Baby Food Jar Week: Baby's-First-Christmas Ornaments

Since I started yesterday's post with a confession, I suppose I shall start today's with one as well. Here it is: I never believed in Santa Claus. I know, right? Pretty crazy stuff. This confession has been met with a number of reactions through the years, but the most common opinion seems to be pity--that somehow my parents failed me by never telling me that Santa Claus was real. But in all honesty, that is a little bit obnoxious to me. I don't feel like I missed out on anything , except maybe having a cool story about when I found out that my parents had been lying to me my whole life, and I am okay passing on that. When everyone else is sharing their stories, I just tell people the story about the mean third grader on the bus in first grade that had just found out and wanted to spoil it for me. He said "Santa Claus isn't real," and I said "I know." I don't think it was quite the reaction he was looking for.

Baby Food Jar Week: Apple Jars and The Projects That Got Me There

So, I have a confession: I don't like Halloween. I really don't like scary things and gore is even worse. It just bugs me.  When I was little the candy was fun, but I have been past trick or treating age for some time. Dressing up can be kind of fun, but I don't like how so many women's (and teen girls') costumes are so revealing and degrading. I am pretty sure little boo peep had a longer skirt; that would not be practical  to shepherd sheep in. I suppose in a year or so, David will be old enough that it might be fun again, but for the time being, I am not a Halloween fan. But I digress.

In any case, I tend to not decorate for Halloween (which again may change as David gets older). Still, something about these jars was screaming pumpkin (which I reasoned could also just be autumn decor). So I made some cute little pumpkins. Cute little pumpkins then begged for cute little faces. From pumpkins came the obvious idea for other Halloween decor of Frankenstein monster heads and ghost faces.

Baby Food Jar Week: Storage Vessels

Though this use is a lot less crafty than some other things I will show you this week, the most practical thing I have found to do with these little jars is the same thing they were made for: store things.

The first things I stored were actually homemade baby food. Not only were the jars convenient storage containers, they also helped me get a better idea of how much David was eating when I wasn't feeding him store bought baby food. Since David is a skinny little fellow, the doctor often asks me detailed questions about how much he eats and having the baby food in little jars helps me answer those questions more precisely.

Baby Food Jar Week: Tea Candle Holders

I have a bunch of baby food jars--half a closet shelf bunch. (The other half is full of toilet paper tubes, but that is a subject for another day). I have collected these jars faithfully knowing that they would be so useful. Then, I failed to actually use them mostly because I didn't know what to use them for.

I have decided to force myself to use all these fantastic jars by declaring this week Baby Food Jar Week. I will make a post about one use for baby food jars per day until Friday. Some of them are ideas I came up with, some of them are things I was inspired to do by someone else, and some of them are somewhere in between.

Today's use is as a cute little tea candle holder. There are millions of ideas for ways to make candle holders out of these little jars. You can use Mod Podge to put tissue paper on the outside of the jar like in this post from Tinker Lab. Or you can put doilies around the outside of the jar like in this post from Our Mush Push. Or you can use rub on transfers like in this post from Finding My Aloha. Or...well, you get the idea.

From Rags to Bridesmaid Dress

This was a project that I didn't expect to take on this week, but I found a need I could fill for minimal money on Tuesday, so it was added to the top of my list.

I believe I have mentioned before a large bag of fabric I purchased from the thrift store for $4. So far, I have made a cooler for Patrick's lunches, a tablet carrying case, a onesie, and four no-sew fabric drawers out of the contents of this bag. Not bad for a bag of scraps, in my opinion. We can now add to that list a bridesmaid dress.

Inside this bag of fabric was a large assortment of random pieces of lavender crepe. I don't know what this fabric did in the past, but I think it may have offended someone. It was punished quite brutally by being cut into lots of odd-shaped, four-sided polygons. I can't imagine what the purpose of this was since none of it was cut nicely enough to have been table squares at a wedding or anything.

Faux Iron Scroll Decor from Wire Hangers

As I mentioned, I have a grand plan for the pieces of wood left over from dismantling our box spring, but this grand plan has first led me to the adventure of the wire hangers.

You have probably seen the toilet paper tube art all over pinterest and the internet in general. I first heard about this idea from a co-worker and a couple years later, I actually made some of my own. I started simple, but I saw this blog post on Suzy's Sitcom and ended up making a much more complicated one along those lines. Unfortunately, I have never found where to hang that one and therefore never ended up painting it either. It may yet find a home.

Speckled Paint Effects by Accident

I purchased some "wood" frames from the dollar store a while back with the intention of hanging them on our bedroom wall with family pictures inside. The wood it appears is actually particle board (which I guess is technically a wood product) covered in a wood-grain-printed plasticy coating. I decided to try to spray paint them.

I have grand ideas about our bedroom that may very well not come to fruition for some time yet, but I have selected a kind of color pallet. I decided to paint the frames a light blue and got the only bottle of light blue spray paint at home depot. It was a pretty color (which I neglected to photograph, but just picture the frame to the left as bright light blue and you will have it), but it was too saturated for what I was going for. I decided to try white washing over it to mute it.

I got some white paint that had been sitting in the cellar of our last apartment for who knows how long and watered it down (It was acrylic)I painted the frames with a thin coat so that you could see the blue through it. Though I did like the effect, it was not right for my room visions. I may do this again somewhere else. Perhaps it would work with a different base color in my kitchen some day. I also needed to work harder on getting it all to look right in the corners, a battle I decided not to fight for this picture because I was going to cover it all up anyway. In any case, I decided to try something else.

If I had read the labels before trying this, I never would have tired it, but then, I never could have painted the frames the way I did. I mixed my blue spray paint with some of my watered-down white paint. That is to say, I sprayed a fair amount of spray paint directly into a paper cup and poured the white paint into the cup immediately following and stired the whole thing up. So, my white paint, as I have already discussed, is water based. My spray paint, on the other hand, is oil based. In other words, no, they did not mix. 

But it is what they did that is why I wrote this. I got speckled and somewhat textured paint. I have seen speckled paint in the store, so this isn't earth shattering news, but I still think it is pretty cool. Since the spray paint speckles sort of float to the top, I had to add more spray paint part way through to keep my speckalage even on all frames, but I was pretty pleased with the results.

At first, I wasn't sure if this effect fit with my vision either, but I made it work in my head. Since the grand visions for our room will probably not be realized until we actually own a house, I figure having it work in my head is good enough for dollar store frames for now.








I think it is kind of cool. What do you think?