The first (and second) day of our Advent Calendar

Our Advent Calendar is a series of activities & outings, rather than gifts or chocolate..

The first day - Make our Advent Calendar!

(yeah, ok, that was just because I was too disorganised to have it done in time..)

Each peg has a tiny card with the activity for the day written inside it, and gets opened up & re-pegged each day.

Day 2 - Decorate our Xmas tree!!

(Yes, we have a fake tree... it was $8.47 at Kmart eight years ago.)

We have quite a few homemade decorations on our tree, but making more features quite heavily over the rest of the month (shhh!! secret.)

I'd love to see other people's activity based advent calenders too!!

Instant Organisation Vol.2

1 fat quarter + 2 small pieces of scrap elastic + this pin = a bag bag.

for keeping all those pesky plastic bags, that even us long-term-fastidious-reusable-bag users still seem to acquire, tidy!

I love really fast projects :D

(worst photo ever, sorry.)

My kitchen smells wonderful..

but you wouldn't want to eat what I've been cooking!

I've been wanting to try making these beeswax lanterns for well over a year- 

I had the wax ready & everything! So when another tutorial popped up on Pinterest, I finally gave it a go!!

The beeswax takes quite a while to melt, but apart from that it was quite simple! Once the wax was melted they only took a couple of minutes to make.

Now I have a couple of drops of sunshine on my kitchen bench, pooling & radiating the light, but I bet they'll look fantastic with a couple of tiny candles in them!

Instant organisation

Pillowcase + large embroidery hoop + small hook = laundry bag!!

Our laundry is in a smallish cupboard in the kitchen, which doesn't have room for a big laundry hamper/basket/thingy (ok, so if the thing that you carry your clean washing around in is the basket, what is the thing you toss your dirty washing in called in your house??), and I'm trying to curb my delightful children's habit of tossing their used clothes all over the floor, so this now hangs on the back of their bedroom door for them to pop their washing into!!

Because it isn't sewn into the hoop you can just drop it into the machine at the same time if it is getting musty, and you can replace it with any pillowcase!

And the best bit is that it took all of one minute to make, awesome.

(from this Pin)

The 3 Musketeers..

The walls of our house are a very neutral pale sand/mushroom/chai latte kind of colour, and when they are empty they look EMPTY.

So I made something to put on one of them :-)

Based on this (pinned, of course) tutorial, they're 20x20cm canvases with photographic prints modpodged on. My kids pics didn't really work with the high-contrast treatment in the tutorial though. I chose a green ribbon because since we have those neutral walls (more like the pic below than the photo above) + a heap of timber + charcoaly black furnishings, we decided to use bright blues & greens to brighten the place up a bit, inspired by this palette from Design Seeds!

Lexi was doing her best to be almost ludicrously adorable & endearing in her photo, her little hands clasped together under her chin ever-so-sweetly, until I cropped them off the picture!!

Cushy

Another Pinterest inspired project, a rainbow cushion for our playroom -

from this Design Sponge pin! Mine doesn't look as smooshy, because I haven't put the central button tuft thingy in.. I'm still undecided about it, but since this is intended as a cushion for the kids, I thought a big button in the middle would actually be not so nice for sitting on!

It was fun to make though, and will look wonderful in our rainbow themed playroom!!

(Disclaimer - having a playroom sounds terribly bourgeois, but I swear it's not lol! Our 3 middle-sized kids share a long single bedroom & the baby is in our room, so that we have a room left over as a playroom for all of their stuff... I'm certain it won't seem so spacious when they are 10-18 years old & still all sharing rooms ;-) but we love the current setup!!! )