posts in category home
Saturday, August 05, 2017
Christ is the head
"Christ is the head of our home, the unseen guest at every meal, the silent listener of every conversation."
Don't you think that if we kept these things at the forefront of our minds we would treat people differently? Do you think that if you were more aware of the presence of Christ in your home you would serve others more than yourself? Do you feel that if you remembered that Christ hears ALL your conversations that you would speak words in a different way?
I am very passionate about keeping Christ and His promises in the forefront of my mind. I fail miserably on a consistent basis...but GRACE abounds and I am a forgiven child of God. I know that I am loved. I know that I am forgiven. I know that He will always love me. But I don't always live like that is true. I don't live my life in a way that shows that Christ is the head of my home and the unseen guest at my meals. I don't always speak to my children thinking that Christ is listening. I try. I fail. I am forgiven and I try again. I am grateful that He is in my home and that He is listening to my conversations. Having these phrases in my home helps remind me of the truths of Christ. I am reminded of His love and grace and that He loves me and my family enough to be a constant part of our home and family life. He does the same for you. He loves you. He is in your home and listening to your conversations. Let us pepper our conversations with love and grace. Let us invite Christ into every part of our lives, dinner, bedtime routines, hanging out, He is part of it all.
May you remember how much you are loved and that Christ is always present in your home and your life. Speaking words of grace and forgiveness to the people in our homes and out of our homes. Speaking Christ's love and salvation to those we encounter is how we can share His gifts with those around us. You are loved. You are a chosen child of God. Live in His grace!!
Friday, June 30, 2017
diy patriotic fabric wreath
Next week we will be celebrating Independence Day!! I thought it would be fun to change up the wreath on my front door to fit the season. My friend from church told me about a wreath she had made using a bandana and when I saw similar fabric the other day I decided to grab some and make my own wreath.
Here is a quick photo tutorial so you can make your own patriotic wreath for your front door too!!
Materials used:
3 fat quarters of fabric...
one in each color (red, white & blue) with whatever design on it that you'd like!
one in each color (red, white & blue) with whatever design on it that you'd like!
A wreath form...
or if you're like me and don't have a wreath form but have
extra embroidery hoops lying around use that.
The one I used was a 12 inch hoop!
or if you're like me and don't have a wreath form but have
extra embroidery hoops lying around use that.
The one I used was a 12 inch hoop!
Scissors
Cut the fabric into approximately 1 inch strips the long way on your fat quarter. I lined them all up and cut them at the same time. Cut those 1 inch strips in half. So you'll have a strip that is one inch thick and 6-10 inches long.
Basically you're going to loop the fabric through itself. So make a loop behind the hoop, then pull the ends through going around the front of the hoop. Hopefully my pictures are helpful and not more confusing!!
Continue this process until you have the hoop (or wreath form) all filled up. Make sure to alternate the red and white and keep the blue to the top left side of the hoop. Make sure to put tight on you loops otherwise they will want to come off.
Hang the hoop (or wreath form) on your door and call it good. I will probably go back to this and add some starts or some other sort of patriotic goodies because it looks a little bare...but I do like the simplicity of it!! Share with me what you make if you use this tutorial. Tag me on facebook and instagram @purejoycreative #purejoycreative
Wednesday, April 26, 2017
a craft room from my dreams
We just moved about a month ago. We hadn't moved in 5 years and one year before that was a local move. This move was tougher than the last, since we moved 5 kids this time...and all the stuff. Oh my, so much stuff. We did our best to pair down and donate and pass along a lot of our unused items. It felt so so good to get rid of so much. But when we got here I realized we didn't get rid of nearly enough. So a lot of our stuff is just sitting in boxes in the unfinished part of the basement...and that is fine, for the time being. I'm going to have to face the facts and go through it all eventually. There aren't any boxes in our main living areas any more. Last week I finally got the boxes emptied and out of the girls closet and we moved the boxes out of our basement family room into the storage room. It makes it feel so much more like home without boxes lying around every where. Our basement storage as you can imagine is a mess though! Eventually we will tackle that!
