Stick Figure Family Tree Ornaments

Yesterday, my little girl told me that she wanted to make some ornaments for the Christmas tree. We didn't have a lot on hand to work with, but I knew I had a nice little stash of glitter she could have fun with, and I knew I could make salt dough. Considering what other crafting supplies I had squirreled away, these are what came to my mind. Consider them a medium difficulty level, as my six year old daughter made them with (a lot of) help from me.

Supplies:
Salt dough:
       1 cup flour
       1/2 cup salt

       Water to consistancy
Food Coloring
Size 2 jewelry wire
White craft paint
Pink Paint (I used pink glitter nail polish)
Fine point Sharpie or gel pen
White glue
Paint brushes
Assorted glitter
Clear Acrylic Spray

Step 1: 
Mix the dough and separate out enough egg-yolk sized balls to make the bodies. We have six family members, so we made six bodies. Make sure you have a good consistency. You may need to add more flour or more water, to keep the dough from being too sticky or too grainy.

Fold in food coloring and knead until the color is uniform. I didn't use gloves, as you can see, and my fingers are now pink.

Step 2:

Form the bodies into pear shapes. These do not need to be completely perfect, but try to get them symmetrical. They will puff out a little during baking.

Take plain white dough, the size of a hominy kernel, and form the head.







Step 3:
Take a one inch piece of jewelry wire, form a coil on one end and push it up into the head, to form a neck. Then push the other end into the body.

A small round tube, the size of a lolly pop stem is the perfect diameter to wrap the jewelry wire for all purposes of this project.

For the ladies, since we have curly hair, I wrapped two inch pieces of wire to form ringlets. I then pressed four of them into the top of the head.

On all ornaments, make a coil on one end of a one inch piece of jewelry wire, and press it down into the top of the head. This is for the hanger.

Step 4:
Cut two 4 inch pieces of jewelry wire to make the legs and arms.

Press these all the way through the body, near the head and at the bottom.

Step 5:
With each ornament complete with legs, arms, hair for those who have it, and hanger hooks, they are ready to bake.

Put them into the oven at 250F for four hours.

Step 6:
Although the heads of the ornaments were white before and after baking, I felt that giving them a couple of coats of white acrylic craft paint gave them a more even surface. However, it is not completely necessary.

Curl the ends of the arms and legs into circles for the hands and feet.  I used a gel pen to draw on the eyes, noses and mouths, in a Charlie Brown inspired style.

Paint a small dot of pink glitter nail polish on each cheek, to give it an antiquated blush. Plain pink paint will also work.

Step 7:
When making the bodies, I made sure that I created colors that corresponded to the glitter I had put away. Because it was likely that there would be holes in the glitter, I wanted to mask it as much as possible.

Water down the white glue to make it easier to paint onto the bodies, and be sure to use a glue that will dry clearly. You want to be careful not to saturate the salt dough, get a good coverage.

Quickly sprinkle on the glitter and try to get it as even as possible.

Use a dry paint brush to dust away any glitter from the face. Gently spray it with a couple of light coats of the clear enamel, to set the glitter and keep it from flaking off.

Place a cord through the hanger hooks, clean away any stray glitter from the faces, arms and legs, and your little stick figure ornaments are ready to hang on your tree!

My Fall Favorites! My Best Fall Posts

It's Fall! It's finally here!

I first noticed Fall one day last week when I saw a small yellow leaf on the floor of the dining room. Since then, I've been checking for more signs every day. Sure enough, the very next day, there was a sprinkling of leaves when the wind kicked up while we were playing in the backyard with our friends. Three days ago I saw the first spots of red on the slope of trees opposite my house. And today - officially, is Fall!

To celebrate, I have compiled all of my favorite Fall Posts from the last two years. My favorite Fall recipes, crafts and activities.




