Ruler container

I have been trying to find space saving and cute ways to store some of the school supplies my students will be using. Last year I worked with some of the 6th graders at my school and found that they hardly knew how to use a ruler so I knew I wanted to incorporate measurement just a bit more than the core suggests.

Cue the wine tubes I found for $2.00 at Joann's.

They are compact and one will fit about half of the rulers I need for my class. The only problem was that they needed a bit of a makeover. (The designs were cute but they had wine words on them.)

I grabbed some gray spray paint (leftover from my wedding last year; I love working with free tools) and got to spraying. I left the lids on so that the cute design would still be visible.
All I needed to do after that was apply vinyl. Because I felt as though I had been wasting lots of the space between vinyl letters lately, I took advantage of the letters and the outline this time. No wasted vinyl.

I think they will be just about perfect for what I made them for!

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Made By You Mondays

A wreath and some objectives frames

This is what they looked like before I hung them up. Sorry for the glare from the lights. I am loving them. Especially the paper in the Objectives frame. They are now hung up and ready to go

I also finally put up the cabinet numbers on my cabinets. I still cannot decide where to position them on the cabinets though...

Today I made a wreath. I am a little obsessed with cute wreaths. I made this one a few months ago. It is pretty wonderful, if you ask me. I love how simple it looks and the red satin ribbon it was hung to the wall with.

I wanted to make a wreath for my classroom for my sake. Something a little vintage-y and I knew for sure I wanted ruffles. I love ruffles. So. Much. It is ridiculous.
So I headed to the nearest fabric store (Joann's is only a quarter mile away from where I live right now) and snagged some faded red linen for only a few dollars. Score. Then I grabbed an ugly wreath for free. (I will try to find pictures of just what I had to work with.) Basically it was a wood wreath with some painted wood figures attached on. Birdhouses and sleds and a sign about snow.
I wrapped the wreath in pieces of the red linen like so:

After that I could not for the life of me decide what to do with the ruffles. I originally wanted to wrap ruffles around the whole thing until I realized it would take a long time for me to make enough ruffles to wrap around the whole thing so I came up with this:

I only ruffled enough fabric to wrap around the top of the wreath, made some fabric flowers, and attached a hello sign with some yellow butcher string. And, yes, the wreath looks a little lopsided in the picture, but I promise that my OCD kicked in and I unlopsided it (otherwise known as straightened it out) I still do not know what I think of this wreath. I do not love it as much as my white ruffle one, but maybe it will grow on me.

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Always in the middle...

Right now I seem to constantly be in the middle of crafts for my classroom. I have two piles in my living room right now. One pile holds completed crafts that are ready to head out to my classroom. The other pile is full of not yet started/in the middle of crafts.

I also usually have something drying in the middle of the floor. Like these:

I took some cheap 8x10 black plastic picture frames from the dollar store and tried giving them a worn, vintage look by not thoroughly painting them. I went over the frame with a sponge brush and some lovely light blue paint a couple of times, trying my hardest not to be OCD about thoroughly covering the frames so I got the sanded down look. (You know the look, where you paint a wood frame and then sand it a bit to give it an old look.) I think they look pretty good.
If you agree, then thank you very much.
If you disagree, then I just have to tell you they look better than in the pictures.
What am I turning these into? Have you seen the dozens of ideas on how to display your objectives? That's what these are going to become.

I also just finished this beaut:

My teacher toolbox.
Once again, just about every other teacher has been posting their own. I just wanted to use some vintage looking paper on mine and I replaced a couple of the smaller boxes for places to hold a small bottle of mod podge (something I can never be without) and brushes for the mod podge.
Ah, and the green words are actually more visible than they look. I promise. The paper has a shiny finish so it did not photograph very well.

For the larger green boxes, I cut the letters out of the paper itself (at my husbands suggestion) and then stuck a piece of white paper on the back, but it took forever to do. The pink went by much faster because I simply applied some vinyl. (That was my very first time cutting vinyl out. I am converted. I love vinyl. Even with these tiny letters I love it so much.)

Also sitting around waiting to be used is lots of fabric, a large painted picture frame, some clipboards, dowels, a pot, hundreds of pieces of paper, tape measurers, twine, and many other treasures.

Cabinet numbers

Because I am moving into an already supplied classroom, I have this sinking feeling that I will forget about something rad that could have made a superb lesson into an extraordinary lesson. There are four deep cabinets that hold a plethora of science and math supplies that I want to be able to keep track of and remember where they are.
I have gone through and written down a detailed list of what is in each of my large cabinets so that I can glance at the list every week or two as a reminder of what I have stored away and so that I will have a tangible list of where everything is kept.
Now...I could just leave things at that and be on my merry way, but where is the fun in that?
Cue the cute cabinet numbers.
I got this idea from Style Me Pretty for pinwheels and then I put my own vintage twist on them.
Their steps are wonderful and easy to follow.
I basically took two accordion strips that measured 3"x12" (before they were folded) to make my pinwheels.
My secret tip is that I actually folded a 6"x12" strip and then cut the strip in half (hot dog style) to get my two 3"x12" strips. Less folding.
After I had the four lovely pinwheels made, I cut out four circles from an adorable blue flower patterned paper.

