Recycle Christmas Cards into Postcards

Wait wait wait wait wait! Hold on! I see you, running towards the recycling bin with those Christmas cards of 2012 (you know, the ones with JUST the name signed... no sweet note?)

Hold on!

I have an idea.

Do you want to save a little $$ in 2013 and do your part in helping the environment?

I SAID, do you want to save a little $$ in 2013 and do your part in helping the environment?!

That's right.

It's possible.

Upcycle those Christmas cards - they'll make fantastic post cards in the 2013 holiday season.

Here's what I did.

1. Start a Christmas card scrapbook: every year, insert your favourite notes and photos from Christmas past. Each year you can watch your friends and their kids change and grow. In 2009, our cards read something like "are you enjoying married life?"; in 2011, they were titled "Dear John, Sam & Babygirl" and in 2012, they were brimming with advice about parenting and remembering The Caterpillar's first Christmas. I'm sure 2013 will reflect many life changes, too!

Cut out your favourite notes & photos to save for a scrapbook

 2. Remove the front covers (with no writing on the back).

Remove the card covers

3. Prepare your cards as postcards for Christmas 2013! Save them with your Christmas decorations for next year!

Recycle Christmas card covers as post cards

Adventures in Homemade: Laundry Detergent

Back in June I planned to put together a series called Adventures in Homemade, coinciding with my plans to try to make as many cleaning products as possible in the comfort of my own kitchen.

Well, little did I know that making your own products takes more trial & error learning than I originally bargained for! Because I never quite found the right laundry detergent recipe for me, I needed to make and tweak my own until it was just right for our own needs.

So without further adieu, I bring you... my homemade laundry detergent recipe, adapted from The Family Homestead (I'm sorry but the fact that this website is stuck in 1997 is actually encouraging to me - if she's oldschool, her detergent can't be bad.. right?)

Step 1: Clean Out Old Laundry Soap Containers - 3 3-4L containers is suitable for this double batch

Step 2:  Grate your soap

1/2 a bar of soap is a good amount, grated.

Step 3: Melt Soap in Water, Add Borax & Amaze

In 12 cups of water, melt grated soap. When the soap is melted, add 1 cup of borax and 1 cup of Sunlight Amaze.

Let the mixture cool.

Add 2 cups of just-boiled water to the bottom of each container. Divide soap mixture evenly between containers and add 16 cups of warm water to each container. Shake shake shake shake shake each container!

Let sit overnight / up to 24 hours. The original recipe calls for 1/2 a cup of detergent for 1 load of laundry, but I use about 2 tablespoons per front load of laundry.

Note: Don't use this detergent on cloth diapers - the use of Borax might void your warranty!

How to Plan a Baby Shower (Under $50!)

My beautiful friend Abbie is blooming with baby. There's a little one in her tummy and we get to meet him or her (him..?) this coming November - and I'm so excited! She is going to be one fantastic mother and I just can't wait to watch her rise to the occasion.

Until then.. there's a lull in babytown among my friends. Around February to April, quite a few of us popped out bundles of joy and drool, and as 3, 4, 5 month year olds are now a part of our regular, daily lives, the excitement is calming (for a little while). (I think). (Unless someone has something they would like to share / wine they would like to refuse).

So, what better time to throw a baby shower for Abbie that has all the fixin's: a midsummer's eve, tea, and - wait for it - a theme.

That's right, this past week my most recent dream-event came to fruition: an Alice in Wonderland themed Mad-Tea baby shower! There's a mouthful. Filled with spots of tea and light refreshments, formal invitations and a seating arrangement, I had a blast throwing this one together - and on a budget, too!

Check out how I pulled it off (for under $50):

The Invitations: $5

Print the invitations yourself - and if you can, design them too! I designed a 4-page booklet invitation involving as many Alice quotes I could find. Once printed, I glued the invitations onto a decorative cardstock (100 sheets for $1) and tied them together with ribbon. The invitations were 4 pages each - so altogether, the invites only cost about $5 to print including ink and paper.

