Never need a reason...Step in time - Step Stools

Decorating Children's Step Stools

 I have several grandchildren of the short variety who needed step stools.  It seemed like a fun birthday present.  Not being handy with wood working and terrified of all cutting power tools, I took myself to Michaels to see if they had ready-made step stools.  Fortunately they had just the right size plain wooden stools screaming to be painted, decorated, and fancied up.  Interestingly, they all had warning stickers "for decorative purposes only".  My intentions were to decorate them and then actually use them - so I considered myself warned.

Feeling a bit lazy, I wandered up and down a few isles looking at wooden letters, shapes, cut-outs of animals, toys, stencils looking for ideas.  There were some really snazzy primary colored wooden letters and also some letter stickers. I purchased the letters and some wooden cut-outs.

First step was to lightly sand the rough patches, then paint each stool.  The wood was unfinished so it needed primer. Turned out the primer was visiting neighbors or getting it's hair done or something - couldn't find it anywhere.  I choose to use additional coats of paint rather than going out to get primer.  One stool was painted brown and the other white.

After painting I used glue to attach the cut-outs and letters.  One the white stool I taped off stripes with masking tape and then used a dauber to make polka dots on the top  On the other stool, I modge-podged stickers to add a little traction to the top and made polka dots around the edge.

Each stool received a couple of coats of poly sealer and voila!

Here's the other one with an eager little foot getting ready to hop on.  I didn't get a picture of the top but it's decorated with star stickers in a swirl pattern.

Patio Wars

The Great Digs

Ferrets love to dig and they are not peculiar about where.  Indie and Penny are happy to shovel all the dirt out of any house plant or outside potted plant.  I put decorative stones in the top of the outside pots to give the plants a chance to grow undisturbed.   They dig the stones out.  It’s always a battle to see who can outwit the other.  Ferrets 1, owner 0. I put heavy rocks (with sharp edges) in the top of the pots  - works most of the time.  Ferrets 0, owner 1

When I first moved into my townhouse the patio was quite ugly, rotted spacer boards and pitted, stained concrete.  Decision made to spruce it up required digging out the rotten boards so that I could plant moss in the spaces and green up the patio. I had help every step of the way.  Indie and Penny were under foot the entire time, ecstatic when the boards were out and they could attack the dirt underneath.   Soon the dirt was spread over the entire patio, they shoveled it out as fast as I put it back.  Ferrets 1, owner 0.

Looking pretty guilty...

Fast forward:  dirt replaced, patio stained and moss planted in the spaces – lovely to look at and enjoy.  I let Indie and Penny outside to run around and play.  When I went outside to water my beautiful moss they had dug up large pieces of it and spread dirt all over the patio again.  Ferrets 1, owner 0

I spent the next few weeks sweeping the dirt back and replacing the moss.  Gradually the moss died and I had bare dirt – Indie and Penny were elated, dirt, lovely dirt to dig in.  Ferrets 1, owner 0.

Next step – much deep thought, how can I have my green spacers, how to defeat Indie and Penny?  Ah hah, a brilliant idea – artificial turf!  Turf purchased, cut into strips and used to replace the moss – beautiful patio again.  Ferrets 0, owner 1.

Over the next few weeks they dug and dug, gradually dislodging the grass in several places.  Ferrets 1, owner 0.

I put heavy pots over the places they liked to dig and gradually they gave up – the lovely green grass has been left alone for the last year or so. .  Shhhh… don’t remind them.   Ferrets 0, owner 1.

Two By Two

Everybody needs a friend...

After about 3 months when the ferret "probation" was over (and I guess we passed), my daughter decided that Indie needed a friend.  She said it wasn't fair for Indie to be all alone while we were at work and school so she wanted to get another ferret.  In for a penny in for a pound and off we went to Las Vegas to purchase a friend.  We went to a local pet store and there were lots of ferrets to choose from. Indie is dark color called sable so my daughter wanted the new ferret to be different.  She picked out another small female, with a light color coat, a "cinnamon".  It was a quick trip, drive out, eat lunch at In-N-Out, hit the pet store and drive home.  Of course, there was anxiety at the agricultural inspection station but we passed through with no issues.  They ask if you are bringing any fruit, vegetables or plants into California but no one asked if we were bringing in a ferret.

