Okay, first off, the boys wrote their Christmas thank yous already! I told them one day it had to be done, I dug out all the Christmas thank yous we had and when I came home from work there were two haphazard piles of thank yous from each of them. Taite had used the Christmas ones, Brayton didn't notice them stacked up on the table that he sat at with his flowery, formal and quite honestly, boring thank you cards. Oh well, they were done and I only had to say it once!
Today I am mailing them off. I am reading them as I get them prepared to go and for one of their gifts, they received a nice reusable water bottle with a $50 attached (they each got one). Their thank yous read like this:
Taite
Thank you so much for the water bottle! It was awesome!
Love, Taite
P.S. I forgot to thank you for the $50! It was unexpected!
Brayton
Thank you for the water bottle and 50 dollar bill. I will use the water bottle a lot.
Love Brayton
Chris and I both laughed about those :~)
We are slowly making progress in the basement. The plans for the bathroom threw off our progress on Sunday and Chris finally figured out (we were kind of frazzled, so we had cleaned up and were quitting earlier than bedtime) that the door in the plans was bigger than the door on the bath upstairs. With the bigger door, there was not enough room between the vanity and trim around the door for it to all work. We have since got started on the bath, closet and spare bedroom walls. We've burnt out one drill and Chris has recalculated in his head what all the work is going to cost and that has slowed us down even more :~) Good thing we don't need the space and aren't in any hurry!
Monday's are our garbage day and I had told Chris I wanted to save the scraps of wood without blue on them for projects such as this one:
It was created by a crafty gal over at Shanty to Chic (just learned it's pronounced "sheek" ~ guess I'm out of it!) http://shanty2chic.blogspot.com/2010/12/photo-block-tutorial-great-gift.html So, my devoted husband went through all the wood we had thrown in this blue tote and took out the blue tipped pieces and I am now left with this (my own tote of craft wood!)
Projects like the one above will help to use up some of the scrap wood AND I can use my Silhouette! Speaking of my Silhouette, I finally cut something out! I've wanted one of these for so long that when I finally had it, I froze! I didn't want to wreck it or the vinyl I wanted to cut and the options of things to cut are endless, but I really wanted to try some vinyl. It was even panicky to rip the cellophane off the roll of brown vinyl Chris ordered for me to go along with my machine. I know, I'm a geek, but I am somewhat of a perfectionist. I managed to set these expectations aside and cut this:
I was supposed to do a test cut to make sure the settings were correct (thickness of material, right blade, etc.) but I didn't want to ruin a perfectly good piece of vinyl for at test cut, so I ruined a perfectly good piece of vinyl for nothing! I eventually did the test cut on the next attempt only to find out it's barely a 1/2" by 1/2" square it cuts and it's done on the very edge so you don't ruin a perfectly good piece of vinyl. I did manage to salvage the one square of vinyl that wasn't twisted, cut and tortured on my first try.
2nd Attempt:
This went much better, but I still learned something ~ you need a small clear table devoted to this little gem of a machine. It cut all of the word "Blessings" beautifully, but when it got to the last item, the swirly thing, I bumped the vinyl, it fed it in crooked and didn't quite cut it as perfectly as I would've liked. Never fear! I've already checked and the square that I salvaged from attempt #1 will allow me to re cut the swirly thing!! I don't even have paint for my blocks, nor the stain for the edges or pictures printed, but I have my vinyl cut! Hehe! Here's to you and any small obstacles you've overcome!
No comments:
Post a Comment