The Mailing: $0

Have the Fish Footman distribute the invitations instead of mailing.

The Decor: $25

This is my favourite part.  

Eat me, drink me.
Photos by www.newvintagemedia.ca

Do your own centrepieces. I took a little inspiration from here and a little from here, spraypainted my vast collection of wine bottles (not all mine, I swear) and glued a ribbon around them. Voila. The total cost to do this was $5/spraypaint colour ($15) and $2 for ribbon. Also, tell your friends you're collecting the wine bottles... don't try to establish your own collection!

$1 Garage-Sale teapot.
$5 teacup set.
Photos by www.newvintagemedia.ca

Plan ahead, so you can gather cool theme-appropriate finds in advance on the cheap. Scour Goodwill, garage sales, and your mom's house for little nicknacks which will add a touch of love. Total garagesale / decor expense (non-centrepiece): $6

Nicknacks from the home.
Photos by www.newvintagemedia.ca

 Be consistent with your theme. Get creative.

Photos by www.newvintagemedia.ca

 Take advantage of the dollar store. Sure, these plates don't look the prettiest. I'm aware. For the actual party, we used square pink plates which were slighly sightlier, but they're still plastic plates. The upside? 20 plates for $1. The downside? Waste and un-classiness. The upside? Where am I going to find 20 washable plates that people will actually let me borrow for an outdoor party? The downside? They're plastic. The upside? Nobody notices after you put food on it.

Photos by www.newvintagemedia.ca

 Mix and match setting pieces. I got lucky and found a set of 12 teacups at a garage sale for $5 (which I'm not counting in the total cost because I don't consider them "just for the party"), but on the other tables I supplemented for cute teacups I have around my house.

A key to Wonderland, for Abbie.
Wonderland is now a synonym for Motherhood.
Photos by www.newvintagemedia.ca

 Candle it up. If you can pull off an outdoor party in the evening, use tealight candles as low-cost decor which add a little ambiance. I dove into my already-huge candle collection.

Photos by www.newvintagemedia.ca

Hang stuff from a tree. I mean, come on, you HAVE been on Pinterest lately... haven't you?

Photos by www.newvintagemedia.ca

Have fun. So it's not perfect. So my tablecloths are actually twin sized sheets I stole from mom's linen closet. So we ran out of chairs. We had fun with it!


The Food: $20

Ain't nothin' like a good potluck. I put together a lemonade, a variety of teas, some finger food sandwhiches and a crostini with a balsalmic reduction.

Obviously our lemonade was so delicious it danced around like this.

Lemonade: $3
2 cups lemon juice
2 cups sugar
2 cups water
Mix, and 12 cups of water (or to taste)
Add 3 real lemons (in slices) to make it look like, you know, you used real lemons

Mine looked.. sort of like this! Thanks, All Toasty, for a prettier picture than I could take.

Cucumber & Cream Cheese Sandwhiches: 15 Sandwhiches = Appx. $5
White bread
Cream cheese
Cucumbers (skin cut off) sliced
Tomatoes
Prepare sandwhiches, cut into quarters

These aren't the actual ones I made (but I hope to get a photo real soon!), but they look prettymuch like this!

Balsalmic Reduction Crostinis: 25 Crostinis = Appx. $5
1 loaf of french bread, sliced thinly
2 avocados, sliced thinly
2 tomatoes, sliced thinly in halves
2 cups of balsalmic vinaigrette, boiled down into a reduction
Slices of mozzarella cheese, to your desired thickness/ thinness
Place tomato, avocado and cheese on crostinis and bake at 275 for 40 minutes
Remove from oven, let cool, and drizzle with balsalmic vinaigrette

There's lots of variations on the Crostinis, but this recipe is the most cost-effective / pretty I've found. You can use goat cheese, strawberries, pesto... you name it, you baller you.

Thanks to my friend Alexa for making them cute as pie.

