Make Do Swiffer

I posted this for Make Do Monday, but it's also fabulous for Works For Me Wednesday! So I'm linking to it as well. Works for Me Wednesday has several hundred folks participating, all giving their great tips on what works for them with housework, family get togethers, dinners, kids snacks, toy purchases, making gift baskets - whatever! This week Kristen at We are That Family is talking about her best tips for traveling with kids. It's quite a list! So go take a look.

I've been totally out of Make Do ideas for the past few weeks, but yesterday my sister sent me an email with her Make Do (complete with pictures!) Thanks Alison!!

The whole idea around Make Do Mondays is...as Ann Kroeker says on her blog, "...we discuss how we’re simplifying, downsizing, repurposing, buying used, and using what we’ve got. It’s a carnival celebrating creative problem-solving, contentment, patience and ingenuity."


First off, I'll start off with a cropped close up of my darling niece, Stella. I haven't seen her since Thanksgiving...oh be still my heart, I miss this child. She's sporting some lovely beads!

Here is what Alison sent...The story goes that I like to Swiffer but the pads, wet or dry, are so expensive and I think they don't go as far as they should. The wet dry out too quickly and the dry get covered up so fast it is annoying, but I love getting under furniture with the wand. So here is my solution when I'm feeling desperate.


I use disposable wipes you can buy in the huge rolls for about $4-5 (75 ct). Sure they may be a bit smaller, but they do the job and are cheap! Then, for dusting, I put a washable dust cloth on the Swiffer head and spray some dusting polish on it. Works pretty well. I think it is a pretty creative way to get around the expense.
Alison

Kristin here...I have to say, you might not want to use furniture polish on floors as it can make them very very slick. Test a small area first, if you do decide to try that method. (Actually, if you are just putting a little on the cloth it probably won't make the floor super slick, it probably just helps to attract the dust bunnies. I would highly discourage spraying the polish on the floor.)

You can also use a spray bottle and spritz the floor with water and go over them with that microfiber cloth and the floors will clean right up. This is how I wash my floors.




It looks like she got a lot of dirt off of her floor. The cloth goes in the wash and the disposable wipe in the trash.

I think Stella thinks mom needs to make another pass with the disposable cloths. :)

Thanks so much for stopping by my place for Make Do Monday, if you have a chance go on over and check out what others are doing for Make Do Mondays. I hope this little trick will help you clean house and keep more dollars in your pocket!

And now that it's Wednesday, check out Works for me Wednesday participants!

Have a fabulous week!
Kristin

WFMW - Interesting address labels

It's another Works For Me Wednesday. This is a blog carnival where hundreds of folks gather to share their tips for better living, better blogging, fun ideas and who knows what else! It's always a good time on WFMW days.

The host of WFMW, Kristen is talking about her favorite blogging tools. I really need to upgrade my blog and use some of these items, that's for sure.

Today, I'm talking about a few ideas I've done recently to spice up the exterior of a package or envelope. A few years back I ordered 100 - 1/2 sheet mailing labels (there are two labels per page.) I have a lot of them left, so I've been finding fun ways to use them. Remember when I talked about all of the printable downloads that I've been finding? (here) Well, I printed a bunch of them onto the mailing labels and cut them up like stickers to put on my packages.

I printed these wonderful little ladies, Matrioshka, from the Print A Day website. I put the name and address of my recipient on the lines above the dolls. It really dressed up the envelope and made it unique.

I print out other lovely pictures, too and have added them to the envelopes, the inside of cards, etc. The label paper has been a lot of fun lately.

However, you don't need label paper, or sticker paper to use these as labels. I used regular printer paper when I made this Dove, also from Print A Day. It's pretty large - nearly an entire 8 x 11 sheet of paper - I just sent off a package this week using this label. I just filled in the address & used packing tape to adhere it to the envelope. I made a label just for this blog post - I'm not sure if there is such a place as Popcorn, Arizona!



I really enjoy sending out letters and cards and it's always nice to spice up the envelopes without taking hours to do. This method just involves your computer, printer and piece of paper and tape or shipping labels. The shipping labels I found online just a few minutes ago seem to run about $10 for 100 sheets. That's a lot of sticker fun!