They looked like the perfect circle to pinwheel ratio.

Next I cut out the numbers 1-4 out of some simple brown cardstock and adhered them to my circles with some glue. I also adhered the circles to my pinwheels with glue, but I think I will apply them again with either a hot glue gun or some glue dots.

 I love them, don't you? Here they are pretending to label some cabinets in my kitchen. I still cannot decide if I want to embellish them with ribbon or just leave them as they are.

Aren't they darling? Don't you just love that vintage paper? I wanted the vintage paper look without causing harm to a book. I found some perfect vintage looking paper at Joann's for 4/$1.00.

The big question is...was it worth it? Because I already had the other supplies besides the four pieces of vintage looking scrapbook paper, this project cost me one dollar and took about 30 minutes to make.

I would say definitely worth it. 

(Plus, if I ever decide to ask a student to grab something out of a cabinet for me, I can just tell them a number instead of saying "second from the right" or something like that. This will save me 1-2 seconds every time!)

(No, I am not that OCD about my time...)

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Fake

Every day I head into my classroom for at least an hour to do some cleaning. Today I needed to do something more than just clean; I could feel my creative juices running out as I sorted through teacher books from the 80s. (No joke.)
So today I made a pennant. I have these lovely orange cabinets in my classroom that I needed to spruce up with something. All it took was 4 pieces of 12 x 12 paper, bakers twine, and some adhesive dots. (I was feeling fancy with the dots. You really just need tape. p.s. Don't you love that bakers twine? I am using it for another project in my classroom where it will stay up all year. I am pretty stoked over the string.)

(Pardon the pictures. They were taken with my not-so-smart phone.)
First I took my bakers twine and taped it to the top right corner of my set of cabinets and the top left corner with the perfect amount of droopiness. (Basically I imagined how I wanted the slope of my pennants to look and taped the twine up accordingly.)

Then I started positioning my pennants with the top edge of the paper directly under the line of the twine.

My pennants just happened to fit perfectly, 4 to a door. The finished product:

Once I had the paper adhered to the doors where I wanted them, I removed the twine and rolled it back up. Now I have the illusion of a pennant banner across my retro colored cabinets, but I can still open doors without messing the whole thing up.

With that, I have a lot more cleaning to do....


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Slick rock is slick

Let me tell you a story of what I did this past Wednesday. (Pictures generously supplied by Maria)
Some lovely people I know named Michael, Ange, Mark, Jill, and Maria (last name for all is Sederberg) woke up bright and early to slather sunscreen on ourselves, use a wilderness bathroom, and head off into the wild with camelbacks. You see, several months back my brother and sister-in-law decided it would be an adventure to hike Subway in Zions National Park to start off a little family reunion we were going to. It certainly was an adventure.
We started off the hike wearing various types of footwear. Maria and I chose sandals, Mark and Jill were in super sweet closed toe sport sandals, Michael was stylin in some tennis shoes, and Ange turned down everyone's offers for nicer shoes and wore some pink sneakers. We walked for just over a mile in scenery that looked like a stereotypical hike; there was a small path in the middle of long grasses and tall trees. We were very excited to begin the hike.

We continued the hike with wonderful cascading rippling hills of slickrock. We got to follow cairns (or "Karens" as Mik continually said) during this part. It was gorgeous.

Mik kept trying to get us to sniff trees. Apparently they smell like vanilla.

After a while, we came to part of the hike that looked had the red rocks that beautiful Southern Utah is known for. (We also came across a scout troop that we continually passed for most of the duration of the hike.)

During a certain part, we got lost. Thankfully it was just for ten minutes and the scenery made it worth it. We had to jump up a baby cliff that was about 4 feet high. Ange and Jill made it up without a problem.

I, however, gave myself a little too big of a push when I came up and managed to face plant and Maria happened to snap a picture right as I landed. Mark was a little confused by what I was doing.

After hiking for a long while, we finally approached the slot canyon. It was gorgeous and dramatic. Sheer cliffs with pines growing all over them.

We had to climb down a very sharp slope over large boulders.

This is one of my favorite pictures. Mark was fixing his shoe and Maria was about to take a picture. I leaned over him but Maria snapped as he came up.