For dessert, I ditched the traditional cake for cake pops - the benefit of cake pops is that you can make hundreds in a few batches and freeze them, which is what I did. I've used my June batch of cake pops for one engagement party and now two baby showers.

Cake Pops: 1 Batch = Appx. $7
Bake a cake mix according to box instructions - let cool, and crumble with fingers. Add 1/2 container of icing and continue blending with hands.
Roll cake pops into balls, lay on cookie sheet, and flash freeze for 30 minutes.
Remove from freezer, place candy sticks in the cake pops, and flash freeze overnight.
Melt baking chocolate, pour over cake pops, freeze for 1 hour.
Drizzle another flavour / colour of baking chocolate over cake pops, freeze for 30 minutes.
Serve or freeze.

Potluck
For the remainder of the food, 3 other ladies brought some cake loafs - to satisfy the sweet tooth. In future, I should probably ask what flavour they're bringing, because we ended up having 3 (albeit very different) blueberry loafs!

The Games: $0

To keep costs low on the games, we kept it simple and fun. The first game involved a pack of playing cards and a little impromptu headbandz: guests had to guess whether the object / character assigned to them was Alice in Wonderland related or baby related... and then had to figure out what it was. That went very smoothly!

The second (and last) game involved a few water balloons and some brave ladies. In typical relay race fashion, we all had to get from Point A to Point B and back with a little challenge (between our legs). Putting a filled up water balloon between our legs, we had to shimmy our selves around until our water broke - "where" it broke on the course indicated when Abbie's will break when, you know, everything goes down. In everyone's case, it was at the end!

Here is a great list of other fun baby shower party games which cost little to nothing!

Adventures in Homemade: Aloha, Borax.

Arbonne. If you will, please say that word with me aloud, with a rrroll on the rrr. Arrrbonne. Here is a company I've heard so much about yet knew so little about, for so long. No, I'm not trying to sell you anything here, (and no, I'm not a consultant) but if you don't know what Arbonne is, I can sum it up by saying they are a company which caters to (mostly women) looking for high quality skin care products with less garbage than your average storebought cream / gel / moisturizer / whatever.

A few weeks ago, I attended my first Arbonne O'Naturel night at a friend's house and learned, you know, the stuff we hate to learn about the contents of our daily products. Essentially, my shelf of skin care products is um, carcinogenic, to say the least.

So, home I went, tail between legs, with the intention to throw out every single product on my shelf... and replace them, stat. But then there was a little financial reality check and a husband who is ever so good at bringing me back down to earth and those two things got me on track. I decided to make a plan to reduce the carcinogens I'm exposing my skin (and therefore, bloodstream) to on a daily basis.

Here's a list of the stuff I actually use - which means the contents actually make their way in my body:

1. Shampoo / conditioner.
2. Facial moisturizer
3. Body moisturizer
4. Makeup
5.  Dish soap
6. Laundry soap
7. Nailpolish
8. (My hubby uses) Hair wax
9. Lip balm
10. Soap

Some of these products are very complex (like nailpolish) and should really be purchased from a supplier who uses as many natural ingredients as possible (Arbonne being one of a few great options). However, not all of these things are out of my reach. So I've decided to embark on the adventures of homemade: turning my kitchen into a laboratory and creating my own homemade personal products.

Over the next summer months, join me in the successes (and probably failures) of homemade personal products. This week, look out for my first creation:

homemade laundry detergent.

(Also. If you do want to just buy Arbonne products, I know a lady and would be happy to hook you up!)

DIY: A Wreath for the Warm Weather

Since having the baby, my time is a little more constricted than it was in my part-time-job pregnancy. Which has really challenged my new addiction to DIY crafts, now more realistically DIYRF (Do It Yourself Really Fast). That said, here's a new quick DIY spring wreath which now graces the front door of our little home.

Step 1: Pick an Empty Wreath

 We got our door wreath from a boutique in town and have decorated it according to each season.

 This cute little wreath can be found for $1 at Dollarama!

