Happy Monday!! The holidays are fast approaching. I find it so hard to believe how fast this year has flown by. My oldest will be a senior in high school before I know what is happening. Why is it the older we get the faster time goes? You always wake to the realization that time is steady moving forward regardless of what you do and how slow you try to do it.
Wanting to spend time with my kiddos and not wanting to go anywhere-I decided to go outside with the sidewalk chalk. We had so much fun doing this and I was really impressed with the creativity that each one of them used.

The first one is mine, second is my oldest son, the middle son and then my youngest son.

I wanted really dark bold colors so I dug out my pastels to go with the chalk. Now that I think about it probably not the best of ideas-It might not be so easy to get the pastels cleaned up. Well-atleast it is pretty :0)

I found these pictures online at http://thepioneerwoman.com/homeandgarden/. They are way too cute-I want to make them so BAD or atleast something like them. But knowing me I probably never will. I always find or come up with great ideas but lately I have had no follow through.

I hope everyone has a GREAT week :0)
Lesley

Happy Halloween!!

Happy Monday!! and Happy Halloween everyone!! I just wanted to say "HI" and post few pictures.
My son and I made this mum for homecoming-He wanted it to be an original and be totally different from everyone elses-I think that we succeeded and she LOVED it. So I take that as a job well done for us :0)

Here are pictures of the Halloween cake that the kids and I made-It was chocolate and vanilla and very tasty. We tried to make black frosting but ended up with the yucky green color.

Here are my babies in all of their Halloween scariness :0) No princesses in our house. I made the older ones dress up and this is what they came up with. Very imaginative-not too shabby for being forced at the last minute by your mom :0)

I hope that everyone has a spooktacular day and get all the YUMMY treats that they want :0)

Once again HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!

Lesley

Vintage Photo Weekend

While I was typing up this post my sister uploaded her post about the pinhole cameras. Here are my pinhole shots. Unfortunately our chemicals started acting up just when I got a really good shot.

Now, I am a big fat cheater so I used the computer to reverse the images so here are my negative shots as photos.

For those of you that don't know (and why would you really?) my sister and I bought two late 1960's model Polaroid cameras from Goodwill for a couple of bucks each. We didn't know if the cameras would work, but they sure looked cool. Now, my sis had the great idea of getting together and having an all out photography weekend. She wanted to make some pinhole cameras (I will let her tell you more about those) and I wanted to see if the Polaroids would work.

So I tells her, I say, "Sis. Since you want to do the pinhole cameras and I want to get the Polaroids working how abouts you get that stuff and I will get the Polaroid stuff and we will work on both when we get together." And then she says " Awesome! Lets get together pretty quick and get our photo on." (I may be paraphrasing)

So we did.

Good news, the Polaroids do work. I bought some uber-expensive batteries (inflation from 1969 I guess) and the three types of pack film that I read were compatible with the cameras. If you have some old land cameras and you want some film that works then try Fuji film 100B, 100C, and/or 3000B. There is a big difference in the films. The 100 films are great for outdoor photos with lots of light. The 3000, not so much. It's better for indoors and low light photos.

These are the first two photos we took. They were taken with the Polaroid 320 camera and 100B film. At the time we didn't realize the 100 film wouldn't be great for indoor shots. We were just so dang happy that they worked.

Next we loaded up the Polaroid 250 with the 3000B film. It worked much better inside as you can tell by the cactus lamp shot and the shot of my sis.

The next morning we went downtown to check out a small camera shop. My sis has quite the eye for a good photo opportunity. She spotted the old building across the street from the camera shop. I took this photo with the same camera as the first two shots. As you can see, the 100 film works much better outside. The next photo op she spotted was the water pump. It's a historical marker, but I don't know what for. The railroad shot was my first attempt. My sis has the much better second shot. I let her have it because I am super generous and it was her idea and she has wanted to take a picture of the railroad by my house for ages.

We wanted pictures of ourselves using all our various cameras so here is my sis with the Polaroid 250 and my last shot with the Polaroid 320 camera with 100B film.

After the black and white film was empty we loaded the 250 with the only color film we had, the 100C. Unfortunately, I forgot to adjust the settings so it was still trying to shoot 3000 speed film even though it was loaded with 100 speed film. Hence the dark first photo. The second photo of my hubby wouldn't have been great, but the sun had set and there wasn't enough light.

Now that we know everything works we will definitely be doing this again.

Oatmeal cameras

Happy Monday!! On my birthday this year we went thrifting (or whatever you call it) and found two old cameras at Goodwill for just a few bucks a piece so we figured why not. If anything they look really cool and would look good on a shelf.

