Overhaul

So there has been a lot, and I mean A LOT going on since my last post. I've been wanting to post for so long now, but I wanted to wait until the right moment to reveal all these new things. I have been working on some projects, but I couldn't blog about them without telling everyone my secret. Though I am sure that a lot of my readers also know me on Facebook and so this is old news to them. But this is what has been going on in my life:

About a year and a half ago, we decided that we wanted to start a family of our own. We wanted to keep it a secret from our families, especially since this would be the first grand child on my husbands side. The next year to come, were filled with monthly disappointments, tears and hundreds of peed on sticks and many temperature charts that always told me about my disappointments to come. At the end of the year, we were considered an infertile couple and the appointments with the specialist were set up. About one week before our appointment with the fertility specialist, I was looking over my latest temperature chart. Now on a normal chart, your temperature should be bi-phasal (an average temperature pre-ovulation and a higher average post-ovulation) but as I was looking at my chart, my temperature had gone up an extra jump to a tri-phasal when it should have started to fall. I just sat there and stared at my computer screen, knowing where my thoughts were going and knowing it would only lead to disappointment if I let my hopes get up like this. I had some other women look at my chart via a forum, and my thoughts were confirmed by another. Fritz told me it would be better to test that night (a Sunday) and be able to deal with my grief that night rather than in the morning, right before work when I'd have to face other people. So I opened yet another testing kit, like I have so many times before. Only this time.....I'm pregnant!
(from the mouth of a frugal mom-to-be: stop paying $15 per preggo test at Walmart and go to the dollar store. You pay $1.25 for the same strip in a cheaper package. Especially worth-while if you pee on ten of them per month.I just think it's a waste of money to spend $15 on something you pee on for 5 seconds,and then throw it out. The same goes for OPK's, buy those at the dollar store too)

How we revealed the news to our families:

We found out that we were pregnant on December 2nd and we wanted to wait until Christmas  to tell our families. A lot of people don't share the news with their families until 12 weeks but by Christmas I was 7 weeks, and should the worst happen, we would want our family's support. We wanted to tell our families in unique and creative ways so here's how things went down: We planned a family barbeque for the Sunday after church. We told them it was nothing special, but just to have lunch together. In the morning, before church, we stopped off at several A&W restaurants, and asked for the wrappers to the Grandpa, Grandma and Uncle burgers that their chain is so famous for. Unfortunately the Grandma burger got discontinued a month prior but after stopping at around 4 or 5 A&W's we finally managed to get a hold of a Grandma burger.
Eventually the family arrived at our place, we had the patties cooked and the toppings on the table, but the buns were placed inside the wrappers and stored on a plate in our cupboard. Once everyone was seated we told them that instead of barbequeing we just stopped at A&W and picked up burgers instead (though we did actually BBQ burgers ourselves) My father in law was the first to clue in and then Rudi, my youngest brother in law. Charl, my other brother in law simply stated "there's only a bun in this wrapper!" and didn't bother to look at the wrapper until it was pointed out  to him by Rudi. While all this commotion is going on, my mother in law, is just staring at her wrapper in utter confusion. and all I hear her say is quietly "prime rib?" (Prime rib is written in small print just above "Grandma burger" and then a couple seconds later, the loud scream of realization occurred!

My family was told in a different way. My parents already have three grand kids, so we couldn't do anything related to new grand parents. So instead, I made use of my nieces and nephew. Since they have no cousins yet, I picked up two little t-shirts, and a onesie, and created shirts that said "I'm going to be a big cousin" . I tucked these shirts nicely inside their actual gifts, in hopes that they would pull them out and reveal what's on them, but instead my three year old nephew just tossed it aside, without even giving unrolling it a thought. and my niece...well, she was in some sort of 2 year old mood. eventually my sister in law picked up one of the shirts. There wasn't as much screaming as with Fritz's family, but everyone was still very excited. My mother already knew (in fact she knew before I even knew!), even though I never told her and denied the fact that I knew she knew....mothers, they seem to know everything.

(my nephew is covering his, but it has dinos on it.)