Have a wonderful day & be sure to check out more WFMW posts.
Kristin

WFMW - Wordle

It's another Works For Me Wednesday. This is a blog carnival where hundreds of folks gather to share their tips for better living, better blogging, fun ideas and who knows what else! It's always a good time on WFMW days.

This week I want to introduce you to something that you may have seen already, but had no idea how it was made. It's so easy and fun!

It's called WORDLE.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

One of the things I have found is that you can't "Right-Click" and save the image. So you have to use the Print Screen feature on a PC or use the Apple-Shift-4 combo on a MAC to save the image. I then put them into my Photobucket account and edit them from there. (Resize, rotate and crop)

The text I used in the images was from some text that talked about gratitude and the qualities needed to be a Fabulous Person. I also added in a few words so that they'd show up in the graphic - like Works-for-me-Wednesday. To keep words together put a dash between them. If one word stands out too much - delete some of the duplicates. If you want a word to stand out more - write it in your text a few more times.

I take the text that I want and put it into my email program and save it as a draft. That way I don't lose the text if I happen to close the window. (Hmmmm, I wonder how many times I've done that!) When I edit the text, I do it in the saved draft.

You can also direct Wordle to a URL and it will create a word cloud from that front page. That's fun, too.

Without further ado, here are the graphics I created today. All in about 15 minutes.








I think these would be great to use as an insert in a card or even as the feature on a handmade card. You could put your children's names, their date of birth, and party words into the text area and use that as a party invitation. I've printed out a few of my favorites and have them on my bulletin board as inspiration.

I left several of these images large, so you could really see the words, but as you can see, they can still be quite striking when they are small, too.

I hope you enjoyed this weeks Works For Me Wednesday. Have a Fabulous, Wonderful Week!
Thanks for stopping by.
Kristin

WFMW - Post-It Pockets

It's another Works For Me Wednesday. This is a blog carnival where hundreds of folks gather to share their tips for better living.

It can be tips about kids, meals, laundry, or the best place to stay when you go to Memphis. You just never know what fantastic tips you will find. So when you finish reading my fabulous tip, please go visit all the other folks at the new host for WFMW -We Are THAT Family.

These pocket Post-its are great. There are three sizes in this package. I got three sets the other day at OfficeDepot @ 3 for $20. They aren't cheap. However, they have the removable sticky back adhesive just like command strips on those removable hangers. (I'm going to take a few of the pockets over to my rental condos for their fridges)
There are two sticky backed strips on the back of each envelope and the envelopes themselves are a flexible thin plastic.
The side of our fridge is where we keep all of my husband's schedules for his doctors appointments and other assorted medical stuff. If I filed it anywhere it would get lost, guaranteed. So it needs to be in plain sight and reached easily. These Post-It Pockets are really great!


This is my calendar that I made. I cannot for the life of me get the day straight - so I made a Post-It that says TODAY on it... and point it at the correct day. I now routinely go into the kitchen and move the post-it each morning. I always know what day it is. Why am I telling you this??

Because I saw that as I was flipping to the front of my homemade calendar where I have placed the post-it pocket that holds the receipts or coupons that I want to keep track of. I thought I'd add in the "today" post-it as a bonus.

Pocket Post-Its work for me!

Have a fabulous day!
Kristin

WFMW - Free Printables

It's another Works For Me Wednesday. This is a blog carnival where hundreds of folks gather to share their tips for better living.

However, this week we are doing a backwards edition. This is where we ask questions and hope that our dear readers will help with answers.

The backwards edition doesn't happen very often, so it's a nice treat. Please be sure and read my request (and go visit the sites I mentioned to see if you'd like to download some of the free treats) and then go over to We Are THAT Family to see if you can answer other peoples cry for help.



It all started with Indie Fixx a blog that I found very interesting. One day a new idea appeared there, it was called Feed Your Soul and the idea was that a few artists each month would give away their art for free because art feeds our souls. The downloads so far are HERE and I have thoroughly enjoyed them.

I found Print A Day through Indie Fixx and she has some fun downloads, too. Her download section is HERE, if you'd like to see her work.

So my inquiry is ... Do you have a place where you find cool pieces to download interesting art? notepaper? index cards? even calendars.

