Valentine's Day Cards

Just a few of our suppliesArt projects are a major part of life with our children. These projects can take many different forms: crafts, painting, beading, drawing, clay/playdoh, and much more. It seems there is always some holiday or season to theme an art project to and right now is no exception: Valentine’s Day. If you have a child that is in school or likes to swap Valentine’s Day cards with his/her classmates and friends, there are tons of options lining store shelves. But if you want to go beyond the ordinary and create some one-of-a-kind cards to exchange, here are some ideas of cards we made with our children for this year for Valentine’s Day.

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Earmarked

earmarked: verb Designate for a particular purpose

Since beginning Here in This House, I have had the pleasure of coming across some amazing products, websites, images, blogs, and events. Often times I will find myself getting lost in a maze of beautiful, alluring pictures and text that send me into a sort of design coma only to reemerge minutes (sometimes hours) later wondering how I can share these items with others. Luckily after several months of bookmarking pages, only to return to them and forget exactly why I saved them, I was introduced to a site called Pinterest. Finding this site is like the first day of school (you know when you’re all excited and giddy over your new school supplies). Pinterest is a website where you can “pin” images from any website and it saves them for you in neat little “files” on your personal page. You can share your pins, you can see other people’s pins, and you can follow your friends to see what they are digging too! I can’t stop playing with it and saving all of these fantastic images to spark my creativity.

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Wordless Wednesday: Our Lazy Sunday

One Little Word | Captured, Week 5

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learn more about the One Little Word | Captured photo challenge here.

And Now for the Dish Rack

Our sink-side messI blame my parents for my dishwasher problem.  (Sorry, Mom.)

As a child, my parents used the dishwasher as the world’s largest dish drying rack. The only time we used it to wash dishes was after big holiday dinners or after the occasional party. Otherwise, it was hand washing all the way. As a result, I have a compulsive habit of so effectively “pre-rinsing” the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher that they’re practically clean already. Look, I should get credit for using the thing at all given the history I’ve got. But after reading an article on using dishwashers effectively in the New York Times and learning more about the water efficiency of dishwashers vs hand washing, I have tried (with moderate success) to exercise restraint with my “pre-rinsing” and let the dishwasher do its thing.

Still, there are always a few things that I insist on hand washing: sippy cups, wooden utensils, chopsticks, steak knives, etc. For those, I have required a dish rack for my drip drying needs.  In the past, I was content to have a lovely countertop drying unit from Simple Human (shown below).  It served us well but in our new home, there is hardly any counter space to spare. Simply using a clean dishtowel or paper towel? So unsightly. Coming off the success of my kitchen storage project, I decided to embark on my Dish Rack Project. My requirements were two-fold: must fold away for easy storage and must look beautiful. (If it’s going to be out, at least make it eye candy!) How hard can that be to find?

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