The week before Christmas, I had my very first ultrasound at 6 weeks. I couldn't see a whole lot, just a little bean, but I did see a tiny blinking pixel, which was amazingly the heart beat, and for maybe 5 short seconds we heard it beating...at 6 weeks! it was incredible!
Then on March 22 we had our 2nd ultrasound this one would reveal the gender of the baby. The ultra sound was incredibly clear. We were able to count our baby's toes and fingers! they are all there!

Hans at  almost 22 weeks.

I am currently 26 weeks and we are expecting our little boy, Hans, to arrive August 11, 2013! Now we are not doing this the traditional North American style that is to say, seeing an OB, and having a hospital birth and most people would expect to do. We are planning (though I know things don't always go according to our plans) to have a non-medicated home birth. I watched a couple documentaries, one of which was "pregnant in America" about hospital vs home birth, and the women who did it both ways always said they wished the had all their kids at home rather than in the hospital. They mentioned an empowerment that comes from going  all natural, and that is what I want to experience. So I am taking that advice and I am starting right off the bat with a home birth with my first one. Plus this has always been normal in my family, to have your kids at home that is.The only reason you would go to a hospital is if something was medically wrong with you or the baby and lives are at risk. People in hospitals are sick or dying, I'm neither of those and so I don't feel the need to be there.  Statistics even show that it is just as safe/beneficial, if not safer/more beneficial to have your children at home in a familiar place where the mother has control over the process. Not that I am anti-hospital birth, or feel the need to defend my decision,  I just think this is the better way to go for my family. But should anything go wrong, midwives are equipped  just as much as your general hospital, and I can always be transferred there should I have to have a hospital birth at the last minute.

Pregnancy Brain
I didn't think this was a real thing. I thought most women just say this as an excuse.... but your mind really does seem to disintegrate around 4-5 months. Here's an example of what pregnancy has done to my brain: I was at IKEA the other day ( and by other day I mean more than a month ago) I saw an item I really liked for the nursery, it was a poster frame with a really cute picture of a quilted looking world with little children and animals and rocket ships. The colours work so well with our nursery. I get to the cash, and the cashier guy looks at the item, then looks at me and says " did you take our display item down?" turns out that I did, since the frame and poster don't get sold together and the display tags were hanging off the item. My mother didn't want to make a scene, because she knew what I did, even though I swore I didn't take the display item. It sure was a good thing we weren't shopping for couches!

So here is what I have been working on for the last while:
1. Our basement:
              The basement is starting to come to an end. All that is left is little projects related to the basement. That is, Fritz is working on building a pub, the frame of which is up, I am working on getting a proper crafting desk put in and I have a couple of paint touch ups to do plus some curtains for the windows and then this should be totally complete. It's amazing how much space a finished basement adds to a house!

2. A new room
Now with a baby on the way, I am working on the nursery. This project is my baby...no pun intended. The details of this will have to go in another post because there are a lot of projects just inside one room! Also it's not complete yet (almost) and I don't want to blog about an incomplete project. But soon enough.

3. Diapers.
I plan on cloth diapering, it's much cheaper and it's doing the environment a huge favour. I will blog about my diapers in a separate post also because it's a big topic on it's own, but I have been working on them and I'd love to share my diaper adventure with you.

4. Gardens.
 I just finished putting a bunch of flower seeds in my flower beds, o none of those have sprouted as of yet. but a lot of my other plants are growing and blossoming!We have extended our vegetable garden  from about roughly 12 square metres to 20 square metres. We have planted a great variety of veggies, and accidentally grew pumpkins. You see, we used our own compost and we composted a pumpkin from Thanksgiving/halloween and now the seeds are in our veggie garden and they seem to be the first ones to sprout ( aside from our rhubarb). Does anyone want a pumpkin plant?




















I also made a new wreath for the summer using twigs from my back yard and some leftover paint:

So from now on a lot of my posts will probably include the frugal ways of a new mom. But fear not, I will still continue to craft and refurbish and reupholster and do all sorts of money saving things. It's just that there is a new dynamic to my blog.

hacking a thrift

In the winter time I have a lot less energy and very little motivation. I'm sure many of you are the same. I think this is because the cold weather makes my blood freeze and thus causes me to just want to crawl under a duvet to keep warm. Today the temperature was -27 C. 

