Leaf Stencil Wall Art: Date Night and Family Outings a Couple Times Over

Well, we are settled into our new home in Western Pennsylvania. I never pictured myself living here, growing up on the west coast and all, but sometimes life takes us places we never expected. We are getting over the slight culture shock and the extreme driving shock and I am now starting to finish projects again.

We have actually been working on a number of things in the past few months, but this post is just about the first one I have actually completed. You can look forward to my posts about our new bed, my version of the Ikea stool learning tower, an ottoman, Halloween costumes, and probably a few others I have forgotten.

Departure From Blog Topic:Graduating Debt Free

Though this is off topic, I felt like it is valuable. My husband and I have both now finished school for the time being. We are striking out into the real world. He has a masters and I have a bachelors. We have two young boys. We have no debt. Money is a tiny bit tight at the moment as we pay for all the costs of beginning life more than half a country away, but we have no debts. In full disclosure, we have charges on the credit card, but no balance that will be carried unless something unexpected happens.

I am not saying that graduating debt free is possible for everyone or that you should or can do exactly what we did. I just want people to know that there are people who do it. Not everyone takes out student loans.

Rustic Homemade Christmas Tree: Homemade Dried Fruit Slice Christmas Ornaments

When I was in 3rd grade, my class was studying Colonial America for history at Christmas time. Though in reality in colonial America Christmas was not exactly the major holiday it is today (in fact it was often outright banned in Puritan areas), we celebrated Christmas "colonial" style.

Rustic Homemade Christmas Tree: Baking Soda and Cornstarch Dough Snowflake Ornaments

The minute I got a good batch of this dough whipped up, I knew the first thing I wanted to try: snowflakes. Perhaps it is related to the paper snowflake obsession, maybe it is the fact that I was born during a snowstorm in Seattle (where it doesn't snow all that much), or maybe it is just because I am weird, but I love decorating with snowflakes. They are just so pretty. But first, we must make the dough.

Rustic Homemade Christmas Tree

Decorating the tree in my childhood consisted of playing the entire family collection of Christmas music (starting with Mannheim Steamroller and skipping that weird music box CD that one of our realtors gave us once) and hanging the large collection of ornaments on our artificial tree that went through a basement flood before it was ever used the first time. We would pile the ornaments on the parts that were easiest to reach until my Dad would point out that the tree was leaning into the room, and then we would all get behind the tree and put a bunch more on there until the lean was more inwards than outwards. The logic was if it fell over, it would hit the wall as opposed to a person.

Harold and the Purple Crayon Family Halloween Costumes

We were Harold and the Purple Crayon this year for Halloween. More specifically, David was Harold, Peter was the Purple Crayon, and Patrick and I were 2 of the pages. We got the idea from this site. For more specifics on our individual costumes, see the links below.

Harold and the Purple Crayon Costumes: Harold

We are being Harold and the Purple Crayon this year. More specifically, David will be Harold, Peter will be the Purple Crayon, and Patrick and I are being the pages. We got the idea from this site, which gives instructions on how to make pages shirts her way (I did it a bit differently). It also gives instructions on how to make a crayon as a prop instead of a costume like me, but the people in the post just purchased the blue pajamas.

Harold could have been really easy if I had been lucky enough to find a pair of plain blue pajamas in David's size, but alas, I did not (okay, I also didn't look all that hard). I did purchase a pair of sweatpants I thought could maybe be turned into the pajamas on the same thrift store trip as I got my giant purple sweatshirt for the crayon, but there was a least one piece I would not have gotten on it without having to add a seam and I found some forgotten light blue knit in my craft chest. I also had matching thread and some non-skid fabric for the bottom of the feet.