Do you have a favorite something that you seem to print off again and again? The image of the watering can is one of my new favorites and I've really enjoyed the mushrooms recently. I've used a few of the cool note papers from Print A Day as a beautiful grocery list and also to leave a note on a neighbors door. It's an unexpected treat to a usual day.

I'm always looking for new places that share their work for free. Or even places that share a little bit of their artwork for free as a sample.

If you have a link - you can put it in this format and it will be a clickable link in the comment section - but if not, I'll put it in this post, so we can all use the information.

<a href="http://URL you want to Link to">Name Your Link</a>

Be sure and check back here through the week to see what others have found.

Thanks and have a great day!
Kristin


Here are some free download pieces - thanks to your comments, I have a few new places!

Tangarang
One Pretty Thing
The Vintage Moth
DLTK - Kids Printables
Folding Trees
The Small Object Steno Pad
Kind Over Matter - Peace Blocks

WFMW - Coffee Caddi

It's another Works For Me Wednesday. This is a blog carnival where hundreds of folks gather to share their tips for better living.

It can be tips about kids, meals, laundry, or the best place to stay when you go to Memphis. You just never know what fantastic tips you will find. So when you finish reading my fabulous tip, please go visit all the other folks at the new host for WFMW -We Are THAT Family.

I used to manage a coffee house called The Dancing Goat Coffeehouse. (The Goat for short) We purchased a lot of coffee sleeves to put around those ToGo coffee cups. I was always happy when people would return with their used coffee sleeve because that saved us a little money and because the sleeves were rarely ruined after just one use.

So when my sister emailed me the other day and said that one of her Lansing "Old Town" friends, Barbara Hranilovich, invented something for coffee cups I was intrigued. She also told me that this product was featured on the Rachael Ray show! The RR show aired in January and featured cool gifts that people received for Christmas and my sister was so excited she had to tell me about it.

I'm always thrilled to hear about a small town entrepreneur but when it combines my family, coffee and something cute - I'm in!

Check it out! It's called the Beverage Caddi and you can read more about it here - Beverage Caddi - These little babies cost under $5 a piece.

You can choose from these fun styles of carriers or with the white one, you can stamp on it! (a craft project! -- can you see Mother's Day gifts from your kids? Father's Day gifts? Yep, it's crafty, too)



Here is an 8 second video - no sound needed for this one - it demonstrates how the Beverage Caddi and be used when you need to carry more than one drink.



and this is from the website - a testimonial.

Type A Mom Review:

Type-A Mom Gift Guide - Gifts for Moms
Written by Shannan Powell
Tuesday, 14 October 2008

Picture it: You’re getting out of the car with eight bags of groceries, a couple of whiny kids and trying to find the right car key to unlock the door. Add into this scenario the cup of coffee that you treated yourself to in an attempt to keep your sanity and you have a recipe for disaster. The odds are good that you’ll end up wearing the coffee, or at the very least, pouring it into one of the bags as you stumble through the front door.

The Beverage CADDi is a cool little gadget that will allow you to hold beverage cups with one finger, freeing up your hands and arms.

I was given the opportunity to try out the Beverage CADDi and was really surprised at the results. My first thought when opening the package was that it looked too simple to actually work. Rather than to try it in a precarious situation initially, I tested it out in the house, just to get a feel for it. It is almost impossible to spill anything when a cup is in the CADDi. I used an unlidded cup, ¾ full of water and swung it around, unlocked the door, picked up the kids and all kinds of things. It never spilled a drop! I had the same results when I tried it out, coming in from a big grocery shopping trip.

The Beverage CADDi will be a permanent fixture in my purse, from now on. These are a must have for everyone, from busy moms to college students. I will definitely be purchasing several to give as gifts this Christmas!

Having my hands free works for me! If you purchase a Beverage Caddi (or several!) please spread the word to others. I love to help out entrepreneurs.

Have a fabulous day and be sure to head on over to We are THAT Family and more WFMW tips!

Kristin

WFMW - What you love

It's another Works For Me Wednesday. This is a blog carnival where hundreds of folks gather to share their tips for better living.

It can be tips about kids, meals, laundry, or the best place to stay when you go to Memphis. You just never know what fantastic tips you will find. So when you finish reading my fabulous tip, please go visit all the other folks at the new host for WFMW -
We Are THAT Family.

