This set out as an easy, quick craft.
Mr. SuzerSpace and I like to read.
So we need bookmarks! And of course they need to be personalized.
In my favorite font.
And that’s where things got a little complicated. Fortunately, by knowing a few tricks for cutting settings, I was able to get this one back on track pretty quickly.
Bicycle riding season is getting close, so I’m crafting to get ready.
In the Spring and Fall, I’m still wearing jeans when I ride, and even though my chain has a guard on it, I’m still pretty fearful my pant leg is going to get caught. I tend to have a more pant leg around my ankles than the average person, because I’m short.
I know how to hem jeans. I just don’t 😉 .
Very often when I craft I just want to use my Silhouette Cameo
I always draw a box around the item to be cut. I weed that first, which gives me a safe area to then weed the actual artwork. No big pieces of vinyl get caught up in my actual work.
I then save the file the same name as the color of the sheet of vinyl (so, in this case, I’ve called it “Silver” because that’s the color I was working with).
I turn the previous artwork’s cut lines to “No Cut” in the cut settings window.
This gives me a guide for a good location of new art on the sheet each time.
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For several years, we’ve been walking for exercise, and one of the many benefits is the bird watching.
We’re also lucky to live in an older neighborhood with established trees, which also brings in the birds.
Some time back, we bought a field guide for birds and used the illustrations to figure out what we were looking at. The inside cover has a couple of pages for recording when and where you’ve seen a bird, and we’ve noted quote a few. I’m sure there’s an app for that now, but we like to do this old school.
One bird that we could hear, but never quite see really interested us. We’d hear it in Spring mostly, early in the morning, and to us, it sounded like it was calling “Sue Za Zee” which is pretty close to “Suzy” which is what my family calls me. (Suzer is my work nickname). We’ve heard this bird for several years, while living in several states.
Naturally, we started calling it the Suzy Bird.
Recently, we finally saw the bird that was making that call, and it turns out he’s the Black Capped Chickadee. Oh sure, the bird scientists think he’s calling out “Chicadee”, but what do they know?
Of course, this calls for a craft!
I’ve made a print & cut project to create a garland of Black Capped Chickadees to adorn my wall. To make this one more nature-inspired, I used a dried day-lily stem to hang them from.
Click the arrow below to see how I made this. At the end of the post, I’ve also included the files as a free download if you’d like to make your own.
I am very late to the shopping at Aldi Party.
If somehow you haven’t heard about this, Aldi is a chain of discount grocery stores. They originated in Germany, and have brought their shopping strategy to the US. The stores are purposely small, with limited offerings in smaller categories than the big US chains. Most of the brands are their own private label. There are no frills – the stores are mostly warehouse style with items stacked in boxes or on basic metal racks. There are no staff roaming the aisles – they are all either at the cash registers or are unloading items. You bring your own bags, and bag your own items.
We’ve found Aldi a great way to stretch our food dollar. We had previously been doing that by couponing and leaving expensive treats (like good blue cheese, nuts and olives) off our list. But Aldi lets us have all that back, plus better pricing on many basic items.
If you google “what’s good at Aldi” you will be presented with pages and pages of bloggers views on what to buy there.
And of course I’m going to add in my top 5:
The good thing about waiting so long to shop at Aldi is they used to not take credit cards. But now they do.
There is one big trick though – you have to bring a quarter. You use it to unlock a shopping cart at the front of the store. You get it back when you lock your cart back in.
I can’t be trusted to keep a quarter in my wallet. What if the Cheez-Its start calling me from the candy machine when I’m at work?
It’s better to craft a quarter keeper!
Click the arrow below to see how I made mine.
