A scrappy flower: my first tutorial!

I've recently discovered soooo many cool blogs with all sorts of fun/relatively easy tutorials, so I've started doing some "stolen idea" crafting. One of which I got at MaryJanes Galoshes. Well after doing one of these I was left with scraps that looked like this:
So I started messing with the scraps and figured out I could make a pretty cool looking flowers. I just scrunched them up this way and that sometimes twisting them a bit then I simply hand sewed starting on the back side right up the center.

I had first made these with some black silky material of which I still had a few odds and ends pieces so I decided to stich those to the back for a two tone look and added a bead.


Here's another pick of adding 2 scraps.
and a view of how the back of it looks so you can see just how odd shaped the scraps were.
Both of these flowers came from that one piece of scrap in the first picture :)
and here they are pictured with the black ones I had made.
Voila, I chose to clip mine to my headband that way I could remove them and mix and match as I'd like according to what I'm wearing. They also look good clipped in the center of my daughters plain bows to make a more decorative bow :)
Sorry the pictures were so blurry, hope you enjoy!

Special time with daddy...

Last Sunday Micah woke up late from his nap and really needed to be swooped off for church, but we know he really like/needs to cuddle a bit so Daddy snuck in a few cuddles before we left :)

Can you tell I've recently been enjoying playing with the Black and White feature on the camera :)

Sprinkler parks are so fun

Some of the last days of summer...ok so we'd already started school, but with the temps still having been over 100 degrees we'll still call it summer :)

cooking things up...

In continuing to study about the New England states we made boston baked beans from scratch as well as brown bread! First "odd" ingredient (to me) needed.. ham hocks.....

None of the kids liked the smell of the molasses.

The beans boiling for an hour.....

So we didn't get enough pictures but we also made brown bread (for the same meal) which we had to postpone for another night because I misread the directions and thought the WHOLE process of the beans cooking was 5 hours.......turns out that was just the last step! LOL So rather than wait till 9pm to eat we opted to try another meal. Since we'd just read about blueberries and Vermont we made homeade waffles (in place of pancakes) with fresh blueberries topped with REAL maple syrup :) Yum! Plus we had maple syrup snow cones!!! Super yummy.

Recess it is!

So when school is not going well a few days in a row what do you do? Take a break, a TRUE recess break :) So off we headed to spend an hour or so in the park, the kids LOVE this park but it's about 20-30min away so we don't go often.

Lighthouses, our style :)

So we've been studying the New England states (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island) and in talking about Maine we learned about Lighthouses THEN the kids were asked to be creative and build one .......