Hey Everyone - My tip for you this week is so easy. You may already do it. You may already have it all around you. You may live next door to it. You may collect it. You may sleep with it.

My Tip is to surround yourself with what you love.


I have posted pictures of my family, my kitty and Burger King here on my blog today.

My Mom's side of the family started a Burger King franchise just before I was born. It has been a part of my life and I love all of the nostalgia of remember it, of working there, etc.

I love my family. I'm truly loving Facebook and seeing all of the photos that my friends and family are loading in there and sharing with me.



I live about 1200 miles from my family and I am truly missing them. Seeing pictures of them and staying connected through email, phone calls, Facebook and instant messaging chats.



It makes being away a lot less painful and keeps me connected to those that I love.


I don't have photos of everyone that I love and care for on this post (It would stretch for miles!) - I don't have pictures of my grandparents, my husbands parents, my friends and cousins. There are lots of people and things that I love.

I do however, like to keep these pictures in my mind.



When I start to feel a little down, thinking about my nieces laughing perks me right up.

So my tip, once again, is to keep those that you love in your mind. It is such a wonderful thing.

Have a fabulous day!
Kristin

WFMW - Cool Drinks

It's another Works For Me Wednesday. This is a blog carnival where hundreds of folks gather to share their tips for better living. It can be tips about kids, meals, laundry, or the best place to stay when you go to Memphis. You just never know what fantastic tips you will find. So when you finish reading my fabulous tip, please go visit all the other folks at the new host for WFMW -
We Are THAT Family.

A friend of mine gave me a hint for this weeks WFMW here at The Goat. She said that she always likes to have glasses in her fridge all ready for a cold drink without having to use any ice cubes to water it down. She loves any type of Coke product in her frosty glass. I'm a caffeine-free gal and I have to agree, a caffeine-free diet coke is real good icy cold.

If you like a frosty beverage, tuck a few glasses into your freezer and they will be ready for your next drink.
When I was working on my house flips, I would use this type of freezer bottle - it has a removable core that you freeze then screw it into the lid, fill up the bottle with your beverage and off you go! The core can stay cold for a very long time.

This is another very cool product for keeping lots of drinks cold. It is a mini cooler with freezable blue ice in it. You stick the entire thing in the freezer and it is ready to go on a moments notice. The blue ice stays cold for hours and keeps your drinks cold for many many hours as well. I love these. I used to stick hot soda cans into these coolers and they'd be cold in an hour.

So my WFMW tip for you is to look for ways to keep your beverages cold, because pretty soon it's going to get warm again - the summer items are going to start arriving in the stores so keep an eye out for those drink coolers. However -- if you use your own glasses, you've got zero dollars going out and a cold beverage for your trouble! Sounds like a great deal.

Have a fabulous week!
Kristin

WFMW - Vitamin E

If you haven't ever checked out Works for Me Wednesday, please do this week for sure. This is the second week that "We Are THAT Family" has hosted this event and we've been asked us to give our very best tip this time around. So the tips should be abundant and hopefully, our best! This week We Are THAT Family is sharing her best meal planning tips and already a hundred people have posted their greatest tips. I'd better hurry to get into the top 200!


I have been saving this tip for awhile because it is truly belongs in the Greatest Tip category.

Here's a story for you.

True story.

My mother had a favorite coffee mug that the handle had broken off of at one point. She decided to glue it back on. This was in the late 70's. No Mighty Putty in those days. She poured just brewed coffee into her repaired mug, came downstairs, sat down on the couch and within an instant the mug fell from the handle and into her lap, of course, spilling hot hot coffee all over her.

Thankfully she just had on a housecoat, so she stripped that off and ran upstairs to get the Vitamin E from the kitchen. As fast as she could, she opened up the capsules (with her teeth) and put the liquid on her burnt skin. A dozen or more capsules were used that night. Within a few minutes she had a lot of relief. It was such a widespread burn that I'm sure she still had some pain, but the Vitamin E really did it's job in helping the skin deal with the burn.

The next day she had a red spot about the size of a quarter that was red and burned. She must have missed that part in her haste. Not a single area blistered from that hot coffee burn. She continued to put Vitamin E on her skin for a few days just in case and especially on that part she missed.

Quite a story, huh?