The cold weather also affects my desire to do craft work because I like doing my work outside, where I can be messy and in the warm sunshine. My brain is always ready to work on DIY projects, but my ice cold body says "naaah maybe when it warms up." However this week, I felt slightly motivated to work on a project.

I guess it also doesn't help that what will be my crafting space is currently still under construction, and sitting at the coffee table with my sewing machine is not as handy. 

I found this great piece in Value Village for a mere $8. It's missing two drawers, but when placed properly, who cares right?

Here's what I did: 

1. I did nothing here. I just wanted you to see the before. 

2. Removed the drawers. They actually held Cd's so I peeled those out with a butter knife. 

3. I printed out some old looking images that I liked, and cut them to the same size as the front of the drawers.

4. I lined up my drawers on my kitchen counter

5. I made a paper mache mix (flour, water,salt) and coated the drawer fronts with a layer to give a slight texture

6. I paper mached the images with 3 coats of the mix allowing it to dry between coats. 

(Olive helped...not)

7. I placed the drawers back in the the stand and Voila!

I still need to touch up the chipped corners, maybe with a bit of brown paint just to disguise it a bit. I plan on removing the legs and placing just the drawer section on top of my crafting table as I will be using it for my crafting notions.

Bad family photos and barking in the rain.

Okay so I missed a greater number of weeks than I would normally between posts. It's been a busy couple of weeks though, with Christmas, New Years, family outings, winter illnesses, basement renos and what not. All of these are poor reasons for not blogging though, I must confess that. They're not even really reasons...more just excuses.  so here's a bit of an update on most of what I have been busy with.

1. Creating another awful Christmas card. Last year we decided to start a tradition of sending out horribly distasteful Christmas cards. This year's is pretty bad: 

2. The Christmas tree went up. The Christmas tree came back down.

3. Working on our basement. I'm not going to post any pictures of that in this post though. I will blog about that when it's complete, but so far we have a great storage room, and the new laundry/bathroom facility down there. 

4. I found this great drawer unit for $8. I plan on covering each drawer with either printed book pages, or vintage floral paper. Then I will use it in my near future crafting corner which will be in our new basement. I will post the finished results probably not too long from now. 

5. I redid the front entrance way to our house by building in a built-in coat/boot/seat area: 

6. I made Olive a raincoat. I made it out of part of a shower curtain. Our new shower stall in our new bathroom, is only half as wide as the curtain, so I cut the curtain and reused the other half to make this new coat for Olive. I tried to find some patterns online but I didn't really like any of them, so I started measuring my dog and ended up creating my own pattern. 

Olive hated having to be measured every 5 minutes. As soon as she saw me with the partially completed coat, she'd make a dash to the basement or under a chair. But eventually it was completed.. Here is the final result:

Turtle Necks Are Still Cool Right?

I love shopping. I Also love saving money and sometimes the two seem difficult to mix. This is why I love thrift stores. You are doing yourself and the world a big favour by shopping thrift. First of all, you save a tonne of money, second, you are reusing instead of throwing out and item, and third, Almost every thrift store  uses some or all of the money to give back to a community. 

At least once per week before I leave my work, I browse through the dresses. I love dresses. And brooches. I don't love every dress, but if it is knee length, a-line, and has a great neck line and has some sort of shape to it, I'll love it.

So today as I browsed through the dresses, I found this interesting brown plaid dress. It looked wearable on the hanger, but it did look a little out dated. So I took it with me to the change rooms. I've had some luck with out dated looking dresses in the past. 

Anyways I tried it on. sleeves were a bit tight but as Stacy and Clinton  from TLC's What Not To Wear, you can always tailor an outfit to make it fit to your body. 

I also had to resew the hem just to make it a little sturdier as it looked hand stitched...but loosely hand-stitched

It may need a second layer of fabric in the skirt since it might be slightly see-through...not too sure about that yet. 

