleeved, navy blue dress shirt and navy blue dress pants.  These we found at Deseret Industries Thrift Store for, like, $2 each.  Then came the over-thingy.  It's not really a shirt, but it's not really a cape or anything like that either.  I guess it's more like a wrap.  Anyway, we found an old dress at Deseret Industries for $3 that looked kind of like a sailor's dress, with the big shoulder pads in it.  It was great.   It kind of looked like this.

Then, I taught my brother how to use a seam ripper and he ripped out all of the white trim, cut off the sleeves and cut down the middle so that we could make it into a wrap.  We saved the sleeves and cut those into big, long strips so that we could wrap them around the arms and legs of the costume.  He then used old boots from a former Halloween costume, and he ordered the belt and the pendant off of Amazon.  The last step was the cape.  The dang cape that took me TWO MONTHS to make.  This was the bane of my existence, but it really turned out well.  It is made from three different kinds of red fabric, one with no decor, and two with decor.  It has an lining, and exterior, and a border around the entire cape, as well as the shoulder patch, the neck patch, the standing collar, and most of the sewn-in designs on the exterior of the cape.  I had to sew the front so that it rested nicely on his shoulders while looking like there was little to no effort in holding it on.  Then, I sewed on some red straps that instead of tying in the front (because that would look tacky), he looped them under his arms and tied them behind his back.  When everything was all said and done, all he had to do was draw on the facial hair and add some white streaks to his sideburns and voila!

... and that concludes this portion of the Post-Halloween Posts!  Until next time, this is your DIY-er, Lindsay, signing off.

Post-Halloween Post: Part 1

I've been making my own Halloween costumes for about four years now, and each year I get a little bit more frugal (meaning not spending hundreds of dollars on so many things before actually figuring out what to do) and a little bit wiser (meaning knowing where to find certain things for really great prices, or even for free!).  This year I wanted to keep things more simple, and I had had the idea in my head for several months before I actually had the time to get started on my costume, and that idea was: Belle.  Most of the time, when one does Belle for Halloween, they do the big, foofy yellow ballroom dress that she dances in with Adam (the Beast).  I favor her simple frock, or her "before" dress, as everyone was calling it.  It goes with the song in the beginning of the movie that has the lyrics, "... but behind that fair facade, I'm afraid she's rather odd.  Very different from the rest of us, that Belle."  I have always felt this way, and have many times been called odd, weird or different, and I used to think that it was a bad thing, but now I embrace it!  Belle has always been my favorite Disney princess because she is the one I could identify with the most, and this year I was her for Halloween!  So enough about me; let's get to the costume!

I started shopping around for material or for a dress that would be easily altered into Belle's "before" frock.  I ended up finding this prom dress in the Halloween section of a Goodwill and got it for $5!  It totally had rhinestones and beadwork all down the front of it that I had to take out before I even thought about altering it.  

That, alone, took me a good few hours, so I watched me some "Gilmore Girls" while working on it.

I took out all of the little stitches that were holding the bottom "swooshes" of material in place and I cut off the top part of the dress, so that I was left with a skirt that was about 10 inches too long.  I measured and cut according to my height and waist, and then I hemmed the skirt and sewed a folded strip of a white bed sheet that I also got from Goodwill for, like, $2, onto the bottom hem of the undercoat of the skirt.  That was the easy part.

The hard part was next, trying to figure out how to make the part of the dress from the waist, up.  Eventually, I figured out how to use the leftover material from the extra-long skirt that I had to make the part that wrapped around me, and then I simply folded some of the same-color material and sewed it on for the dress straps.  The finishing touch of the dress was sewing a zipper on the back so that I could actually get in and out of the dress, although I couldn't do it on my own, and things got interesting when no one was around to help me zip or unzip!

After the actual dress was done, I cut and sewed the apron out of the same white bed sheet from Goodwill, and I got the white shirt from Deseret Industries for $2.  The shirt was long-sleeved, so I had to cut and hem the sleeves.  There was a big froofy (yes, I like this word) ribbon design on the front of the shirt that I had to take off, as well as the buttons, and then I sewed open the collar to make it look more square.  Adding the finishing touches of the blue bow, the hair and makeup, and my basket and book props, and I was good to go!

PS, I think this is what Belle would have looked like had she been drawn in the 21st Century...

Stay tuned for my next post on my brother's costume!

Mesa Temple Painting Update

So this is an update from a post I did back in June of last year.  I had some free time last summer, and I wanted a picture of either Christ or a temple up in our home, but everything that was framed was way out of my price range.  Then I got the idea to make one of my own.  The blog post from June was my drawing of it, but I am updating it here because my fabulously talented artist of a roommate, Chelsea Curran, decided to paint it right after I "done messed up."  I prefer drawing with pencil or charcoal, and she prefers painting (or at least is amazing at it!), so here is my drawing and her painting:

I am so happy to say that this work of art is now hanging on our wall, and I absolutely LOVE it!!

Music Hutch

So this post is somewhat normal... I think.  I have a tendency to start projects, like three or four at a time, and then not be able to finish them until much later.  That is exactly what happened with this one!  About a year ago I bought a small hutch off of a consignment site for about $25.  I was going to do great things with it, and I did, but the whole project took about a year to complete.  This hutch was very battered and worn.  It had no backing on it, and the former owner had painted it black because it seemed too far gone to save.

I bought this hutch to replace the drawers that I keep my music in because the drawers were full and I was accumulating music faster than I ever have, being both a choir director and taking part in another choir on the side.  The goal was to have something that I could display in my house that would look nice and go with the decor.  Then, about two months later, I decided that I always did things the conservative way and that I should shake it up a bit!  So instead of doing the olive green, sandstone tan and fiesta red, I got really whimsical and chose teal, purple and white!  Yeah, it didn't go with anything in my house, but that is what a sunroom is for, right?!  Anywho, I was able to take this hutch from all black, strip it, sand it, paint it and seal it, and I LOVE IT!


This is before:

This was the stripping process:

This was the priming process:

This was the first coat of paint:

And this was the final coat of paint, the sealant and the finished product!:

At the risk of making it look more like a dress-up closet for little girl's dresses, I added a little silver lining to the front doors to make them pop!

Even though this was fun, I don't think I will be doing such a big project anytime in the future.  But I will be posting Halloween costumes soon!