Our family has lots of success stories when it comes to the healing power of Vitamin E for burns and scrapes. As long as I've lived away from home, I've had a bottle of Vitamin E capsules on the kitchen counter, next to my stove - always. Burn your finger on a pan - grab a capsule, break it open with your teeth (it's really soft and easy) and squeeze a little bit of the E on the burn and the pain just goes away. If you get a steam burn - those are nasty because you can't see them -- immediately grab a capsule and spread a thin layer of the E across the area where the steam hit you. The next day, you shouldn't feel a thing.

Vitamin E also helps burns heal if you haven't gotten to it right away. Put a little on each day. It helps to minimize scarring, too. My sister fell off her bike as a young child and skinned up her face - we put Vitamin E on her as often as possible for a few months and those horrible scars just disappeared.

I dropped my curling iron while I was curling my bangs and burned my eyelid of all things! That one I didn't get to immediately but the injury was fully healed in three days and never left a scar. Of course having sticky vitamin e on my eyelid wasn't the most fun, but it was only for a few hours a day for three days.

Vitamin E is completely and totally amazing. Oh and if you have spent too much time in the sun - remember that old friend? I know it's cold out in a lot of the country, but sun burns are so painful - rub some of that Vitamin E on it and you will find that you will peel a lot less and the pain will lessen considerably.

I hope you have found my tip to be helpful. To find more tips, please visit the WFMW page at We are THAT Family.

Have a fabulous day!
Kristin

To see all my previous WFMW tips - click HERE

Buy once - Use twice

A long time ago in a land far far away, I lived in Michigan. My husband and I were hosting Thanksgiving for my family and his and I needed to get things ready to go. When I lived closer to my family, I would have just gone over to my mother's house and raided the closets and cupbards for the linens and dishes that I needed for Thanksgiving. Since I now lived about 80 miles away, it wasn't quite as easy to do. So I put on my creativity hat and thought about it.

What I needed most were tablecloths for the two large antique tables that I would be using. I was going to push them together to make one long dining table, so I needed something that would be consistant for the long expanse. I was also on a budget.

What I came up with was felt. Red felt and a little bit of cream felt. I bought several yards of it for about $3 a yard as I recall, and I also purchased a pair of pinking shears. The shears cost more than all of the fabric! ...but only by a little. I put the felt on the table, weighted it down so it wouldn't move and I cut the felt with the pinking shears around the tables. It was exactly the shape of each table. I used the red on the table tops and the cream was being used as hotpads on the tables, maybe even a table runner type of idea. I can't quite remember at the moment. I think I may have even cut out leaf shapes and put peoples names on it.

The tableclothes were a hit, to say the least and the dinner was fabulous as well. A few days later as I was finally getting the tables moved back to their original locations I realized that most of the felt was in great shape. Only a couple of spills of food in a few spots. I now had all of this felt and it was a shame to throw it away, which was my original intention.

I got out a dinner plate and a lunch plate - traced around them and used those two sizes as templates. I grabbed those mighty expensive pinking shears and started cutting out circles. Large ones and small ones out of the felt that was left, after I cut out all of the "spoiled" felt.

I made plate protectors for all of my heavy bowls that I stack together. I used some of them for my plates and platters that don't get used too often, but are stacked on top of one another for long periods of time. I still had lots of felt left over, so I made stacks of 20 - 10 small and 10 large for several family members for Christmas.

I used up every cent of the $25 I spent on the felt and the shears. It was truly one of my better ideas.

I have posted this for Make Do Mondays - hosted by Ann Kroeker. She asks us what we have done to make do with what we have, or how we wear it out or decide NOT to buy something because we really don't need it. This is a new blog carnival so be sure and go over and take a peek.

I thought this would be a perfect Works for me Wednesday post. Childrens birthdays, Easter dinner, St. Patrick's Day are all times when you might want to prepare a family meal and a nice felt tablecloth might just be the ticket for an inexpensive cover. Please go see more tips at WeAreThatFamily, the new host for WFMW.

...and this certainly turned out to be even more thrifty than I had originally intended! So it qualifies for Leigh's Thrifty Thursday at Tales from Bloggeritaville.

I will link to those posts as the days arrive.

Thanks so much for stopping by!
Kristin