The dress is made by designer Jonathan Logan. I had no idea who this was, but then I looked him up and I still didn't know who he was but his dresses are all really beautiful! I do know now that J.L was a company formed in the 1940's and designed classy dresses geared towards young ladies.   Also if you look up his dresses on ebay, they sell anywhere between $150 and $250 these days.

I paid: $4.00. Sweet. 

My Jonathan Logan dress. 

I also made some other purchases somewhat recently. 

I bought this great turtle neck. Those are still cool right?  I think this one belonged to a very hip grandma. I only assume that because someone had sewn in shoulder pads and I don't think those have made a definite come back yet. So I removed them...but I will hold on to them in case that style does return, that way I can claim that I had them long before anyone else. 

granny's turtle neck.

cost: $ 4.00. Not bad. 

And then I purchased, this AMAZING sweater dress thing. It's by tna, and its a mix of a bunch of different wools. Plus it has that great big collar on it and it's super warm because of all the sheep and llamas that donated their wool to make it. . 

my warm sweater dress.

Cost: $4.50 Steal.  Original retail price: $180. Yup...I got a good bargain here. 

I don't really like knick knacks, but I love this little teal bird.
cost: $1

DIY Beauty

This is a very quick post. Something that I just HAVE to share with people. I don't take credit for this as I found it online about a year ago so I give credit to whoever/whomever discovered this.  This is mostly for girls, but my husband does it too, and I totally recommend it for guys too.

You know those Biore strips you buy at the drug store or the beauty section of your local grocery store? You know how they cost and arm and a leg to buy but you really want beautiful pores and so you would willingly sacrifice that limb...sometimes?

Well I'm going to share with you a VERY cheap solution that allows you to keep all limbs.

Buy one box, or two or one million, whatever your heart desires of Knox Gelatin, (Or whatever brand, but this seems to be a fairly basic and popular brand)









Here are the steps to follow:

• Mix 1 tbsp of gelatin with 1 1/2 tbsp of milk. (you can use any type of milk...but I would stick to the basics; skim, 1%, 2%, whole. Try to avoid butter milk or chocolate milk you can try it if you'd like though but don't say I told you to do that.  
• Stir it so that it's kinda thick and then microwave it for 10 seconds...no more than 15 seconds.
• Now put it on your face, not too thin. I recommend NOT putting it on sensitive areas like around the eyes, and I would also avoid areas that have very fine hairs...it hurts to pull it off afterwords and you don't want to damage the sensitive skin around your eyes. I usually just apply it on my cheeks, nose and T-zone
• Let it dry. This takes about 15 minutes. When it is dry your face will feel really tight. Have someone tell you something funny. If you can only laugh on the inside and not on the outside...then it's dry. 
• Start peeling. take a look at the strips of gelatin you pull off ( you can wash off the tiny bits that get stuck since water just turns it back into squishy gelatin). You will see a forest of pore stuff. Gross. 
• Never buy the expensive stuff again.

You will also have bought enough to do this over and over again...and how much did you spend? Maybe $3 or so.

Don't throw that out!

I'm stuck at home with a gross cold, surrounded by blankets, a hundred used Kleenex' and a sleeping dog. So why not use this time to write another post about penny pinching.

So as I have recently mentioned, we are renovating our basement. We removed our staircase  which used to be an L shaped one, and replaced it with a new straight staircase. The wood form the old staircase was very solid and I really wanted to do something with it so we made night stands from it. They are currently rather tall compared to our bed, but the plan is to eventually make a bed frame that will heighten our bed to a more proportional height in comparison with our night stands.

I also made baskets for the night stands to hold small or personal items. I simply made a box out of cardboard, and them brought my handy glue gun ( a crafter's necessity) and lined the inside and out side with a printed fabric. In my case I used the same fabric that I used for the trim of the lamps that are on my nightstands...gotta coordinate!) I then added a ribbon trim to clean up the edges and a bow so that I have something the pull the box out of the shelf with...like a drawer handle.
I still plan on adding one more thing to the night stand, but I am not too sure if I will do this or not. The plan is to create a sort of hammock under the shelf, that will really act as a second shelf. This would solely be to add a little balance the shelf as I feel the bottom half is too empty. Unless one of my readers has another suggestion which I would be open to hearing/reading.

