Living Room Continued...

Hello all! I have continued working on my living room over the last several months. It has been a slow process punctuated by vacations and family visits, but some progress has been made. I finally painted my family tree and it turned out great. I started by doing a sketch on paper and then using this small sketch to transfer it to the wall in pencil. I sketched the tree on the wall with pencil and then painted over it with a terracotta colored paint. I put one coat of paint on the tree and then tried to scrub the excess pencil of with a scotchbrite pad. The resulting effect was really cool! Since my walls are textured the paint took on a fresco style look and the pencil blended really nicely with the paint to look like shading. The effect was purely by accident, but it turned out fantastic and I LOVE it!

Here is the tree with our family of ghost hanging in it. The kids thought that was a great Halloween decoration to have ghosts flying through the trees.

This is my new couch. I got it at Basset furniture, which I really recommend. You can customize your own couch and it isn't as expensive as Thomasville. Really nice quality. The couch is velveteen, which I have always wanted, so I love it too. At some point when I'm finished sewing for my brother's wedding, I will also complete the throw pillows and drapes that I have planned and you can see the finished product. I hope to be able to finish the family silhouettes that I am in the process of making as well. So, check back in with in the next month and hopefully I'll have some more projects to show you.

Living Room

Sorry about the blogger break, but I've working pretty hard on a few things. The first being my living room painting job. So here are a few pictures of the room now. I will still be adding a mural of a tree on my accent wall, but I have yet to design and organize that. I'm excited about having more color in our home, for now. I'm so sick of white walls! I feel like this warm yellow makes the room a little more sunny even when it has been gloomy outside.

The tree mural will go in on the other side of the tall trunk to continue my family tree theme. I'm feeling really good about this. David wasn't super excited about how much money I spent on paint, but he did like the result.

Another Week!

Hi guys! I have had another great week of Couponing. I have recently added the buttons for my favorite coupon organization website. It has everything your couponing heart could desire. A fantastic printable coupon database as well as how to shop the most our of your weekly adds. These ladies have a book that I'm seriously thinking about getting. They claim that they can help you save 70% on your groceries. That sounds extreme to me, but you never know until you try!

On the weight loss front, I am still plugging along. I clearly need to stop eating as much as I do, but I hate being hungry. For me it is a double edged sword. I realize that I need to start eating more small meals a day to get over that, but I'm so busy I can never remember to do that. The struggle! Any ideas? The exercising is going good though! I have done the 5day for 30 min. for two weeks now and I'm definitely feeling better. Ya know, more energy and I've been sleeping way better. My clothes are definitely feeling alot more baggy, but for heavens sake, where is the weight loss? I think I've lost one pound! Believe me when I say that my butt needs to loose alot more than one pound! THE STRUGGLE!

On the project front, I'm currently working on scanning and compiling my ancestral pictures for a family reunion this summer. I love these pictures. I could look at them for hours. In fact I'm scanning them so that my relatives won't start asking for some. Cause I'm not giving any up! (Sorry sister. I love you) I'm going to make some slide shows to share with my family and I'm really enjoying the look down memory lane.

Well it is awfully quiet down stairs so I better go check on the state of my children. Until next week good luck on what you're doing!

Hello All!

Well hello! I have been contemplating what I would like to share on this blog for sometime. I have felt like I wanted some kind of out let for my thoughts and projects for a while and I miss sharing what I'm up to with my friends and family on regular basis. So I thought that I would create a blog that I could share what I'm working on and that my friends could share what they are up to as well. So I'm planning on inviting all those that I want to hear from and share with. If you would like to become a contributor let me know, otherwise you can just check in now and then.
Here are some of the things I'm working on:

1. Weight loss. Yes, I've lost about twenty pounds and I'm working on conquering my annoyance with exercise. So I'm trying to exercise for 30 min. 5 times a week.

2. Another big new thing is coupon shopping. I've decided that I want to increase the money within my budget that I can use on whatever I want and decrease my grocery spending.

3. Maybe I should have put this first, but I've started working on writing a children's book series. The first will be a joke book and I'm looking for childrens school yard kinds of jokes. Please email me any you can pick up from your kids or you remember from your own school yard experiences.

I kinda feel like I want to keep this blog private. So I will go with that for a while and we'll see later how that works out. I can't wait to hear from all of you and see your comments!

Love , Shawna