Step 2: Choose an Assortment of Flowers

For the sake of not having to replace them weekly, I chose to go with faux flowers. 

 Find a pair of wire cutters and snip off the flowers to your desired length...

Step 3: Arrange
...and arrange them on your wreath.  

 If you're looking for something a little more permanent, glue the ends of the flowers to the inside of your wreath. If, like me, you want to keep changing it up according to the season, fasten the flowers with bobby pins.

Step 4: Display!

Nursery Reveal!

A few months back in January, I did my own little Pinterest-styled blog (I was still waiting on my acceptance letter, haha!) about my dreams for our babygirl's nursery. Take a look, it's very idyllic. If you can achieve that look, YOU WIN.

I'll be honest, I don't WIN but I'm pretty happy with how The Caterpillar's room has turned out. I was actually able to use many of the ideas I had dreamed of - including the poster with her initial, lots of fun colours (although we still have yet to jazz up the dresser drawers), fun wall decals, a DIY mobile, and a paper-heart garland.

Our budget for this nursery was simple: keep things as cheap as possible. We love babygirl but she doesn't know her room isn't haute couture.

That said, check it out!

This room graces a dresser set donated directly from John's childhood bedroom, a set of mixed media ABC/123 wall decor (yarn and Cheerio box), a series of plush toys we have been gifted or that have survived our childhoods, and a series of framed photographs or prints which look pretty dang cute.

In this room, you will also find a second-hand crib (excellent quality), a hand-made mobile featuring contrasting colour tones (sure to catch baby's eye), a double bed we kidnapped from my mom's house, a papercutting craft made by The Caterpillars very own Godmother Stacey, and a wide variety of children's books. You'll also find a change table some random person graciously left at the Swaziland Book Drive drop-off centre which Stacey & Andrew so dearly stuffed into their car... somehow.

You can purchase one like this at the Etsy Shop.

There is nothing like getting innovative with space.

A Little Inventory

Hello all! For the next 72 hours, I'm accepting suggestions for feel-good quotes & bible verses to turn into posters for an Etsy shop I'm hoping to start soon (hoping!) with a collective of local crafty ladies.

You make a suggestion, & if I use that suggestion, I'll send you your hi-res poster through e-mail so you can print it - simple as that!

DIY: Thank-You Notes from Gift Bags

Yesterday I was thrown a really wonderful baby shower by a group of friends that I hold so dear. For the record ladies, not only do John and I appreciate the super thoughtful and loving and wonderful gifts, we appreciate all of your encouragement, support and excitement over this time of our lives. Thank you!

Today I set out to find a great DIY thank-you card pattern, but instead I ended up making my own out of some of the gift bags I received yesterday. I was inspired by a friend who made Christmas ornaments out of Christmas cards she was given this year! Re-re-recycle.

Anyway... you can do it, too. Here's how:

You need:

• Cutesy gift bags (or pre-used card covers - pre-used is the point, if you want to keep it free)
• Cardstock (regular paper will also work)
• Scissors
• Glue
• Envelopes
• Pen

Step 1: Choose your gift bags

Like this one! To make 12 cards, I used 3 medium-sized gift bags

 Step 2: Cut out your cards & paper / cardstock
Trace your envelope with a piece of cardstock to make sure you're not making your cards larger than your envelope. Then, trace that rectangle onto all of your gift bags & cut out.

A gift bag with no heart. Aww, poor gift bag.

Step 3: Fit and cut your cardstock to be a little smaller than your gift bag cutout. That way you get a cute border!

Gift bag (left) should be smaller than cardstock (right) so the cardstock becomes a border (like in the cards above)

Step 4: Find the ugly, crinkled parts of your gift bag & cover them up!

Write "thank you" (or any other small note) on a piece of paper & place it over any crinkly parts

Adding wool would be another creative way to cover up the crinkly bits - source

Step 5: Glue it all together & add cut-out shapes to the back of your card

 Step 6: Write your note & pop it in the mail. Who doesn't love mail?

I don't not love mail.