This is the Polaroid 250 Land Camera. This camera is from 1967 and at that time it retailed for $160 we paid $2.00 for it.

The next one is the Polaroid 320 Land Camera and this is from 1969 and it retailed for $60.00 then. We paid $3.00 for it. This one came in a case and had a flash with it.

We bought these back in June and recently decided that we wanted to find out if they actually worked or not. So at around $15.00 for a 10 exposure film and $10.00 per battery we decided to go for it. It would be fun trying (and expensive). Well guess what? They worked and they worked good. So that totally made it worth the money spent on finding out. It took us some time getting used to the settings and getting the pictures right. We had a bunch of fails-but the ones that worked looked really great.

Next on our weekend agenda was to make a pinhole camera out of an oatmeal box. We used the instructions from this blog http://www.fecalface.com/SF/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=441&Itemid=92. He uses some pretty foul language but he is funny and very thorough in his directions. The camera was very easy to make. Sorry but I did not get a picture of my finished product and I left it at my sisters so I am unable to get a picture of it now. But I will add a picture as soon as I get it back.

Taking pictures on the other hand were very hard. Either you had too much light or not enough. I scanned in a few of the ones that I thought looked really cool. The first one is a negative that I made and the next two are my attempt of turning that negative in a photo. My chemicals were getting low and old but we were at the end and didn't want to mix a fresh batch for just a few pictures. That is why the last two are dark and splotchy. I still like them though :)

My sister did this photo on the computer using my negative. Very AWESOME!!

We do plan on trying this again soon-so maybe we will master it and get some awesome pics to share.
I hope that you enjoyed reading this-we really had a great time doing it.

Have a great week!!

Lesley

Homemade Laundry Soap

Good morning!

I have put my quilt on hold for a little while because I haven't had a lot of free time, but fear not. I will complete it soon.

One thing I have done is tried to be more Eco-friendly. I started getting water delivered to my house instead of buying bottled water. That way I will be putting 150 less plastic bottles into landfills every month. Ouch!

I have also made my own laundry soap. To be fair, this was also an attempt to save money. I have read about it a lot and always thought I should do it, but I never took that first step. Well, on Tuesday I took that step. I bought Borax and Washing Soda at Kroger. I already had some Ivory soap at home that I was planning to use for this same purpose.

I found a dozen different recipes online, but only a couple for powdered laundry soap. I wanted to make powdered because it takes up less space and I didn't want to cook soap. I mean really, who does? The only drawback I saw was some people mentioned the powdered soap being bad for septic systems, which I have. I don't understand that though. It is all the same ingredients. The only difference is that I am dissolving the soap beforehand instead of after. I thought maybe people were using too much powder because that can make it difficult to dissolve. Whatev.. I like to live dangerously so I was making powdered laundry soap.

I took a cheese grater and started grating my Ivory soap into a bowl (I had the smaller bar, prob about 3 oz.). It didn't work out like I wanted. Apparently my soap was a little too moist to grate and it ended up smearing all over the cheese grater. Well, there goes that plan. I guess I am cooking soap after all.

I got out a paring knife and cut the rest of the soap bar into thin slices then put it in a pot with some hot water. I heated the water while stirring with the grater to get all the soap to dissolve (I stirred with the grater to get all the soap off it). Once the soap was dissolved I added 1/2 cup borax and 1/2 cup washing soda to the water and stirred until it was all dissolved. This all probably took about 10 minutes. Then I realized I didn't have a large sealable container to put the soap into. So I looked everywhere and found a milk jug, but it wasn't going to be enough. I put half my mixture into the milk jug anyway and then added water to finish filling the container. I shook it up to mix and set it aside. My husband brought me a bleach bottle that he had just emptied so I cleaned it out and put the rest of my mixture into it, added water and shook to mix. Done. I now have 2 gallons of laundry soap.

I let it sit for a day and then decided I should try it out on some dirty towels. I shook my milk jug to mix up the soap then measured out about 1/8 - 1/4 cup of soap. Probably closer to 1/4 cup because it was a full load. Now, I read that you can use white vinegar as a fabric softener and this was a guinea pig load. What the heck? I added some vinegar to my load.

The end result? I have clean towels. They smelled clean, but not like soap. Just clean. And I still had that Ahhhh.... Moment when I first pulled them out of the dryer. You know the one. Where you just want to lay all the hot towels on a bed and roll around in them. All in all I would say this was a success. Good thing too because I still have 2 gallons left to use and enough supplies to make about 100 gallons more.

Here's to saving the environment!