Our Weekend

This weekend has been pretty quite as Brad and Brandon were at restpite and Lee was at work which left just me and Ben at home. I love the times I get to spend with my children just one on one I get to focus purely on them. I have managed to get back on top of the mountain of washing that had accumalated whilst I was unwell using my homemade laundry detergent. Some of the boys white school shirts were so badly stained that they did not come up in the wash. So I decided to bleach them overnight and rewash them in the hope of saving them. Im pleased to say this worked and saved me having to get rid of 6 good school shirts.

Washing to be done

 

Washing to put away

 

 

 

I was also inspired by a post written by Rhonda Hetzel at her blog Down To Earth entitled Junk Drawer Challenge. You can find the post here http://down---to---earth.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/junk-drawer-challenge.html#comment-form
I have a drawer in my kitchen that the boys use for their stationary and colours which it has to be said was a complete mess here is a before picture.

 

I just recently bought Brandon some new pants and the packaging they came in was basicly a pencil case so I saved both packets and used them for this task. Here is the packaging I am refering to.

 

I emptied out the drawer and put things into piles all the pencils together, all the crayons together, all the other items such as sissors / rulers / rubbers etc together. I put all the pencils in one set of packaging, all the crayons that were not broken into another set of packaging, and all the other items into a pencil tin that was in the drawer already. I pulled the drawer out and gave it a good clean before putting everthing back and this is how it looks now.

 

I had a large number of broken crayons left over so decided to make some teddy shaped crayons for the boys using these left over broken bits. I put them into piles colour matching as closely as possible.

 

I then peeled the paper from the crayons leaving just the wax crayon itself.

 

I then cut up the crayons into small pieces and put them into my teddy bear silicone moulds.

 

 

 

I put these in the oven at 240 for about 10 minutes untill the wax had melted. I then took them out of the oven and using the end of a paint brush gave the wax a good mix to get a solid colour as opposed to a rainbow effect colour. I then left them to sit on the side for a few hours to cool and solifiy and then poped them out of the moulds and this is what we had.

 

Some fun teddy bear crayons

 

 

The boys were very impressed with these and have been having great fun using them. I have also been busy catching up on my blog reading. I have around 6 blogs that I follow religously and had not read for about 2 months so that meant a lot of reading. It was just what I needed to get my head back into the zone of frugalism and simple living so thank you ladies for your inspirational posts.

I also made a start on one of the 5 scarfs im hoping to get done as xmas presents one for each of my 3 boys, one for Lee, and one for my god-daughter Leia. Appologys for the picture quality my camera has been playing up a bit recently and I need to get Lee to take a look at it for me. I will post a much clearer picture when I get the chance.

 

 

Hope you have all had a good productive weekend at your homesteads.
Much Love
Claire
xx xx xx