Fall Recipes:
Whole Wheat Cheese Raviolis with Apricot Squash Sauce
Apricot Squash Soup with Grilled Provolone Sandwiches
Vegetarian Chili With Meat Alternative
Nonfat Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies
Nonfat Crab and Squash Chowder


Fall Festivities:
A Yard For Harvest
Seed Saving How and Why

Fall Crafts:
Harvest Wreath
Sweater Legs
Cable and Ribbed Glove Pattern
Table Centerpieces From Found Natural Materials
Embroidered Heirloom Pillows

Harvest Wreath

Fall is absolutely my favorite time of year. The outdoor temperatures become more comfortable, the insects diminish, and the colors of the landscape here in Missouri are exquisite as the fog rolling in on a cool autumn morning.

I feel peaceful and relaxed at the idea of hunkering down for the winter. Harvest season is less than a month away!

As I shared in this post last year, one of my favorite fall activities is seed collecting. Visiting parks, the woods, even walking around my neighborhood usually culminates in a rather large collection of seeds to stash away.


As I wrote in this post, another of my of my favorite things to do in the fall is to harvest my yard. Not only the edible parts, but the grasses and twigs for my fireplace, weeds and wild flowers to make centerpieces and arrangements, and my unruly, out of control wild grape vines to make wreathes and other decorations.

This prolific vine gets cut back every fall and regrows in the spring. I think it's rather pretty, even though it's a messy thing. It's worth it to me to keep it because I can make pretty wreathes out of it.

This year, I have not been enjoying the outdoors quite so much. I decided to make a new wreath, but rather than collect my decorations before hand, I have decided to hang the wreath bare with only a simple cotton print and denim bow.

This autumn, as the landscape changes, we will look for our decorations for it and collect them on our walks while we are gathering our seeds. Anytime we see something pretty or interesting, we will collect it and bring it home. I am hoping this will motivate me to get out more and enjoy the lovely temperate weather. I'll update pictures of it on my facebook page, http://www.facebook.com/TheyAreAllOfMe, as it begins to fill up!

Growing A Yard For Harvest

I love to have a manicured yard. I want my yard to look good so that when I come home, I am arriving at a beautiful and uplifting place.

Growing native flowers is one way to achieve this with minimal fuss and no watering or chemicals. It's also important that I find my plants for free, and amassing my collection of native plants is something that I am always working towards. With many of my local parks growing native flowers, and no shortage of interesting flowers growing along the roadside, collecting seeds for my yard is both simple and exciting!

One thing that is just as important to me as having a nice looking yard is to have a yard that is useful. Again, growing native flowers is a useful way to garden because it benefits the local eco system and attracts beneficial insects and feeds the birds, squirrels and wild life. But native flowers are not only nice to look at and good for the environment, they make nice dried arrangements in the fall and can be used in many ways. Some wild flowers are edible like Queen Annes Lace (wild carrot) or have medicinal uses, like Echinacea.





I grow flowers with the ultimate goal of harvest. Even my ornamental rose bushes have a purpose aside from being pretty. I can make potpourri out of the blooms after they just reach their peak, and then I can blend them up to make rose beads for jewelry making.

Growing a yard for harvest naturally means growing a yard that is abundant in food. I would love some day to have a yard in which I can walk out into and pick a wide variety food to eat. I have my vegetable patch, my herb garden and my strawberry bed. I also have a hazelnut tree that I will find a mate for soon so that in a few years I will have loads of hazelnuts to snack on and cook with.

Nature offered me a blackberry bush earlier this year, that just sprouted in my yard and 75% of my vegetable garden volunteered itself, from the compost that I created from my kitchen scraps. I planted the cucumber and the bed of lettuce, but Nature decided to give me 3 squash plants, 2 pumpkin vines, 7 garlic plants and over twenty tomato plants. Yes, Nature is very, very good to me and I know how to use my bit of Earth.

One day I plan to have a small orchard, of four to six fruit trees, and I have a large currently unused area designated to grow others types of berries, apart from the blackberries I already have. But it's important to me to have a yard that is useful in many ways - not just pleasing to look at or delicious to eat, even more than a space for the children to play.

There are plants in my yard which are only grown for some sort of functional purpose.


I have an ash tree that was cut down to the stump a year ago because it was badly placed and would soon grow into the chain link fence. The sugars built up in the roots allowed it to sprout several upright branches, turning the tree into a bush. I noticed this when the shoots were small and could be snipped easily, but I quickly realized the potential in them. I allowed to shoots to grow tall, for they are straight and pliable. We have used them to roast marshmallows and hotdogs over the fire pit, and they are also useful for building natural trellises for vining plants. Cutting them down every fall will allow new shoots each spring to be used for many things throughout the next growing season. Because they are very bendy, they can be easily shaped and I am currently considering what types of things might be created from them.