One of the best things about our new house is the basement. Half of the basement is finished and as I mentioned before half is unfinished, but works great for storage. There are also two bedrooms in the basement. My oldest daughter was so excited to find out she would be getting her own room!! And I was ecstatic to find out that I would be able to use the extra basement bedroom which has no windows as a CRAFT ROOM!!! So, yeah, no windows...but a CRAFT ROOM! I will take what I am blessed with! So the process of setting up said craft room has been a lot trickier than I imagined. So much of my stuff was spread throughout three different rooms in my old house that now I have to figure out a way to make everything flow in one room. I have taken to pinterest and created a board just for my dreams of how I want my craft room to look and feel. Obviously I won't be able to implement ALL of the ideas I have pinned but it's a great way to find some ideas for things I didn't think of on my own. I am still in need of a desk and some closet shelves but I feel good about where I am at and I am able to work in there so that's good. I will share some pictures with you so you can maybe get some ideas for yourself...but please know this is just a couple of weeks unpacked and still a huge mess (which I'm not really showing you). I have dreamed about having my own craft space for YEARS...so I am not trying to rush through the set up and organization of my room. It's a work in progress and will take some time. Especially finding the perfect dresser to hold up a door as a desk top for me! So excited to have the space and I think my husband is SUPER excited to get all the craftt supplies out of our bedroom!!
And remember that my craft room budget is slim to NONE!! So I am using things I already had and making my own items. Until a craft store picks me up and helps me furnish my room (in my dreams) it may look a little like a college dorm with a hodpodge of mismatched furniture and storage items. And I am okay with that for the time being. I will work on a cohesive look once I get all my big furniture items (which I have to save up for a buy with cash!!) So, please don't judge my non-magazine worthy craft room. I am just elated to have the space!!!
When you first walk in your can see my wall of embroidery hoops and back on the other door (that leads into the storage part of the basement) is a shoe organizer full of office supplies.
This is on my desk with my essential pens, scissors and other items ready at hand.
Tuesday, April 25, 2017
a big move
We moved from Tennessee to Missouri about five weeks ago. It seems like we've been here for only a couple of weeks but at the same time it feels like we've been here for years. The people are so friendly, thoughtful and generous. Just tonight a man from the congregation brought over a play set for the kids...he drove it over on his tractor!! So fun! Small town life is pretty exciting! We have been blessed with so many things from babysitting, to eggs, meat, flowers, and now a playground. Just tonight I wasn't really feeling like cooking so I just planned on making "breakfast" for dinner...and then a kind woman walked across the street from the church and brought us the leftover food from the LWML Zone Rally that they had today. Some of the best broccoli cheese soup I've ever had along with croissants and chicken salad. God is meeting our needs in many and various ways. God is blessing our socks off with the generosity of these people. I'm pretty sure we won't have to buy eggs again...for a long long time. One man has already brought us 10 dozen eggs (not all at the same time) and another family with hens has brought us more. We have had two different families bless us with part of their cows. And we've gotten four whole chickens. Not to mention the pantry shower that the church had for us before we even got here. I don't need to buy green beans or corn for a very long time!! We feel very blessed. And if we don't just look at the material goods we see blessings too...the people are very friendly, generous with their time and very kind. We walk to the grocery store, the post office and the bank. We could walk to the library but it's a little bit further away and we usually get a LOT of books so we usually drive. We do our "big" grocery shopping about 25 minutes away but it helps me plan meals out better so I'm not always having to drive into town. The craft store is 25 minutes away too which obviously is good for my wallet!!
Speaking of the craft store...during our move I took some time off from my handmade business and I'm slowly getting back into the swing of things with my lettering and painting. I have many custom orders that I am currently working on and a HUGE project that I am so so excited about but I can't share what that project is just yet...but let's just say that it is a dream project! So here are a few random pictures from the last month or so...actually most of these are from the last week or so. I need to get back on this blog and write about our move.
We were so blessed with so many wonderful helpful friends during our time of transition. Many people came to help us get our house ready, bring us meals, watch our kids. We couldn't have made this move without the body of Christ. We are so grateful for their love and support and we truly miss our friends and family back in Tennessee. Thanks be to God for modern ways of communication. While it's totally informal and not as good as face to face, it is so good to be able to keep up with friends through social media, texts, and video chatting!!
Time for some pictures....
See, he literally drove it from his house to ours...on his tractor!!! So cool!!!
Our library had a rock painting night and now Naomi and I want to paint.all.the.rocks!!
My top secret HUGE project is inside this envelope! There's your sneak peek!!
I actually made something for my own house and it didn't take me 5 years!!
I took some time today to create a printable for Mother's Day...and a card that you can purchase as well. The printable is listed in my etsy store here and the card is here.
There is a German restaurant here with THE.BEST.GERMAN food I've ever had...and I'm German. Yum!!!