The new ferret became "Liesel the weasel". Ferrets are part of the weasel family so it seemed appropriate.  Liesel was quite a bit smaller than Indie so we had to keep them separate until Liesel was big enough to hold her own.  Ferrets play rough, they pin each other down, bite and a larger ferret will drag a smaller one around.

Liesel as a baby:


Indie and Liesel ran around the house together and had all kinds of ferret fun.  Liesel did not seem as energetic as Indie.  She would actually lay on the carpet and rest which Indie never did. Liesel was calm and very sweet with a gorgeous coat.

Two ferrets were twice the fun and twice the poop. Two needed more space than one.  We ended up purchasing a used Ferret Nation cage.  It had 4 levels, a luxurious ferret condo about 5 feet high, 2 feet deep and 3 feet wide. Quite an imposing edifice that didn't fit in my daughter's room with her other furniture.  Indie and Liesel took over the guest room.  Good thing there were not too many guests wanting to stay.

Here's the ferret condo:

Their new digs had a baby butterfly costume turned into a ferret sleeping bag on the bottom level with a hammock and tent on levels two and three. The penthouse level was devoted to food and water. What more could a ferret want?

Rocking and Rolling - Chair Slip Cover

Slip Cover Adventures

It's been a while since I've posted anything but I have a good excuse - I've been having an adventure.  Not a white water river rafting adventure or a trek across Thailand, but an adventure none the less.  I have this not so attractive swivel chair in my living room.  I got it for a good price from my local furniture consignment store, not wanting to invest in a new chair until my fuzzy friends were no longer ruling this roost.  Here's a picture of the chair:

Kind of a weird perspective but you can see it's a dull colored plush sort of fabric.  The chair itself is really comfortable and it swivels. The swivel is crucial because if the chair is turned around like you see in the picture, the ferrets climb up the chair, stand on the back and jump across the space to the table behind.  From the table they can get crawl through the railing and get upstairs.  Getting upstairs is one of their life goals so any time an opportunity presents itself they take full advantage. Here is how the chair usually looks:

Because the chair is used as a ladder, it is full of pulled threads.  Not so attractive.  I thought about reupholstering the chair but decided against it because a) nice fabric is expensive, b) the ferrets would still climb on it and wreck the new fabric, and c) I have no idea how to do it.

But - the chair was driving me crazy, dull and unattractive and getting worse by the second, kind of like your hair once you realize it's past time to get it cut.  Maybe I could make a slip cover for it. I took a quick trip to my local Joann Fabrics and headed straight to the piles of "discount fabrics".   I found a bolt with 8.3 yards left, actually called "outdoor" fabric in colors that I thought would work.  It was very tightly woven and sort of slippery - maybe it would prove impossible for the ferrets to climb the chair!  Anyways, it was $9/yard, kind of pricey to experiment with.  I say "experiment" because I had never sewn a slip cover and had no idea how many yards of fabric I needed. I put the fabric back and then noticed that all of the discount fabric was 50% off .  Grabbing it back, I headed to the cutting counter trying to figure out how much to buy since I had not actually measured the chair (note to self for next time).  Since the remainder of the bolt was about $36 I just bought the whole thing figuring that the rest of it could be used for something....which is probably the reason I have filled up a couple of closets with fabric.

Spoiler alert:  If you want actual directions to making a slip cover, stop reading now and head for the Internet.

How to begin - start with Pinterest of course where lots of kind folk had posted tutorials on making slip covers, videos, pictures, etc. Several suggested using cheap fabric like old sheets to make a pattern, playing around until you get it right and then using this to cut out the nice fabric.  Probably a wise way to go but being the impatient sort I just started fitting it onto the chair, beginning with the cushion and tracing around each part with a black marker on the wrong side of the fabric.  If you take this approach make sure you have a fine marker that does not bleed through and show on the right side.

Penny is a great help - crawling under the fabric I am trying to pin.  You can see a part of the arm, bottom and back of the chair being pinned together wrong side out.  Slick trick but hard on the brain to do it all in what seems like reverse.