I have a slope in my back yard that is a great place to allow the grass to grow in the late fall and get nice and tall. We purposely stop mowing it in early September. There are some weeds that grow in it, that once dried make nice floral arrangement along with the native wild flowers, but what I'm really after is the grass. In the late afternoon when there is no moisture on it, I will reap the grass and form it into little bundles. These are for my fire place during the winter. We also trim the trees back when the summer begins to get hot and the rapid growth of spring dies down. The limbs will then be cut into 8 inch long sections and dried out for fall, to become kindling. In the winter when I want to start my fireplace, which I tend to do daily, I grab a nifty little bundle of dried grass from the stack, and handful of the dried twigs. Getting the fireplace going is pretty easy with them, no need for fancy store-bought starter logs or supplies.

All along my chain link fence are many types of vines. But the vines I am especially interested in are the wild grapes. They are either too old to produce, or they are a naturally barren variety.
I don't grow them for the fruit, I don't even like grapes. I want the vines. These are invasive and unruly, however, I cut them down to their trunks in the fall, pull off all of the leaves and use the vines to make natural decorations, like wreathes to be decorated with fall leaves or Christmas baubles.

There is also my water garden, where I grow bulrushes and cattails. The long slender leaves of the cattail plants are great for decorating, lashing and I keep meaning to get around to weaving them into baskets or placemats. It's on my to-do list.

I do not consider myself an urban homesteader, and I have no desire to live on a farm at this point in my life. But utilizing my space in the most useful way possible just makes sense to me. Nature is very giving when you let it do it's thing.

Turn a T-shirt into Short Workout Pants

"I really am enjoying my new job. In my first training session, they said that they call us "industrial athletes." This is no joke! My job is to load packages into the back of a truck. The boxes are often heavy and they want you to move them as quickly as you can.

It's extremely physical. Squatting, lunging, lifting, reaching and placing heavy packages at a rapid (aerobic) pace for approximately three hours solid per shift, is quite an enviable workout and had a lot to do with why I chose to apply for this job.

My first night on the dock, I wore a tank top and a pair of jeans. I quickly wished I hadn't! The denim is too hot, too constricting and every time I squatted or lunged, I mooned everyone behind me. My second night on the dock, I wore a pair of running capris and was so thankful that I did. I decided to get a whole wardrobe of workout capris and T-shirts.

The thrift store had a few workout/yoga pants that were in my size, but I had to modify the length. Otherwise, I realized I could make new running capris out of large T-shirts!

Here's what you need:
T-shirt, at least a size large
Sewing machine (hand stitching won't cut it with this project).
Elastic (you can recycle from old clothing)
Thread
Pins
Scissors

To begin with, choose the appropriate sized shirt. The size of the shirt you'll need is determined by the size of your hips and backside. Consider the length. Consider what you want to do about a waste band.
My median size is a 10, and a mens size large is enough to make a basic pant for me. The red shirt pictured was a 2XL and there was enough leftover fabric on each side too make a waste band if I wanted. I'll describe that later.

Fold your T-shirt in half down the middle, with the sleeves together.

Take a fair amount of care to smooth it out with your hand as much as possible. Working with knit can be a little tricky, as it stretches and pulls out of shape easily. When we're talking about pre-worn T-shirts, it should be expected that there will be some wonkiness right off the bat. Just go with it and gently hand press it, moving the bulky places out of the way.

You can take your measurements and draw up a pattern if you like, but I just grabbed a pair of knit work out pants that fit me the way I like.

Lay your workout pants (or similar pattern) on top of the T-shirt as this picture shows. It is really important that the portion that is the outside of the legs lines up with the folded side of the T-shirt. That is because you are going to have only one inner seam on the leg of your pants. No need to waste time and thread by adding unnecessary seams! Besides, if you have a logo or design on the front of your shirt, this will simply be placed on the side of your pant and not look too weird. You may notice also as this picture shows, that the bottom of the pant lines up with the bottom of the T-shirt. This means your pants are pre-hemmed! Cool, right? I know!