After we hiked down into the canyon, we came across all the pools that Subway is known for and the lovely river that connected them. Some of the pools came all the way up to our shoelaces while others required us to swim. It was always interesting to hear people as they walked through these pools. Loud squeals came when they found a deep spot. Often the pools were cloudy and the bottom was not visible so we I tripped quite a bit.
Mark had a strange obsession with frogs, tadpoles, and fish. There were some adorable frogs that kept finding in most of the pools.

As we reached the first rappel, we realized there would be a long wait because there were two groups ahead of us. We considered simply jumping in at the spot that looked like the shortest jump, but a lady from a group ahead of us told us that plenty of people break their ankles and feet and all sorts of body parts jumping in at that spot and then we would have to pay lots of money to get a helicopter to pull us out. Thankfully the scouts saved the day and discovered that by climbing under some large rocks, we could avoid the rappel entirely.

Later we had to climb down some very large rocks. We waited in a pool until the scouts made it down and then checked out the setup. Someone had connected a rope to the large rocks at the top of the pool. There were two drops we had to go down. The first one was awkward because there was a large round rock at the top that was hard to grab and made it difficult to go down unless your foot found the foot hole. (I also have not been climbing in several years so I am sure this would be much easier for a regular climber.)
Once we got down the second drop, there was a small ledge in the water you could stand on before it dropped off into deeper water. This meant you had to swim about 15 feet in 50ish degree water to another ledge in the water that was under a fallen log with only a couple feet of air between the log and the water. This part of the slot canyon was only a few feet wide. With all these factors, I freaked out for a second. I stalled swimming as long as possible and finally my favorite little brother popped his head under the log to beckon me. I went for it, dragging my lovely husband's camelback. Thankfully camelbacks float or else I am sure the camelback would still be in that pool.
The following picture shows one of the places we had to rappel down. It was over a small waterfall. We hooked up our rope and because the drop was so short, we basically slid down the rope. Not too complicated. Even with wet gloves. (Possibly my fault that they were wet.)

There were several other pools with cloudy water that a brave soul would volunteer to check and see how deep they were. One in particular needed about 15 feet of swimming. Thankfully this one held water that was in the 60s instead of 50s. Maria swam across first to see how far we would need to make it while swimming. I threw her my pack once she found high ground and decided I did not want to swim. I wanted to see how far I could make it with jumping. I thought I would do one of those smooth, cool jumps with my head out of water the whole time.
I might as well have just done a cannonball. I went under by several feet and I still did not reach the bottom.

Some pools held warm water that we relished standing in. Some had warm water on top and cold water at the bottom. We loved the variety that we tramped through.

At one point, we had to swim to a ledge. I had problems with this. One leg made it onto the ledge in the water and the other leg was stranded in the deeper water. I was stuck doing the splits on a rock and needed Mik to pull me up because I was laughing too hard to do anything about it.

After waiting long periods of time to do both rappels (the scout troop took a long time to go over both and we were stuck behind them both times) and eating lunch, we finally made it to the final rappel. It was gorgeous. This time we were stuck behind some intense climbers that took their time going down this small cliff. Below we could see a gorgeous sight and could not wait to get ourselves into the beautifully formed pools and walk through the curiously circular canyon.

While we waited for our turn to go down, Mark explored the cliff we were waiting on. He made his wife (and Angi and myself) nervous so he eventually came back up to the level we were waiting on.
Also while we were waiting, a few army guys came up. Because they did not want to wait for two groups to rappel down, they hooked a rope to a fallen tree and went down in the crack you see right behind Mark in the picture below. I had to stop watching them after about 28 seconds because they were leaping around from one cliff to another and climbing down a fallen tree. It was ridiculous.

I was the fourth one to go down the cliff. We had a makeshift harness that we shimmied into and started to walk down the cliff.

Mark helped all of us down at the bottom.

I am pretty darn cool.

We all safely got to the bottom and enjoyed the sights to be seen.
When we got out of that lovely part of the canyon, we discovered another treasure. Water cascading over the slick rock provided for some lovely natural water slides. Jill and myself went down every one that we could.

I found that I slipped just about every time I walked on anything that was even slightly wet as soon as we got to this part of the hike. After about five minutes of my warnings to the rest of the group ("this part is slippery!"), Mark kindly told me that no one else was slipping.
The rest of the hike out of the canyon was not quite as exciting. We were all getting tired and sick of walking in the river or bouldering. Our feet hurt. We ran out of water when we still had 1.5 miles to go. We were afraid that we missed the trail that took us to the switchbacks and back to our car. Thankfully Mark and Jill went faster than the rest of us up the switchbacks and got the cars all ready to go by the time the rest of us made it up the climb.

It was an intense hike and one of the most physically demanding things I have done in my life, but I loved it. I loved it because of the adventure, the people and the scenery.  (Although if I do it again, I will make sure to bring at least 3 liters of water per person.) The trip took us about 9 hours but it would have probably been at least two less if we did not have to wait for all the people that were in line to rappel ahead of us.