A friend asked me to draw their family for Mother's Day and I decided I better practice on my family first to make sure I could do it...besides Naom's glasses being too high I think it turned out okay!
Sorry if we're friends on FB and you've seen all of these already! I promise to try to blog more...but honestly the best place to catch me and what we're up to is on Instagram!!
And if you want to check out a little bit of my craft room there will be a tour of it on my friends blog. I'll post the link tomorrow!
Speaking of the craft store...during our move I took some time off from my handmade business and I'm slowly getting back into the swing of things with my lettering and painting. I have many custom orders that I am currently working on and a HUGE project that I am so so excited about but I can't share what that project is just yet...but let's just say that it is a dream project! So here are a few random pictures from the last month or so...actually most of these are from the last week or so. I need to get back on this blog and write about our move.
We were so blessed with so many wonderful helpful friends during our time of transition. Many people came to help us get our house ready, bring us meals, watch our kids. We couldn't have made this move without the body of Christ. We are so grateful for their love and support and we truly miss our friends and family back in Tennessee. Thanks be to God for modern ways of communication. While it's totally informal and not as good as face to face, it is so good to be able to keep up with friends through social media, texts, and video chatting!!
Time for some pictures....
See, he literally drove it from his house to ours...on his tractor!!! So cool!!!
Our library had a rock painting night and now Naomi and I want to paint.all.the.rocks!!
My top secret HUGE project is inside this envelope! There's your sneak peek!!
I actually made something for my own house and it didn't take me 5 years!!
I took some time today to create a printable for Mother's Day...and a card that you can purchase as well. The printable is listed in my etsy store here and the card is here.
There is a German restaurant here with THE.BEST.GERMAN food I've ever had...and I'm German. Yum!!!
A friend asked me to draw their family for Mother's Day and I decided I better practice on my family first to make sure I could do it...besides Naom's glasses being too high I think it turned out okay!
And if you want to check out a little bit of my craft room there will be a tour of it on my friends blog. I'll post the link tomorrow!
Monday, April 18, 2016
mirror image canvas art
One day when I was using my kids bathroom I had a brilliant idea (because let's be honest isn't that where most brilliant ideas start?! HA!)...they have a wall only a couple of feet behind their sink and above their sink is a huge mirror. So my idea was to paint some large canvases and write some words backwards on the canvases in order for the kids to be able to read them while looking in the mirror!
They spend more time looking in the mirror in that bathroom than looking behind themselves so it just seemed logical. I got this idea about a year ago. Slowly but surely I started to make things happen.
First I wanted them to have a place off the sink to store their toothbrushes. So I got some ideas from pinterest and got to work. I got some 2x4s cut to size, bought some plumbing clamps and hooks from Lowe's and I was set for my project. I screwed the hooks and clamps to the boards and put mason jars in the clamps. I made a place for each kid to put their toothbrush and hang their towel. Then above those hooks I hung up the canvases where I wanted them to be.
Some time passed and I printed out some Bible verses backwards and just taped the paper to the canvas. I wanted to get an idea of what it would look like. More time passed and then right before Thanksgiving we decided to get a new faucet for the kids bathroom along with new hardware...the problem was, the previous homeowners had painted around the current hardware so we couldn't just replace it with our new hardware because it was different and didn't match the spaces where we took the old hardware down. Why do people do that?!! So, the Monday before Thanksgiving we spent the day painting the kids bathroom...that was not our plan for that day but it needed to be done. And we got it done.
Fast forward another few months and I got around to painting the backgrounds on all the canvases! About time right?!!
I hung them back up in the bathroom and waited until I could get more time to do the decoration part. I made time a couple of weeks ago to get these canvases done. I hate having projects in an incomplete state and this one was just dragging on too long. But the joy of them taking so long is that I was busy making custom pieces for other people!!
So, long story short I finally got the pieces finished...but I feel like I may go back over the white with paint to make the words stand out even more! So here's a small little picture tutorial on how I did the backwards canvas art!
Firs I painted the backgrounds apricot...the blue ones were for something else which I'll share tomorrow!
This is a picture of the mirror. So the canvases have a little ombre' effect because they start light and get dark...or start dark and get lighter depending on which way you're looking at them! You can also see the little toothbrush holder things that I made...and our new wall color (which is way better than the seafoam green they used to be).
I figured out my spacing by placing the paper on the canvas and then drawing out where my blue paint marks were. Then I drew on the opposite side so that my words would still fit backwards.