When you cut, you want to account for your seam allowance. I only wanted a quarter inch seam, so I made sure I cut that far from the outside edge of my (pattern) pants.

You're cutting through four layers of T-shirt, and therefore you are cutting both pieces you need to make your pants. Sewing goes pretty quickly.

Each piece that you have is a pant leg. Fold each one in half vertically, with right sides together. Make sure you match the sides evenly. They should be symmetrical.

Pin up the leg, stopping right when you get to the point that is the crotch.

These pants are meant to fit snuggly, and your seams will take a lot of pulling - especially if you're using them for working out.

The last thing you want is your seam to rip open while you're jogging down the street, in the middle of a yoga session or working the leg press at the gym. I know I don't want to have my co-workers laughing at me endlessly because my pants split open in front of everyone!

Each and every seam is doubled and tripled. Two straight seams, about a millimeter apart, and a zig-zag stitch that is evenly straddling the outside straight stitch. I then very carefully trimmed away the excess fabric, to within two millimeters of the seam.

Once you have your pant legs sewn and threads trimmed, you'll want to turn them right side out. This photo is an error, I started pinning with the pant legs inside out and realized that If I had sewn them that way, the seam that joins them would have been on the outside.

Once the pant legs are inside out, match up the seams at what will become the crotch (I hate that word!)

Pin the two pieces together and just as you did when you sewed the pant legs closed, sew a quarter inch seam using a straight stitch. Sew a second parallel stitch a millimeter apart and then zig-zag down the middle of the outer stitch. Trim off the excess fabric.

After you have the two halves of your pants joined, you want to try them on. If they are too loose, you can take them in. If they don't come up high enough, you can add an extra long waste band.

I recycled elastic from old clothing. On the gray pants that have the logo, I chose to do a waste band because they seemed to be to short and would pull down in the back during squatting. I could have used the scraps leftover from the red shirt, and this would have looked quite nice. However there was an ugly old gray sweatshirt that has been sitting in the recycle pile for a while and I chose to take the waste band off of it because it matched so well. I cut the elastic to the length that I needed, enfolded it into the waste band and sewed it together. I then pinned this band, with right sides together, to my pants and sewed it with a double straight stitch and a zig-zag. Trimming off the excess thread, these pants were done!

The red pants were plenty high in the waste, and I decided that I wouldn't bother with a waste band. I didn't care to have a hem, either. I know that having the elastic showing makes them look like ridiculously long underwear, but I don't mind. My shirt will cover the elastic.

I did want to make the point, however, that they may well function as long underwear! You can have them as leggings in the colder months, wear them under skirts, whatever you like.



These pants were so easy to make, I can see making many of them in the future! Whenever I find myself running short on work-out pants, I can just grab a few big T-shirts from the thrift store or my husbands dresser and whip a few up!

Easy DIY Clothespin Bag

 
 
This bag was made using materials I had on hand, and took less than 20 minutes.

Materials:

1 child's ruined T-shirt, size 5 or close to.

1 metal coat hanger, or arm length piece of wire of similar gauge and width.

Needle and thread or sewing machine.

Pair of pliers.

My daughter was so sad when she ruined this T-shirt. I was too, it was the first time she wore it. We don't throw away fabric if it is in decent condition, because we know that we can always make something from it.

I've been in need of a new clothes pin holder and decided to use the shirt for that.

You can use a child's T-shirt, trim down an old pillow case, or make yourself a pouch from scratch. Whatever works for you!

I have made a few of these over the years and prefer the child's T-shirt because we usually always have one around to serve the cause - and because they are the correct width so as not to need to sew the sides or hem the opening.

It may be difficult to tell in this picture, but I flipped the T-shirt inside out and then sewed alongside the seams of the sleeves and across the top, just beneath the collar.

I straight stitched it, and then zigzagged on what would be the outside edge to prevent fraying. If you cannot zigzag, I would at least double stitch it as the bulk of the clothespins will be hard on the seam.

Trim away the sleeves and neck opening after sewing.