Penny is lucky she didn't get pinned into the project!  The first part finished was the chair cushion.  It was the easiest since you could actually lay the fabric on the cushion and trace around it.  I also bought white cording to make the piping around the cushion and the top of the chair. It was easy to make: cut a strip about 1.5 inches wide, fold in half with the cording in the middle (wrong sides together) and sew as close as possible to the cording.  The piece(s) should be cut on the bias and stitched together into the lengths you need.  This keeps the fabric from stretching out of shape when you sew it.  Since my fabric had absolutely no stretch and I'm sort of lazy as I mentioned before, I cut a straight strip along the edge of the fabric.  Here's the finished cushion:

The rest of the slip cover was like a big puzzle.  I measured each section of the chair - arms, bottom, sides, back, traced around where I could and cut out over-sized pieces.  These pieces were fit together, pinned and then sewed one seam at a time.  After each seam I would put the cover back on, still inside out and make adjustments, re-pin and then sew the next seam.  It was a long process and sometimes I would pin it, go over to the sewing machine to sew and couldn't figure out why I had pinned it that way.  Back I would go to the chair, re-pin again, back to the sewing machine, etc.  I think I pinned one of the arms where 4 pieces come together about 5 times, just couldn't wrap my brain around it.

It was easiest to sew the piping to one of the pieces and then pin them together.  I could not just pin it in between the pieces because the fabric was slippery.  I finished each seam because it unraveled easily and I wanted to be able to wash the cover without it falling apart.The entire slip cover project probably took about 20 hours.Here's the final product and I must say that I am really happy with it, especially since it's my first attempt.

The only bad news - it's not too slippery for the ferrets to climb.  I guess I will mostly be looking at the back of the chair just like before.

How to Train Your Birthday Party

Choo choo Logan's two..

My youngest grandson turned two on Christmas Day and had a train birthday party last Saturday.  My daughter and I had so much fun getting every thing ready.  She's very creative and of course Pinterest provided some great ideas.  Most of the decorations were made with items bought from the dollar store.  Here's what she came up with:

*White table plastic table cloths with black duct tape railroad tracks

*Bright green metal pails with yellow railroad crossing signs hot-glued to sticks (paint stir sticks work well) and filled with rocks that were "borrowed" from along side the railroad tracks.  The rocks keep the signs up and were returned after the party.

* Duct tape railroad tracks on the sidewalk leading up to the house
* White railroad crossing signs on stakes for the entrance to the party and next to the food table

* "Train" cars made out of green and blue plastic containers with wheels glued on for the chips and carrots with clear containers, again with glue on wheels for the dip. At the front of each train there was a wood locomotive wood cut-out ($1) painted gray. This completed the train.

* Goodie bags were green plastic containers with wheels glued on. They contained a wooden train whistle, one of the wood train cut-outs to paint, a balloon punch ball and a locomotive made with candy.

* On the food table she used a toy wooden train as a centerpiece
* Pictures of Logan from the prior year were blown-up into 5x7 size, hole-punched an strung on the ribbons attached to the helium balloons.  Some of the borrowed rocks were tied to the ribbons so the balloons did not float away.  She put these on all of the tables.

* A train made from cardboard boxes that were spray painted and taped together - this was for the kids to crawl through (little kids)
* Cake that Grandma made - that's me.  It's included in the pictures below.

I baked the cake in a 16x16 square pan that takes 3 cake mixes.  Then I baked another regular size sheet cake and cut the "2" out of this cake.  I put the "2" on top of the square cake. Each cake was frosted with colored vanilla flavored frosting.  The green color was changed by adding one can of white and a lot of yellow food coloring to make it a bright lime green (it's kind of a Christmas green in the can), The sprinkles came with the green frosting.  I piped white around the edges and embedded green, yellow, blue and brown m&m's along the edge.  The railroad track is hershey's candy bar pieces and the "rails" are black frosting that you can buy in a tube. We printed the birthday sign, glued it to foam board and used paper straws for the posts.  The final touch was one of Logan's wood engines set on top of the tracks. Total cost was about $20 with lots of candy left.  And - it tasted good! 

