In with the new, out with the old

What do these two have in common?  Answer:  They both suck.  One in a good way, one in a bad.  The one on the left is old news.  Finally.  We have had it since we got married over 8 years ago.  And it was fine in our first 1 bedroom apartment, then in our mostly wood floor house.  But now, since we have carpet and a disgusting dog that lives in our house, well it just wasn't cutting it.  The new purchase was long over due.  I mean that old one smelled like dog butt, I couldn't even keep it in the hall closet anymore because it made our coats smell like burnt dog.  It was banished to the garage.  But really who wants to spend money on a vacuum?  Not me.  We found this wonderful Dyson at a refurbished vacuum shop for about half the price of a new one, plus they put a 1 year warranty on it.  My new best friend and I vacuum almost everyday, not because I like to but because of the dog.  And I can say it is quite satisfying to see how much that vacuum picks up every time.  There is even one entry way that I was getting ready to call the carpet cleaners in for and that has seemed to lighted up too.

Project Time

January came and the doldrums set in.  I was trying to figure out what I could do or where I could go, short of a warm sunny cruise to snap me out of feeling boring.  And I had a nice little simple project pop into my head that I had spotted on a blog a while back.  I remembered I had picked up these lovely cloth napkins like five years ago because I liked them. 

They usually sat in my buffet table rolled up, taking up space in the unused wine rack.  Until a week ago, when I found a much better use for them. And I already have a million pillows that need new covers so this project cost me nothing but a little time.

You need 2 cloth napkins to make one pillow cover, and need to obviously make sure that if you have, say an 18" pillow that your napkins are about 20".  Basically you cut one cloth napkin in half.  Flip it so the hemmed sides are together and overlapped.  Pin pretty side of both napkins together.  Sew them together around the edges.  Then flip right side out using the overlapped already hemmed edge to pull it through, and boom you have a pillow cover.  To stop the gappage that may occur you can sew little strips of velcro across the opening.  (that was the time consuming part for me, the detail work).  And if my directions are fuzzy check out the tutorial that I loosely followed.

the pillow at the top shows where the hemmed edges and the velcro strips that hold them.  You can hardly even see it.

I love an easy, free and satisfying project.

Christmas

 Well Christmas has come and gone, I just now remembered to get the pictures off of my camera.  In a nutshell: Christmas was fun my parents and brother were in town for the week and we had fun spending time with my family and also Andy's family during the week.  Here are just a few of my favorite pictures from Christmas Day.