Using a pair of pliers, open up your coat hanger and stretch it out. You want the length of wire to be approximately 2 to 3 feet - or an arms length.

Fold the wire in half and pinch it with the pliers.

Three and a half inches from the bend, begin twisting the two sides together as you see in the photo. Give it a couple of twists.

Now take your doubled over end and shape it into a hook. Make sure your hook comes down low, and nearly meets the twist. There may be times when your bag is swaying in the wind and you don't want it to fly off of your clothesline!

You now have a bag instead of a T-shirt. The opening of your bag is already hemmed for you! On the inside of this hem, pop two little holes, about half an inch apart to feed the ends of your wires through the hem.

Make sure that you feed both wires through the hem simultaneously, and pop them out of the other side of the bag.

After you've popped the wires out of the other side of the hem, use the pliers to loop them around each other as shown.

Bend the wires as needed to form a hoop at the opening of your bag.

You may now fill the bag with clothespins and hang it on your clothesline. There, it can slide along the line with you and you won't have to bend over to pick them up!

So... You Wanna Build a Water Garden?

I'm something of an addict when it comes to water gardens. I think I enjoy building them as much as I enjoy looking at them. Before I move onto the building, let me tell you why I must always have one.

Water gardens are ridiculously easy to grow. You practically have to try to mess them up. Trimming the plants back in the fall and mucking it out in the spring (that's a really gross chore, actually) is all of the maintenance it requires. I used to think a water garden had to have hundreds of dollars of electrical gear to maintain it. And believe me, there is no shortage of that stuff on the market! Leaf skimmers, UV filters, regular filters... it's a little crazy. Not to mention all of the chemicals you're supposed to dump in it. But, to be honest, I've just let them be for the most part and they get along quite well without me.

Water gardens attract and nourish local wild life. We usually always have tadpoles in the spring, and a resident bullfrog. The birds can get a bath or a drink of water, the squirrels, ground hogs, raccoons, you name it. And if we're lucky, we can see this once in a while! There's always snails and sometimes even leeches, water striders, dragon flies and other fascinating visitors.

I've built a few water gardens and I've lost count which one I'm on. So I'll start at the beginning.

This is what I started with, eight or nine years ago. The rental house I was living in had this funny wood framed box sitting in the middle of the backyard for no apparent reason.

The landlord said I could remove it if I put something better in it's place. So I decided to make a little pond.

I dug the hole, and then I dug up rocks from the very back of the yard. Actually, where I got the rocks was between the backyard and a creek that was owned by the city. So the city probably owned the rocks. I didn't think they would be missed. They were well underground and needed to be dug out. I also got my first liner for much less than was expected. I hadn't realized until much later that the store had it mismarked and they charged me for weed barrier. What should have cost me $60 was only $11. Like I said, I didn't know this until a year later.

Some gravel from another part of the yard, and some free mulch from the city dump and we were off to a pretty nice start. I didn't have a bench, but a neighbor let me have a stump to sit on.

I put a small ten dollar pump in it to keep the water moving since it had no plants at first.

I collected wild plants from the creek area, including bulrush and cattails. Visiting my local lake yielded some nice finds too, with a bit of duckweed. I had  hoped to find water lilies in the wild, but no luck. I purchased one from Walmart for $4.89.

I transplanted a few other plants from the woods nearby and some roses from the front yard.

The photo on the right is my first pond, which cost me less than $30 dollars - just from being resourceful, working really really hard and getting very lucky.

But if you're a ponder, you'll understand why this wasn't quite enough. You see, ponders always want bigger, better and more elaborate.

I wanted a bigger pond!

I met a really sweet lady from a pond forum on Garden Web. She had a rather large liner just sitting in her shed and wanted to give it to me. I accepted, but I wanted to gift her something in return.
She agreed to accept a large painting of her pond. I'm glad she did, that liner cost her $80 to ship to me! She also included some starts of some plants. Some of them made it, like the pretty soft pink grapefruit lily and the purple irises, and others didn't really like the weather up here. She was from Florida. Her painting took me a year and it's really quite large. But it was such a labor of love, let me tell you!

Thanks to her I was able to double the size of the pond. I used my old liner to put in an upper tier.