I then took my paper and colored all over the front of the paper where I had written the words with chalk.
Then I placed the paper chalk side down onto my canvas and traced over the letters with pencil. I used a sharpie to write on printer paper because I wanted to be able to see the words through the paper. This is a case where it's good for the pen to bleed through the paper!!!
If you were doing a regular canvas painting with words facing the correct way you can use this same technique to transfer your words. This is how I started transferring all my lettering and still do on occasion. Just color the back of the paper with chalk, place it down on the canvas and trace the words again with pencil. The chalk acts like carbon paper and leaves a chalk outline of your words (or whatever you traced with the pencil on the paper)...hope that all makes sense!
This is hard to see but it is the chalk line on the canvas!
Then I just went over the chalk with my permanent chalk marker. I love the American Crafts chalk markers and you can get them at Target (amongst other places I am sure).
Here are the mirror images all hung up...
It was a little bit challenging but very fun to write backwards!!
And here's a shot straight into the mirror!! Hi!!!
I am happy with how they turned out and glad to have it off my to-do list. Like I said earlier I may go back over the words with the marker again or paint them, but only if I have some free time...so it may never happen. But I am pleased with the results! Do you have a wall close to a mirror? I'd love to make some of these for you also!!
Wednesday, January 06, 2016
homemade spaghetti sauce
So, if you've been hanging around my blog for a while you know that I love to dabble in cooking. In fact I probably already shared how I make my own spaghetti sauce but I thought I'd do it again. I am a by the recipe book kind of cook...but sometimes I branch out and try to my own spin on things. Spaghetti sauce is one of those things that is good to experiment with. If it doesn't' taste right just add something else until it's good. Once you have a good base you can play around with the flavor! So I'm going to give you a general idea of how I do it and then it's up to you to try and make it your own!
I start with a hot pan and a good drizzle of olive oil. Then I add one chopped onion. Stir it a bit so the onion is all coated in oil and let this cook for a while before I add anything else. Then I add in some minced garlic and let it cook some more.
After about five minutes they were already turning to mush!!
What do you add to your homemade spaghetti sauce? Do you have any suggestions for the leftover meat sauce?
I start with a hot pan and a good drizzle of olive oil. Then I add one chopped onion. Stir it a bit so the onion is all coated in oil and let this cook for a while before I add anything else. Then I add in some minced garlic and let it cook some more.
Next I added two peeled and chopped carrots and let that cook for a while.
I usually make my sauce in the fall when my tomato plants are producing more tomatoes than I can keep up with...however this year my tomato plants didn't do so well...luckily I had frozen a bunch of tomatoes from my abundance from the previous summer. Just cut the tomatoes in half, throw them in a freezer bag and get as much air out as possible. These tomatoes were frozen for at least 14 months and I couldn't tell the difference in my sauce. So I ran the tomatoes under some warm water in a colander to get the freezer burn ice crystals off and then I just added them to the pot.
After about five minutes they were already turning to mush!!
After I let the tomatoes, carrots, garlic and onion simmer for a couple of hours I added in some herbs and spices. I used salt, pepper, basil, oregano, thyme and a little nutmeg. Taste it once it's simmered for a bit and add more of whatever you'd like to make it suit your taste. I added more salt and basil once I came back to taste this sauce. I used to add a little brown sugar which helps cut the acidity of the tomatoes but since we are trying to cut out sugar I used the nutmeg instead.
After I let it simmer a little more I get out my stick blender and puree the whole thing. Then I add about 2 tablespoons of tomato paste to help thicken the sauce a bit. Blend it again and let it simmer until I'm ready to add the meat.
This time I added in my cooked ground pork and just made it a meat sauce. But you obviously wouldn't have to do that. I served this meat sauce with spaghetti squash "noodles" and some roasted broccoli. A delicious dinner that my kids love. Even Abi, the pickiest, always asks for seconds of this meal! Spaghetti squash is a great alternative to use if you're wheat free or trying to stay away from grains...we go through months where we eat wheat free to reset our tummies and other systems and this is a great meal to fall back on! Plus I love using fresh veggies. You could totally use a jar of sauce, I do when I don't have tomatoes in abundance. And yes, this sauce does take a while to make but it's something you just add to, leave it alone for a while and stir once in a while when you come through the kitchen! It doesn't take a lot of work...just some time!
What do you add to your homemade spaghetti sauce? Do you have any suggestions for the leftover meat sauce?
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