What else is new?
Olive, my dog, got into our Halloween chocolate. I know you are probably gasping at the thought of a dog eating chocolate, but no worries...she survived it. My house on the other hand was covered in doggy doo-doo and smeared chocolate...some of it I wasn't sure which was which. She also decided to eat this chocolate on the quilt that I am making and so there is chocolate stains on that as well.  One week later at my husbands birthday party ( a.k.a Fritzmas), she helped her self to an entire bag of dried jerky a.k.a biltong which my husband received as a gift. So Ollie had a fairly fulfilling week.

I feel like a lot of the things that come out of my mouth starts with the phrase " I saw this thing on Pinterest..."
so....

I saw this thing on Pinterest. A new way to use your fire place. Our house has a non-functional fire place. I.e. we would need a new pipe inside our chimney, and an insert, whether pellet, wood or gas we haven't decided what we would want in the future. But for now,as seen on Pinterest,  it's filled with candles. Tall candles, short candles, skinny and fat. For now we have been lighting the actual candles, but eventually we will fill the hollowed ( by means of burning) candles with electric tea light...just to give the effect of the candles burning. The look is very cozy, without the cost of gas or pellets or wood, and once the electric tea lights come into play, without the risk of fire.

To sum it all up: I'm sick, my dog is a pig, I like Pinterest for DIY ideas.

Busy Busy Busy Bee!

I'm learning how to can food this year. So far I have canned 7 small and 3 large jars of tomatoes and 2 large jars of pickles. I've also done the freezer bag method... I've got about 8 bags of frozen tomatoes, 6 bags of frozen beets and maybe another 8 bags of frozen beans. YUM!! And I still have another grocery bag full of tomatoes to can!
This is my first year doing this  so my recipes are very basic. so If you know of any great canning recipes send them my way...you can do so in the comment section below...I'd love to know what other's are canning!

I did not can that bottle of Amarula... If I knew how to do that...

I though canning would be more difficult but it's actually quite simple. I started off boiling my filled jars and then realized what the heck?! I have a pressure cooker! so I did a bunch in the pressure cooker which took a fraction of the time.
 Here's a funny situation that canning has gotten me into though: I decided that instead of canning in small jars, why don't I use the larger jars?  so I went out and bought a box of larger mason jars, cooked and peeled my tomatoes, and proceeded to place them into my pressure cooker... the jars were taller than my pressure cooker, ugh!
I had to go on a scavenger hunt throughout the city to find a large (and cheap) enough pot to  hold my jars and allow for a 2 inch cover of water. I finally found a canner in Walmart, the only one left.

I have also been doing some gardening. The soil in my area is the most amazing soil ever...it literally feels like potting soil so adding gardens is so easy to do. I don't know if I changed the gardens too much since my last post, but today I expanded the garden along the fence line. The way it was designed was soo......blaah. it looked like a narrow gutter running along the fence. I prefer to have some dimension to my gardens so I I made it deeper, and added some flow to the edge. Next year I hope to get more of a variety of perennials

Thrift finds:

 This brooch I found at a flea market. The owner said it belonged to her husbands mother...or was it grandmother..I'm pretty sure it was grandmother. Anyways, none of her kids wanted it...so I bought it for a twoonie! I love it! I think I'm going to become a brooch kind of girl

Add caption

This is a great mixing bowl complete with handle and pouring spout. great colour too!              

Sneak Peak Crafty stuff:

My dog keeps chewing up my pin cushion. I always come home to see that my cocker spaniel has become a pin cushion spaniel and I have to spend some time pulling pins out of her long furry ears. So I made myself a pin cushion and gave Olive the Blue pumpkin tomato thing that used to hold my pins. It also hold my measuring tape and other small notions.

FUN!

Here is a sneak peak at my quilt: 

Far from finished.