My landlord brought me over some hostas, and I built a little wooden bench from some branches (for the legs) and some pallets my husband brought home from work.

I was building stuff from pallets before Pinterest made it cool! :D

The only cost for this was the cost of supplies for the painting and the shipping - all of which totaled less than $10.



I quite loved the pond after this and continued adding found plants around the perimeter and at one point, we bought a wooden and metal bench from a yard sale for $5. Here are some pictures!

I built this little arbor from branches I found in the woods behind the yard.

I still have these purple water lilies, and they are still very prolific bloomers.

Each year I have to pull them up and cut back the roots and stems and repot them. If left alone, the roots would matt up all over the bottom of the liner.

I originally wanted a water garden so that I could have it as subject matter in my painting. But I've actually never gotten around to painting it.

I am able to take some rather nice photos, though!

This waterfall worked out for a year, but the upper pool leaked too much so I took it out.

It was nice while it lasted!

One day my husband announced that the house across the street from his ill father was available for rent. I didn't want to move, but it was important for him to be closer to his dad. I wasn't going to leave my water garden, though!

I drained the pond and put the plants into a kiddie pool, and then I dismantled the whole thing.

I laid the liner out to dry before folding it up.

 Each of these rocks was loaded up onto the back of the moving van and brought with us. Damn right. There was NO way I could part with them, having excavated each one by hand and carried it up a thirty degree slope!

Our landlords had been really good to us. We also felt that we had been good tenants and deserved to get our deposit back. Therefore I made sure this hole was filled in before we left. I dug up dirt from the creek area and hauled bucketful by bucketful and painstakingly filled it back up, with enough on the top to allow for settling. But you know, they still stiffed us on the deposit.

 The new house had a nice slope in the back corner of the yard. This seemed a great place to put the pond. The slope would be perfect for a larger waterfall, and it wasn't beneath a tree, which I always regretted in the previous house - it always filled up with leaves quickly!

Digging a hole for a water garden, you always want a deep end for deep water plants like lilies, and a shallow end for marginal like cattails and rushes.

And boy, was I right about the waterfall! It was beautiful!

But there were some problems with this. The pump required to run the waterfall was a power hog, so we didn't run it very often and dirt would pool up in the filter, clogging it. The pump sucked... literally and metaphorically. It was always breaking down and needing to be fixed. It leaked a lot, too.

No one ever saw the pond except for me, on days when I chose to walk all the way to the back of the yard and sit by it. And without any shade, I never wanted to! After three years, I decided to move it again.

By this time, we had purchased our house and could do whatever we wanted to it. We have a two tiered porch, that when we first moved in, had a stair case coming from the top balcony. We didn't like this staircase, partly because it looked an eyesore and partly because our little ones would use it to carry out their escape plans. After their third time sneaking out, we took the stairs off and had a rather empty space that was perfect for the pond.

I dug the hole so that it looked like the pond went beneath the porch. Moving the pond has shrunk it considerably, but it's important a water garden fit the space that it's in appropriately and this felt like the best size to sit beside the porch.

One day, I hope to build a second one on the other side of the porch so that it looks like the porch is sitting on top of a singular pond.

 My kids had quite a lot of fun that day helping me move the pond, though I believe I did most of the work while they played in the pit.

This hole wasn't quite so difficult to fill in, since I could backfill the dirt that I had dug out of it in the first place.

Here is the pond as it sits presently! It's filled to the brim with plants and snails, frog spawn and probably leeches. In this spot, everyone can see it and we enjoy it every day, even in the winter. You may notice there is no longer a pump on it, because I've decided that they are much more hassle than they're worth. One day I may add a spitter, who knows. There are three varieties of water lilies, the irises my friend had sent me, and the cattails and bulrushes that I pulled out of the creek in the very beginning.

You can build a water garden out of so many things! They can be large, medium sized (like the ones I've shown here), or they can be as small as a pretty bowl with some gravel in the bottom and lily growing out of it.

You can visit Garden Web's Pond and Aquatic Plants forum to get a lot of advice and see some really amazing ponds!

There are many books that you can buy or check out from the library, as well.

 Do you have a water garden? I'd love to hear about it!