Happiness

The Oprah Show yesterday was all about being happy.  Did you know that joining a club or class that requires you to show up at least once a month has the same impact on your happiness as doubling your salary?  This is mainly due to the fact that you are increasing your social network.  Making connections with people and creating memories increases our happiness.  This is true for kids as well, so the next time you want to do something nice for your kids consider creating a memory instead of buying them something.  Have a happy day :)

Pillows, Pillow, Pillows

Right now I'm kind of on a pillow kick.  I wanted my front room to look more Valentinish (is that even a word).  So here are the pillows I've made over the past few days.

and here they are all together:

They were pretty easy to make, but a bit time consuming.  I started out by sewing a square pillow form and stuffing a pillow inside.  Then I cut 6-8 strips of fabric that were about 3" wide and 45" long.  The white pillow is cotton, so I surged both long edges.  The pink pillow is silk so I just surged one of the long edges and melted the edge that would show with a candle.  Then I gathered the strips.  I started by gathering one strip as tight as I could, then hot glued it as I rolled it to make a flower.  I hot glued the flower to the center of the pillow.  Using the remaining strips I just gathered them a bit and started hot gluing them onto the pillow starting at the flower and working outward in a spiral design.  I think it would look cute with a whole couch full of flower pillows in lots of different colors.

Re-Connected

This year I finally decided to reconnect with the world.  For the last ten years I have been a stay at home mom raising my children.  My husband and I have 4 wonderful children and I love being able to be home with them.  I also love to try out different crafty projects and am tinkering with refinishing furniture.  Brandon works for a bank and loves to golf.  Actully he loves sports altogether.  He's played, watched, refereed and coached for as long as I've known him.  A year ago we moved and one way I decided to reconnect with the world and stay up to date on some old friends was to start a blog.  I'm very new to this and not very computer savvy.  I have no clue what I'm doing so we'll see how this goes.