Need a Joy Fill Up?

 Creating Equals Joy

I don't know about you but for me there is real joy in creating.  It doesn't matter if the idea seems small or the project insignificant or even if the outcome is not what I expected - there is still satisfaction in the "doing" of it, a certain delight in figuring out how to accomplish whatever I have chosen to do.  I am certainly not an "artist" in the big sense of the word.  I haven't painted any masterpieces, composed a brilliant musical score, given a magnificent performance or written a will-be-some-day classic poem or book.  It doesn't seem to matter, the tiniest spark of creativity brings joy.

Why do I (we) love to create?  I believe it is because we are created in the image of God, the original and ultimate creator.  A friend gave me a little devotional book titled "7 Days Behind" by John Paul Jackson.  The reading for Day 5 starts with a passage from the book of Job (Job 38:4-7) that talks about God creating the foundations of the earth and the last sentence is "When the morning stars  sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy."  The response to God's creation - joy.


The reading goes on "True creativity is solely dependent on the One we could never create or dream up, and unless the Uncreated One reaches down from Heaven and injects revelation in us, nothing will be formed. The painting will not appear on canvas. The haiku will not emerge from our pen. Every drop of our creative ability comes from Him...All creative elements, whether art, drama, music, sculpture, poetry, or whatever else, are born from the same seed - revelation...You can't do anything without revelation. Revelation births creativity.."

God gives us ideas (revelation) and the desire to create. God loves to create and so do we. Joy, joy, joy!

Fuzzy Wuzzy Was...

What the heck is a ferret?

About 5 years ago my 18-year old daughter decided that she should have a new pet and her choice - a ferret.  I had never seen a ferret before and knew nothing about them.  She promptly took me to a friend's house to be introduced to his pet ferret.  We went upstairs to his bedroom and he quickly closed the door before Gus got out. Gus was a sable colored male ferret about the size of a small cat.  Very funny looking with a long body, short legs, cute face and fuzzy tail.  He had kind of a funny smell and moved quickly.  Gus liked to climb up the furniture and get on the desk - why?  To steal the computer mouse.  He spent hours each day wrangling the mouse down and under the bed to his "stash" of stuff that he collected.  Bummer for him, his owner took the mouse back every time.

Gus ran around the room and tried to go up my pant leg as I was sitting on the floor.  I was very nervous wondering if he was going to bite me.  Reassured that he did not bite I tried to hold him but he was too squirmy, a very busy boy.  I asked all the usual questions - what do ferrets eat, where do you keep one (Gus was a free-range ferret, no cage. He had the run of the room and slept in a cardboard box.) I was told they eat ferret kibble and can be litter box trained, love to play and are basically silent.  They make a funny "clicking" sound when they play but do not bark or whine. Perfect pet for a townhouse.

I had to admit the funny looking thing was growing on me.  My daughter quickly took advantage of this weakness and the next Saturday announced she was going to Las Vegas to buy a ferret. "Why drive so far to get a ferret?"  Answer - they are illegal to sell in California so you have to go out of state to buy them.  Off she went and came back with Indica or Indie for short:

 Indie was a 12-week old, tiny bundle of fur with an adorable face.  She slept most of the time and then played like a crazy.  Turns out ferrets sleep 18-20 hours a day and sometimes more with bursts of energy in between.  She quickly grew to her full size of about 1.5 pounds.  Female ferrets are smaller than males and Indie is a smaller female.

My daughter loved Indie and she provided hours of entertainment and fun.  Lots of friends visited because none of them had ever seen a ferret either.  Indie was good with using the litter box in her cage but when she ran loose in the house it was a different story and not a pleasant one.  Lots of little messes to clean up.  Ferrets have a short digestive tract so what goes in comes out frequently.  Indie got banned to her cage and my daughter's room with newspapers in every corner, only allowed out in the reset of the house when she could be watched.  Of course "watched" means something different to a teenager so....still messes to clean up.  Cats will go to their litter box wherever it is.  Ferrets will go to a litter box if it's close but generally when they gotta go, they gotta go, so it needs to be close.  This counts as a negative in my book.  But she was really cute....